La Santa Muerte: Unearthing the Magic & Mysticism of Death

About the Author

© Ray Garcia Photography

Tomás Prower is a graduate of the University of California, Santa Barbara. He holds two degrees: one in global socioeconomics and the other in Latin American and Iberian studies. A natural-born globe trekker, he sought additional education at the Universidad de Chile while working as a translator for their literature department. Due to his fluency in English, French, and Spanish, he was given the opportunity to become a cultural liaison for the French Government in South America between France, the United States, Chile, Peru, and the member states of Mercosur. During this time, he traveled extensively in the Amazon Jungle, learning as much as he could about the region’s indigenous peoples.

Upon returning to the United States, Tomás moved to Reno and became the External Relations Director for the American Red Cross in Nevada. Since then, he has returned to Los Angeles where he works as a mortician while pursuing his fascination for the macabre. When he is not dealing with the recently deceased, he studies the magical and religious practices from cultures all over the globe and writes every chance he gets. His world travels continue to provide the spiritual outlook behind his eclectic style of witchcraft and the philosophic subject matter in his writings.

Llewellyn Publications

Woodbury, Minnesota

Copyright Information

La Santa Muerte: Unearthing the Magic & Mysticism of Death © 2015 by Tomás Prower.

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First e-book edition © 2015

E-book ISBN: 9780738746708

Cover design: Ellen Lawson

Cover illustration: Sam Guay, additional imagery: iStockphoto.com/25314496/©bennyb

Editing by: Lunaea Weatherstone

Interior photographs by Anthony Louis of Twenty-Deux

Llewellyn Publications is an imprint of Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Prower, Toms.

La Santa Muerte : unearthing the magic & mysticism of death / Tom?s Prower. -- First Edition.

1 online resource.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.

ISBN 978-0-7387-4670-8 () -- ISBN 978-0-7387-4551-0 1. Death--Miscellanea. 2. Death (Personification) 3. Grim Reaper (Symbolic character) I. Title.

BF1442.D43

133.4’3--dc23

2015021777

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Contents

Introduction

PART I: History and Mythology

Chapter 1: The Patron Saint of Sinners .

Chapter 2: Let’s Talk About Death

Chapter 3: Her Story

PART II: Tools of the Trade: Death’s Magical Correspondences

Chapter 4: The Look of Death

Chapter 5: The Colors of Death

Chapter 6: The Tools of Death

Chapter 7: The Veneration of Death

Part III: Spellwork

Chapter 8: The Anatomy of Santa Muerte Spellwork

Chapter 9: Money Magic

Chapter 10: Love Magic

Chapter 11: Lust Magic

Chapter 12: Healing Magic

Chapter 13: Protection Magic

Chapter 14: Hexes

Chapter 15: Legal Magic

Chapter 16: Create Your Own Magic

Chapter 17: The Beginning

Appendix: Santa Muerte Locales in the United States

Bibliography

Introduction

Death has always been the single greatest motivating force in all of human history. Whether it be our basic instincts of hunting and gathering to fend off starvation or an ultimatum of war that serves as a rallying cry to unite us for the cause of the greater good, nothing has shaped the history of humankind like death. Moreover, many of humankind’s greatest cultural and architectural wonders have been created in honor of death: the pyramids of Egypt, the mausoleum and terra-cotta army of Emperor Qin Shi Huang, the Al-Masjid al-Nabawi, the Taj Mahal, St. Peter’s Basilica, Westminster Abbey, and much more. Even if not directly dedicated to death, many of the greatest books, songs, and achievements throughout the ages have been the result of a single person, aware of his or her own inevitable mortality, who wanted to make a mark on the world and leave a legacy by which they would be remembered.

As humans, one of our greatest powers over all other living beings on earth is our foresight, but this evolutionary gift comes at a great cost. Yes, we are the only animals that possess advanced logical reasoning skills and can envision far beyond our current reality, but we are also the only ones that know that we are destined to die. While many people, unable to cope with this predetermined fate, paralyze themselves with fear and anxiety, a growing number of people see it as an ultimate source of power.

