Saint's Death Research Articles

Santa Muerte: The most fashionable saint of the year

This article presents and analyses the relation between the cult of a Mexican folk saint, Santa Muerte (Saint Death), and fashion. The article describes the unique phenomenon and its complex history as an amalgamation of Christian and pre-Hispanic elements. Even with the cult’s growing recognition, Santa Muerte is still surrounded by controversies – lack of academic research and stereotypes presented by media and popular culture lead to numerous discrepancies such as erroneous image of the followers of Santa Muerte who are often depicted as criminals related to drug smuggling. The main part of the article focuses on the practices of building and decorating the altars, shrines and chapels for Santa Muerte. The text also highlights a spreading custom of designing various types of dresses and robes for the figures of the patron and the practice of modifying the figures themselves (adding ornaments, artefacts and various items). Some of these items and ornaments express the intentions of the prayers, holidays and individual preferences of the worshippers. Following sections present the impact of the cult of Santa Muerte (especially its aesthetical dimension) on the fashion industry, which is visible in the example of jewellery and clothing. The article concludes with an exploration of trends among the followers of Santa Muerte and their impact on the esoteric industry that is wide and rapidly developing in Mexico.

Przemiany ikonograficzne w kulcie Santa Muerte (Świętej Śmierci). Analiza wybranych przykładów

The article explores the transformations in the image of the most popular Mexican folk saint, Santa Muerte (Saint Death). Based on photographic documentation and in-depth interviews conducted during field research in Mexico in 2022 and 2023, an analysis of iconographic changes has been carried out, particularly evident in the case of Santa Muerte figurines. By examining the most widespread variants of figurines available in devotional and esoteric product shops, one can observe the influence of Afro-Caribbean beliefs, pre-Columbian heritage, medieval and baroque aesthetics, as well as local folklore and popular culture, which directly shape the iconographic sphere of Santa Muerte’s cult. Examples include the color palette and manner of decorating the figurines, the saint’s attributes, and offerings. The article illustrates how current iconographic transformations reflect changes in beliefs, rituals, and perceptions of Santa Muerte both among her followers and those outside this community.

Zastosowanie teorii performansu Diany Taylor w badaniach nad kultem Świętej Śmierci w Meksyku

The aim of the article is to analyse the latest trends in Mexican cult of Santa Muerte (the Saint Death) using the terms proposed by Diana Taylor in her theory of per­formance. The concepts of the archive and the repertoire are especially functional for describing contemporary hybrid religious phenomena which undergo constant transfor­mations and which origins are diverse. Application of mentioned terms permits to capture the sources of those metamorphoses and their religious and cultural background. This allows to demonstrate how the unrelated archives convert into the repertoire of practices connected with the cult of the Saint Death. These practices are not limited only to the ones representing strictly religious character but they include various activities – performanc­es of everyday life – for which Santa Muerte is a certain type of context, background or reference point.

Emperors, Aristocrats, and Columns: Christian Imperial Politics in the Late Fifth Century CE as Reflected in the Life of Daniel the Stylite

This paper examines the hagiography of Daniel the Stylite, believed to have been written by one of his disciples soon after the saint's death at Constantinople in the late fifth century. It first explores the identity of Daniel's named patrons, highlighting the status of these individuals as members of former imperial families who were not currently in power in the East, but who were competing with the reigning emperors of the day for patronage of the holy man. Second, it highlights the imperial-like manner of the hagiographer's presentation of Daniel, particularly his column-dwelling existence with its analogies to imperial columns in the city, and his ordination by the hand of God, and it suggests that the author was shaping his presentation of the holy man to appeal to the Christian court of his day. Both of these aspects of the text indicate that the hagiographer wished to present Daniel as the pre-eminent holy man of late fifth-century Constantinople, whose monastery was worthy of future patronage by emperors or aristocrats with imperial connections.

