Vindicator

In what way is Santa Muerte culturally related to the Virgin Mary?

UglyTruth

People will believe any kind of idea in order to escape the conclusion that they're fundamentally wrong about something.

UglyTruth

Santa Muerte is just a Catholic spin off deity.

No, the Catholic Church openly condemns Santa Muerte. The RCC is more closely linked to Saturn/Cronos (eg symbolic cannibalism and Saturnalia as Christmas festivities) than to overt death worship.

notdivided

this adds a whole new level to a play I saw w/ Christopher Walken as the lead, A Behanding in Spokane.

Vindicator

Santa Muerte is just a Catholic spin off deity.

No. Mexicans worshipped the death goddess long before Catholics made to the scene.

Vindicator

I doubt it. Mexicans have worshipped the death goddess, Coatlicue, and sacrificed people by the thousands to her since before any nun ever set foot in the Western Hemisphere. Creepily, there is a striking resemblence between her legend

According to Aztec legend, she was once magically impregnated by a ball of feathers that fell on her while she was sweeping a temple, and subsequently gave birth to the god Huitzilopochtli. Her daughter Coyolxauhqui then rallied Coatlicue's four hundred other children together and goaded them into attacking and decapitating their mother. The instant she was killed, the god Huitzilopochtli suddenly emerged from her womb fully grown and armed for battle.[2] He killed many of his brothers and sisters, including Coyolxauhqui, whose head he cut off and threw into the sky to become the moon. In one variation on this legend, Huitzilopochtli himself is the child conceived in the ball-of-feathers incident and is born just in time to save his mother from harm.

And the Book of Revelation:

The Woman and the Dragon

12 A great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head. 2 She was pregnant and cried out in pain as she was about to give birth. 3 Then another sign appeared in heaven: an enormous red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns on its heads. 4 Its tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky and flung them to the earth. The dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that it might devour her child the moment he was born. 5 She gave birth to a son, a male child, who “will rule all the nations with an iron scepter.”[a] And her child was snatched up to God and to his throne. 6 The woman fled into the wilderness to a place prepared for her by God, where she might be taken care of for 1,260 days.

This, along with the miraculous image of Mary that appeared on the cloak of an Aztec peasant , caused the fast majority of Mexicans to convert to Christianity in just a few short years.

bopper

No they converted to Roman Papacy, not Christianity. And I think it had a lot to do w/ fear and coercion more than anything. The superstition you mention worked well too cause it was the Roman Religion. Sorry I had to add my two cents.