Let’s Talk
About Death
“At the end of the game, the king and the pawn go back into the same box.”
~italian proverb
It is no accident that you are reading this book. Everything happens for a reason, and that reason is ultimately you. There’s a saying, often attributed to Carl Jung, the founder of analytical psychology: “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate.” This is a startling concept to many. The idea that we are the cause of all our successes and all our failures frightens people. It is much more comforting to believe that our successes derive from our hard work while our failures derive from circumstance or even from external obstacles. It takes great courage to own up to everything we do, but once we truly realize that both success and failure are the result of our thoughts and actions, we become the master of both success and failure.
As a devotee in the mystery school of La Santa Muerte, you must become such a master. You must wholeheartedly believe that you have the power to co-create miracles with this deity of Death. Magic, after all, is simply the knowing manipulation of natural energies to create an intended result. In truth, we are manipulating energy all the time, but because we have become so accustomed to it, we don’t call it “magic,” reserving that word only for things that we don’t understand how to intentionally manifest.
Think of an airplane; think how magical this mode of transportation would have seemed to people for the majority of human history! But because we see it every day and understand that it has to do with the generally accepted laws of physics, air travel has lost its sense of magic. The miracle of flight is nothing more than the knowing manipulation of wind, velocity, reshaped metals, and fuel propulsion energies to create the intended result of air travel. To harness the power of flight, we must understand physics, and to harness the power of death magic, we must understand La Santa Muerte.
Once we truly know her and understand her, only then can we better understand how to work with her magic in this world. In order to have a proper understanding of La Santa Muerte, though, we must first understand death.
Genesis of Death
Officially, death has been around for as long as life has been around. Death and life are cooperative partners who are dependent upon each other. And since humans can be categorized under living things, death has existed side by side with us through all stages of our evolution.
Technically speaking, though, we only have been aware of our modern concept of death since Paleolithic times approximately 300,000 years ago. Neanderthals were the first human species to bury their dead. Before this, the cadavers of deceased members of the human tribe were just left in the same location and position in which the person had died. But this new practice of burying the dead served as a then-perceived hygienic benefit to human civilization wherein the toxic miasma released as a by-product of putrefaction was relegated underground. Although modern microbiology has debunked this myth of decomposing bodies being toxic (known as “miasma theory”), an interesting thing of note is that the Neanderthals of the Paleolithic era were wandering hunter-gatherers. The disease-causing implications of leaving an organic body to putrefy and decompose above ground aren’t enough of an argument to justify the time and energy involved to ritualistically bury the deceased. They could just move on to healthier locations and put that time and energy into endeavors more productive for the living members of the tribe. Thus, burials must have been done for other reasons.
While we can’t know with certainty why our Paleolithic ancestors buried their dead, anthropologists have generally accepted that it was for religious reasons, pointing to artifacts buried with the deceased that signify a belief in an afterlife. Whether the artifacts and burial were motivated by generous concern for the well-being of the deceased in the afterlife or by the selfish concern for the well-being of the living—to not be haunted by the deceased due to a lack of respect for their remains—some kind of continuation after physical death was believed to be real. From this perspective, one can assume that our very first conceptualized notion of death was not one of finality but rather one of transition.
This idea of “death as a transition” stayed with humanity all the way to the modern age. In popular magic, this aspect of death can be seen in the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot deck in the thirteenth card of the major arcana: the Death card. This card shows Death as a skeleton who wears a suit of black armor, holds a black flag emblazoned with a white rose, and rides a white horse. At the horse’s hooves are a young child, a grieving maiden, a member of the clergy, and the cadaver of a king lying face up with his crown irreverently tossed beside him. While there are many ways to interpret this illustration, in very broad strokes it reflects Death’s neutrality and indiscrimination (killing royalty, children, women, and holy men all equally), while the white rose (often called the Mystic Rose) symbolizes life or rebirth. In addition to this depiction and symbology of Death having many similarities with the figure of La Santa Muerte, the overarching message of the Death card is one of transition. In a tarot reading, drawing the Death card rarely signifies actual death, but rather the end of something that ultimately leads to a change through sudden transition.
