El Padrenuestro y los rezos andinos en los siglos XVI y XVII: la comunicación con lo divino

Abstract

Through the study of selected discursive and semantic aspects of the Our Father prayer, translated into Quechua in 1584, I approach the communication with the divine in the Andes. By contextualising the Our Father in pre-Hispanic and colonial Andean prayers, we can observe differences in their discourse and lexico-semantic organisation. The Our Father uses few parallelisms and is written in prose, whilst the Andean prayers are organised in semantic pairs and show a poetic rhythm. The Our Father ‘adapts’ Quechua words to a new context. This led some indigenous specialists of the colonial period to conceive their own system of sin and pardon, thereby creating a reinterpretation of the Christian doctrine.