In 1686, Marcial de la Cruz, a Zapotec from the community of San Francisco Cajonos, confessed that he had murdered his wife, Catalina María, two years earlier. Tired of running from authorities, burdened with a guilty conscience, and concerned about the house and land that he had left behind, Marcial returned to tell his fantastic story. He recalled how on the day of the murder Catalina had convinced native officials from the neighboring community of San Mateo to release him from jail, where he was being detained because of a dispute over a mule. On the way back to San Francisco, Marcial stopped to bathe in the river, but Catalina decided to continue walking. After bathing, Marcial hurried along the narrow path to catch up with his wife, but she was nowhere in sight. Then, suddenly, a jaguar jumped out from behind a large maguey plant, poised to attack. Fearing for his life, Marcial commended himself to God and held out the rosary that he wore around his neck to fend off the ferocious animal. He picked up a large stick and struck the jaguar three times. As the jaguar dropped to the ground, Marcial heard a voice say to him in Zapotec “Cuckold, don't kill that woman,” and he saw the jaguar transform into his wife. Stunned by this terrifying vision, he sought refuge in the convent of Santo Domingo in Oaxaca City. His flight from authorities would eventually take him to Mexico City, Puebla, Vera Cruz, and Chiapas before he returned to San Francisco Cajonos.

The mystical and supernatural experiences that many nuns faced in seventeenth-century convents in Puebla shaped New Spain's spirituality. These experiences and the way they were recounted provided the elements for an archetype of conduct and for socially accepted virtues. Using their imagination, these nuns, servants of God, enlightened and morally exemplary, maintained a direct relationship between the convent, the supernatural world, and colonial society.

Anthropological studies of popular religion have emphasized, almost exclusively, the collective and public aspects of religious expression but have ignored private, individual piety. Yet collective and private religious expressions have been linked throughout history. When individual manifestations of religious expression were socially endorsed, these private forms of piety influenced the creation of identity and models of behavior. Because these archetypes of religious conduct were so important within colonial culture as a whole, it is important to gain an understanding of the events that led to their formation and the way in which they travelled from the culture of the convent to that of the larger society.

As she lay bleeding to death from an accidental knife wound, María Josefa Vargas said to her husband: “Look what the Devil has done (Mira lo que hace el diablo).” María Josefa and her husband, José Rosario, were both indigenous, natives of Almoloya and Tenancingo respectively, and at the time living in Malinalco in the Valley of Mexico. They had been fighting playfully over some meat that María Josefa had bought to make cecina Mock anger and a very sharp knife made for bad companions, and José Rosario accidentally cut María Josefa in the leg.

María Josefa's words are one of those elusive examples of the key place occupied by the Devil in Mexican popular culture in the late eighteenth century. By the late colonial period the Devil seems to have become more of a concern for rural Mexicans, particularly within indigenous communities, than he had been before. Once a European import, the Devil had become a more evident part of the symbols used by Indians in the countryside. He had become less of a concern to Church and State authorities and was rather used to explain accidents, such as the one cited above, but more frequently as an excuse or a reason for unacceptable conduct, such as violence or illicit sexuality.

In the late nineteenth century, the move away from classical criminology toward positivist criminology brought with it new categories of crime and new definitions of the criminal. A great deal of scholarship has focused on positivism's new approach, which grew out of research in Europe, especially in France and Italy, and later took hold in Argentina and other Latin American countries. It might be supposed that as a state's judicial and penal authorities and doctors of forensic medicine were becoming more professionalized and positivist at this time, and as state and society were becoming more secularized and urbanized, such a traditional figure as the devil would have disappeared from criminal court cases.