Posted on 03/04/2013 4:13:12 PM PST by haffast
A follower in New Orleans built a public shrine in her honor. An actor in Albuquerque credits her with helping him land a role on the TV show "Breaking Bad." She turns up routinely along the U.S.-Mexico border at safe houses, and is sighted on dashboards of cars used to smuggle methamphetamine through the southwest desert.
Popular in Mexico, and sometimes linked to the illicit drug trade, the skeleton saint known as La Santa Muerte in recent years has found a robust and diverse following north of the border: immigrant small business owners, artists, gay activists and the poor, among others — many of them non-Latinos and not all involved with organized religion.
Clad in a black nun's robe and holding a scythe in one hand, Santa Muerte appeals to people seeking all manner of otherworldly help: from fending off wrongdoing and carrying out vengeance to stopping lovers from cheating and landing better jobs. And others seek her protection for their drug shipments and to ward off law enforcement.
"Her growth in the United States has been extraordinary," said Andrew Chesnut, author of "Devoted to Death: Santa Muerte, the Skeleton Saint" and the Bishop Walter F. Sullivan Chair in Catholic Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University. "Because you can ask her for anything, she has mass appeal and is now gaining a diverse group of followers throughout the country. She's the ultimate multi-tasker."
Exact numbers of her followers are impossible to determine, but they are clearly growing, Chesnut said.
The saint is especially popular among Mexican-American Catholics, rivaling that of St. Jude and La Virgen de Guadalupe as a favorite for miracle requests, even as the Catholic Church in Mexico denounces Santa Muerte as satanic, experts say.
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(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
People can turn away from God in any numbers of ways, sometimes even deceiving themselves as to the direction of the turn.
Personally, I have a Hoodie Crow on my dashboard, and there always seems to be comely damsels following me for some reason.
Saint Death? There’s a clue there son,
Cultural diversity is so enriching for the new America. /s
Aren’t the remains of the real one on display under glass in some cathedral somewhere? Or is that the skeleton of some other female saint? All those skeletons lying about, it’s a little cryptic.
“Because you can ask her for anything, she has mass appeal and is now gaining a diverse group of followers throughout the country. She’s the ultimate multi-tasker.”
That is a GREAT concept for a saint! You can ask for her to help with anything from ‘please cure my son of his illness’ to ‘please don’t let the cops catch me for raping children’. Yet another sick spiral. Previously, this had only existed in the nutjob rantings of men like Richard Ramirez, but now, it’s cool to worship satanic figures. Saint Death? She is a made up figure, an attempt to carry over ancient Mesoamerican death reverence into the modern world. There is only one death, Samael, and he is not a figure to be worshiped.
Of course it’s popular in Mexico, it’s syncretic paganism hidden under a thin veneer of Christianity.
It’s the same beliefs that Catholic Church in Mexico has tried to stamp out that lead the ancient Mexica to ritually slaughter people regularly to appease their Gods.
No wonder the Drug Cartels adopted it.
Why don’t they just call her an Aztec death goddess, now called by a new name?
/sarc
Somehow, this doesn’t seem like a healthy philosophical development.
A comely damsel followed me home. She turned into an old crow. ;)
Be careful!
Underworld Satan is more like it.
Yeppers..
>>”the Catholic Church in Mexico denounces Santa Muerte as satanic”
Not a good sign...
Aye, the legend Crows...err...grows.
This is a cult to be concerned about. There are as many as an estimated 2m people in Mexico that show some degree of attention to La Santa Muerte.
The parallels between this and Kali, the Indian death goddess, are a bit too close for comfort. Some of its followers were the Thuggee (”stranglers”), from perhaps the 14th to the 19th Century, known for their willingness to indiscriminately murder anyone.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kali
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thugee
The British finally had enough of them, and effectively wiped them out, twice, before they were extinguished. This was done with the broad praise of everyone else in India.
The Thuggee were able to operate freely for so long because they looked like most everyone else. Much like La Santa Muerte followers look today.
For an invisible cult whose primary goal is murder, to operate freely in the US is asking for trouble.
“Mexican-American Catholics, rivaling that of St. Jude and La Virgen de Guadalupe as a favorite for miracle requests”
Don’t buy it.
“Mexican-American Catholics, rivaling that of St. Jude and La Virgen de Guadalupe as a favorite for miracle requests”
Don’t buy it.
I’ve met the fellow who is the leading expert on Santa Muerte in the South, Robert R. Almonte.
The funny thing about Santa Muerte is that the bad guys really believe that if they have the image on their vehicles or have something hanging off the rear view mirror that they are “invisible”.
Alamonte has been going around the country for years teaching law enforcement how to spot the various figurines, images, amulets that the followers use. Suffice to say that once a cop knows what to look for they can readily identify traffickers by looking for all the various signs. If they pull a vehicle over and see the stuff on the dash or rear view mirror they know they have bad guys. The dummies really think they are invisible.
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