If there is a feast day in the future it will likely be November 2, for the recent decision of devotees to incorporate Saint Death into their Dia de los Muertos commemorations seems to fast be shifting from a trend to a tradition. More recently, in her gown the brown hue of graveyard dirt, she is a necromancer, constituting a conduit for communication between the realms of the living and the dead.
Her blue mantle represents aid with studies, imparting wisdom in academic and other intellectual affairs. In her purple cloak she brings health and healing, another colour used to combat COVID-19. In her gold gown she bestows wealth and abundance and in her green garb she offers her aid with legal matters. But what is overlooked by much of the media is that in her red mantle she aids men and especially women with love and lust, while dressed in ivory, the White Girl brings peace, well-being and spiritual cleansing. In her ebony gown, she is known for harming enemies, and it is this colour that has earned her the reputation of being a narco-saint but the media overlooks that this colour is also used for protection, including more recently protection from COVID-19, as Kingsbury and Chesnut have documented. Depending on the colour of her gown or the votive candle bearing her name, she offers different favours. Santa Muerte is prayed to for miracles by a wide demographic of devotees. Explaining the appeal of the skeleton saint, a Mexico City street vendor stated, “She understands us because she’s a badass ( cabrona ) like us.” In stark contrast, Mexicans would never refer to national matroness, the Virgin of Guadalupe, as a cabrona, which is also often uttered to mean “bitch.” These Latin American vernacular saints are united to their devotees by nationality, culture and often class. In Mexico and Latin America in general, folk saints such as San La Muerte (the Argentine male cousin of Santa Muerte), Jesus Malverde, and Rey San Pascual (the Guatemalan male cousin of the Pretty Girl) have millions of devotees and are often sought out more than the thousands of Catholic saints, most of whom are Europeans who lived centuries ago. What really distinguishes the Bony Lady (another popular nickname), however, from other regional folk saints is that for most devotees she is the personification of death itself and not of a real woman that lived and died on Mexican soil. Unlike canonized Catholics, folk saints are believed to be spirits of deceased Latin American women and men considered holy for their miracle working powers.
Whether as a gold medallion, or statuette, or votive candle she is typically depicted as a Grim Reapress, wielding the same scythe and wearing a shroud similar to that of the Grim Reaper, her male European forebear. But the folk saint is far more than that as Chesnut has detailed in “ Devoted to Death ”.įor those that have not encountered her before, Santa Muerte is a Mexican folk saint who personifies death in the form of a female skeleton. Unfortunately, in most media the multifaceted miracle-working saint is portrayed as solely a narco-saint, that is to say a figure appealed to by narco-traffickers for supernatural dirty deeds.
GRIM REAPER SCYTHE HALLOWEEN SERIES
The first member of the Mexican death trinity has been in the limelight during the past decade or so, especially with her appearances in numerous TV series such as Penny Dreadful and Breaking Bad, and movies, such as Bad Boys 3, for which Kingsbury and Chesnut served as expert consultants. What is the relationship, if any, among the three iconic figures of Mexican death culture – Catrina Calavera, Santa Muerte, and Day of the Dead? SANTA MUERTE featuring more and more Mexican-themed Day of the Dead and Catrina items in their Halloween merchandise, we’ll leave aside the trick or treating and pumpkin carving of our own childhood in the United States or the vicars and tarts parties of the UK, and more recently the cross-dressing HalloQueen bashes, to try to answer one of the two questions that invariably come up during our presentations on Day of the Dead and the Lady of the Shadows (one of Santa Muerte’s main monikers).
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