These people are the devotees of the Spirit of Death herself, La Santa Muerte. Rather than shy away from thoughts of our impending mortality, those who are devoted to Death utilize this uncomfortable foresight, like the greats of history, to make a difference in the world here and now. Thinking we have forever might be more cheerful, but in no way does it compare to the motivational power of we’re only here temporarily.

Understandably, the modern veneration of Death (the Spirit of Death with a capital D, not the physical act of death with a lowercase d) is a type of faith that is still mostly underground and in the shadows of society. This is because death makes people uncomfortable, especially in the Western world. With medical breakthroughs and stronger environmental laws, infant mortality rates are at an all-time low while the average life-span continues to rise, thus making death all the more unfamiliar. And even when a death does occur, we have an entire funeral industry to take care of all things postmortem so we never have to interact with death or see it on a daily basis. In the not too distant past, it would have been very difficult to find someone who wasn’t well familiar with death and their own mortality, but nowadays, the first time many of us confront the reality of our own death is at the DMV when we have to check that box deciding whether or not to be an organ donor.

Death has become so unfamiliar to us that it is seen as almost unnatural, when it is the most natural thing in the world. Not too long ago, I was also a death denier. I had graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara with a degree in global socioeconomics and another degree specializing in Latin American studies. My life focus was on living people and how they interacted with other living people. Even when I lived in Mexico, Chile, Argentina, and the Amazon jungle, Westernization was everywhere. Death was hardly ever present to inconvenience the lives of the living, let alone openly venerated by a group of devotees. It wasn’t until I returned to Los Angeles that I came face to face with the mystery school of La Santa Muerte … on a dare, no less.

One of my best friends had been looking for new and exciting things to do while hanging out in the heavily Latino-populated gateway cities of L.A. He mentioned a place that was rumored to hold midnight Masses by candlelight around a giant statue of the Grim Reaper. Growing up with a love for the macabre, nurtured by movies like The Addams Family and Beetlejuice, I was instantly fascinated, and he dared me to go in and talk to one of them, a devotee of Death. Admittedly, I was a bit scared, especially by the Grim Reaper statue that went to the ceiling and took up a good sixth of the building, but my anthropological curiosity was stronger. That subsequent conversation with a priestess of Santa Muerte lasted only a couple of minutes, but a fire had been lit within me to learn more. I wanted to be like them, able to talk openly about death without fear and using its mysteries to live a more connected, magical life here and now during my living years. Thus began my initiatory journey into the mystery school of La Santa Muerte.

This book is the accumulation of everything I have learned since then about La Santa Muerte, her unique brand of death magic, and the growing number of people who use her dark philosophy as a credo for life. The morbid and magical information found within these pages is the result of not only objective academic research and interactions with modern devotees, but also of firsthand experience as a devotee myself and practitioner of cross-cultural religious and spellcrafting traditions.

The book is written in a three-part format designed to be approachable to novice practitioners of magic, veteran spellcasters, students of academia, and those just curious about this macabre veneration of Death and its philosophies for the living.

Part I introduces you to the cross-cultural sociology of how humans have interacted with death and the historical origins of how people first came to venerate La Santa Muerte.

Part II dives into an overview of the mechanics involved in death magic, giving a general tutorial of the magical side of La Santa Muerte, including what tools we use in spellcasting, how we use them, why we use them, and the scientific psychobiological effects they have on us.

Part III contains actual spells from the Santa Muerte tradition, arranged in a step-by-step format that is easy to follow, covering everything from money, love, and healing to protection, lust, and legal magic, and more.

Until now, the history and magic of La Santa Muerte have been kept buried underground, shrouded in a black veil of esoteric Latino mysticism. With their spellcrafting tradition condemned as infernal, those who dare to seek out Death as an ally have disguised it as an eccentric form of Roman Catholicism to hide its darker secrets from the judgmental public. A veneration of the macabre that unabashedly counts the LGBT community, feminists, prostitutes, thieves, drug smugglers, prisoners, police, and armed services members among its most devout. You are about to learn the unearthed wisdom of Death that has for so long been predominately passed down in Spanish language oral traditions.