Saint Death and the virus: Mexico’s Santa Muerte is reaper, healer and spiritual key worker

Saint Death and the virus: Mexico’s Santa Muerte is reaper, healer and spiritual key worker

Information on Ibrahim ibn Adham's life in written sources

The article considers data about the life of one of the first Sufis – Ibrahim ibn Adham, known for holiness in the Muslim world. The author set the goal – to study the life of Saint on the basis of source data. Biographical data is rather scarce. In Arabic-language sources there is data on the date of Saint death. The main source is oral narratives, which are used by aqyns, storytellers. Verbal texts among the people served as an excellent source in the creation of qissa. In the Turkic world, there was an idea of the worthiness of creating works on Shaykh Saints. In turn, the belief contributed to the emergence of many versions of “Qissa-i Ibrahim ibn Adham”. The value of the studying source lies in the fact that they raise moral and ethical standards that guided the Shaikh Saints in their activities. In the process of work, Kazakh, Uyghur and Turkish versions of the narrative and translations of hagiographic works into Turks were revealed, which indicates the wide distribution of such works. Interest in such texts remained until the 20th century. The rare collections of libraries in Almaty contain lithographic editions of the studied source. The sources identified in the process of work were studied in a comparative aspect, the works of well-known orientalists on Sufism were involved. The study contributes to the expansion of the source base on Sufism, the results achieved can be used not only by specialists of orientalists, but also by University teachers. Keywords: Islam, manuscript, life of a Sufi, translations of treatises, Central Asia.

Lo and behold the miracle: votive painting in the public sphere

This visual essay takes as its point of departure the Mexican tradition of ex-voto, the votive paintings that are offered to the saints to fulfil a vow. In particular, it explores contemporary forms of votive paintings to elucidate what becomes of miracles when they are transposed to the public art sphere. My case study focuses on the work of a Mexican art collective whose members are devoted to Santa Muerte (Saint Death) and reveals that art can act as literal embodiments of a thaumaturgy – the supernatural work of the saint – and as expressions of the rippling effects of a miracle. This paper proposes, that the manifold scales and expressions of a miracle, observed through their paintings, become visible in the public sphere. Ultimately, it contends that by increasing the visibility of thaumaturgy, artwork made in thanks to a saint comes to contain the manifold temporal consequences of a single miraculous event.

Szkielet znaczeń. Meksykański kult Santa Muerte w perspektywie semiotycznej.

The article provides an overview of chosen aspects of the cult of Santa Muerte („Saint Death”) in Mexico from a semiotic perspective. What distinguishes Santa Muerte from other Mexican folk Saints is her astonishing, constantly growing popularity in recent decades, as well as her exceptional receptiveness to elements originating from diverse currents of popular religiosity, including commercial esoterics, neopagan practices, and Cuban Santeria. These differenials can be explained by indicating a set of particular features that enable to qualify Saint Death as a „semantic lens”.

Saint Death by Marcus Sedgwick

Saint Death by Marcus Sedgwick

Our Most Holy Death: The phenomenon of the cult of Saint Death in Mexico

The purpose of this paper is brief presentation of learning and development of the cult of Saint Death, and to indicate to the interest in anthropology and religious studies on this phenomenon that contributes to a better understanding of this interesting topic. It is certainly not an exhaustive study on this issue, but only a starting point for further, more comprehensive and interdisciplinary researches. The cult of Saint Death is increasingly popular, not only in Mexico but also in neighboring countries, such as Guatemala, El Salvador and the United States. The cult of Saint Death is already a social phenomenon which has yet to be systematically explored, especially as this syncretic religious system is very popular among the Mexican underworld: drug dealers, street vendors, taxi drivers, vendors, piracy, street children, prostitutes, pickpockets, criminal gangs and murderers.

