SAINT DEATH
“Such a caring for death, an awakening that keeps vigil over death, a conscience that looks death in the face, is another name for freedom.” ― Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death (1992)
After their gig the Filipinos like to go skate-boarding at midnight down on the beach road. It’s their new craze, and a great way to wind down. They’ll come up to my terrace for a while before heading for one of their skating haunts, and by that time I’m usually ready to crash. And not ready to deal with the Dogs up at the viewpoint, who know the musicians and wave them through, but don’t know me.
Once in a while I’ve joined them in the daytime, though. On the road through Kata there’s a stripped-out commercial space that used to be a restaurant, which has been turned into a little skate park since the pandemic shut it down, and sometimes I find them there on my way to the beach. It’s a good vibe, with loud music on, the whirr and clatter of wheels, and Mia rolling spliffs in the afternoon. Sasha turns up as well, Kittiya and Megan are there and Yam of course, so it’s almost the whole original Jamrock crew that camped out under the rubber trees throughout the second lockdown. I’m feeling blessed as I mooch around watching my young friends and looking at the street-art that fills the concrete walls. I’m struck by this figure that looks very much like Santa Muerte — Saint Death, Sacred Death, Holy Death.
Recently I’ve been intrigued by references to this cult, which is reported to be the world’s fastest-growing religious movement. Huge crowds gather at private altars in the suburbs of Mexico City to make offerings to her, to pray for healing or protection, and buy icons and paraphernalia. It’s a heresy of Catholicism with its origins in Mexico but an increasingly widespread appeal throughout the Americas and clearly beyond.
I’m staring at Our Lady of the Shadows and trying to decipher the ribbon legend when Megan’s brother Kyle comes over to bump my fist and see if I’ve got a cigarette.
Kyle’s a nice lad. Well, maybe thirty now, I’m not sure, very much in his prime, quite a draw for the girls, long-haired and smoulderingly handsome, but nice with it, no apparent ego problems despite the outrageous gift of his voice.
I give him a cigarette and gesture at the icon I’ve been admiring.
‘Have you seen this? They say it’s the fastest-growing religion in the world.’
He reads the banner. ‘Live. Fuck…’ and chuckles. ‘Wait — Live, or Love?’
‘I don’t know. Live, I think. You know Spanish?’
‘Some.’
‘Nostra Senora de las Ombras. Hermana Blanca. La Flaca. Santa Muerte.’
‘Ah! Yes, I have it too.’ He shows me his upper arm, a tattoo of a beautiful girl from shoulder to elbow. She’s not a skeleton, not at all, but her make-up, with dark pools of eye shadow and trick-hollow cheeks, artfully reveals the skull beneath the flesh.
‘Huh, yeah, that’s beautiful,’ I say. ‘So they have this in the Philippines too?’
‘I got it because I like it. But I heard of this Santa Muerte. They worship Death. But — why? I forget why.’
Our one, two, three beautiful girls hurtle by, weaving their hips to gain speed for the ramp. The space resonates with the clunk and grind of wheels and and reggae music booms around this space bounded on three sides by concrete walls and the other by shutters of dazzling sunlight.
‘It’s maybe a macho thing,’ I muse. ‘Very popular with criminals apparently, as well as working class and poor people. I guess it’s like — I worship death. You think I’m scared of you?’
‘Right,’ he says. ‘Gangsta thing.’
And we leave it at that.
But there’s more to it, of course. I first heard it mentioned by a martial arts expert offering self-defense instruction, who became more and more interested in the importance of mindset, going beyond the secular in developing a metaphysics of protection, and rebranding himself as ‘Inner Guardians’. He made the connection between our death-obsessed times and the booming popularity of the Latin death-cult at this strange time in the history of the planet, with frightening red numbers representing death-tolls flashed up on billions of screens twenty-four hours a day to terrorize the population into accepting the most dangerous (purported) medical product ever released. I don’t know if he took the idea any further, but seeing the image on a wall in this echoing micro-drome piqued my curiosity, and I started reading around.
Santa Muerte is said to be a ‘cult of crisis’, meaning that devotion peaks during times of hardship. As Señora de la Noche (‘Lady of the Night’), her protection is invoked by those exposed to the dangers of working at night, such as taxi drivers, bar owners, police, soldiers, prostitutes, and of course drug dealers and petty criminals. She appeals to outcasts — their choice of the heterodox cult over established religion is a form of rebellion against legitimate society.
I start to like her more and more.
The image I photographed, I learn, is an example of the merging of the figure of the Santa Muerte with Our Lady of Guadalupe, as shown by the blue shawl decorated with stars and the fiery halo behind her head. As ‘Guadamuerte’, she becomes a surrogate for the Virgin herself and the whole feminine archetype in Roman religion.