So come and face your fears head-on. To deny death is to deny one of the greatest unchanging truths of life. It is a truth that, once accepted, will lead to a greater understanding of life. Much like the innumerable funerary rituals throughout the world, the philosophy of La Santa Muerte is intended for the living. It is not a manual on how to die, but rather, how to enjoy life because it won’t last forever. We are here on earth to be human, not gods. And the human experience involves death, a lesson not to be feared, only understood. Now is your chance to learn the lessons of death without having to die. Let your old life and preconceived notions of death pass away. Your new, magical life is about to begin.

[contents]

PART I

History

and Mythology

1

The Patron Saint

of Sinners

The fear of death is worse than death.

~robert burton, the anatomy of melancholy

What does Death look like to you? I don’t mean your actual, physical death with a lowercase d. I mean Death with a capital D, the Spirit of Death itself … or rather, herself. You see, to me and millions of people all over North and South America, Death is a woman. Not just any woman. She is a skeletal figure who wears a black, hooded cloak and carries a scythe. Yes, our image of Death is the Grim Reaper, or better yet, the Grim Reapress (a title coined by Dr. Chesnut in his book Devoted to Death).¹

If you’re like most people, this frightening embodiment of Death is probably something you wouldn’t want to dwell upon, much less venerate, and yet in the U.S. alone there are hundreds of thousands of people who not only dedicate their lives to her magic and philosophy but also see her as a comforting mother figure. And this number is growing exponentially. But why? When there are so many religions and deity figures in the world, why do countless people choose this Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) embodiment of Death as their patron deity and supreme source of both inner peace and personal empowerment?

Very rarely is someone a devotee of La Santa Muerte from birth. Most of us come from other faiths which, for one reason or another, were not able to provide us with the answers we are searching for. Many of us come from faiths that outright and unabashedly condemned us, saying that due to our professions, past mistakes, or sexual identity/orientation, we are not welcome into their good graces. Some of us, desperate for a miracle, turned to La Santa Muerte as a last resort and witnessed her special brand of magic firsthand, ever after becoming staunch believers. And still others have come due to curiosity about the mystery school of La Santa Muerte, only to discover that her worldview and spiritual philosophy resonate with their souls. No matter the origins of our relationship with La Santa Muerte, we are all devotees because we have communed with her and worked with her magic well enough to know that she is very real and very willing to help us if we call upon her.

When I was a child, I never would have guessed that I’d be writing a history on La Santa Muerte, let alone a book of spells whose efficacy I have experienced personally. With an Irish father and a Mexican mother, I grew up a good Catholic boy. In fact, I even attended Catholic school all my life until college. I learned about Jesus and the Bible, I received Holy Communion every Sunday, I confessed my sins to a priest, and I believed that to worship anything other than a single, masculine God was utterly blasphemous. Little did I know at the time that my childhood world of holy mysteries, incense, saints, and ceremony was preparing me quite well for a future steeped in magic.

Like many of La Santa Muerte’s devotees, I was drawn to her through a sense of not belonging. I was always a sensitive kid who was too feminine to fit in with the boys, too masculine to fit in with the girls, and too smart for my own good. Like anyone, I just wanted to be accepted. So, from outside the crowd, I studied human behavior, psychology, pop culture, and everything I could to figure out what everyone else seemed to just inherently know: how to fit in. And the more I learned, the more I realized that it was all an illusion. No one knew what to do to fit in, so everyone just pretended to act like everyone else in the hopes that they’d be accepted, giving up personal interests and self-expression for comfortable conformity.

This realization changed my life forever. If fitting in meant having to sacrifice who I truly was and confine myself into this box of constantly worrying what other people think of me, it just wasn’t worth it. If I hadn’t learned that lesson, I would never have found the fortitude necessary to be an open devotee of La Santa Muerte. Because, let’s be honest, practicing a form of witchcraft that invokes the aid of the Spirit of Death will attract a lot of negative attention. The more I lived my own life, the more other people began to think highly of me—ironically, though, the less I cared about what other people thought of me.

