Mexican Statue of “The Holiest Death” (La Santísima Muerte)

This statue represents one of several varieties of a spirit known as la Santísima Muerte, or “the Holiest Death.” You can find online much more information about these spirits.

I believe that I bought her in Los Angeles in 2018, at a time when the popularity of these spirits in Mexico and in US Latino communities was growing fast.

A paper adhesive label on the bottom of the statue reads, HECHO EN MEXICO (“Made in Mexico”). The beliefs surrounding these spirits are continuous with other syncretic Mexican ideas about the enduring presence of the dead in the lives of the living. Some of the most famous varieties of this spirit are associated with Mexican drug cartels. These spirits tend to be credited with amoral power and with the power to facilitate the worshiper’s achievement of goals, no matter how immoral those goals might be. Compared with spirits that are bound by morals, such spirits are believed to be more effective, faster acting, and more willing to carry out the supplicant’s wishes according to the supplicants’ precise expectations. Devotion to this spirit seems to be motivated by either desperation in the absence of legitimate avenues of redress or death-defying greed for short-term benefits, even at a high long-term or eventual cost.

The plastic statue represents a human skeleton holding, in the right hand, a scythe with an etched blade. The left hand holds up a detachable globe representing planet Earth. Black stains in and around the eye sockets and the mouth suggest the residues of rotting flesh. The skeleton wears an inner cassock, which is part of the plastic statue, and an outer hooded cloth of sequined cloth. The hood is light yellow, and, from the shoulders down, cloth cloak and the inner cassock feature colored bands of orange, darker yellow, red, green, purple, and deep-ocean blue. The base of the statue is also deep-ocean blue. Altogether, the spirit resembles the Grim Reaper, a Western spirit who is believed to arrive at the hour of one’s death and is imagined as cutting a person or the person’s life as a harvester would cut down a wheat stalk.

The statue is adorned with glued-on red, yellow, and peach-colored roses; three semi-precious stones; a plastic imitation stones; and three plastic replicas of large, possibly animal incisors. This ornaments sit in large blobs of glue, and the glue gun left stray filaments of glue all over the statue. Around her waist, the spirit wears a monk’s braided-rope belt. Also glued to the clothing are a Mexican coin and 13 plastic copies of British and US American coins. Six of the plastic coins appear on the front of the statue and six on the back. The real, Mexican coin is the central and outermost coin on a necklace pendant at the center of the spirit’s chest. The four plastic coins at the base of the pendant are British. Between the feet of the dressed skeleton sits the replica of an owl with a red beak. The owl perches on a branch, and the branch rests on a pile that resembles stones or coral. On the base of the statue, in front of the owl, is a loose and grainy white material that might be white sand mixed with pulverized crustacean shells. The a pile of the same substance appears at the back of the owl’s head, where the head meets the plastic folds in the spirit’s robe. On the base of the statue behind the owl, a smaller-grain, reddish powder might be ocean sand from a different locale.

A hollow in the base of the statue contains transparent amber-colored resin that remains a bit sticky. The objects held tight by this resin seem to be intended to the invest the statue with the spirit, with the spirit’s power, or with the means of allowing the supplicant to communicate with the spirit. The resin holds dozens of seeds that resemble; an effigy of a male Roman Catholic saint with a cane or a shepherd’s hook in his left hand; a seemingly female Roman Catholic saint dressed in green, who might be Our Lady of Guadalupe, Mexico’s patron saint; and a large, medallion-shaped object. These last three objects are embedded in a whitish putty-like substance. Also visible through the resin is a coin-shaped depression in the putty. Numerous seeds rest in that depression.