Скачать или смотреть Mexico celebrates Day of the Dead and folk saint Santa Muerte, the death saint

(3 Nov 2013) A mariachi band played over a grave at a cemetery in Mexico City on Saturday, one of the many ways Mexicans were celebrating The Day of the Dead.
On the annual holiday, it's a tradition for Mexicans to visit deceased loved ones at their grave sites and pay tribute to them with music, bright decorations, flowers and candles.
These offerings might also include a favourite dish of the deceased person.
Vanessa Romero visited the gravesites of her brother and cousin and said she felt the presence of her relatives.
"There is something, something exists, I don't know what, because I have never seen it, I have no idea what it is, but I know he is here. He came to see us from far away," Romero said.
"He knows (her dead brother) that we are here with him and with her, because my cousin is here too," she added.
In the state of Oaxaca, followers of the Mexican folk saint Santa Muerte, Death Saint or Holy Death, held a parade in her honour in the town of Santa Maria Atzompa.
A few dozen Death Saint devotees walked a dirt road carrying dolls and figurines with her likeness.
The Death Saint is a skeletal figure of a cloaked woman with a scythe in her bony hand.
Followers pray to Death Saint for help with all types of problems from stopping lovers from cheating to landing better jobs.
In recent years, the Death Saint has been linked to drug trafficking.
She is worshipped both by drug dealers in Mexico and by the terrified people who live in drug-torn neighbourhoods.
In May, the Vatican's culture minister Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi called the Death Saint a blasphemous symbol that shouldn't be part of any religion.
Ravasi said worshipping such an icon is a degeneration of religion.
"Many people think that by worshipping the Death Saint, one believes in the devil, that one is against God. Actually, according to what I've read, she is another
faithful servant of God," said Francisco Pichardo, a follower of the Death Saint.
Following the parade, followers of the Death Saint gathered for a ceremony in her honour.
They put together shrines with flowers and candles and several figurines in varying sizes.
The origins of Santa Muerte are unclear.
Some followers say she is an incarnation of an Aztec goddess of death who ruled the underworld.
Some scholars say she originated in medieval Spain through the image of La Parca, a female Grim Reaper, who was used by friars for the later evangelisation of indigenous populations in the Americas.

Find out more about AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/HowWeWork
Twitter:   / ap_archive  
Facebook:   / aparchives   ​​
Instagram:   / apnews  


You can license this story through AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/metadata/you...