By Randy Fitch
The Holy Death has grown from the religious diaspora of beliefs in past and present Mexico. While in 2001 the “devotion to death” went public, the growing belief in an incarnation around death has been brewing in Mexico even before the Spanish conquered the Aztecs. However, one ingredient that came along with the Spanish in their fifteenth-century overthrow was an icon from the bubonic plague era, the Grim Reapress. This was believed to be a representation of death’s wife, thought to be a kinder, gentler form of death, and one that can be bargained with (Santa Muerte, Rollin 2017).
When the Spanish arrived in Anahuac in 1521, they found that Aztec priests murdered countless innocents in human sacrifices to please their many gods. While many historians dismissed the sixteenth-century reports as wildly exaggerated propaganda used to justify their cause, in 2015 and 2018, archeologists working at Templo Mayor in Mexico City discovered proof of widespread human sacrifice among the Aztecs, even towers and racks of human skulls. In addition to slicing out human hearts with obsidian blades and spilling human blood on ziggurat altars, the Aztecs likely practiced ritual cannibalism (Human Sacrifice: Why the Aztecs Practiced this Gory Ritual, Dave Roos, www.history.com 2018).
As the Spanish overtook the region, bringing Catholic Inquisitors with it, the era of mass human sacrifice by the Aztecs, which amounted to the horrific butchery of untold thousands, came to a close. And while Catholicism was required of the Aztecs, the priests eased the transition by replacing the many Aztec deities with saints… Its common knowledge the Catholic Church assimilated and redefined the belief systems of other cultures into their own. They may have not realized, however, that they are still working through the price of that assimilation today.
The Spanish influence on the belief system of the native people didn’t end with forced Catholicism. As they brought slaves from Africa to Cuba, the enslaved brought belief systems such as Palo Mayombe and Santeria across the Atlantic, which eventually migrated into Mexico.
Palo Mayombe is a Kongo derived religion from the Bakongo Diaspora in Africa. This religion was transported to the Caribbean during the Spanish slave trade and sprouted in Cuba mostly and in some places in Puerto Rico in the 1500s (Palo Mayombe, Christopher Peace, lawrencetalks.org).
Santeria was brought to Cuba by the people of the Yoruban nations of West Africa, who were enslaved in great numbers in the first decades of the 19th century. The name “Santería” derives from the correspondences made by some devotees between the Yoruba deities called orishas and the saints (santos) of Roman Catholic piety (Britannica.com).
Start the cauldron with Catholic Mysticism and its assimilated Aztec gods such as the death goddess Mictecacihuatl, add a pinch of Afro-Cuban Santeria and a dash of Palo Mayombe, throw in more recently some Wicca and a sprinkle of new age magic, and voilà, now we have only a part of what we know of the belief system formulating around the Holy Death, which, appears to loosely bear a likeness to chaos magic in its apparently unintentional syncretic approach to the occult.
And take note, something is happening here, as her followers believe there is evidence their skinny lady, as they like to call her, answers their prayers. Which begs the question, are these phenomena caused by the power of their beliefs or the work of a supernatural entity?
Next, we will take a look at how Catholic Christians could turn to the Santa Muerte.
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