Santa Muerte by Paul Theroux

 

Though a Santa Muerte chapel in Orizaba, Veracruz, was celebrating its tenth anniversary, and another chapel was to be built in the south of the city, a Santa Muerte shrine in Pachuca had recently been destroyed by the local authorities, enraging the worshipers. The government had targeted some shrines that were associated with drug cartels. As the cult had grown in popularity, so government disapproval increased.

Holy Death in her medieval monk’s robe, her yellow skull grinning in the shadow of her loose hoods, gripping her wicked scythe in skinny finger bones, was, among other roles, a narco saint. Although the worship of the Bony One (La Huesuda) dates back to pre-Hispanic Mexico, in the seventeenth century the skeletal figure of Saint Death, ‘vice-regal’ and crowned, was carried in Holy Week processions in Oaxaca, ‘to demonstrate the triumph of death over the Son of God.’ TYe Santa Muerte cult, in its florid, more macabre for, is more recent, and the present day has seen a great resurgence of followers, especially among criminals. An elaborate Santa Muerte shrine (offerings of fruit, mescal, and money) had been found in 2002 in the house of a Gulf cartel boss, Gilberto Garcia Mena (El June), according to Diego Osorno in his account of cartel violence, The War of the Zetas.  Mena’s house was in Guardados de Abajo, a Mexican village that was visible from the riverbank near Roma, Texas, near the border town of Ciudad Aleman. Another connection between the skeletal saint and drug cartels was the chain of alters stretching for 150 miles along the Riberena –the south bank of the river – parallel to the border- dozens of shrined dedicated to Holy Death, placed there by narcos for protection.

Offering hope to the desperate (as well as to drug dealers, prostitutes, smugglers, and gangsters) and a spiritual; shields from the authorities, Santa Muerte was now the fastest-growing faith in Mexico, with millions of believers. Enterprising cultists were setting up shrines all over the country, some grand edifices and many no more imposing than the shop front I had visited in El Llano del Lobo, south of Matehuala. . .

The Unico National Shrine of the Holy Death was a small, white-washed, flat-fronted building with a square window facing the street, and in that window a statue, a large robed skeleton, with a smaller spidery skeleton just behind her. A deep doorway – more a gateway than a door –was cut into the thick wall. The street was bleak, empty of people, which made the jangling music from the market three streets away somewhat surrealistic. As for the window, nothing in the skeleton’s stark bony demeanor or toothy grin spoke of welcome or offered solace.

We lingered, lurked a little, hesitated, then went through the gateway, through a tunnel-like lobby painted with skulls that gave it a garish, ghost-train, haunted- house carnival atmosphere, into the chapel itself, which was cavernous, lit by flaming candles, and filled with skeletons. The rows of wooden pews were empty except for one woman in a dark  shawl, her hands wrapped in its folds, her gray etiolated face turned toward the alter and the smoking candles and blackened lamps.

The alter was set like a stage, scattered with the paraphernalia of death- skulls, bones, coffins, and wilted flowers – and a six-foot skeleton of Santa Muerte in a bright white wedding dress and tangled veil, holding her scythe in one hand and a globe in the other. A black wig was tipped sideways on her skull, and at her back a pair of four-foot wings, the Angel of  Death dressed as a ghoulish bride. But there were portraits of Jesus on the alter, too, and crucifixes, along with skeletons of different sizes. .  .

I had been hearing children giggling but could not see them. Then I saw them, two boys rolling on the floor in a passageway to the right of the alter, near a stall hung with beads and trinkets where an old woman was dangling a Santa Muerte skeleton before the reverential face of a potential customer. The children were playing and teasing under a forbidding figure of Santa Muerte, this one in a purple prom gown.

A skeleton dressed in cloudy satin was labeled LA NINA BLANCA, votive candles of various colors flickering around her, each one representing a particular wish. And plastic spiders, many of the, purple and black, long-legged, clinging to wispy strands hung behind the alter and at the center of wheel-like webs. Another skeleton at the corner of the alter, and a painted image of an ordinary Mexican man in a blue shirt. ‘A portrait of the founder, maybe,’ Valerie said, possibly a man named David Romo Guillen, a former Catholic priest and self-appointed bishop of the cult, who’d recently been arrested for kidnapping and money-laundering.

