Mexican Inquisition (Guinness, The city of the seven hills, 1891)

Text: "I beheld, and the same horn made war with the saints, and prevailed against them;" "And he [the little horn] ... shall wear out the saints of the most High, ... and they shall be given into his hand until a time and times and the dividing of time." Daniel 7:21,25

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   During my recent visit to Mexico, I saw myself the remains of several of the victims who had been walled up alive by the Inquisition. The bodies are exhibited in the public museum in the city of Mexico, and also in a museum in Toluca. Four of the victims taken from the Inquisition wall in Puebla are represented in the accompanying picture. I also obtained in the city of Mexico the photograph of the three other walled-up victims which has been reproduced by a photographic process in the body of this work, pages 160, 161.

   The following description of the "walled up" victims found in the Inquisition at Puebla is from Dr. Rule's valuable work:

   "In the basement of the old building was a long gallery [inside the main wall of the edifice], which is very massive, beneath the pavement of which were discovered the remains of about two hundred human bodies. The skeletons lay along the gallery side by side, and for economizing space, shoulder to foot and foot to shoulder alternately. A message to the civic authority brought carts which removed the bones, and the pavement was relaid. . . . While the exhumation of the two hundred skeletons was going on, another discovery was made. What seemed to be the interior face of the main wall, not interrupted by door or window, was for some distance smooth, with a brick facing, but in some places along the smooth part the bricks had been broken away from the floor upwards, disclosing spaces resembling very narrow closets, empty, as if rifled of their contents. These breakages excited suspicion that the remaining unbroken surface might cover similar recesses. Dr. Buller, therefore, had that part of the wall sounded with hammers; in four places he found it hollow, and had the bricks carefully removed. To the horror, surely, of the explorers, our human bodies met their view. One man, sitting on a stone; two men standing; one woman laid on her back, with a bundle at her feet said to contain an infant. They were all carefully removed to the public museum of the city of Mexico, where they may now be seen just as they were when put into an open wooden case, varnished in hope of preserving them entire, and covered with glass. Dr. Butler had them immediately photographed, and with a verbal description of the discovery, kindly gave me a copy of the picture in photograph, which is herewith repeated as closely as possible in a woodcut.

   It is remarkable that the victims found by Dr. Butler were dressed all alike, and bound in the same manner. It was a regulation dress, no doubt, kept in store for inmates of the ordinary prison cells, when condemned to be walled up, at which time each one was to be clad in the same sad livery, bound close and fettered just the same. The niches which held three of the four were vertical, and must have resembled narrow chimney-flues, barely sufficient for a living person to stand upright, and not wide enough to allow the body to fall prone when life became extinct. Although it might bend a little, the body was held up by the sides of the tomb, and stiffened after death in the same posture that it had in the last agony."—History of the Inquisition, Rule, pp. 328g, 328i.

[picture above]

VICTIMS OF THE INQUISITION FOUND IN THE CONVENT OF SANTO DOMINGO, MEXICO, 1861.

(Reproduced from a photograph in the author's possession.)

[picture above]

WALLED-UP VICTIMS OF THE INQUISITION.

Found at Puebla, Mexico.

Guinness, Henry Grattan, The city of the seven hills, London: James Nisbet & Co.; Morgan & Scott, 1891, pp. 300-302.

Online Source: www.brethrenarchive.org/people/henry-grattan-guinness/pamphlets/the-city-of-the-seven-hills/ (or archive.org/details/cu31924013475896)

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