Such focus on transition, specifically a transition into an afterlife, proved to be a main focus of human civilization’s earliest religions. One of the most well-known of these is the complex and multifaceted polytheistic religion of ancient Egypt. The ancient Egyptians’ preparations for the afterlife are one of the most enduring aspects of their culture in modern times. They believed that everyone had a soul that was comprised of two parts: a ka and a ba. Both being ethereal, the ka is closer to the popular Christian concept of a soul wherein it is the life energy that leaves our body upon death, although since it was nourished during life through food and drink, it needed to continue receiving offerings of food and drink even after death. The ba on the other hand is very attached to the body, and the only way it could be released to join the ka and thus form the akh was through a proper funeral. Since the actual physical body continued after death to be the nourishing energy necessary for the ba to survive, it was imperative to preserve the body from decay through mummification. Originally, it was believed that only a pharaoh possessed a ba, but as time went on, it became common acceptance that everyone had a ba.
The reunion of the ka and the ba, however, had many afterlife challenges set in place to determine whether the soul was worthy enough to be reunited into the akh. The final challenge was known as the “weighing of the heart,” wherein the heart (thought by the ancient Egyptians to be the center of thought, memory, and emotion) was weighed against an ostrich feather that represented Ma’at, the goddess of truth and justice. All of a person’s wrongdoings would stay in the heart, making it heavy, while a pure heart would be free of burden and therefore light. If the heart was lighter than the feather of Ma’at, the ka and ba could be reunited into the akh, but if the heart was heavier than the feather of Ma’at, the heart would be immediately eaten by a chimeric beast that sat in waiting at the base of the gigantic scales.
This practice bears a strong resemblance to the Christian concept of the Last Judgment, wherein, after death, a soul is judged whether it is worthy of the Kingdom of Heaven based on the quantity and severity of the person’s sins committed on earth. Modern devotees of La Santa Muerte regard the scales as one of her main tools with which she judges the quality of one’s soul in relation to one’s goodness while alive and also as a symbol of divine justice. It is important to remember, however, that although La Santa Muerte has the charge of judging the quality of one’s soul, she is still ever neutral and nonjudgmental. Officially, it is the mechanics of the nonsentient scales that determine a soul’s goodness. Consequently the judgment is controlled purely by one’s actions while alive. La Santa Muerte merely acts as the enforcer of the judgment whose ruling we created while on earth.
Despite this idea of death as a transition and not a finite ending, death was still a frightening thing. Since ancient times, we have tried to devise ways to prolong life and keep healthy. This fear of death is often misunderstood to be a fear of the act of dying. In actuality, what we all fear is the unknown, specifically the unknown of what happens to us after our physical death.
The truth is that none of us actually knows for certain what happens to us after our physical death—the only ones who do know are dead. Each of us, however, has something of a personalized idea of what will become of us, and some of us even believe wholeheartedly that we know what happens after death. But a belief (even a very strong belief) is not the same as actually knowing. Whether we are judged and sent to realms of perpetual bliss or torment, reincarnated on this earth in another form, or simply disappear into an endless void of nothingness, they are all equally valid possibilities because the correct answer is unknown to us.
If we explore further into this fear of the unknown, we come to a startlingly honest discovery. The truth is that we don’t really fear the unknown; we fear our negative assumption of the unknown. By definition the unknown is not known to us, and as such there is a 25 percent chance that it is bad, 25 percent chance that it is good, 25 percent chance that it is both, and a 25 percent chance that it is neither. The probabilities as to the positive/negative outcome of what happens to us after death are no different because it is unknown.
If we absolutely knew with 100 percent certainty that something purely wonderful and joyful will happen to us after death, there would be no reason to fear death. It has become known, and the known is a positive outcome. We might be sad to leave our loved ones, but we would not actually fear death. Likewise, if we knew with 100 percent certainty that something purely horrifying and torturous will happen to us after death, we still wouldn’t fear death because it has become known, and the known is a negative outcome. We would dread and have much anxiety about our life after death, but we wouldn’t fear the act itself.
While both of those hypothetical examples are great for explaining the rationale for our fear of the unknown after death, they are not much consolation for us here and now. As mentioned earlier, none of us actually knows with 100 percent certainty what happens to us after death, and so there will always be a lingering unknown and doubt in our rational minds. But that has not stopped the human race from trying to learn what would happen to us after death and attempt to gain ourselves an advantage in the afterlife. To do this, many mystery schools were developed in the ancient world that dealt with this unknown and the many other unknowns in life.