On the shadowy walls of the chapel, plaster images of Saint Peter and wooden crucifixes were set next to other portraits, one of them Jesus Malverde, the narco saint from Culiacan – seated as always – wearing cowboy boots, a white shirt and string tie, and holding wads of money . .  . .

No one questioned our being there, nor had anyone stopped Valerie from snapping pictures with her cell phone. We walked around, whispering, looking closely at the relics and images. At the stall, it was possible to buy prayer cards that were formulated to be effective. I chose one for someone who was desperate to be rid of an oppressive person.

‘Protector de la Santisima Muerte,’ it began. ‘Blessed Death Protector, I come before you, broken, beaten, lost on my path of life and love. I ask you, my Mother, to, please hear my request [insert request here: ‘a member of my family is driving me crazy,’; I whispered to help me a this truly troubling time. I am being punished unfairly at the hands of a non-communicator. They are aware that their behavior is painful and tormenting and yet proceed to do so anyway . . .’

And when I began to examine the trinkets at the stall, the woman behind the counter –mother of the playful boys rolling on the floor- asked whether I wanted something special.

‘Something lucky,’ I said. ‘To keep me safe while I drive.’

‘Try this.’

She unhooked a string of beads on which a three-inch silver image of Santa Muerte dangled.

‘This will help you. This is good for protection.’

I paid the equivalent of $3. 

‘But wait’, she said, and uncorked a small bottle, pouring aromatic liquid over the beads, saying, ‘Balm [balsamo]. To clean it, from all the other people who’ve touched it.’

It’s the worship of death,’ Diego said as we left the chapel.

‘I wonder.’

It seemed to me that death worship was not the point here. Santa Muerte was not the image of someone who was once living, but rather a representation of death, and her most appealing aspect was that she turned no one away, certainly not sinners, who she welcomed, forgiving everyone, especially the wickedest among us. Just as crucial, Santa Muerte did not demand repentance and reform; on the contrary, she embraced the sinners and the sins. People came here for indulgence, and for miracles. She represented acceptance – ‘Keep on sinning!’ was the subtext of her theology – she granted miracles to those who lit the right candle, offered a piece of jewelry or some pesos, or begged to be helped.

Santa Muerte did not require any holiness or atonement, only sincere belief, demonstrated (as some adherents did) by crawling on all fours to shrines and praying on bloody knees. It was easy to understand La Flaca (the Skinny One), Dona Flaquita (Little Skinny woman), La Huesuda (the Bony One), but there were sixty others listed by Claudio Lomnitz in his exhaustive book on the subject, Death and the Idea of Mexico, including La Parca (End of Life), La Grulla (the Crane), La Pepenadora (the Scavenger), La Llorono (the Ghost), La Jodida (the Busted One), La Apestosa (the Stinking One), La Arana Pachona (the Sanctimonious Spider), the vulgar La Chingada or La Chifosca ( the Screwed one), and more. These variations spoke to the Mexican who felt flawed, hunted, lawless, hopeless, doomed. Indeed, as the embodiment of death, Santa Muerte is the Idol of Doom.

Veneration had never been greater than at this moment, the population soaring to something like twenty million in the past ten or fifteen years, while at the same time such veneration has been condemned by the Vatican in 2013 as sacrilegious. It was well known that Santa Muerte appealed to those who made their money in illegal, criminal, or shadowy trades – picking pockets, trafficking drugs, killing for hire, and prostitution. But in promising protection, and perhaps a miracle, instead of heaven, death worship was the perfect faith for Mexico, where half the people lived in poverty .  .  .

It is easy in Mexico to leave the main road, take a side road, turn into a narrow track, and wind up in the past, and the past often seems like an underworld. What troubles the poor villager in Mexico (and in Africa and elsewhere) is what troubled the villagers of the distant past: the difficulty of finding firewood for cooking, or grazing land for the goats, or transport to the market, or the scarcity of water, or the maddening entanglement of debt. Of course most people know the burden of debt, but what makes the indebted Mexican villager exceptional are the tiny amounts involved in what is a matter of life and death.

On the Plain of Snakes; A Mexican Journey by Paul Theroux; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; Boston, 2019