The Voice in the Drum: Music, Language, and Emotion in Islamicate South Asia by Richard K. Wolf

ETHNOMUSICOLOGY The Voice in the Drum: Music, Language, and Emotion in Islamicate South Asia. By Richard K. Wolf. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014. [xxiv, 375 p. ISBN 9780252038587 (hardcover), $60; ISBN 9780252096501 (e-book), various.] Music examples, illustrations, appendices, notes, glossary, bibliographic references, index.Ethnomusicologists persistently ask how people's cultural and musical understandings are connected. In this work, Richard K. Wolf explores how music- specifically that of drums-provides a framework for emotion in ritual contexts for Islamic communities in South Asia. The events of the book take place across the subcontinent-in particular in Uttar Pradesh and Delhi (India) and the Panjab and Sindh (Pakistan), although drumming traditions throughout the subcontinent are mentioned-as well as over the course of several decades, showing how discourses across time and regions constitute how people understand, or choose to represent, these traditions and their involvement in them. Rather than being a standard ethnographic treatise, most of this work is written as a novel. This literary form allows Wolf to keep sight of individual people as active, complex agents as he explores the interconnections of emotion, music, movement, language (and text), ritual, and religion across the subcontinent. However, this work also demonstrates that, as literary forms, ethnography and the novel have significant differences that are not easily compatible.The first four chapters are written in a split voice. The first part of each chapter is written from the point of view of Muharram Ali, the novel's protagonist. As an aspiring journalist, Ali tasks himself with writing a series on musical activities that take place during the Islamic holy month of Muharram. He looks not only at the musical connections between geographically distant drumming repertoires in India and Pakistan, but also asks questions about how participants link their musical experience to their faith, how drumming elicits emotion in a ritual context, and how sung poetic forms might structure drum patterns. The connection between text and drum patterns-thus the presence of voice in the drum-becomes one of Ali's major lines of inquiry. As can be expected, he encounters a wide-ranging set of answers from professional and hereditary musicians, participating community members, religious practitioners, and self-appointed experts. As he widens his research, not only must he make sense of multiple (and sometimes contradictory) points of view, but he must also confront his own biases and naivete. The novel form allows Wolf to provide a detailed description and commentary on the process of ethnographic research itself and the conditions in which it transpires.In the second part of each of these first four chapters, Wolf contextualizes Ali's observations and experiences through literature reviews and his own ethnographic experience, and lays out theoretical lines of inquiry that align with the themes Ali explores. Wolf shows how repeating beat cycles are not the only way to organize drum patterns; rather, many vernacular patterns are based on prosody, i.e. patterns of sounds found in poetic texts. Wolf uses the connection between drum patterns and prosody to problematize the rhythm/ melody dichotomy, showing how drum patterns can sound like texts and be melodic (p. 9). Examining the sociocultural positions of musicians in South Asia and the role of emotion in Muslim ritual observances allows Wolf to examine how participants' agency is structured. The first part of the book culminates with chapter five, which is an extensive description of Ali's experience of Muharram celebrations in Multan, Pakistan. This description links Wolf's theoretical explorations of emotion, agency, and music to a live, ritual celebration.Chapters 6 through 10 are written in Ali's voice alone. While chapters 8 and 9 examine Muharram celebrations in Hyderabad, Pakistan, chapters 6 and 7 branch beyond Muharram to look at drumming, emotion, and texts within Sufi 'urses (saint death anniversary celebrations) in and around Lahore, Pakistan. …

