Le paradis aux Amériques. Les fantasmes religieux des premiers explorateurs
Paradise in Americas. The Religious Fantasms of the Former Explorers

Summary/Abstract: The discovery of the New World by Christopher Columbus arose in the imagination of the Europeans a constellation of religious images and phantasms. Imbued by the messianic and apocalyptic atmosphere of the 16th century, when the Spanish Reconquista was finally completed, the “admiral of the Ocean” transported to the Americas the hope of discovering the Promised Land. Utilizing the information from the medieval T-O (terrarum orbis) maps, which situated the Terrestrial Paradise at the oriental end of the oïkoumène, Columbus identified South America, discovered during his third voyage, with the Garden of God, and the inhabitants of the Caribbean Islands with prelapsarian, adamic people. This is how the first contact of the Europeans with the Amerindians shaped the concept of the “good savage”. The successors of Columbus, scholars such as Pedro Martyr or Las Casas and explorers such as Juan Ponce de León (discoverer of Florida), Giovanni Da Verrazano (discoverer of the Atlantic coast of North America), Jacques Cartier (discoverer of Canada), Amerigo Vespucci and Paulmier de Gonneville (discoverers of South America) have produced an imaginary “translatio paradisi”, a colonization of the Americas with European images of the Biblical Paradise.

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