LA SANTA MUERTE
FOUNDED: In Mexico, personifications of Death have existed since the time of the Aztecs, but veneration of Santa Muerte was popularized in the mid- twentieth century.
STATUS: More active now than ever before.
EXCLUSIVITY FACTOR: Anyone can turn to La Santa Muerte for help or protection—if they are willing to make sacrifices to please her.
SECRECY FACTOR: Low. There are shrines to La Santa Muerte in public places all over Mexico.
THREAT FACTOR: High. Some members of the cult sacrifice humans so that Santa Muerte will answer their prayers.
QUIRK FACTOR: Mexican folk art has some kitsch currency, and the image of Santa Muerte is prime fodder for T-shirts and tattoos.
HISTORY AND BACKGROUND
Her name means “Saint Death,” and she looks like a grim reaper in fancy dress. Why are so many Mexicans drawn to this ominous figure? Mexicans who practice Catholicism (the country’s predominant religion) have always venerated a plurality of saints, the most important being the Virgin Guadalupe. Santa Muerte is sort of like Guadalupe’s bad-girl counterpart. One might pray to Guadalupe for blessings like health and happiness; but if you need someone cursed, or even killed, Santa Muerte is the lady to turn to.
Because of her vengeful badass reputation, Santa Muerte attracts a large criminal element. As narcotráfico—drug traffic—has increased in recent years, so has the popularity of Santa Muerte. She, along with a few other figures, is known as a “narco-saint,” whom members of Mexico’s thriving drug cartels call on for protection and assistance, sometimes even paying tribute with human sacrifice. Members of these cartels live brutal, often short lives, and can relate to this dark deity. Santa Muerte worship has spread like wild-fire in Mexican prisons.
In the past decade alone, drug-related violence in Mexico has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, including many innocent civilians. In the areas where the cartels are most active, people are exposed to unspeakably awful things. The drug lords earn respect through fear by disfiguring their victims and publicly displaying their corpses. Many people who face these horrors on a daily basis have lost hope in the help of traditional deities such as Jesus and the Virgin Guadalupe—but they trust in Santa Muerte to protect them.
This phenomenon has caused great alarm among officials of the Catholic Church, who believe that the proliferation of the cult is the work of Satan. Mexican priests are performing more exorcisms than ever before—but the cult of Santa Muerte shows no signs of dying.
MEMBERSHIP REQUIREMENTS
Drug lords and gang members are not the only devotees to Santa Muerte. Most others in the cult are poor and live in extremely volatile circumstances. The economic meltdown of the 1990s made many Mexicans turn to any source they could find for help, and Santa Muerte is a “saint of last resort.” It is estimated that her cult has about eight million followers in Mexico, with more among Mexican migrants in Central America, the US, and Canada.
To earn the favor of Santa Muerte, one must leave a sacrifice at one of the many shrines devoted to her. It could be something as simple as a white flower—or, for sizable requests, a much more gruesome offering may be required. Human heads have been found at Santa Muerte altars, and it is rumored that some members practice “blood baptism” by wearing the skin of their sacrificial victims.
INSIDE LA SANTA MUERTE
Santa Muerte is not a fully developed religion, and many practice it in conjunction with Catholicism. It used to be practiced clandestinely through worship at shrines in private homes, but in recent years the cult has become more visible. There are shrines on street corners, temples, and self-proclaimed priests devoted to Santa Muerte.
The image of Santa Muerte is a skeleton holding a scythe draped in long robes. Worshippers may blow smoke, spit alcoholic drinks, or smear narcotics on a statue of the deity to help activate its powers. And the blood and body parts of humans and animals are used in more extreme rituals. Blood may be smeared on devotees, as well as the statue of Santa Muerte.
All of this is done in the hopes that Santa Muerte will perform miracles for her faithful followers. Gang members may pray to her for money or to avoid arrest. However, debts must be settled for answered prayers. One who does not pay proper tribute to Santa Muerte may end up with his head on her altar. 
