Also called Holy Death, La Santísima Muerte, La Flaca, La Niña Blanca, Doña Queta's shrine
A living Mexican folk devotion to Santa Muerte, a female personification of death honored with candles, rosaries and offerings for protection, healing and a safe passage at death. This page explains what devotees do in public and offers a respectful open practice for outsiders.
Tonight's moon is read when the page loads.
Take care: This is a living faith; do not use it as a theme, joke or prop, and do not photograph devotees without permission. Keep candles in glass on a heat-proof surface and never leave them unattended.
Enriqueta Romero, known as Doña Queta, set a life-size image of Santa Muerte outside her home in Tepito in 2001. On the first day of every month she or her helpers lead about an hour of prayers and a Santa Muerte rosary modeled on the Catholic one. On November 1, the shrine's anniversary, the image is dressed as a bride and thousands come to pray.
Devotees choose candle and robe colors by the request: white for gratitude and purity, red for love, gold for money, blue for study and wisdom, purple and yellow for health. A seven-colored candle, which Chesnut traces to the Seven African Powers candle brought by Cuban migrants, asks for help on several fronts at once.
For most of its history the devotion was private, kept at home altars in working-class neighborhoods. Many devotees now honor her on November 2, the Day of the Dead, with flowers, sweets, cigarettes and tequila set before her image.
Santa Muerte, Holy Death, is shown as a robed female skeleton, usually holding a scythe and a globe. Researchers see her roots in Spanish Catholic images of death such as the Grim Reaper, mixed with Mexican attitudes to death that also shaped the Day of the Dead. Veneration was recorded in the 1940s in working-class Mexico City neighborhoods such as Tepito, and it drew national attention in 1998, when police found a shrine to her in the home of a kidnapper, which fed a lasting and unfair link with crime.
The devotion became public when Enriqueta Romero set up her Tepito shrine in 2001. Since then it has grown quickly; Chesnut estimates many millions of devotees in Mexico, Central America and the United States, most of them ordinary people seeking protection, healing and work. The Catholic Church in Mexico and Evangelical churches condemn the devotion, yet most devotees still consider themselves Catholic and pray the rosary and Our Father before her image.
A raw egg is passed over the body to absorb heaviness, envy or the evil eye, then cracked into water and read. Widespread across Mexico and Latin America.
A small, regularly tended shrine where a family remembers its dead with photographs, light, water and offerings, a practice shared in different forms by Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, African, Afro-Caribbean, Mexican and modern pagan households.
A home altar built for the Mexican Day of the Dead, set with photographs, marigolds, candles, water, salt, pan de muerto and the favorite foods of the dead so that their spirits feel welcome when they return on November 1 and 2.
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