These pendants have been “prepared” by a Mexican curandero, using the method from the grimorio Clavicula del Rey Salomon - which involves setting it out in the moonlight when the moon is waxing, and saying ancient prayers over it, exposing it to incense, and using special prefume. The folk saint “La Santisima Muerte” is usually depicted these days with all of the blandishments of the Grim Reaper, and the figurines that most curanderas and brujas use for their spells looks exactly like the Grim Reaper. There are three figures that are used in this cult - a white one, a black one, and a red one. The white was is for cures and for luck. The black one is for protection and vengeance, and the most commonly used one is red - for love spells. In any event, people generally ignore that, and they almost always implore the help of the Santisima Muerte for love spells. Santisima Muerte. Some versions of this folk saint have her holding a scythe, like the grim reaper, while others have her holding a set of balance type scales, like St. Michael. These scales represent the idea that, when the Santisima Muerte arrives to take you away, if the good you have done in your life outweighs the bad, she takes you in one direction, and if the bad outweighs the good, she takes you in the other. Yet another version of her shows her holding a globe, and this is in keeping with the saying about her that “She also rules this world”, or a variation of that is that “She is also one of the rulers of this world.” This particulay medallion actually has all three of these symbols, plus the very important halo, which expresses another thing that is often said about her, which is that “She wants to be considered as any other saint”.

The Indian roots are mostly with the dual nature deities, whose “death side” was indicated by skeletal figures - the most famous survivor of that tradition is “La Santisima Muerte”. She is rooted in the cult of an Indian goddess whom the Aztecs called Mictlancihuatl - the name means “Lady of Death”. The “Life Side”, then, would be the Virgin of Guadalupe. The concept that many curanderos hold is that the Virgin of Guadalupe is our mother when we are born into the this world, and her sister, the Santisima Muerte is our mother when we are born into the next. In a sense, there is a concept that we are looking forward at one, and back at the other, but we are just looking at the same thing from two different perspectives. We look back at our birth and forward at our death, but we fail to see that birth and death are the same thing. The Santisima Muerte is extremely popular in Mexico, and it seems that her cult is growing by leaps and bounds.

From Fausto's Art Gallery in Ojinaga, Chihuahua.
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