Sure, I didn’t care if human people didn’t like me, but having the One True God not liking me was something else entirely. Growing up Catholic, the concept of original sin, wherein humanity’s natural state is that of wickedness and sinfulness, just seemed wrong. So did the notion that God is some ever-disapproving parent who could become eternally angered over the smallest thing. To me, anger is such a petty human emotion for anyone to have, let alone Almighty God. I began to question all that I had just passively accepted to be true about the nature of the Divine. If I was created with such a damning flaw as original sin, then maybe God isn’t actually all-powerful. If I was purposely created with that flaw, then God must not be a loving deity. If God is all-powerful and loving, then why was I created to be damned? And if God is somehow neither all-powerful nor loving, then why worship him and call him God at all?

These questions are not unique to me. Every devotee in the mystery school of La Santa Muerte has asked these same questions, and there are as many answers as there are devotees. The vast majority of us have been labeled bad by society and by organized religions, so we had to look inward for our answers. My answer, after much soul searching, resulted in the acceptance of God as an all-powerful and loving deity (though not the only deity) and that it was his self-proclaimed interpreters here on earth who were twisting his words into something ugly, hateful, and untrue. If you ask any other devotee of La Santa Muerte, they will proudly tell you that they also believe in an all-powerful and loving deity beyond La Santa Muerte. For most, that deity is the masculine, solitary God of Christianity. For others, that deity is actually a pantheon of multiple all-powerful and (in their own way) loving deities. And some of us even adhere to a nebulous deity that is ultimately an ineffable and intangible energy beyond human comprehension, such as the Tao. To believe in La Santa Muerte and adopt her as a patron saint/deity, we do not have to abandon our prior religion; we only have to bring her into our current religion and be willing to learn the eclectic secrets of her mystery school.

But still, the question remains: why choose to dedicate your time, energy, and life to La Santa Muerte and her mystery school when there are so many other deities and philosophies of life to follow? What makes her, the Spirit of Death, so attractive, especially when death is something so naturally abhorrent to us as living beings?

Santa Muerte Philosophy 101

I admit that when I first heard of La Santa Muerte through word-of-mouth gossip from a close friend who was also on the spiritual path, I was terrified. Dark magic was not something for me. Being a good person, light magic seemed more appropriate. I studied the esoterics of more popular faiths and philosophies, including Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Wicca, while staying far away from anything that smelled of Christianity. It wasn’t until I met the ancient/alternative Christianity philosopher B. Dave Walters that I discovered the mysticism and magic of ancient Christianity as it was before it became distorted as an organized institution. He encouraged me to seek out and study the dark side of magic as a natural companion to the light side. In Hermeticism, this is called the Law of Polarity, meaning that everything has an equivalent opposite, and by studying one end of the pole, you can better understand the other end. Without an up, how can there be a down? How can you appreciate health if you haven’t experienced sickness? How could good exist without labeling something else as bad? How is it possible to truly understand the light if you cannot truly understand the darkness? Thus, if I wanted to understand the mystery of life, I had to first understand the mystery of death.

Truth be told, when I first began exploring the ways of modern Death worshippers, I was expecting to see a bunch of somber Goths who wore all black, read Edgar Allan Poe, and obsessively watched Tim Burton movies. I was laughably naïve about the cult, and, like most people, I had an incorrect assumption about the modern devotees of La Santa Muerte. Yes, we do evoke the Spirit of Death and cast spells, but we look just like anyone else. And, in truth, we are just like anyone else, except we have a different philosophic outlook on life.

Essentially, we believe that the world is good. We believe that the divine energy (God, the universe, the Tao, etc.) is perfect, and since that divine energy is in everything, everything is perfect. Everything is also perfectly connected to and depends on everything else in a symbiotic relationship for harmony and survival. The problems of life result from a self-disassociation with everything else, the belief that you are separate from all other things. This sense of separation leads to constant judgments and comparisons as being either better or worse than all other things. If you believe that you are better than something, it often leads to the self-justification of harmful deeds. This can be exemplified by some people’s belief that they (mankind/males) are more important than all other forms of life, and so they treat animals, the environment, and females as objects only to be utilized for their own enjoyment. Conversely, if you believe that you are worse than something, it also often leads to the self-justification of harmful deeds. This can be exemplified by some people’s belief that having