THE MANSON FAMILY
With his wild-eyed stare, delusions of grandeur, and killer instincts, Charles Manson is a psychopath through and through. This maniac and his merry band terrorized California during the tumultuous summer of 1969.
Young Charlie was a juvenile delinquent-turned-career criminal who had spent more than half of his life locked up in jail before landing in San Francisco in the Summer of Love, 1967. He established himself as a guru in the hippie-infested Haight-Asbury district, where he found many (mostly female) followers. He preached a philosophy derived partly from Scientology, which he had studied in prison. He also encouraged free love, and he and all of his followers lived together as “The Manson Family.” It’s a testament to Manson’s animal magnetism that he convinced a bunch of his followers to travel with him to Los Angeles, where they settled down with some new converts they had picked up along the way.
For a few months, the Family commandeered the Hollywood home of Beach Boy Dennis Wilson, who had befriended Manson and tried to help him achieve his dream of becoming a rock star. But the guru’s musical talent was lacking, and his entourage of miscreants didn’t make the best houseguests. After being kicked out of Wilson’s home in 1968, Manson relocated the Family to the Spahn’s Movie Ranch, an out-of-use set for Western productions.
It was there that the Manson Family’s story turned into a horror movie. Manson became obsessed with the Beatles’ White Album and claimed that the music was speaking to him in code. He predicted there would be a race war in the summer of 1969—a time of chaos he called “Helter Skelter,” after a song on the album. He directed his drug-fueled followers to strike out.
The first to die at the hands of the Manson Family was Gary Hinman, an associate of one of the men in the Family who had allegedly been involved in a drug deal gone bad. They held Hinman hostage for two days in July 1969 before stabbing him to death.
In August, Manson dispatched four of his followers to 10050 Cielo Drive, the home of movie director Roman Polanski. He wasn’t home, but others were: Polanski’s wife, actress Sharon Tate, who was eight and a half months pregnant; her friend Jay Sebring, a celebrity hairstylist; Polanski’s friend, writer Wojciech Frykowski; Frykowski’s lover Abigail Folger, heiress to the Folger coffee fortune; and 18-year-old student Steven Parent, who had the misfortune of going to visit his friend, a groundskeeper on the property, on that fateful night. Parent was shot in the driveway, before Manson’s crew cut the phone lines and sneaked into the house to continue their killing spree. With knives and guns, they slaughtered everyone inside. Sharon Tate begged for the life of her unborn baby, but she was mercilessly stabbed to death despite her pleas.
Manson was displeased at how the messy massacre went down, so the next night, he set off from the Spahn Ranch with six of his followers to show them how it was done. They ended up at the home of supermarket executive Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary. The Family woke the sleeping couple and killed them in a stabbing frenzy.
These murders rocked Los Angeles, but it wasn’t until October that police figured out that the murders may have been related. Graffiti, written in blood at the crime scenes, provided the link. The writings were all Beatles references, saying things like “Death to pigs” and “Healter [sic] Skelter.” Manson and the people who had killed for him were finally arrested.
The 1970 trial was a circus, with Manson making outrageous statements (“Why blame it on me? I didn’t write the music!”) and doing things like carving an “X” into his forehead for attention. The women on trial, still loyal to Charlie, followed his lead and carved X’s into their own foreheads. Even Manson Family members who were not locked up did the same. Jurors were horrified by the distasteful performance of these seemingly unrepentant murderers.
Manson and his followers were found guilty and sentenced to death, but their sentences were automatically reduced to life in prison in 1972 when the California Supreme Court abolished the death penalty in that state. Charles Manson remains incarcerated at California’s Corcoran State Prison, but even from there he retains a hold over the imaginations of many who find his story morbidly fascinating.
AUM SHINRIKYO/ALEPH
It’s hard to believe that what began as a yoga and meditation group evolved to biological warfare, but that is exactly what happened with Japan’s Aum Shinrikyo. The group’s founder and spiritual leader, Shoko Asahara, has claimed to be the first “enlightened one” since Buddha, capable of levitation and mind-reading. This fatherly guru took in thousands of young Japanese who were seeking a more meaningful existence. He insisted that the apocalypse was nigh, though the dates were a little unclear—the end would come either in 1996, or between 1999 and 2003.
