A Mother's Love and a Soldier's Devotion - Santisima Muerte in Perspective

When you stare into the empty eyes of La Nina Blanca do you feel the resonant warmth of a mother's love? It's there, if you look deep enough, at least for those who pay Her true devotion. Even those coming from a more objective distance can't help but notice the prevalence of motherly care that attends Her presence.

At Her shrines children run forward clutching icons of Most Holy Death, apples in hand to present Her with gifts for blessings She has bestowed their families. Newly weds stand ready with offerings to thank Her for their opportunity at future prosperity. Even gunmen come to Her as a mother, heads bowed in respect, offering tremulous thanks to the great matron whose hand has been held another day from executing a final judgement on their actions.

These are sights not easily accepted by many in the United States and Mexico, who view such passionate expressions towards an icon depicting death as aberrant and perhaps diabolical. Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi during his recent trip to Mexico denounced Her no less than 3 times in four days, comparing Her tradition to the religiosity common among the organized crime families in Italy. In his most harsh condemnation he decried blasphemy against Her devotions while continuing to conflate the entire practice with criminality:

"It's not religion just because it's dressed up like religion; it's a blasphemy against religion...The mafia, drug trafficking and organised crime don't have a religious aspect and have nothing to do with religion, even if they use the image of Santa Muerte,"

Written from a cartoonish and limited perspective on the situation, these statements fall far afield from the silent embrace of Muerte Querida (Beloved Death) as it is known by Her devotees. Unmeasured words from an aloof Cardinal cannot change the fact that this social degradation inflaming his rhetoric is a systematic failure propagated by the very orthodoxy and officials that he stands as a representative for. From the shadows of the society that corruption in his church helped create, La Rosa Blanca smiles on Her children as they overcome their daily struggles and find strength in a powerful devotion to Her faithfulness.

She comes from the West with flowers in Her hair...

"Santa Muerte...hears prayers from dark places...She was sent to rescue the lost, society's rejects...She understands us, because she is a cabrona like us. We are hard people and we live hard lives. But she accepts us all, when we do good and bad." 

- Hayde Solís Cárdenas, a 65 year old street merchant and devotee of Santa Muerte in Mexico City (Source: On Mexico's Mean Streets, the Sinners Have a Saint, New York Times, March 26th, 2004)

A beautiful woman has come to the United States, she comes from the West with flowers in her hair, through the auspices of a growing devotional tradition spreading across the Americas. Santa Muerte, Saint or Holy Death, has made Her public debut after over two centuries of quiet mediation in matters of love and fidelity. As a previous piece on Modern Mythology mentions, word of Her emergence is roaring in from a diverse array of mediated messages and personal accounts. As elusive as ever, even in the light of social media's invasive reach, Our Lady of Shadows remains a delicate mystery.  

She comes willingly to those with no hope, who have been turned away from all official recognition, operating outside the boundaries of orthodoxy, and She is of a most practical, and efficacious nature. In the midst of sex scandals, economic upheaval, institutionalized violence, income inequality, a culture of rape, a surveillance state (whose patron, Our Lady of Perpetual Surveillance, has yet to make a true public debut,) extreme weather and increasing distrust in official organizations, devotion to Her has threaded throughout the disaffected populations of the Americas. Various numbers are offered for how many devotees She currently has, but no one knows for certain due to the nature of Her worship being on the margins, and the possibility of conflating numbers due to the shock value of Her iconography and politicized nature of the media around Her.

Ambiguous Origins

Santa Muerte is ambiguous in translation by the time She reaches the English speaking media, meaning Saint or Holy Death depending on who you are talking to. This ambiguity leads to some interesting hermenuetics on Her proper place in the Christian pantheon. 

Historically She has been associated with love magic, specifically prayers to return wandering husbands, and in broader conceptual terms, as “Holy Death,” She is the embodiment of Christ’s reconciliary death on the cross, having parallels to traditions which venerate the Good Thief.  Some have commented that she is the "dark side of Mary," but this is only true in terms of the Passion narrative, where Holy Death provides the exit from the natural world which the Holy Mother gave entrance too, in other respects Santa Muerte is quite distinct from the Marian tradition. She is called, at times, Santa Sebastiana, St. Sebastienne, and Doña Bella Sebastiana,Our Beautiful Lady Sebastienne, after the patron Saint of Holy Death, St. Sebastian.

Santa Muerte: Encountering Death

By M.G.

"Popular in Mexico, and sometimes linked to the illicit drug trade, the skeleton saint known as La Santa Muerte in recent years has found a robust and diverse following north of the border: immigrant small business owners, artists, gay activists and the poor, among others - many of them  non-Latinos and not all involved with organized religion... The saint is especially popular among Mexican-American Catholics, rivaling that of St. Jude and La Virgen de Guadalupe as a favorite for miracle requests, even as the Catholic Church in Mexico denounces Santa Muerte as satanic, experts say." - ‘La Santa Muerte gaining in popularity in the U.S.’, Associated Press

A friend of mine, (of dubious character but capable of remarkable scholarship), once told me that the more marginalized a people, the more powerful their magicks will be. If true, few figures must be more powerful than Santisma Muerte, the death saint of Mexico.

A grim but widely revered figure, the cult of Holy Death is increasingly popular in this impoverished land whose very notions of law and community are daily threatened by underworld gangs and entrenched government corruption. Slightly resembling the Hindu Goddess Kali in her attributes, the affectionately nicknamed 'bony lady' is alternately described as either a nun who committed suicide after being abandoned by her lover, the Virgin Mary’s shadow aspect, or an Aztec underworld goddess returned to the modern age.

Whatever her origin, this Grim Reapress is always depicted using European imagery of the skeletal and undead. Her chief icons, the owl and the human skull, underscore her nocturnal, necromantic nature, yet she manifests in peaceful white-robed forms as well as terrible aspects clothed in a darker hue. Her devotees claim that just as death comes to all humans rich and poor alike, so to will Santisima Muerte accept devotees from all walks of life, including persons whose lifestyles fall outside the auspices of the Roman Catholic Church's approval, including gays, sex workers, and those in criminal trades as well as those who fight them.

Although woefully gringo in my ethnic background, I have had the opportunity to visit some of the better known botanicas in Brooklyn and my native Philadelphia. Latin Folk Catholicism is a colorful, incredible stew of African, European and indigenous spiritual influences, with saints and powers reputed to provide help with any worldy (or not-so-worldly) problem.

Devoted to death (another gringo analyzing this topic).

Remember the Dead

Cando eramos vivos,
Andabamos pol-os caminos;
E agora que somos mortos
Andabamos por entre os hortos
Tocando nas campanillas
E commendo pimentos ...*

-- Song of a troop of revenants in Manzaneda, Trives (Orense, Galicia) cited in Claude Lecouteux's  Phantom Armies of the Night

The Seven Sisters rise high in the Southern Arch reminding us that the time for donning the mask and shroud has come. The celebrations which stretch from Oct. 31st through the beginning of November, known to most as Samhain, All Hallows Eve, the Day of All Saints, Hallow’een, and in Latin countries, Dias de los Muertos, are a time for reconnecting with those of us who have passed on to the next stage of the pilgrimage, who walk the Summerlands, as the Spiritualists say, beyond the thin veil of shifting materia that gives us the illusion we are solely heirs to a body demarcated by the bounds of flesh.

Our remembrance of the customs that attend this time have been blurred by Victorians like James Frazer, whose fear and fascination with sex and death put all of our ancestral traditions on the defensive. However, the work of more recent scholars has begun to untangle the knots of understanding that have obfuscated potent alternative understandings, and provide a much healthier insight into on our relationship with the ancestral dead.