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I first met La Santisima Muerte -- "The Most Holy Death" -- in Austin Texas, down at Cantu's Herbaria. I saw a row of statues of what seemed to be a typical European "Grim Reaper" rather unexpectedly holding a balanced pair of scales and standing with one foot upon a stylized Aztec skull. Underneath the figure, when i picked up a statue, i could see an assortment of embedded lucky charms: lucky Abrus precatorius red "beans", grains of wheat, and a lucky trunk-up elephant. Another statue had a cross of Carava charm, some rice, and a pinch of magnetic sand inside.

I was intrigued by the lucky charms encased within what seemed to be a dire and forboding figure, and so i asked who "he" was, but i was quickly corrected: La Santisima Muerte is a SHE. I was then given a long story of how she keeps men faithful to their wives and will judge and kill men who violate the sanctity of marriage if called upon to do so, because her husband was unfaithful to her, causing her to commit suicide, and to hate and punish all unfaithful men.

The shop owner, Mrs. Cantu, even took me in a corner, away from my husband and taught me how you perform a seven-knot spell for La Santisima Muerte -- it's virtually identical to the hoodoo nine knot spell for a Nation Sack, but you keep the knotted string that has been smeared with semen tied around her statue, for safe-keeping. The statue is actually designed with a groove around the base to accept the wound-up string. After that, she gave me a Santisima Muerte holy medal as a gift and told me with smiling eyes to not let my husband see it.

Later, down in San Jose, California, at Dos Aguas Botanica, where i bought my first statuette of Santisima Muerte, i was told that "women perform a novena to her to keep men faithful."

And in Sebastopol, California, at the Flea Market, where i first encountered her image on a novena booklet, i asked the old woman selling it, in my broken ugly Spanish: "La Santisima Muerte -- la razon por la que? [gesture of praying hands] Por que ... oracion?" -- and she replied, "Matrimonio" -- marriage.

So who was this Holy Death? Where did she come from? Why does she judge men and protect women's marriages?

One occult shop owner without much knowledge of Mexican folk culture loftily explained to me that she is "The Angel of Death," a European or Judeo-Christian concept that accounted for her skeletal visage, but certainly did not explain why Mexican gardeners were gravely showing me the Santisima Muerte holy cards in their wallets and telling me that "She is The Virgin Mary as a skeleton" -- which itself begged the question -- "Why on earth would folks want to depict the Virgin Mary as a skeleton in the first place?"

Eventually i ran into the true story, as least as scholars of Mexican culture present it these days: La Santisima Muerte is a "banned saint," the Roman Catholic "cover" for an ancient Aztec goddess named Mictecacihuatl, a death goddess and co-ruler, with her husband, of the underworld.

Mictecacihuatl, the wife of the Aztec death god Mictlantecuhtli, is the sister to the Aztec heavenly goddess Tonantzin, who has been syncretized with the Virgin Mary as Our Lady of Guadalupe. That's why Mictecacihuatl became "Most Holy Death, The Virgin Mary as a Skeleton."

As to the idea that this goddess was a living woman who committed suicide when her husband proved unfaithful, i am not so sure. I consider the stories of her death and subsequent haunting of the living to be similar to, or influenced by, the folk tales of La Llorona, the weeping woman who mourns for her dead children, and who is a cautionary popular figure along the Texas, Arizona, and California border. In other words, the goddess is thus demoted to the status of a ghost.

Here is a nine-day cycle of prayers to Santisima Muerte, taken from a Mexican Novena booklet. It begins with a separate prayer to the string that has been covered with the semen of the beloved and knotted with seven knots. This "Ejaculatory" prayer is recited as the string is wound around into the groove in the base of the statue. Following this, the oration for the "First Day" is to be recited. This "First Day" of the spell should be a Sunday, for reasons that will become apparent later within the text.