Mystery Schools of the Classical Age
Two of the most famous mystery schools that focused on death and the afterlife were the Eleusinian Mysteries and the Orphic Mysteries of the Greco-Roman era. Of course, as their names suggest, much of the intimate details of these mystery schools remain, well … a mystery. Secrecy was of the utmost importance, only initiates were allowed to know the sacred knowledge, and even then, there were gradations and levels of initiates who were allowed to know more than others.
From what we know now, the Eleusinian Mysteries centered around the Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone. A basic summary of this myth is that the young goddess Persephone was taken to the underworld by Hades, the god of death and the underworld. In some versions she is sexually abducted, while in other versions she went willingly, but in either case, she was taken to the underworld. Her mother, Demeter (goddess of fertility and agriculture), was so angry and distraught by her daughter’s disappearance that she stopped tending to her divine duties of assisting with agriculture. Humans began to see their crops wither, and they prayed to Zeus (the king of the gods) to do something to save them from starvation. Zeus eventually did intercede and forced Hades to return Persephone to her mother, but while in captivity, Persephone had eaten seeds of an underworld pomegranate. Eating underworld food meant she was technically bound forever to the underworld, but Demeter was adamant in refusing to allow the crops to grow so long as her daughter was with Hades.
Striking a compromise, Zeus declared that Persephone would return to her mother, but she would also have to spend one month a year in the underworld for every pomegranate seed she had eaten. Thus this myth served the purpose of explaining Persephone’s position as Queen of the Underworld and the changing of the seasons: summer being the vibrancy of Demeter with her daughter, autumn being the sadness of Demeter knowing her daughter would soon be returning to the underworld, winter being the sorrowful time of Demeter separated from her daughter, and spring being the joyous time of Demeter’s reunion with her daughter.
The Eleusinian mystery school focused heavily upon this myth and believed it to contain the secret of eternal life. Initiates into this mystery school believed that just as Persephone was taken to the underworld and then was able to return to the world of the living, they, too, could transcend death. Such transcendence was secured by the initiate elevating him or herself to the level of a god and attaining immortality. Because of the secrecy involved, the exact teachings and knowledge of the Eleusinian mystery school and how they professed to become immortal are still not fully known.
The other death-based mystery school of note was the Orphic Mysteries. Best described as a combination of modern Hindu, Buddhist, and Christian philosophy within the framework of fourth century BCE Greek culture, the Orphic mystery school developed its own unique method of transcending death based on the underworld-transcending myths of Orpheus, Persephone, and especially the birth of Dionysus.
While there are multiple and varied stories of Dionysus’ birth, the basic commonalities are that Dionysus was a son of Zeus born as the result of an extramarital affair with a mortal. Hera, the wife of Zeus and goddess of the family and marriage, is angered by this and sets in motion a scheme to murder the illegitimate child. Dionysus is ultimately killed but not before a piece of him is saved and sewn into the thigh of Zeus, from which Dionysus goes through another gestation period and is reborn.
Initiates of the Orphic Mysteries take this myth to show that the death of a physical body does not necessarily mean the death of an individual. According to them, the human soul is immortal and goes through many reincarnations after death. Life in any incarnation, however, was ultimately one of discomfort in the sense that we hunger, thirst, feel pain, and are forced to labor all our lives. The Orphic mystery school claimed that there was a way out of this reincarnation cycle via asceticism, knowing how to navigate and properly commune in the underworld between reincarnations, and secret rites that remain unknown to this day.
These ancient mystery schools are worth noting because they can be seen as early equivalents to our modern mystery school of La Santa Muerte. While not having the same objectives of transcending death or breaking the cycle of reincarnation, the various devotees of La Santa Muerte, like the devotees of the Eleusinian and Orphic Mysteries, are a minority that is united by a philosophy on death that is seen as transgressive to the religious philosophy of the contemporary majority. Though the mystery school of La Santa Muerte may seem like a twentieth-century phenomenon, research into these and other mystery schools of the ancient world show that such death cults have been around since the beginnings of human civilization.