From Surveillance to Securocracy

From Surveillance to Securocracy Tony Cella (bio) Campo de guerra (Battleground) Sergio González Rodríguez Editorial Anagrama www.anagrama-ed.es/novedades 168 Pages; Print, $17.07 Campo de guerra (2014) is Mexican journalist and novelist Sergio González Rodríguez’s third non-fiction work in Spanish on violence in Mexico. Its predecessors are Huesos en el desierto (2006) and El hombre sin cabeza (2013). Huesos documents the systematic torture and murder of young women in Juárez during the 1990s while El hombre—part memoir, part anthropological study, and part visual critique—examines the semiotics of dismemberment and human sacrifice to la Santa Muerte, or Saint Death, by Mexican drug cartels. Campo de guerra continues in the vein of the author’s earlier works while addressing new topics that reach far beyond Mexico’s borders. The main purpose of the book is to propose a new approach to the Drug War in Mexico, one that ceases to see it strictly as a criminological phenomenon and focuses more on the US’s geopolitical interests and strategic use of Mexican security forces. Another goal is to explain, contextualize, and ultimately denounce the move towards a new global model of control and surveillance: a “Securocracy.” Winner of Anagrama’s award for best essay in 2014, Campo de guerra is 168 pages long and comprised of four chapters and an epilogue. Throughout the book, González Rodríguez explores the social, political, and economic factors that have contributed to an increase in drug-related violence in Mexico since the 1990s. He also reflects on global topics such as ultracontemporary battlegrounds— including cyber warfare, espionage, and other militarily-driven technologies—and planetary transhumanism, or the displacement of the human subject from the center of modern life by machines. Among the questions the author raises we find: what factors have led Mexico to be considered a “Narco-state,” and is it accurate to classify it as such? Where do Mexican citizens turn for justice given the prevalence of political and judicial corruption? How can we contest the paramilitarization of the police and the cyber-meddling of unchecked government agencies? And finally, how might human welfare be reprioritized in a world increasingly centered on the profits of financial institutions and militarily-induced technological expansion? González Rodríguez does not leave these questions open ended, nor does he try to eschew controversy. As in past works, he intends to both inform and spur activism. In the first chapter, González Rodríguez addresses his concerns about the future of privacy, human rights, and sovereignty in the post 9/11 world. Later, he proceeds to argue that the US has orchestrated the Drug War, in large part, to force Mexico to adopt a number of productive, intelligence, penal, and security reforms. These reforms, he contends, have led to major spatial and symbolic transformations in Mexico but failed at making the country any safer. The target of his criticism is the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP) signed by presidents George W. Bush and Vicente Fox Quesada, an agreement whose aim, according to the author, is to pressure Mexico’s armed forces into protecting US national security interests in Central America and the Caribbean. This may sound like a conspiracy theory, but González Rodríguez goes to great lengths to cite official documents from the Pentagon, the State Department, the Office of the Mexican Attorney-General (PGR, in Spanish), and the United Nations to support his claims. He also provides information given to him by former intelligence operatives that worked with American and Mexican officials in the War on Drugs. González Rodríguez does not forget about internal politics. In the second and fourth chapters, he explains how former Mexican president Felipe de Jesús Calderón Hinojosa’s efforts to eradicate drug trafficking began without any regard for, nor previous consultation of, the Mexican people. According to the author, Calderón encouraged Mexico’s armed forces to take a more proactive role in policing the country, despite their duties being restricted to specific areas and tasks by the Mexican constitution. Here, González Rodríguez explains how Mexican authorities...

Magical Realist Moments in Malín Alegía’s Border Town Series

In Malín Alegría’s Border Town, the first young adult fiction series set on the Mexico-United States border, magical realist moments subvert power relations and reveal that popular beliefs are legitimate forms of knowledge. Magical realist occurrences demonstrate the importance of knowing about Mexican American folklore and folk saints such as bailando con el diablo [dancing with the devil], las lechuzas [bewitched owls], La Llorona [the weeping woman], and la Santa Muerte [Saint Death].

