In his blog at the Guardian, Andrew Brown comments on a New Yorker article about the drug war in Mexico that touches on a cult that prays to Death:
They are making their way to a shrine set up seven years ago by a woman known as Queta who was given a life-sized skeleton by one of her sons seven years ago, and who has instituted a practice of prayers to it on the first Friday of every month. She says that it is unwise to ask too much of death: “health for my family and work” are the recommended boons. Of course, the work on offer in the slums is unlikely to be blessed by the Catholic Church.
…It was not the contrast with Catholicism, or with Pentecostal Christianity that struck me about the story, though. In fact the cult of Death has borrowed elements from both. The believers tell rosaries and recite the Lord’s prayer. The cult of figures or relics is common to both: I have seen one Latin American pentecostal megastar selling “annointed [sic] handkerchiefs” to his followers. So this is recognisably a twisted relation of those two religions.
But in the New Yorker’s treatment, the religion is tacked on at the end of the story, which opens with a conceptual art exhibit, involving the blood-soaked blankets in which the bodies of murder victims are found. And the contrast that really struck me was how much less expressive respectable art was being than popular religion. The cult of death needs no critics, no catalogues and no late night talk programmes to explain it.
Read Andrew Brown’s full blog post here, and the full New Yorker article in question here.
[Thanks to Mario Patino for the link]