Howard Meets Santa Muerte (Saint Death) - Confessions of an Indolent Mystic #4

Death is an un-graspable reality, yet man must endevour to grasp it regardless. Most cultures live in denial of it: we tame it, relegate it to a distant concept, and even commercialize it since we refuse to deal with it ourselves when it approaches and happens to others. Little do the overwhelming majority of us realise the gift we throw away by not Being Unto Death.

Not content to settle for partial spiritual truths, half-measures, or endless indulgence in the Ego entertainments of spiritual practices and psychedelic button-pushing - all of which I love, by the way - I have pushed my way through the psychic debris which the world has convinced me is "myself" and have reached what is likely the last checkpoint in the great race towards "Enlightenment:" I have come to terms with my own Death. Not in some abstract way which most of us are already familiar ("We're all dying, maaaaaaan"), but truly on an emotional, logical, and physical level, confronting the fact that I am a finite being. Really sitting with the experience and allowing the shockwaves of realisation to repeatedly hit me like a storm-tossed tide transforming rock into sand. It isn't easy to remain this open to such an assault, I tell you, but don't mistake my account of this experience as a claim to supremacy or singular importance - I was just the poor fool who was in the right place at the right time.

The Individual has to accept his fate;
And to love his fate: Amor Fati;
Because no one can escape death,
And through this realization the Individual is free to act,
and condemned to responsibility for himself,
Towards his Death. Forwards and Towards, dropping a meaningful Authentic and existence;
And away from the tempting, weak, comfortable Inuathenticity that surrounds him;
An affirmation of life and embracing a Death - a momentum devoid of pity;
But filled with predatory choices - freedom and solitude is the Authentic life of Dasein;
Temporarily present in the temporal existence of the one, the one must fall back into the day;
Because Dasein must, because he must.
-- Unknown F1ghtclub2k3 from YouTube

NOTE: Dasein = Martin Heidegger's terminology for the Authentic individual - one who is living in awareness of finitude.

For my whole life I have lived in confusion. As a child I did okay, climbing through the forests and the fields, being with nature, getting lost, seeing a dead deer once with maggots and flies teaming from its gut... pretty cool stuff. Then they sent me to school, which I didn't like very much. I was a barbarian - I didn't belong in such a formal environment. Not to say I was allergic to learning - I did a lot of that on my own and from the people I loved. They didn't allow me to learn on my own and I didn't love them, so I learned only the minimum to get by. I saw schooling as something to be survived and the evenings, weekends, and holidays as my own to be free. Little did I know, this was prepping me for the rest of my life: work on the weekdays, sometimes on Sundays, and wait for the weekends so I can join my fellow Irish in our collective drinking problem or some other indulgence on the fringes. It's my "choice", right? Drink myself silly at the pub, take ecstasy at the club, listen to rock/metal to bleed out my ears, sit at home and wank... as long as I show up for work on Monday. Well, I choose to be a web designer, privately study... and wank. Before that, my teen years could be summed up as a relentless search to find my place, keep it, and get laid. I accomplished two out of the three, but to no definite fulfillment. My early adult life was no different, either. I finally got laid, experimented with a variety of spiritual paths, experimented with a variety of drugs - all under the pretext that there was something wrong with me... and I still got no resolution. Still, like the vast majority of us, I was a slave to a system of someone else's design. Still buying their products, still believing their versions of reality, still paying taxes, and still hurtling towards the grave at the expense of my youth - the youth that gave me good looks, seemingly endless curiosity and energy - and I enjoyed virtually none of it.

Today I hoover over the 30-year mark. True to my generation, I suffered prolonged adolescence right up until I actually hit 30 and realised I couldn't use the excuse of being young anymore... not that I used that excuse intentionally... so I doubled down my efforts on the "figuring this life thing out" shit. My starting point was "Okay, I'm a man. How does a man be?" and I looked to my ancestors. I looked to the Fenian Cycle, which contained moral instructions for a young man who intends to be a warrior.

If you have a mind to be a good champion, be quiet in a great man's house; be surely in the narrow pass.

