Matching Items (2)
Description
La Santa Muerte is a folk saint depicted as a female Grim Reaper in Mexico and the Southwestern United States. The Grim Reaper, as an iconic representation of death, was derived from the Angel of Death found in pseudepigrapha and apocalyptic writings of Jewish and early Christian writers. The Angel of Death arose from images and practices in pre-Christian Europe and throughout the Mediterranean region. Images taken from Revelation were used to console the survivors of the Black Death in Western Europe and produced a material culture that taught the Christian notion of dying well. The combination of the scythe (used in the eschatological harvest), the black cowl (worn by medieval priests and monks officiating at funerals), and the skeleton (as the physical body of the deceased) are a series of apocalyptic Christian referents that form a metonymical composite referred to as the Grim Reaper.
In medieval Iberian Dances of Death, the Grim Reaper was depicted as female, an unyielding social leveler, and an important participant in the Last Judgment. Personalized Death became associated with healing, renewal, magic, and binding, as apocalyptic Christianity blended with the Christian cult of the saints and the Virgin Mary during the Reconquista and the colonization of Mesoamerica. Utilizing secondary historical sources, metonymy, and iconology this Master of Arts thesis posits that the La Santa Muerte image resulted from a long historical interaction of Greek, Roman, Jewish, Visogothic, Islamic, and Christian death imagery leading up to the colonization of Mesoamerica.
In medieval Iberian Dances of Death, the Grim Reaper was depicted as female, an unyielding social leveler, and an important participant in the Last Judgment. Personalized Death became associated with healing, renewal, magic, and binding, as apocalyptic Christianity blended with the Christian cult of the saints and the Virgin Mary during the Reconquista and the colonization of Mesoamerica. Utilizing secondary historical sources, metonymy, and iconology this Master of Arts thesis posits that the La Santa Muerte image resulted from a long historical interaction of Greek, Roman, Jewish, Visogothic, Islamic, and Christian death imagery leading up to the colonization of Mesoamerica.
ContributorsBreault, Eric (Author) / Astor-Aguilera, Miguel A (Thesis advisor) / Gereboff, Joel (Committee member) / Maupin, Jonathan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
This doctoral thesis utilizes a material culture approach of lived religion to analyze everyday practices resulting from past social interactions and discourses that alter the relation of things and actors within structured categories of thought and action. The case study for this analysis is a genealogical investigation of the icon of Death that attracts both lived Catholic and Occultist practitioners within the shared self-identification of folk magic. La Santa Muerte is an icon of Death that recently emerged as a Mexican folk saint over the last two decades, but appears to be a historical outcome of medieval Western European material depictions of a Good Death. My thesis addresses the question, what social and historical processes led to the Occultist adoption of the Mexican folk saint La Santa Muerte? I conclude that a Romantic counter-ideology denying both empirical rationality and Christian normativity gathers a diverse assemblage of people to the icon of Death. My methods include iconology, historiography, ethnography, and iconographic fieldwork. The result is a genealogy that traces a deep history of practices and materiality from the ancient Mediterranean through medieval Western Europe and the colonization of Mexico until the present moment on social media. My fieldwork examines what La Santa Muerte signifies or embodies in Nezahualcóyotl (Mexico City), Puebla, Puebla, Mexico, Nogales, Sonora, Mexico, Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico, and on social media. In my dissertation, I outline how lived Catholicism and Occultism converge within a gathering of religious practitioners who seek to subvert dominant social narratives that accuse them of deviancy.
ContributorsBreault, Eric Bruce (Author) / Astor-Aguilera, Miguel (Thesis advisor) / Arnold, Philip (Committee member) / Avina, Alexander (Committee member) / Bruner, Jason (Committee member) / Clay, Eugene (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022