Santa Muerte
Nuestra Señora de la Santa Muerte, often shortened to Santa Muerte, is a new religious movement, female deity, folk-Catholic saint, and folk saint in Mexican folk Catholicism and Neo-Paganism. A personification of death, she is associated with healing, protection, and safe delivery to the afterlife by her devotees. Despite condemnation by the Roman Catholic Church and Evangelical Protestant denominations, her following has become increasingly prominent since the turn of the 21st century.
Santa Muerte almost always appears as a female skeletal figure, clad in a long robe and holding one or more objects, usually a scythe and a globe. Her robe can be of any color or pattern, as more specific images of the figure vary widely from devotee to devotee and according to the ritual being performed or the petition being made.
Her present day following was first reported in Mexico by American anthropologists in the 1940s and was an occult practice until the early 2000s. Most prayers and other rituals have been traditionally performed privately at home. Since the beginning of the 21st century, worship has become more public, starting in Mexico City after a believer named Enriqueta Romero founded her famous Mexico City shrine in 2001. The number of believers in Santa Muerte has grown over the past two decades to an estimated 12 million followers who are concentrated in Mexico, Central America, and the United States, with a smaller contingent of followers in South America, Canada and Europe. Santa Muerte has two similar male counterparts in Latin America, the skeletal folk saints San La Muerte of Argentina and Paraguay and Rey Pascual of Guatemala and Chiapas, Mexico. According to R. Andrew Chesnut, Ph.D. in Latin American history and professor of religious studies, Santa Muerte is at the center of the single fastest-growing new religious movement in the Americas.
Names
Santa Muerte can be translated into English as either "Saint Death" or "Holy Death", although R. Andrew Chesnut, Ph.D. in Latin American history and professor of religious studies, believes that the former is a more accurate translation because it "better reveals" her identity as a folk saint. A variant of this is Santísima Muerte, which is translated as "Most Holy Death" or "Most Saintly Death", and devotees often call her Santisma Muerte during their rituals.Santa Muerte is also known by a wide variety of other monikers: the Skinny Lady, the Bony Lady, the White Girl, the White Sister, the Pretty Girl, the Powerful Lady, the Godmother,
"Madre", Señora de las Sombras, Señora Blanca, Señora Negra, Niña Santa, Santa Sebastiana or Doña Bella Sebastiana.
History
After the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire, the worship of Mictēcacihuātl, the skeletal Aztec goddess of death, diminished but was never eradicated. Judith Katia Perdigón Castañeda has found references dating to 18th-century Mexico. According to one account, recorded in the annals of the Spanish Inquisition, Chichimecs in central Mexico tied up a skeletal figure, whom they addressed as "Santa Muerte", and threatened it with lashings if it did not perform miracles or grant their wishes. Another syncretism between pre-Columbian and Christian beliefs involving death can be seen in Day of the Dead commemorations. During these commemorations, many Mexicans flock to cemeteries to sing and pray for friends and family members who have died. Children partake in the festivities by eating chocolate or candy in the shape of skulls. Perdigón Castañeda, Thompson, Kingsbury, and Chesnut have countered the argument that Santa Muerte's origins are not Indigenous proposed by Malvido, Lomnitz, and Kristensen; stating that Santa Muerte's origins derive from authentic Indigenous beliefs. For Malvido this stems from Indigenist discourse originating in the 1930s. Nevertheless, ethnoarchaeological research by Kingsbury and Chesnut as well as archival work by Perdigón Castañeda, has established clear links between pre-Columbian death deity worship and Santa Muerte supplication.In contrast to the Day of the Dead, overt veneration of Santa Muerte remained clandestine until the early 2000s. When it went public in sporadic occurrences, reaction was often harsh, and included the desecration of shrines and altars. At the beginning of the 20th century, José Guadalupe Posada created a similar, but secular, figure by the name of Catrina, a female skeleton dressed in fancy clothing of the period. Posada began to evoke the idea that the universality of death generated a fundamental equality amongst all human beings. His paintings of skeletons in daily life and of La Catrina were meant to represent the arbitrary and violent nature of an unequal society.
Modern artists began to reestablish Posada's styles as a national artistic objective to push the limits of upper-class tastes; an example of Posada's influence is Diego Rivera's mural painting Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in the Alameda Central, which features La Catrina. The image of the skeleton and the Day of the Dead ritual that used to be held underground became commercialized and domesticated. The skeletal images became that of folklore, encapsulating Posada's viewpoint that death is an equalizer.
