Our Lady of the Underground
The first time Chris Muniz prayed to Santa Muerte, his life was spinning out of control. It was June 14, 2016, and his boyfriend had left him. An addiction to methamphetamines ate away at his cheery smile and burly figure, so much that his own mother didn’t recognize him. He passed the days working at a San Antonio dry cleaner and his nights shut up in his room, using. Isolation and drugs were destroying him, he knew. So when his boss took him to a South Side botanica — a retailer for folk medicine and magic — Muniz wandered the crowded aisles, past candles and spices, statues of Jesus and the Virgin of Guadalupe. He selected a little orange figurine, a feminine grim reaper with an owl at her feet and a scythe in her skeletal hands.
Following the store owner’s advice, Muniz took the figurine back to his apartment and set it up on a little coffee table with candles. He spoke the invocation, sat and began to talk about his heartbreak, his misery, his drug habit. But his words sounded hollow in the empty apartment. “I just looked at her a while,” Muniz says. “It was like, ‘This is a fucking statue, man. What the fuck is it gonna do?’ But then the candles started going a little weird.” All at once the feeling hit him: an overpowering and accepting presence that made him weep. It was like she was pulling the ugliness out of him, he says. Without quite knowing why, he began rubbing his tears into the figurine: his first offering.
Santa Muerte — “Holy Death” — is at the center of one of the fastest-growing and most controversial new religious movements in North America. In the two decades since her mainstream debut, she’s attracted a global following of anywhere from 5 million to 10 million, a diverse collection of working-class Catholics, pagans, artists and immigrants. Bishops have called her blasphemous, drug cartels have adopted her image and the Mexican government has bulldozed her shrines. Yet her following only continues to grow, including in increasingly Hispanic Texas. Whether you need love or money, safety or security, Santa Muerte is open for business — and business is booming.
Santa Muerte began as many American spirits did: as a syncretic mixture growing in colonial soil. After the Spanish conquest of Mexico in the 1500s, open worship of underworld gods withered under pressure from the church. Deities like Mictēcacihuātl, the star-swallowing Aztec queen of the underworld, receded from view. But according to religious historian R. Andrew Chesnut, author of Devoted to Death: Santa Muerte, The Skeleton Saint, the conquerors had unwittingly provided a replacement in their religious texts: La Parca, a female grim reaper popular in Iberian medieval traditions. What began as an artistic trope soon occupied the niche left by the vanished goddess. When a group of Catholic inquisitors were dispatched to Central Mexico in the 1790s to investigate the worship of a skeletal figure, Chesnut says, indigenous worshippers informed them its proper name was Santa Muerte.
Read more: https://www.texasobserver.org/our-lady-of-the-underground/