Daemonium paradisi: el diablo y las perturbaciones meteorológicas en América

This article, framed within the environmental humanities, examines the ideological interpretation of adverse meteorological phenomena in pre-modern America, highlighting their instrumentalization within Spanish colonial discourse. Influenced by a Catholic worldview, spanish explorers conceived of the New World as an apocalyptic scenario of a cosmic battle between Christ and Satan. According to this narrative, Satan had transformed America into a corrupt earthly paradise, legitimizing the conquest as a crusade to establish a new Catholic order, the New Jerusalem. This analysis highlights how religious ideology articulated a relationship of domination over the territory and its inhabitants, transforming the natural and social environment into a spiritual battlefield that reinforced ecclesiastical hege-mony and legitimized colonial violence under the moral imperative of good over evil