Do not beat your hound without a cause; do not bring a charge against your wife without having knowledge of her guilt; do not hurt a fool in fighting, for he is without his wits.

Do not find fault with high-up persons; do not stand up to take part in a quarrel; have no dealings with a bad man or a foolish man. Let two-thirds of your gentleness be showed to women and to little children that are creeping on the floor, and to men of learning that make the poems, and do not be rough with the common people.

Do not give your reverence to all; do not be ready to have one bed with your companions.

Do not threaten or speak big words, for it is a shameful thing to speak stiffly unless you can carry it out afterwards. Do not forsake your lord so long as you live; do not give up any man that puts himself under your protection for all the treasures of the world.

Do not speak against others to their lord, that is not work for a good man.

Do not be a bearer of lying stories, or a tale-bearer that is always chattering.

Do not be talking too much; do not find fault hastily; however brave you may be, do not raise factions against you.

Do not be going to drinking-houses, or finding fault with old men; do not meddle with low people; this is right conduct I am telling you.

Do not refuse to share your meat; do not have a niggard for your friend; do not force yourself on a great man or give him occasion to speak against you. Hold fast to your arms till the hard fight is well ended.

Do not give up your opportunity, but with that follow after gentleness.
-- The Tales of Ossian

It was clear that even though I knew these instructions instinctively, I didn't understand all of them, and I often broke some of them. Over that first year, a slow burning fire consumed my mind more and more - the fire of guilt over every little transgression I had made since childhood. I knew that these things were in the past and couldn't be undone, and so I decided putting them out of my mind was the best tactic... that didn't work. They kept nagging and nagging, harder and harder, to the point I could no long function. Then came the story of the baby swan. A story I will include a link to below, if you're interested.

... but it suffices to say, my realisation that I was alone in my commitment to such a doctrine of high standard and was surrounded since birth by a society that had no interest in anything like it except their individual, immediate, and subjective code of honour that was subject to change at any moment. I realised what a pediment I was in and that my mind had been plagued by these misgivings for a very certain reason: without fully realising it, I had elected to become a better person - my own person - and for that I had to drive a figurative stake into the ground. I decided to make a statement to the Old Gods of Ireland that from this point forward I leave my old self behind and become a new man that would forever uphold the standards of the Fianna and the Old Gods, and be Born Again as a man.

Fast forward four of five months to only a week ago from today. I am living the life of a good man, I am doing my best, but still lives within me the unforgettable sorrow. Washing up against me are those wind-tossed waves of time, beating down my rock. What to do? I look around and see nothing but a constantly moving world - an occasional ambulance and funeral procession as I go about my day, but I pay nothing but a passing heed. I do nothing because this is just something happening to someone else, something I know will happen to me, only way way deep and far behind the battlements of my Ego. The walls that keep me safe. Yet, in my alone times, it hits me. I cannot stop it. The swoosh, swoosh of time, letting me know in brief glimpses that all I know will pass and I shall too.

Let me now point out that, like us all, I had moments of realisation of mortality and the loss of my loved-ones, but I held those fast away from me. It was in the night that I couldn't sleep - when all was dead in the house and out on the street, that I couldn't let go, lest I miss something vital. Best to sleep in the day, when life was happening - maybe I would continue to happen, also, or maybe because I was so exhausted from fear of the night. I was terrified, and the usual escapes weren't working. I couldn't drink myself to sleep, I only thought harder about my predicament; I couldn't "YouTube myself to sleep" because nothing satisfied my thirst for meaning anymore. I didn't realise what I was running away from, I figured it was simply a phase of prolonged procrastination. A fellow traveler offered to Skype call to discuss what we both, individually, should be focused on. After two hours of talking about the mad world we live in and how to survive in it, out of nowhere I confessed: "I'm absolutely frightened by death, my brother. The idea that all whom I love will die and then I will, too, freezes me in terror every day." My brother in struggle had no words of comfort for me. I responded that I was not in need of comfort, simply being heard - whether being heard by myself or heard by another, I'm not sure. It was in the following days I met la Santa Muerte.