To be clear, though, it is important to differentiate a mystery school from a religion. Essentially, a religion is a social, organized belief system that attempts to explain the relationship between humankind, the world, and the Divine. A mystery school is a supplemental philosophy that gives more explanation of a certain aspect of the aforementioned relationship. A mystery school is not a religion unto itself because, although it has a very distinct view on a certain aspect of life, it is only an elaboration upon the religion. In both the Eleusinian and Orphic mystery schools, initiates held unique and transgressive philosophies that elaborated upon the aspect of death and the afterlife in the already established and commonly accepted religion of ancient Greece and Rome. Similarly, the mystery school of La Santa Muerte holds a unique reverence and philosophy about Death and her interactive role with humanity that elaborates upon the religion of their choosing.
A good analogy would be likening mystery schools to sunglasses and religions to the landscape around us. Landscapes can vary wildly from urban to suburban to rural and everything in between. These different landscapes compel us to interact with each other and the world differently even though the basic necessities of survival are universal. The landscapes have been long established and are slow to change (if at all), but if we don a pair of sunglasses, we begin to see things differently. The landscape hasn’t changed, but our perception of it has.
Though our daily lives are still lived in accordance with our landscape, the tint of our sunglasses allows us to better see certain details to which we were previously blinded. And we can take these sunglasses to different landscapes, allowing us to tint these different places in the same way to emphasize the same details. The mystery school of Santa Muerte helps us to better see the details of transition, change, and impermanence in any religion to which we currently adhere. Of course, Santa Muerte is just one of many mystery schools out there, akin to how black is just one color that sunglasses could be tinted. Changing the color doesn’t change what we see, but it changes how we see it.
This is why, contrary to popular belief, you do not need to be a Christian to become a devotee in the mystery school of La Santa Muerte. Just as there are Christians who believe in reincarnation, and Buddhists who believe in a singular, masculine deity, so too are there people of various faiths who believe in the power and magic of La Santa Muerte. The reason why much of the modern devotion to and magic of La Santa Muerte is associated with Christianity and Roman Catholicism in particular is that the majority of devotees come from and live in a Catholic landscape. Thus, the current majority will often do things in a Catholic way, whether through habit or necessity, but their devotion to La Santa Muerte tints how they see what they are doing. And unless you have the same tint to your vision, you may both be looking at the same thing as a devotee, but you are each seeing something very different.
Remember, La Santa Muerte is nonjudgmental, and she comes to everyone regardless of their religious adherence. So long as you come to her with an open mind and an open heart, the philosophy and co-creational magic of La Santa Muerte are adaptable to any faith.
Preferably, an eclectic and well-rounded knowledge of comparative religion is ideal for any devotee in the mystery school of La Santa Muerte because all knowledge ultimately leads to self-knowledge. Specifically, knowledge of how various cultures view Death can best help in understanding the various ways humanity has interacted with her. To best understand how the majority (though not all) of modern devotees of the Santa Muerte Mysteries interact with her, it is important to have some knowledge of the Aztec view of death, the main pagan religion from which our modern Santa Muerte developed.
Death in the New World
Religion permeated every aspect of Aztec society. It was a polytheistic religion wherein different members of society would adopt different patron gods or goddesses based on that deity’s dominion and sphere of influence while still recognizing the divinity and authority of all other deities in their pantheon, especially the chief deity Huitzilopochtli, god of the sun and war. In their view of the cosmos, the world was divided into the heavens, the earth, and the underworld Mictlán, which were each further divided into more layers. Upon death, the afterlife destination was dependent upon one’s cause of death, but in general there were three main afterlife locales.
If a person had experienced a hero’s death (in battle, as a sacrifice, or while giving birth), their soul would transform into a hummingbird and accompany Huitzilopochtli and the sun. If a person had experienced a water-related death (drowning, waterborne diseases, lightning from a rainstorm, etc.), their soul would enter a verdant paradise known as Tlalocán. And if a person had experienced a natural death (the majority of people), their soul would go to the underworld of Mictlán.
In modern times, Mictlán is seen as one of the origins of La Santa Muerte’s neutrality toward the living. It did not matter if you were a wealthy noble in an Aztec court or a foreign slave owned by that noble, everyone went to the same Mictlán equally. There was no dichotic division between one heaven for the righteous and one hell for the wicked. The only earthly action that determined one’s afterlife was one’s cause of death.
Regardless of who you were on earth, if you died a natural death, you would not immediately be sent to Mictlán. The Aztec underworld consisted of nine progressive levels, and Mictlán was the last level. Getting there meant enduring a four-year afterlife journey of traveling through the eight other levels of the underworld where various forms of pain and torture awaited. After arriving at Mictlán, the soul would finally be allowed to rest in peace and remain in a pleasant underworld.
