Nuestra Señora de la Santa Muerte

Nuestra Señora de la Santa Muerte, Our Lady of The Shadows, The Lady of The Dark, The White and Black Lady, The New Mictēcacihuātl. Our Lady of Holy Death, often simply called Santa Muerte, is an impossibly tall Skulled Dragoness with light blond fur, a lighter underbelly, pointed triangular ears, a red canine-like skull face, and a long thin tail. She’s often depicted in a large black dress with a descending white cross pattern, along with a matching wide brim hat with a silken veil hanging from the brim, obscuring her eyes with her snout poking out from the veil. Sometimes she’s seen holding a variety of items, most commonly a golden scythe with either The Scales of Justice or a globe. In more modern depictions, Muerte is seen in a black Nun’s habit, a white scapular over her shoulders, a cincture tied around her midsection and a long black veil that extends down to her shoulders, along with a pair of square glasses. Although Death has been around ever since Adam and Eve ate The Apple, Santa Muerte, literally meaning “Saint Death”, started to form in Mexico during the 1930s and late 1940s. 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. Veneration of Santa Muerte was documented in the 1940s in working-class neighborhoods in Mexico City, such as Tepito. 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. 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. Since 2001, there has been "meteoric growth" in Santa Muerte belief, largely due to her reputation for performing miracles. She has roughly 12 million adherents, with the great majority of concentrated in Mexico, the US, and Central America. 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. As of 2016-2017, devotion to Santa Muerte is 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. Santa Muerte is a personification of death. Unlike other Latin American folk saints, Santa Muerte is not, herself, seen as dead. She is associated with healing, protection, financial wellbeing, and assurance of a path to the afterlife.

Her comfort.