After days of fully allowing that crashing sensation of wind-swept waves against my hardened rock, in my less lucid times I set about looking for extra-normal help setting my affairs in order, lest I die at any minute. That same spirit-brother had reminded me of the peculiar ways of the South Americans - peculiar, as in their resistance to religious colonization. For hundreds of years, Blacks and Latinos had developed their own secret religions within Catholicism and Protestantism (a process known as syncretism) - Hoodoo, Voodoo, Santeria, and others. I knew my own Irish syncretism wasn't strong enough to enact powerful magic, so I took to Google: "Santeria revenge" and I found a prayer of revenge, posted to a strange Spanish name I'd never heard before - but, maybe, you have. La Santa Muerte - "Saint of Death".

At first this was an interesting cultural phenomenon, a fitting deity for the "killing fields" of Mexico - a female skeleton. All of the surface media spoke of (one) Human sacrifice cult, criminals who prayed to her for protection during their misdeeds, and some narcos pistols seized with Her likeness etched into them. Surely just another criminal death cult, right? Not really. Turns out la Santa Muerte is worshiped by eight to ten millions people in North and South America alone. Ordinary people, looking for protection against violent crime, illness, and for prosperity and love. Something about this skeletal babe made sense deep down inside. Something primordial. It also helped pique my interest that in 2009 the Mexican military was ordered to demolish 40 shrines to la Muerte all along the Mexican-American border and that the Catholic Church renounced the observance of this "saint" to be Satanic. This only tickled my curiosity more. Why is observance of this saint the fastest growing religious movement in the world today? It couldn't simply be the proximity Mexicans, in Mexico, feel to death and need protection from, since this phenomenon is growing just as fast in the United States of America - even amoung Whites and Blacks - as it is in its home country. Could it be because this figure represents something primordial in man himself?

For me, this is the case. And at least according to researchers Andrew Chesnut (author of Devoted to Death: Santa Muerte, the Skeleton Saint) and David Metcalfe (both authors at skeletonsaint.com), most believers take Her to be the embodiment of Death itself, and not merely a saint of it. A power that has sovereignty over who dies when and of what, and ability to change those circumstances upon prayer. A power often looked to by the Mexican people to protect them against gang and random violence. A devotee told a story of being on a bus, two stops away from the police station when two men boarded and asked kindly for $5 lest they resort to violence. Seeing the man's la Santa Muerte pendent around his neck, one of his assailants called off the robbery out of respect for a fellow worshiper. Not only do devotees fear Santa Muerte, but they fear Her retribution if they dare to fuck with Her devotees.

This all rang very true to me. Death is the great equalizer. If it was an agent unto its own, it would be charged with the sole duty of deciding who survived however long, in what condition they survived, and who they coupled with - all within the authority of Death itself. I reflected on a theory I had over the past months, that my Irish ancestors really actually worshiped The Morrigan - the tripartite Goddess in Irish mythology - of which Danu of Tuatha de Dannan (the tribes of Danu) is a member. This tripartite Goddess was known to mediate Death, War, Sovereignty, and Cattle. My theory being, that all of our highest ancestors worshiped Death itself. I became excited by the idea that this was making its way back through Mexican syncretism and that some mysterious force had led me to it at the exact time I needed the inspiration. I decided to become a devotee in order to bootstrap the power of the forgotten Irish Morrigan with the resurgent Mexican Muerte. I decided I would perform a white candle prayer to Her, offer Her a cigarette, and offer her a bottle of unfiltered beer (all of which She enjoys, according to folk). First, I needed to cycle to the store to get the accessories. Upon my way, weaving in and out of traffic and onto the pavement I was slowed behind a party of three heading to the restaurant nearby. One of those women was wearing a black hoody with a skull on the back... not a fashionable or common piece of clothing in this place at all... at that point I laughed out loud - literally - all the way to the store and continued my day with complete confidence that Death Herself was watching me and aware of Her existence.