One of the strongest connections of the Aztec philosophy of death and the Santa Muerte mystery school philosophy of death is the concept that life is dependent upon death. Such was the case of Aztec society’s infamous obsession with sacrifice, in particular human sacrifice. While sacrifices were performed for a variety of reasons, one of the main reasons for human sacrifices was due to their belief in being indebted to the gods. In broad strokes, Aztec legends tell of how the gods had sacrificed themselves so that humankind could live, since everything on earth that sustains life grew from the blood and severed body parts of the self-sacrificed gods. In turn, humanity had to continuously offer blood sacrifices to ensure the continuity of life, particularly the daily rejuvenation of the sun. Thus, in Aztec mythology, death is the forebearer and prerequisite of life, not the other way around. We don’t die because we live; we live because we die.
These two important concepts—the neutrality of death and death preceding life, both fundamental to the mystery school of La Santa Muerte—are not only derived from Aztec religion but also from the Santa Muerte Mysteries’ other foundational faith system: Roman Catholicism, in particular Spanish Roman Catholicism.
Around the same time as the Aztec empire, the various factions of Christian Spain had united under King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella and successfully conquered the Muslim caliphate, thus regaining control of the entire Iberian Peninsula in Europe. But prior to this, medieval Spain had been ravaged by the bubonic plague, famine, ceaseless wars against the Muslim “invaders,” and the insidious witch hunts of the Spanish Inquisition. Death was, therefore, an omnipresent possibility and an everyday reality to all people.
For Roman Catholicism in general, though, the afterlife was supposed to be constantly in the back of the minds of the faithful. The religion’s main focus is upon how to enter the Kingdom of Heaven and avoid the fires of Hell, and the way to go about this is by being a good, kind, and loving person in this life. Conversely, by being a wicked, hateful, and sinning person, we would be barred from entering Heaven and be condemned to Hell. Of course, the Roman Catholic Church of medieval Spain had a much more far-reaching and unforgiving definition of sin. In comparison, the modern Roman Catholic Church post–Second Vatican Council, while by no means a liberal and all-accepting institution, is much less severe, damning, and Hell-focused as it was back in the fifteenth century.
This meant that while many of the opportunities to live life to the fullest were still off limits to a medieval Spaniard, the Catholic Church was able to placate the faithful with the promise that our real life would begin in Heaven, after our mortal death. Thus the credo of “suffer in this world, live in the next” was born, wherein our physical life is just a testing ground to see if we deserve the reward of Heaven or the punishment of Hell.
The omnipresent possibility of sudden death, however, is the part most relevant to our modern philosophy of the Santa Muerte Mysteries. To those living in medieval Spain, this threat was real and posed a daily concern. A person back then always remembered that they could very well die tomorrow, and thus the actions of each day were paramount. Nowadays, although still a possibility, the chance of sudden and unexpected death is nowhere near as high.
Our industrialized world provides every opportunity for one to keep in good health, and scientific breakthroughs are constantly being made in medicine, surgery, and rehabilitation, thus making sickness and physical injuries much more survivable and even preventable. Because of this, the vast majority of people do not worry about death in the way our ancestors once did, now relegating it as a concern only for the elderly. The assumption that we are going to wake up tomorrow makes our actions of today seem less important since we’ll always have tomorrow to start again or correct any mistakes. The people of medieval Spain did not think that way, and neither do the modern devotees of La Santa Muerte.
While most of us don’t actually think we will die tomorrow, we devotees in the mystery school of La Santa Muerte try to always keep in mind that this is only an assumption and that no one knows how long they have here on earth. Through this bit of Roman Catholic philosophy, we try to make each day count and not put off for tomorrow what we can do today, especially since we know that through the co-creational magic of La Santa Muerte, there is very little that we cannot do on any given day.
In further chapters of this book, you will learn how to do this magic. But it is important to remember that the magic of the Santa Muerte Mysteries is a magic of co-creation with La Santa Muerte. Now that you have a general knowledge of the history of death and some of the main parallels of La Santa Muerte’s ancient roots, only one more lesson is necessary before you should actually begin practicing magic: you must learn the history of La Santa Muerte herself.