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ABSTRACT
Over the last decade, the cult of La Santa Muerte (St Death) has attracted a remarkable number of followers in Mexico and the USA. Whereas the social context of her devotees, who tend to live on the fringes of society, has attracted ample attention from scholars and journalists, one of the principal puzzles is still how a skeleton image of death has come to be seen as a saint by large numbers of Catholics. How is it possible for this figure to embrace such antagonistic qualities as death and sainthood in a Christian context? In this semiotic-material exploration of the image's genealogy, I suggest that La Santa Muerte should be seen as a coalescing of two radically distinct images of death: the popular-secular Catrina and the occult-biblical Santísima Muerte. The St Death venerated today encompasses the ambiguities of the two and creates an exceptionally vibrant and popular Catholic image.
Acknowledgements
The author thanks Claudio Lomnitz, Hugo José Suárez, Esther Fihl, Andreas Bandak, Mikkel Bille, Lars Højer, Michael Ulfstjerne, Myriam Lamrani and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on this article at various stages. A special thanks to Misael Medina Pineda who was the first to point out to me the similarities between the images of La Catrina and La Santa Muerte. Without his stimulating observation the article would not have materialised.
Notes
1. Studies conducted into the post-2001 cult of La Santa Muerte (Malvido Citation2008; Perdigón Citation2008; Fragoso Citation2011) emphasise that the majority of devotees perceive themselves as Catholic even through there is room for a substantial devotional diversity, as Chesnut has argued (Citation2012). Devotees in Mexico City are aware that the Roman Catholic Church cannot possibly formally recognise death as a saint. They prefer instead to speak about their faith in Saint Death as ‘another religion’ (otra religión) detached from the Roman Catholic Church. Yet they incorporate the unorthodox Saint Death under the umbrella of a Catholic cosmology (Saint Death is god's daughter or his angel) and liturgy (the public street rosaries held to her follow the form of a Catholic rosary beginning with a communal prayer to the Christian God before reciting the prayers of Our Father and Ave Maria between the readings of five mysteries created especially to invoke Saint Death). Moreover, the images of Saint Death are often placed next to formally recognised images of saints (e.g. Virgin of Guadalupe, Saint Charbel and Saint Jude). As such, the cult around Saint Death provides a perfect example of a Catholic folk religion, such as the cults around Mal Verde and El Niño Fidencio. Yet Saint Death's peculiar nature has marginalised her even further than most other folk saints, since the Roman Catholic Church considers the worship of Saint Death to be a kind of devil worship. There are examples of other cults worshipping death in Latin America (e.g. San La Muerte in Argentina); however, for clarity, the material discussed in this article is restricted to the Mexican Santa Muerte.
2. Fetishism has been the subject of exhaustive discussions in anthropology; economy and psychology (cf. Spyer Citation1998). Debates about fetishism have much in common with the present discussion, but I have limited mine to idolatry, which is more in line with the theological problem facing popular Catholicism of situating and separating human and (pagan) non-human agency than with an exploration of false consciousness.
3. My translation of the last part of the second prayer of La Novena is taken from two different prayer books. The first is Novenario de la Santísima, published in 2008 by Aigam. The other pamphlet Novena, La Santísima is anonymous. It was given to me by a devotee. Doña Queta confirmed that it was identical to the older pamphlets of La Novena that she knew of in the 1960s and 1970s.
4. David Romo was until his arrest in 2011 the journalists' favourite when investigating the cult of La Santa Muerte, because he was the most polemic devotee, and moreover a Catholic priest in the Traditional Holy Catholic Apostolic Church, Mex–USA. He was constantly agitating that the cult was under attack from the Roman Catholic Church and the Mexican Federal Government. Devotees by and large disclaimed his importance and tended to gather at other shrines, not at least because they found David Romo tended to exaggerate the dispute for his own advantage and to add support to his claim to be the leader of the cult. In 2014, several people claim to be spokesperson for La Santa Muerte (e.g. Enriiqueta Vargas), yet rather than a particular spokesperson the cult's momentum continues to be centralized around the mimetic practice related to erecting a street altar to Saint Death.