Abstract
In this article, we trace the syncretic origins and development of the new religious movement centered on the Mexican folk saint of death, Santa Muerte. We explore how she was born of the syncretic association of the Spanish Catholic Grim Reapress and Pre-Columbian Indigenous thanatologies in the colonial era. Through further religious bricolage in the post-colony, we describe how as the new religious movement rapidly expanded it integrated elements of other religious traditions, namely Afro-Cuban Santeria and Palo Mayombe, New Age beliefs and practices, and even Wicca. In contrast to much of the Eurocentric scholarship on Santa Muerte, we posit that both the Skeleton Saint’s origins and contemporary devotional framework cannot be comprehended without considering the significant influence of Indigenous death deities who formed part of holistic ontologies that starkly contrasted with the dualistic absolutism of European Catholicism in which life and death were viewed as stark polarities. We also demonstrate how across time the liminal power of death as a supernatural female figure has proved especially appealing to marginalized socioeconomic groups.
Highlights
In this article, we consider the syncretic origins of Mexican folk saint, Santa Muerte, the female folk saint of death, in the colony of New Spain and detail her ongoing syncretic development in the post-colony of Mexico
We describe how through the meeting of Christian and Indigenous thanatologies in the colonial space—which soon became a space of omnipresent death, due to mass genocide of local peoples—early iterations of Santa Muerte originated which involved tapping into the power of death and liminality for miracles of healing and restored life
Lady Nine Grass, in the Tonindeye codices which date back thousands of years, portray her with a face featuring skull-like hinged jaws, much like Santa Muerte. Her sartorial attributes, such as her “blouse-like quechquemitl” are “representative of the lifegiving female deities in Postclassic Mexican iconography” reflecting the “PreColumbian view of life and death as cyclical”, and her powers over transitional states as a liminal deity of death (Pohl 1994, p. 78). Despite her original Spanish iconography inherited from the Iberian Grim Reapress, Santa Muerte as a dynamic new religious movement offers Mexican devotees a form of death worship that is in sync with Indigenous thanatologies and the liminal power of death
Summary
We consider the syncretic origins of Mexican folk saint, Santa Muerte, the female folk saint of death, in the colony of New Spain and detail her ongoing syncretic development in the post-colony of Mexico. Taking an ethno-archaeological, anthropological and historical viewpoint, we argue that Santa Muerte accreted from the meeting of two distinct conceptions of death during the colonial era, when Spanish colonizers brought Christianity to Latin America to convert Indigenous people, and with it the figure of the Grim Reaper which represented death. We will start with an explanation of what a folk saint is, after which we extend a brief introduction to the Mexican death saint This will be followed by an analysis of her inception as a syncretic saint emerging as a formative version of who she is today in the colony and developing later in the post-colonial era wherein the new religious movement further expanded, coalescing influences from manifold African diaspora spiritual traditions. We suggest that as a loosely organized faith, with no official clergy nor rules (Argyriadis 2016, p. 34), Santa Muerte lends itself to syncretism and that this accounts, in part, for the appeal and success of the new religious movement
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