Devoted to Death: Santa Muerte, the Skeleton Saint

Chesnut, R. Andrew. Devoted to Death: Santa Muerte, the Skeleton Saint. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. 221 ix pp. $24.95 (USD. paperback). ISBN: 9780199764655 Devoted to Death is an engaging introduction to the folk saint Santa Muerte. In lucid prose, R. Andrew Chesnut presents one of the first academic accounts of the skeletal saint whose popularity in Mexico and the United States has grown dramatically over the past decade. Drawing on years of experience as an ethnographer of popular religion in the United States, Central America, and South America, Chesnut introduces the history of Santa Muerte, or Saint Death; recounts her adherents' varied ritual expressions; and describes the material culture associated with her community of devotees. In mainstream media, devotion to Santa Muerte has been linked to participation in the narcotics trade and other illegal activities. However, one of Chesnut's key goals is to complicate the image of Santa Muerte as a demonic anti-saint by highlighting the many reasons a broad swath of devotees, from Mexico to the United States, seek out her guidance and protection. Writing in a sharp yet conversational narrative style, Chesnut documents his own growing understanding of the folk saint's reach as he recounts key features in devotion to Santa Muerte. Chesnut describes historical accounts of the folk saint and charts her rise from an obscure spiritual aide for lovesick women to a powerful, popular supernatural figure. Scholars suggest her skeletal form hearkens back to images of death that developed in medieval Europe, but Mexican devotees insist she was a beautiful young Mexican woman unjustly killed during the Inquisition. All would agree that the skeleton saint has become more popular among some communities than St. Jude or even the Virgin of Guadalupe, two other popular folk saints in Mexico. Drawing on interviews and first-hand accounts, Chesnut describes features of the saint's worship, including homemade altars and common offerings in public and private shrines. The book is structured thematically, with each chapter paired with a coloured candle representing a different feature of Santa Muerte devotion. For example, the chapter introducing the history of the sect is represented by the brown candle of wisdom; the chapter describing the products sold bearing her likeness is represented by the yellow candle of money and wealth. This structure enables Chesnut to ingeniously introduce a range of topics concerning Santa Muerte devotion. One of Chesnut's primary aims is to consider how devotion to the folk saint has grown so drastically since the 1980s. …

Santa Muerte, Protection, and Desamparo: A View from a Mexico City Altar

From the mid-1990s, devotion to Santa Muerte (Saint Death) became highly visible, not only in Mexico but also in the United States. Its evolution has coincided with the expansion of organized crime, creating the impression that the icon belongs to a coherent “narco-culture.” This article contextualizes ritual practices at a single altar in Tepito, a Mexico City neighborhood historically specialized in informal and illegal commerce. Its monthly prayer service, which dates to September 2001, now balances the needs of its congregation with a kind of response to accusations against devotees in the mass media. Ironically, the range of gestures that share Santa Muerte iconography encompasses laments and high-minded indignation over blanket attribution of violent intentions to a population, but also a language for making threats. The average devotee is always affected by the likelihood that new acts of violence will be styled as religious.

The Legacy of Assotto Saint: Tracing Transnational History from the Gay Haitian Diaspora

