LA SANTISIMA MUERTE
Anita Rodriguez
“On September 14, 2008, 44 people were murdered in the narco wars. Last month 60 died in one week. The authorities found 12 decapitated corpses in Yucatan. In two years over 4,300 people have been murdered – and everybody knows this figure is but the tip of an unreported iceberg.”
Like an ancient riverbed in the collective psyche waiting for fertile conditions to flood the national consciousness, a strangely disquieting cult is sweeping Mexico. La Santisima Muerte, or Saint Death -- also affectionately called La Nina Blanca and La Madrina -- has re-arisen in a booming market for her statues, fetishes, charms and paraphernalia in esoteric and religious stores and mercados from Los Angeles to southern Mexico.
La Santisima has always been discreetly present in Mexico, tucked in among the saints -- but now she is conspicuous, appearing everywhere. A 66 foot-high image of her has been erected in Tutitlan, a barrio of Mexico City. A cult of the Nina Blanca broke into a chapel and replaced a statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe with one of the Santisima.
Millions of web sites and blogs are devoted to la Santisima. They range from academic dissertations on her pre-Columbian origins to the evolution of her popular iconography, to video interviews with devotees who have experienced faith healings, to sites detailing the proper manner of building her altar and conducting her rituals. You can learn which colors of her image can be used for which petitions, what prayers and offerings are appropriate.
Mexican newspapers feature stories about the people who build and maintain her shrines, while Catholic periodicals publish sermons condemning her worship. Despite pressure from the all-powerful Church, the cult has generated its own hierarchy of bishops and priests (one of whom was recently murdered), they conduct processions and masses in her honor. Two “official” churches of La Santa Muerte claim to be the real one, and between them they are estimated to have 2 million followers.
Perhaps the highest concentration of shrines is in the barrio of Tepic in Mexico City, the most dangerous neighborhood in one the most dangerous cities in the world. The association of la Nina Blanca with crime is so close that an altar to her is considered by police to be proof of drug -related or organized criminal activity.
The contemporary La Santisima evolved from an old archetype, or a conglomeration of old archetypes. Today she is dressed in glitter, plastic gems, synthetic silks, satins, flowers and enhanced by flashy electric effects -- but she is old wine in a new bottle.
Her resurgence at this time in Mexican history is only one chapter in a long narrative that goes back 3,000 years. The Aztec goddess of death was Mictlantecuhtli, and long before the conquest her cult was deeply imbedded in Mexican consciousness.
The church absorbed native belief into Catholic ritual and iconography, built cathedrals on pre-Columbian sites already sanctified by centuries of indigenous pilgrimages and dressed ancient deities in the clothes of the most likely saint. By transforming Tonantzin into Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe, the church harvested believers whose deep faith in the Mother archetype is rooted in native soil, in pre-Catholic belief, and the habit of centuries.
But Mictlantecuhtli could not be disguised as a saint or an aspect of the Virgin. The negative feminine and the image of death were too charged for the intensely misogynist 16th century Church and the Inquisition. She became a repressed archetype, her worshipers among the most deeply disenfranchised, and she sank into psychological and social unconsciousness.
It is said that 17 generations are required for a family dynamic to wear itself out. How much longer if the entire society surrounding the family supports the dynamic? Only 14 generations have passed since the Conquest.
Another Aztec goddess the Church could not sanitize was Coatlique, the Mother of the Gods, whose carved image so terrified the Spaniards who first dug it up that they immediately re-buried it. Reminiscent of Kali, she wears a necklace of human hearts and dismembered hands. That statue now stands in the Museum of Anthropology in the D.F., and one can’t but empathize with the impact it had upon the first Europeans to see it.
In Aztec iconography Coatlique and Mictlantecuhtli were two distinct entities -- but La Santisima evokes them both, as if their two energies have merged into a single icon. Coatlique was the “filth eater,” consuming the sins of humans. The present-day Santisima also offers a kind of absolution in that she will aid a petitioner to commit a crime – and not only accepts sinners but sin. Her shrines dot the drug routes. Her cult flourishes in prisons, most famously in El Reclusorio Norte, Mexico City’s biggest. Gang members wear her tattoos, engrave their weapons with her image, build altars to her in their cells.
According to one interview with one of La Santa’s followers: “Bad people need somebody to pray to too! If you are going to kidnap somebody how can you ask the Virgin of Guadalupe? But you can ask la Santa Muerte for success and protection. She is good for risky undertakings, like running drugs, performing a robbery or crossing the border. All the narcos have altars to her - and powerful government people, rich men too – they need revenge, they have to get rid of their enemies, they need protection from violence.”
However, La Santisima’s base of converts spills beyond the criminal element. She now draws from the millions of urban and rural poor, the 52% of the country that lives on under 20 dollars a day and constitute the informal, invisible economy, such as street vendors, taxi drivers, multiple mini-service providers, those who live in Mexico’s dangerous slums, housewives, servants, construction workers, police and soldiers. To these people shamanism is still more accessible and familiar than a doctor. Mexico may be Catholic, but the old beliefs persist, even if unconsciously and changed by influences from culturally diverse sources. Just as there no atheists in foxholes, hardly a Mexican of any social or educational level will not resort to a curandero.
The Santisima especially shelters and protects all those the state institutions have failed and rejected. The Revolution, the government, the army, the police, the political parties, the Church and even Our Lady of Guadalupe have not delivered justice and security to Mexico’s disenfranchised.
Even Satanism, human and animal sacrifice is rumored to be associated with La Santa, and given the brutal, grisly murders being committed by the warring drug cartels it is conservative to suspect the worst.
According to Bernardo Barranco of El Centro de Estudios de las Religiones, “The growing cult of la Santa Muerte reveals in a very clear manner that we have been building a bi-polar country; the Santisima cult, in itself, consists of subterranean practices very far from Occidental Catholic morality.”
The growth of her cult has long been parallel with the increasing power of organized crime and violence. But since president Calderon declared war on the drug cartels two years ago violence has dramatically escalated.
On September 14, 2008, 44 were murdered in these narco wars. The month before 60 died in one week. The authorities found 44 decapitated corpses in Yucatan. In two years over 4,300 people have been murdered – and everyone knows this figure is but the tip of an unreported iceberg.
Masked commando squads armed with bazookas, grenades and AK 47’s have broken their cohorts out of prisons, attacked police stations, kidnapped people in restaurants and massacred whole families, babies included. Newspapers proclaim that in some states the army, police, state and municipal governments are no longer in control. Citizens are clamoring for the safety of the country’s streets and their families. The government is living behind theatrical security; the rich are leaving the country or installing chips in the bodies of their relatives in order to locate them by satellite. They are armoring their cars and hiring bodyguards.
But for the great majority of Mexicans there is no where to turn -- but to La Santisima.
I was inspired to write this article because of the reaction to a painting I innocently did. The man who commissioned it asked for a Santa Muerte. I had no idea how powerful a symbol I was playing with, and I painted her as a transparent hallucination wrapped in wind-blown lace towering above the landscape.
My friend sells in the plaza in Guanajuato on weekends, and there were a lot of people standing around when I delivered the painting. He loved it. But more than that, the painting attracted a somehow excessive fascination. People of
distinct social classes stood and stared at it for a little too long, as if mesmerized. I wondered if, as an American, I had made yet another cultural faux paux -- but no, they liked it. And I received a cascade of orders.
I believe it is not my mastery of painting that accounts for the response, but the power and social relevancy of the archetype.
Anita Rodriguez is a native Taoseña from Taos, New México EEUU, who now lives in Guanajato, México. She is a painter, writer, and adobe artisan.
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