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In a 1783 report preserved in the papers of the Inquisition at the Archivo General de la Nacion, Mexico, the parish priest of Tempoal, Panuco, Veracruz, denounces a number of unorthodox practices in his village. They are: corruption of Catholic teachings, pagan medical practices, the celebration of feasts centered about the flying pole dance, unorthodox ideas about the afterlife, and beliefs in the evil eye and ailments caused by the "loss of shadow".

In the first of these true stories, transcribed in the Otomi of San Antonio Huehuetla, Hidalgo, the inhabitants decide to go make offerings to the Lagoon, which threatens to flood the town. They take music, liquor, chickens and turkeys, cut paper dolls, food, candles, hallucinogenous plants, flowers and a basket of clothes to the Non-Indian Flower Woman who dwells in the Lagoon and who is appeased by the offering.In the second text two young men set out to look for workon the road. Their adventures, generally unfortunate, take them as far as Poza Rica, Veracruz, from which they return home defeated and hungry.

Little is known of the life of Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón, author of one of our major sources on ancient Mesoamerican religion. The ethnologist Noemí Quezada discovered, transcribed and presents here a manuscript from the papers of theInquisition in the Archivo General de la Nación in which Ruiz de Alarcón is accused before the Holy Office of having celebrated more than one auto da fe during 1613-1614 in Atenango, today in the State of Guerrero. The documents contain information on witchcraft, the use of the drug ololiuhqui and Alarcón's persecution of Indians who had relapsed to their native practices.