Lady Death. Madrina: the Mother.
Her deepest roots, I read, lie probably in her role as a psychopomp, like Anubis or Charon, the spirit-guide without whose help you will never find your way to the afterlife. Devotees of Santa Muerte have begun to recognise their saint as a reincarnation of Mictecacihuatl, ‘Lady of the Dead’ in Aztec culture, and the traditional ‘Day of the Dead’ celebrations as her unofficial feast day. (This re-emergence of pagan precursors is said to have provoked a degree of panic within the Catholic hierarchy.)
So in fact it’s nothing new, this worship (if that’s the right word) of death. It only seems strange to our kitsch modern outlook, which neurotically avoids the contemplation of mortality considered so essential in earlier cultures. I can see how Santa Muerte might play a role in a ‘metaphysics of protection’, of which, God knows, we are badly in need.
Historically, then, there’s nothing so unusual about it, and it’s our culture, tongue-tied and shame-faced in the presence of death, which is the anomaly. It’s only to us, metaphysically illiterate and ignorant of the ways of the spirit, that such a thing as Santa Muerte seems strange at all.
Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.
As this iatrogenic holocaust unfolds, with more and more hideous discoveries about the effects of the vaccine emerging week by week, these words from Psalm 23 keep coming back to me, dimly remembered from church services when I was a kid. I never thought they would have such resonance in my lifetime.
The fear-propaganda was incessant. Terrorism, pure and simple — “the best political weapon,” as Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, “for nothing drives people harder than a fear of sudden death.” Bio-terrorist governments herded their people into the vaccine centres and a whole society to the brink of cultural and economic suicide. And from the fear was born Sudden Adult Death Syndrome — SADS, and the horrors few are aware of yet.
I assume the Santa Muerte cultists sought the protection of their saint, not the needle. If the latter, they abandoned their metaphysics of protection for a cruel trap.
You can scoff, if you like, at crowds of poor peasants crawling on their knees, clutching their skeletal icons and chanting about death. But consider your own culture:-
Ten years ago, a strange ritual was enacted in London, as part of the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games — the thirtieth modern Olympiad. The ceremony, directed by Oscar-winning film-director Danny Boyle, with musical direction, appropriately enough, by Rick Smith of Underworld, was entitled ‘Isles of Wonder’ — and it must have made many wonder. With a cast of hundreds and some impressive puppetry, it portrayed the host country in a very strange light. The UK’s National Health Service was chosen to represent the spirit of the nation, realised as a choreographed vision of vast wards of sick and bedridden children, cosily wrapped in Victorian night-caps and gowns, attended by hordes of dancing nurses. Behind them was revealed an enormous simulacrum of a newborn baby. Looming over the whole scene, a huge, sinister figure of death in black robes like a witch, holding what might be a wand or a syringe.
There are narrative overlays celebrating bed-time stories and a rich tradition of children’s literature, from Peter Pan to Mary Poppins, but nothing could overwrite the disturbing occultism of that dominating stage image. What a bizarre way to represent the culture of the host country, obsessed, it would seem, not with health but with sickness and death! It comes across, now, as some weird premonition of the panic of 2020, and the kitsch infantilism that accompanied it, especially in the UK, where, at an appointed time each week, people were allowed to leave their houses and stand on their doorsteps — socially distanced, of course — to clap and bang pots in the street, applauding their socialised health system even as it was actively engaged in forced euthanasia and medical murder. Even the motif of dancing nurses would return to haunt us in numerous ridiculous Tik-Tok dance-routines made by NHS staff with nothing better to do.
And the giant baby revealed at the end, suggestive of the birth of a new world, resonates with the rhetoric of the Great Reset and the Green New Deal, a Brave New World arising from the green transition and bio-digital convergence.
I wasn’t aware of this bizarre ceremony until someone unearthed it a couple of months into the lockdowns. Now, looking at video and photos of the 2012 event, I’m incredulous. Why would anyone create such a vision, simultaneously insipid and nightmarish, cloying and disturbing, as prologue to a festival of athleticism? Could anything have less to do with a celebration of Olympic values?
The video is a fascinating social document; and what does it tell us about contemporary British society? Let’s be clear, the bizarre vision does not represent a death cult like Santa Muerte, but quite the opposite — a cult, rather, of safety, physical safety, an impoverished surrogate for metaphysical protections. And that witch is no psychopomp, believe me. Her spell is cast by the fear of death; the dark side of the nanny state.
Who would want to live in such a society?
