La Santísima Muerte:
A Mexican Folk Saint

by Edward Bryant Holman

The difinitive text about the Santisima Muerte is based on years of study, including interviews with dozens of believers and practitioners and believers in the folk saint in boht Mexico and the United States. Author Edward Bryant Holman is a recognized expert on Mexican magic - brujeria and curanderismo. He currently resides in Presidio, Texas, just across the river from Ojinaga, Chihuahua, where he has done most of his research.

Here is an excerpt from the book:

It is said that the Santisima Muerte, a folk saint portrayed as a figure looking pretty much identical to the Grim Reaper, is strictly a Mexican phenomenon, being based, supposedly, on a skeleton goddess figure of the Aztec Indians, who ruled Central Mexico prior to the conquest of Mexico by the Spanish in the early sixteenth century. The popularity of this cult has grown phenomenally over the last decade or so, even spreading outside of Mexico and working its way into the culture of the New Age, where she is grafted onto roots that are quite foreign to those planted in the soil from which she originates.

Sometimes simply known as La Muerte, a term that is the same as the Spanish term for Death, this natural double entendre serves as a way of equating the concept of Death itself with the person of the Santisima Muerte, who is literally the Angel of Death, the one who comes at the end of one's life on Earth in order to take one to the place where the Souls of the Dead must go. The process of what transpires with the spirits of the dead at the time of their parting and thereafter is all couched in the dogma of the Roman Catholic Church, within the set of understandings that underscore the concepts that are considered to be the most important within traditional Mexican society. Certainly there is an element of syncretism in the Mexican folk religion which otherwise purports to be Catholic in every sense, but this syncretism is not entirely a matter of the faint glossing over of widespread Indian religious mores by a supposed veneer of Catholicism, as some writers might find it fashionable to suggest might be the case. In fact, the Indian elements might, indeed, be in place to a certain degree in the cult of any saint, be the saint an official, canonized saint of the Church, or else a folk saint, but these elements are both distant and subliminal at best, there being little or no mechanism for the continuation of any of the overt trappings of the old native religions now after five centuries since their destruction and suppression. As a culture of Chicano Nationalism which harnesses the myths and symbols of Mexican culture takes hold, La Santisima Muerte is now called upon to fulfill a sort of equivalent to the Goddess role in European based New Age cult beliefs, as a sort of a Bad Girl figure serving as a counterbalance or an alternative to the sacrosanct nature of the Virgin of Guadalupe. By emphasizing the supposed pagan roots of this folk saint, she becomes the focus of a new Mexican and Chicano neopagan paradigm, joining the likes of Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca as the focal points of this thinking, the mythical figures that seem to champion the cause.