Skeletons were clad in extravagant dresses with braids in their hair, altering the image of Posada's original La Catrina. As opposed to being the political message Posada intended, the skeletons of equality became skeletal images which were appealing to tourists and the national folkloric Mexican identity.
File:Posada2.Catrina.jpeg|thumb|One of José Guadalupe Posada's Catrina engravings
Veneration of Santa Muerte was documented in the 1940s in working-class neighborhoods in Mexico City, such as Tepito. The new religious movement of Santa Muerte first came to widespread popular attention in Mexico in August 1998, when police arrested the notorious gangster Daniel Arizmendi López and discovered a shrine to the saint in his home. Widely reported in the press, this discovery inspired the common association between Santa Muerte, violence, and criminality in Mexican popular consciousness. At present, Santa Muerte can be found throughout Mexico and also across the United States and Central America. There are videos, websites, and music composed in honor of this folk saint.
Since 2001, there has been "meteoric growth" in Santa Muerte belief, largely due to her reputation for performing miracles. In the late 2000s, the founder of Mexico's first Santa Muerte church, David Romo, estimated that there were around 5 million devotees in Mexico, constituting approximately 5% of the country's population.
By the late 2000s, Santa Muerte had become Mexico's second-most popular saint, after Saint Jude, and had come to rival the country's "national patroness", the Virgin of Guadalupe. The meteoric rise of this new religious movement has engendered considerable controversy. In March 2009, the Mexican Army demolished 40 roadside shrines near the U.S. border. Around 2005, the new religious movement was brought to the United States by Mexican and Central American immigrants, and by 2012 had tens of thousands of followers throughout the country, primarily in cities with large Mexican and Mexican-American populations., devotion to Santa Muerte was the fastest-growing new religious movement in the world, with an estimated 12 million followers, and the single fastest-growing new religious movement in the Americas. The COVID-19 pandemic saw further growth in the new religious movement as many believed that she would protect them against the virus.
Attributes and iconography
Santa Muerte is a personification of death. Unlike other Latin American folk saints, Santa Muerte is not, herself, seen as a dead human being. She is associated with healing, protection, financial wellbeing, and assurance of a path to the afterlife.Although there are other death saints in Latin America, such as San La Muerte, Santa Muerte is the only female saint of death in the Americas. Iconographically, Santa Muerte is a skeleton dressed in female clothes or a shroud, and carrying both a scythe and a globe. Santa Muerte is distinguished as female not by her skeletal form but rather by her attire and hair. The latter was introduced by a believer named Enriqueta Romero.
The two most common objects that Santa Muerte holds in her hands are a globe and a scythe. Her scythe reflects her origins as the Grim Reaper, and can represent the moment of death, when it is said to cut a silver thread. The scythe can symbolize the cutting of negative energies or influences. As a harvesting tool, a scythe may also symbolize hope and prosperity. The scythe has a long handle, indicating that it can reach anywhere. The globe represents Death's vast power and dominion over the earth, and may be seen as a kind of a tomb to which we all return.
Other objects associated with Santa Muerte include scales, an hourglass, an owl, and an oil lamp. The scales allude to equity, justice, and impartiality, as well as divine will. An hourglass indicates the time of life on earth and also the belief that death is not the end, as the hourglass can be inverted to start over. The hourglass denotes Santa Muerte's relationship with time as well as with the worlds above and below. It also symbolizes patience. An owl symbolizes her ability to navigate the darkness and her wisdom; the owl is also said to act as a messenger. A lamp symbolizes intelligence and spirit, to light the way through the darkness of ignorance and doubt. Owls in particular are associated with Mesoamerican death deities such as Mictlantecuhtli and seen as evidence of continuity of death worship into Santa Muerte. Some followers of Santa Muerte believe that she is jealous and that her image should not be placed next to those of other saints or deities, or there will be consequences.
Many artists, particularly Mexican-American artists, have worked with Santa Muerte's image. One of the images considered to be the most controversial in Mexico is the fusion of Santa Muerte and the Virgin of Guadalupe, into what is sometimes known as GuadaMuerte. This image has been very polemical for many Mexicans as it features Santa Muerte dressed like the Virgin of Guadalupe, in blue veil with stars on it, red dress, with a fiery yellow halo behind her head and often in a praying pose. It has, according to news sources, been so upsetting to the Catholic Church that Santa Muerte leaders in Mexico have advised against its use, while in the Santa Muerte community some leaders and devotees are angered that their powerful, formidable folk saint would be conflated with a completely separate entity, the Virgin of Guadalupe, as the practices are different on many levels.