Online Links:
| |||||
| |||||
|
Lost between 1009 and 2009
I was listening to the news on NPR once upon a time, and heard an amazing story regarding the cult of Santa Muerte.
Oh, and just to set it straight with any avenging spirits, angels, or lawyers out there, the slightly disturbing image over there is borrowed from an equally disturbing Time photo essay.
So, on to the point. Running rampant throughout Mexico and other parts of latin America is a culture of adoration of "Holy Death." It seems she's a lovely lady, a little short on skin perhaps, but oddly intertwined with the Virgin Mary as an important intercessor to the BIG MAN to help we mortals stay healthy, wealthy and wise, if we ask her right.
I'm somewhat mystified by this whole phenomenon, especially since the catholic church has come out saying the veneration of the death saint is not compatible with the Catholic faith. Yet millions of devout Catholics have decided that Santa Muerte is a powerful enough figure that going against their church is justified.
This whole thing seems so mythlogical and archaic as to be baffling, especially given the similarities to Aztec precursors to this same practice.
Well, it goes to show that even millennia after "christianizing" a culture, the roots of the beliefs that the church tried to drive out are always asserting themselves. That this belief practice is purportedly centered in the violent criminal cultures of Mexican drug cartels is also telling. A population that has already voluntarily stepped outside of the order of a government seems predisposed to lay aside what the rest of us consider to be modern ways of thinking.
This whole thing brings me back to "The Demon-Haunted World" in which Carl Sagan really hits upon the nature of our silly, messy brains to fixate on the unexplainable, the mystical and phenomenal, and how we build elaborate belief systems on seemingly random events. Of course the more traumatic one's life tends to be, the less control a person has over their environment, the more that person builds up a "greater being" who can order and control the world. You don't get much more unstable than drug cartel culture in which wars in the street end up with hundreds of murders and beheadings every month.
In toying with a script I am working on, I essentially postulate that if the mystical, mythological systems of earlier societies were shown to conclusively exist, humanity would tumble into tribal groups (in as much as groups would congregate strongly around a belief, culture or ethnicity more so than our current "globalized" society) and chaos would erupt. But this cult of Santa Muerte implies that these tribes may be much larger than I was ever anticipating, and much more bizzare.
Really I am writing this simply to offer my amazement that in the modern information age, the troubles of a society have brought back what is for all practical purposes, an mythological Aztec death god who you see tattoed on people's backs, paraded down the street on a litter, and riding around on the subway with people.