INTRODUCTIONThis essay uses Michel-Rolph Trouillot's notion of power and the production of history as a starting point to explore the ways that Assotto Saint (1957-1994), a gay Haitian American who was once a well-known player in the Black gay and AIDS activist cultural movements in the United States, is remembered and written about in contemporary venues.1 I argue that the politics of remembrance pertaining to Saint's cultural work and activism has significant consequences for our understanding of late twentieth century social and cultural movements in the United States as well as gay Haitian history. I explore the fact that Saint's work has fallen out of popularity since his death in 1994, except in limited identitarian, mostly literary venues. The silences surrounding his work thatI describe in this essay are peculiar considering that Saint not only had important social connections with artists who are well-known today, but also, unlike artists with less access to financial resources, he left behind a huge archive of materials housed in the Black Gay and Lesbian Collections at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture as well as a rich and prolific corpus of published work. By offering a re-reading of these archival materials and placing them in their socio-historical contexts, I also make a restorative gesture to commit Assotto Saint's legacy to public memory. Through investigating the life, activism, and cultural work of this self-proclaimed diva of the Haitian diaspora, this essay ultimately attempts to offer a dynamic understanding of the movements Saint took part in as well as a re-reading of the dominant narratives about Haiti and gay sexuality.I begin with a biographical sketch of Assotto Saint to highlight the connections between events in his life and major historical occurrences in Haiti and the United States. The subsequent section provides an overview of the range of his cultural work in terms of medium, genre, and theme. I also emphasize Saint's efforts as an institution builder for the Black gay cultural movement as well as the broader AIDS activist cultural movement. This overview builds a foundation that allows us to understand why Assotto Saint has not received the same kind of posthumous recognition as his contemporaries. His work has been recognized, primarily by circulating his essay Haiti: A Memory Journey in recent anthologies of Caribbean writing; this, however, has also in some ways reduced the complexity of the transnational critiques fiercely presented by this historical figure in his lifetime. In the final sections of the paper, I describe what is at stake in the practice of remembering Assotto Saint with all his complexities, thus rectifying the essentializing and silences that have surrounded his literary contributions and activism.The Life and Death of Assotto Sainti was born on all angels daybut throughout my lifei've been a bitch out of hell/don't nobody show up at my funeralto call me nice or some shit like that/save it for turncoat cocksuckerswho on their deathbedsopen their mouths wide to claim god/-Assotto Saint, Devils in AmericaAssotto Saint died of AIDS-related complications in New York City on June 29, 1994. The week of Saint's death, the city swelled with queers: drag queens, gays, lesbians, transgender people, and AIDS activists among others. Drawn by an act of celebration-the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Stonewall Riot in Greenwich Village-and of mourning and frustration-a decade and a half of the ongoing AIDS crisis-the gathering of queers in New York City coincided with Saint's death in the uncanny way that so many of his major life events paralleled the social and political changes of his time. The poet, playwright, performer, and activist was born in Les Cayes, Haiti as Yves Francois Lubin on October 2, 1957, the same week that the infamously repressive, US-backed dictator Francois Papa Doc Duvalier was elected president. …

The Grace St. Dominic Brings to the World: A Fresh Look at Dominican Spirituality

The Grace St. Dominic Brings to the World:A Fresh Look at Dominican Spirituality Romanus Cessario OP (bio) The phrase "Dominican spirituality" has entered only lately into common usage within the Dominican Order. Neither St. Dominic (c.1172-1221) nor the early Dominican saints, including Thomas Aquinas (1224/25-74) and Catherine of Siena (?1347-80), would have recognized the expression. These holy ones of course would have known and observed the practices that, today, one includes under the heading of "Dominican spirituality." They, however, would have understood these basic pieces of Dominican life as indispensable constituents of that regular form of life, which, since the first decades of the thirteenth century, Dominicans have fostered and sustained. They would have accepted these practices, in other words, as composing the rhythm of Dominican life, though not as expressing the unique features of a classifiable Dominican spirituality. Although the distinction initially may strike one as trifling, it is one thing to animate a form of life that embodies a divine grace and another to observe the axioms of a spirituality, even of a school whose authenticity the Church recognizes. The Dominican scholar Thomas Gilby says that form refers to "the inner shaping principle [End Page 84] of a thing."1 Like the natural forms that exist in creation, or even like the aesthetic forms that artists impose on their materials, form implies that something possesses an identifiable stability. We easily distinguish pineapples from panda bears and the music of George Friederic Handel from that of Harry Connick, Jr. In a word, form indicates what makes someone or something to be what he, she, or it is. Dominican form gives shape to a distinctive way of life within the Church. An official document of the Order of Preachers, in fact, employs the phrase, forma vitae, the form of the Order's life.2 Were Dominicans to speak about their "spirituality," they would necessarily mean by the expression, "Dominican Spirituality," the distinctive form of life that distinguishes them from members of other religious institutes. They would at the same time describe the inner shaping principle that those who are drawn to espouse Dominican life desire to embrace, to make their own, and to give themselves to, all under the impulse of a freely given grace that we call a "vocation." The Dominican form of life flows from the grace St. Dominic introduces into the world. It is a marvelous thing to ponder that one specific grace, originally embodied in the Castilian priest Dominic of Caleruega, today unites Dominican priests and cooperator brothers all over the world. This same grace also places today's Dominicans in a direct lineage with those men who for almost 800 years have worn the black and white habit of Dominic's Order. The Dominican form received its official recognition from the Roman Pontiff Honorius III (d. 1227) on December 22, 1216. Although his predecessor, the illustrious Pope Innocent III (d. July 1216), had confirmed Dominic in his project, Pope Honorius's bull, a document that miraculously survived the fury of the French Revolution and today is housed in the French provincial archives of the Haute-Garonne, accounts for the much anticipated eighth centenary jubilee of the Order to be celebrated in 2016.3 The inspiration for speaking of a grace that stands at the heart of a Dominican vocation comes from words that Honorius III addressed to Dominic in January [End Page 85] 1221, some six months before the saint's death. These words have found their way into what is called the "Constitutio Fundamentalis," a text of recent composition that serves as a kind of preface to the constitutions and ordinations that today govern Dominican life: "'He who never ceases to make his Church fruitful through new offspring,'" began the Pope, "wishes to make these modern times [the thirteenth century] the equal of former days [the first Christian centuries] and to spread the Catholic faith. So he inspired you [Dominicans] with a holy desire to embrace poverty, profess the regular life and commit yourselves to the proclamation of the word of God, preaching everywhere the name of our Lord Jesus Christ."4 No doubt about it. Pope Honorius...

