Among the Pueblos of the Southwest, supernatural rain-bringers known as kachinas have long been at the heart of their religion. Masked dancers, impersonating various kachina figures, participated in ceremonies to ensure abundant crops and the people's well-being.

Spanish missionaries, however, viewed such rituals as devil worship and superstition. A major facet of their conversion program, therefore, looked toward wholesale destruction of the kachina cult.

During the first decades after the founding of New Mexico, the war against this particular Native practice, led by the clergy and backed by Spanish soldiers, met with considerable success.

By the 1650s, the offensive kachina dances were seldom seen, having gone secret, underground. Spaniards believed their campaign of suppression and destruction had worked.

Their elation, though, proved premature. In 1659, a new governor reached New Mexico, Bernardo López de Mendizábal. He quickly showed himself to be arrogant, self-serving and bitterly anti-clerical.

He claimed to have superior authority over the missionaries, which was not the case. When they refused to buckle to his demands, he attacked them at every opportunity.

In the matter of kachinas, or catzinas, as the Spaniards knew them, he found an issue he could readily exploit.

Soon after taking office, Mendizábal received several Pueblo delegations in his adobe Palace. They had learned that the new governor was hostile toward the church, so they complained to him that the missionaries had prohibited them from performing their sacred masked dances.

Mendizábal listened intently and then announced that he was granting the Indians permission to stage these ceremonies openly, in public. Indeed, he gleefully and strongly encouraged them to do so.

Soon members of several pueblos converged on Santa Fe, carrying kachina costumes in their baggage. These they donned in "dressing rooms" inside the Palace.

After dancing for the governor in the building, they adjourned to the Plaza and continued the performance in front of shocked citizens.

New Mexican churchmen were scandalized, and they sent off letters and reports to the Inquisition in Mexico City, denouncing the governor. The Native dances they condemned as acts of idolatry and heathenism containing obscenities.

In his own defense, Mendizábal wrote that he saw nothing diabolical in the performances. To him they appeared quite harmless, not unlike the colorful folk dances common in rural Spain in which masks were used. And he stated, as long as he was governor, the catzina dances could continue.

A local Spanish resident was horrified to see, in his words, "the superstitious spectacle."

In later legal testimony given against the governor, he declared that one dancer "wore an ugly costume like a devil with horns and a bearskin ... a horrible thing."

Afterward, upon being notified that an officer of the Inquisition was headed to New Mexico to seize him for religious crimes, Mendizábal was heard to say that before any such thing could happen he would hang the official from the nearest tree.

In fact, the rogue governor suffered arrest in 1662 and was sent in chains to Mexico City. Two years later, he died in the Inquisition's prison.

In the wake of Mendizábal's departure from the scene, the kachinas were once more subjected to persecution. In raids on their kivas, hundreds of dance masks and other sacred objects were hauled off by soldiers and destroyed.

The losses must have had a traumatic effect on the Pueblo people. Certainly they contributed to the anger that fueled the seismic revolt of 1680.

Today, most people are familiar with the kachina dolls, or wood carvings, that originally had only religious purposes. But they have now evolved into objects of Indian art for the collectors' market. The old catzina dances, however, especially among the Rio Grande pueblos, continue to be performed in strictest secrecy.

Historian Marc Simmons is author of numerous books on New Mexico and the Southwest. His column appears Saturdays.