Making a life out of the Worship of Death: a psychodynamic and phenomenological ethnography of Santa Muerte in the State of Mexico

Abstract

This thesis is an ethnographic study of the Mexican cult of Santa Muerte employing Jungian and psychoanalytic frameworks of anthropological understanding. I use the theory of ‘cultural complexes’ (Kimbles and Singer) in order to facilitate an understanding of Santa Muerte with a focus on the psycho-historical dimension of the subjective experiences of her devotees. Although I am not trained as a psychotherapist and my research took place way outside of the regular context of psychoanalytic cum therapeutic engagement, my ethnographic involvement with specific individuals and detailed documentation of their life-histories, interpreted through Jungian thought and psychoanalysis, opens up a view on the inter-subjective and unconscious (at once personal and cultural-transpersonal) dimensions of the contemporary mega-urban life-worlds of the State of Mexico. I argue that Santa Muerte addresses the psychic tension between Christian polarisation – between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ – and Mesoamerican ouroboric dualism. Our Lady of Guadalupe has lost her stronghold as the prominent mother image in the life-worlds of these devotees who often find themselves in volatile existential situations. As such, the socio-spiritual economy of the relationship between devotee and Santa Muerte reflects the nuclear archetype, thereby suggesting a need for maternal security. Furthermore, I interpret Santa Muerte as a personification of the collective Mexican Shadow which mediates the Great Mother archetype, thereby pointing to a transitional period in the Mexican collective unconsciousness. She is a cultural expression of the Black Madonna compensating for the Virgin’s ‘sublime and pure’ Christian qualities – an elevated morality apparently too at odds with the oppressive inter-subjectivities of Mexican sociality. As such, Santa Muerte can be used as a conceptual tool through which to evaluate wider socio-political constructs, and to foreground the increasing salience of the Mexican death drive. Santa Muerte, Mexico, death drive, psychoanalytic anthropology, cultural complex, Black Madonna