O tempo da santidade: reflexões sobre um conceito

Apresentamos e analisamos o conceito de 'tempo da santidade'. Esse conceito foi forjado durante a pesquisa de doutorado que realizamos entre 2008 e 2011 sobre a canonização de Tomás de Aquino. Na tese defendemos que o principal interessado no reconhecimento oficial da santidade desse teólogo foi o papa João XXII, e que se tratou de uma canonização teológica. Para chegar a essa conclusão elaboramos o conceito de tempo da santidade. Trata-se de uma análise retroativa do período compreendido entre a data da canonização e a data da morte do santo. Com base nesses dados elaboramos uma tabela de temporalidade. O conceito permite análises comparadas. O tempo de Tomás de Aquino é de 49 anos (1323-1274). O conceito permite olhar para a santidade como um fenômeno social construído coletivamente.

Death with a Bonus Pack

This paper discusses a popular but hardly investigated cult of an informal saint Santa Muerte (Saint Death). Santa Muerte enjoys growing popularity in Mexico and neighboring countries. One of the reasons for it is the cult's extensive presence in mass media. It remains exposed to influence of other popular religious traditions, including Spiritualism and elements of the New Age spirituality.

Schopenhauer on the ethics of suicide

The concept of death is of special importance in Schopenhauer's metaphysics of appearance and Will. Death for Schopenhauer is the aim and purpose of life, that toward which life is directed, and the denial of the individual will to life. Despite his profound pessimism, Schopenhauer vehemently rejects suicide as an unworthy affirmation of the will to life by those who seek to escape rather than seek nondiscursive knowledge of Will in suffering. The only manner of self-destruction Schopenhauer finds philosophically acceptable is the ascetic saint's death by starvation. Here the individual will to life is so completely mastered as to refuse even the most basic desire for nourishment, and thereby passes into nonexistence in complete renunciation of the individual will. Schopenhauer's attitude toward suicide nevertheless embodies an inconsistency. If, as Schopenhauer believes, the aim of life is death, and death is an unreal aspect of the world as appearance, then there appears to be no justification why the philosopher should not rush headlong into it - not to affirm the will to life in an abject effort to avoid suffering, but in order to fulfill life's purpose by ending it for distinctly philosophical reasons immediately upon arriving at an understanding of the appearance-reality distinction.