Death is, of course, a portal through which any of us may one day fervently wish to pass. Not all, though. At a time when the transhumanist elites on this planet are trying to kill off the rest of us useless eaters, the super-wealthy are hoping to secure for themselves some kind of synthetic immortality through their Gilgamesh Project, hailed by the WEF’s Yuval Harari as ‘the leading project of the scientific revolution’. Death is nothing sacred, he proclaims, merely a technical problem, like any other disease. But even Harari sees something of the absurdity of the immortality project.
“Harari suspects that the biotechnological revolution signals the end of sapiens: we will be replaced by bioengineered post-humans, ‘amortal’ cyborgs, capable of living forever. But amortality isn’t immortality, because it will always be possible for us to die by violence, and Harari is plausibly sceptical about how much good it will do us. As amortals, we may become hysterically and disablingly cautious … The deaths of those we love may become far more terrible. We may grow weary of all things under the sun – even in heaven … We may come to agree with JRR Tolkien‘s elves, who saw mortality as a gift to human beings that they themselves lacked.” (The Guardian, Sept 11 2014)
While life-extension technologies will never, one assumes, be available to any but the wealthiest elites on this planet, the absurdity of Harari’s amortality can be generalised to the broad scope of Western culture as a concomitant of the deceptive cult of safety which paved the way for the pseudo-pandemic. In fact I’m tempted to adapt the word with only a slight change of emphasis, as a neologism to describe the specific emptiness of the entire technocratic worldview. Amortality… even as Harari uses it, the word evokes a spiritually impoverished condition, a cosmic ennui which in itself encapsulates exactly what it is about death that the human spirit should venerate.
Such a rationalised cult of public safety or ‘public health’ is always used to provide moral cover for totalitarian measures, from the French Revolution to the Soviet Union and The Third Reich. No doubt this is an example of how totalitarian doctrine arises from the atomised masses; the obsession with safety, the submission to a ‘nanny-state’, arguably makes a medical dictatorship inevitable at some point, or at least available to a totalitarian movement to exploit when it’s ready. At the same time it’s a symptom of spiritual malaise arising from a desacralized vision of life which shies away from the reality of death. The mechanistic poverty of the technicians’ vision carries the collective experience further and further from a sense of the Logos, creating an increasingly dependent population which consents automatically to its own irrelevance and loss of value. Thus the cult of safety ultimately betrays — already has betrayed — the timid masses who follow it. ‘Amortality’… such a perfect word to describe that technological, unnatural limbo of pseudo-life, of not-quite-death, which is the best the technocrats can ever do do fill their God-shaped void. Against which, the veneration of death — not the seeking of it by any means, which is not our prerogative — becomes a spiritual rebellion, a protest on behalf of the natural order, and a reaching out to natural energies which can never be accessed through fear.
A living organism is not a machine, but a consubstantiality of matter and spirit, sealed by the emission of a single photon at the moment of conception, and joined, according to the mythology, by a silver thread which Santa Muerte will cut with her scythe at the moment of death. If that thread can no longer be found, there can be no separation, no distinction between matter and spirit, and the organism is condemned to be either one or the other — which in this material realm can only mean matter. The organism must degrade, in other words, into a machine — whose parts can be continuously replaced but which can only aspire to the condition of life; an automaton, as Descartes conceived of animals — a mere mechanism.
It seems logical to me, then, that life cannot exist independently of death: that the denial of one is also the denial of the other, because it’s the denial of that consubstantiality, that super-position of matter and spirit. To ‘banish death’ in these terms is merely to redefine the living organism as a machine, in a reprise of the grotesque Cartesian error.
No doubt Harari and his fellow amortalists would see this as abstruse and sentimental reasoning, as primitive wish-fulfilment, all part of the same delusion that insists that human beings possess some kind of hidden ‘spark’ — yes, he used that word, without irony — a ‘soul’, or ‘spirit’, a life force that expresses itself in free will, the self-evident experience of being alive. To reject that notion, on the basis of crude data-ism, is nihilism of the most insidious kind, a materialist dead-end. Harari’s bloodless amortals will not inherit the earth; their way leads only to a deeper death, and they will find that out in the end, too late to pray to Our Lady for release. In the mean time, and as a matter of urgency, we need to recognise their philosophy for what it is: spiritually dead, politically totalitarian, hubristically insane; and reject it for the disastrous aberration it is.
Santa Muerte, who holds power over all, bless us with your love now and at the moment of our deaths.
Glory be to Holy Death, blessed Death, peaceful Death
As you have been with me from the beginning
So are you with me now
And so you will be with me always
AMEN
“And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them.” Revelation 9:6 (KJV)
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