Saint Death

In Mexico, an ominous new religion is taking shape, the worship of St. Death:

On the first day of each month, one of the most unusual religious congregations in Mexico gathers here at Alfareria Street in a tough barrio that even aspiring outlaws regard as a place to watch your back.

In the late afternoon, thousands of acolytes arrive in the Tepito neighborhood, home to the wildest black market in Mexico, where truckloads of pirated goods — from bootlegged Disney DVDs to stolen vials of swine flu vaccine — are trafficked in back alleys where police fear to go, and God help the unwary.

So perhaps it makes sense that they come here cradling portable altars bearing a statute of a female skeleton, often sporting a Barbie wig and wrapped in a sequined gown — a specter the Lonely Planet guide says bears "an eerie resemblance to Mrs. Bates from the film Psycho" — a sexualized grim reaper wielding a scythe in one hand and a globe in the other. The icon represents one of the most popular cults in Mexico: Santa Muerte, or Saint Death.

The devotion to Santa Muerte rattles many, even in Mexico. She is widely and purposefully misunderstood. The media focus on the lurid cult as a sign of the country's descent into new-millennial madness, a perfect partner for a danza macabra, played out against the backdrop of a modern plague — the drug war — and its obsessions with body counts and ritualized decapitation.

The Catholic Church has rejected the cult, calling it demonic, and the Mexican military has swept across the border region, destroying roadside shrines built in the saint's honor. The authorities have condemned Santa Muerte as a "narco-saint," worshipped by drug traffickers, cartel assassins and dope slingers.

But the worship is more a reflection of contemporary Mexico, says the anthropologist J. Katia Perdigón Castañeda, the author of "La Santa Muerte: Protector of Mankind." The cult is an urban pop amalgam, New Age meets heavy metal meets Virgin of Guadalupe. It is no accident that it is also cross-cultural — that the centers of worship are the poor, proud heart of Mexico City and the violent frontier lands of Laredo, Juarez and Tijuana. The cult borrows equally from Hollywood and the Aztec underworld. Altars, necklaces and tattoos honoring Santa Muerte also make appearances in Mexican American neighborhoods from Los Angeles to Boston.
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"The believers may be drug dealers, doctors, carpenters, housewives. The cult accepts all. No matter the social status or age or sexual preference. Even transsexuals. Even criminals. That's very important, that the cult of Santa Muerte accepts everyone," Perdigón told me, "because death takes one and all."

The article goes on to say that the religion of St. Death is not about the afterlife; rather, the belief is that she can grant you favors in the here and now. Worshippers give her offerings of food, flowers, trinkets, money, and drugs. One mode of worship is to blow marijuana smoke onto her image. How sad, though, to, literally, turn from life to death, to put your faith in death.

Watch for this religion to catch on here and not only among poor Hispanics but in the American middle class mainstream. After all, what better expresses our strange morbidity and the cult of death already expressed in what we entertain ourselves with–video games, death metal, gangster rap, vampire novels, slasher movies–and in the strange allure of abortion, euthanasia, and suicide.