ABSTRACT
Historically, many different religious influences have met and mingled in Aritama–the ancient Indian religions of the highland and lowland tribes, Catholicism as taught during four centuries, early European pagan beliefs introduced by the Spanish colonizers and, finally, Protestantism. From all these varied sources, sifted through the screen of fear and hope, people have selected those elements that have seemed to be the most satisfying for their needs and have formed of them their own system of beliefs in the Supernatural, the Sacred, the Absolute, and man’s relationship to it. It would be meaningless to separate religious attitudes and practices in Aritama into Christian or pagan, Spanish or Indian categories, and it would be misleading to think in terms of a breakdown of aboriginal traditions under the impact of a new religious system or in terms of stubborn survivals and retentions in the midst of growing exterior pressure. For there has been no such breakdown. There have been only slow change and reinterpretation, slow development and painfully slow replacement, but there is above all the single enduring mold of local tradition into which every new influence is pressed and shaped until it has become a meaningful part of the whole. Religious attitudes in Aritama form an integrated system, not only with respect to the wider context of the culture, but in itself, as a conceptual framework for man’s relationship to the supernatural.