Clearly Asahara’s predictions did not prove true, but when he started a yoga school in his one-room apartment in 1984, those dates were still far in the future. He taught his devoted followers psychic-development exercises to aid in their growth and enlightenment. By the time he became interested in prophecy, Aum Shinrikyo was designated as an official religious organization. According to Asahara, only Aum members would survive the coming apocalypse, after which the group would take the place of the Japanese government.
The end, he said, would be hastened by the US starting World War III with Japan. Because of this, Aum had to be armed and ready to fight. Brilliant young scientists were recruited from top universities to aid the group in this respect. In secret laboratories near Mount Fuji, they produced an arsenal of biochemical weapons, including nerve agents such as VX and killer diseases such as anthrax and Q-fever. The cult also established its own militia.
Armed with chemical agents, this violent group began taking out their “enemies” left and right, incinerating some victims in specially built microwave ovens in their laboratories near Mount Fuji. Then, in 1994, Aum conducted a sarin gas attack in Matsumoto city. The targets of the deadly attack were three judges presiding over a case against Aum—but the nerve gas killed seven people and injured two hundred others. Tragically, the authorities did not connect Aum to the attack until the group committed their most infamous deed: the Tokyo subway attack.
The increasingly paranoid Asahara responded to a police investigation of the cult by orchestrating a Sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway in 1995. Twelve people were killed and over five thousand injured in that horrific rush hour raid. If the cult members who carried out the attack hadn’t experienced technical difficulties with their distribution system, they could have killed tens of thousands of commuters. In the aftermath of this atrocity, they committed several smaller scale attacks throughout Tokyo, with varying degrees of success, until finally Asahara and several other senior Aum members were arrested.
Asahara was jailed and sentenced to death (in 2012, his execution was postponed). But outside of his prison, Aum Shinrikyo still survives. The group reformed in 2000, changing their name to Aleph. They have not committed any acts of terrorism since 1995, but plenty of devotees still believe in Asahara’s twisted teachings.
LINEAMIENTO UNIVERSAL SUPERIOR (LUS—SUPERIOR UNIVERSAL ALIGNMENT)
Were you born after 1981? If so, you’d better stay away from the LUS sect. These South American kooks consider children to be evil, especially if they were born after that year.
In 1981, their leader, Valentina de Andrade, began spreading the message she claimed was passed on to her by cosmic beings: that God does not exist, Jesus is an extraterrestrial, and only members of her group would survive the pending destruction of the Earth by escaping in a spacecraft. She established Lineamiento Universal Superior, LUS, to fulfill her mission. To join LUS, members abandoned their children, who de Andrade considered to be “negative energies.” Her followers would be ready for a fresh start once the UFO promised by de Andrade came for them.
But there were dark dealings to contend with on earth first. From 1989 to 1993 in Altamira in northern Brazil’s Para state, nineteen children were abducted and suffered mutilation and torture at the hands of LUS Boys ages 8 to 13 were castrated, supposedly as part of a black magic ritual, and then left for dead in the woods. The community was shocked by these gruesome crimes, but for a time they went unsolved.
Then in 1992, de Andrade and her group were investigated in connection with the disappearance of a child on the Brazilian island of Guaratuba. They avoided prosecution when witness accounts were inconsistent—possibly the result of intimidation and influence-peddling, which de Andrade and her accomplices used to avoid prosecution for many years.
Valentina de Andrade fled for Argentina. In the meantime, authorities gathered enough evidence to bring four LUS members to trial for their roles in the killings. Two of the men convicted and sentenced to prison were the physicians who performed the castrations.
Five children survived the tortures of LUS Two of them testified at the trial of Valentina de Andrade, which did not take place until 2003. One young man recounted in graphic detail his abduction, being put to sleep with a foul-smelling rag held over his face, and how he awoke in a wooded area, naked and missing his genitals. But incredibly, even with this testimony, de Andrade was acquitted. If she ever does make her great escape to space, this evil woman will not be missed. 