Santa Muerte Worship

Nuestra Señora de la Santa Muerte (Spanish for Our Lady of Holy Death), often shortened to Santa Muerte, is a new religious movement, a female deity, and a folk saint in Mexican folk Catholicism and Neopaganism. A personification of death, she is associated with healing, protection, and safe passage to the afterlife by her devotees. Despite condemnation by the Catholic Church, and more recently by evangelical Christians, her cult has become increasingly prominent. Santa Muerte almost always depicted as a female skeletal figure clad in a long robe and holding one or more objects, usually a scythe and a globe. Depictions vary widely according to the ritual being performed or the petition being made. Her modern following was first reported in Mexico by American anthropologists in the 1940s. Santa Muerte was an occult practice until the early 2000s, and most prayers and other rituals were performed privately. Since the beginning of the 21st century, worship has become more public, initially in Mexico City after a believer named Enriqueta Romero founded a famous Mexico City shrine devoted to Santa Muerte in 2001. The number of believers has grown over the past two decades. An estimated 12 million followers are concentrated in Mexico, Central America, and the United States, with smaller numbers of followers scattered across the Americas and Europe. Santa Muerte has two male counterparts in Latin America, the skeletal folk saints San La Muerte of Argentina and Paraguay and Rey Pascual of Guatemala and Chiapas, Mexico. According to Professor Andrew Chesnut, Santa Muerte lies at the center of the fastest-growing new religious movement in the world. After the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire, the worship of death diminished, but was never eradicated. The annals of the Spanish Inquisition record that the Chichimecs of central Mexico tied up a skeletal figure, whom they addressed as Santa Muerte, and threatened to whip it if it did not perform miracles or grant their wishes. Another combination of pre-Columbian and Christian beliefs about death can be seen in Day of the Dead commemorations when many Mexicans visit cemeteries to sing and pray for friends and family members who have died. Children participate in the festivities by eating skull-shaped chocolate or candy. In contrast to the Day of the Dead, public veneration of Santa Muerte did not commence until a few decades ago. Public reaction was often harsh, and included the desecration of shrines and altars. Santa Muerte first came to widespread public notice in Mexico in 1998 after police arrested notorious gangster Daniel Arizmendi López and discovered a shrine to the saint in his home. Widely reported in the press, this discovery inspired the common association between Santa Muerte, violence, and criminality. The recent phenomenal growth of the number of devotees of Santa Muerte is mainly due to her reputation for performing miracles. By the late 2000s, Santa Muerte had become, after Saint Jude, Mexico's second-most popular saint and a rival of the country's national patroness, the Virgin of Guadalupe.