From Coatlicue to Guadalupe: The Image of the Great Mother in Mexico

Mothers and Spirits: Religious Identity, Alcohol, and Death

“…Offerings of tequila to Santa Muerte in Mexico serve to reinforce local and national identity, while challenging traditional discourses of state and church, providing supplicants with an alternate religiosity that utilizes established prayers and rituals and playing on the tensions between the two 26 Pevey, Williams and Ellison confirm similar findings with their sociological study of women's bible classes. See [41].…”

“…The banning of alcohol in public worship spaces relegates alcohol consumption to the domestic sphere, making private and/or hiding those behaviors regarding alcohol consumption, forcing women to turn to public methods (shaming) to regain the control they are expected to maintain over their domestic spaces. 26 These suspicions of alcohol in the church act at odds with the role of alcohol in the Christian text of the first miracle, and subvert the notion of alcohol as a symbol of blood sacrifice, alcohol as material evidence of sacred miracles, or even alcohol as mediating agent through which Christ's ministry is first realized. The function of alcohol in Southern Baptist terms is a symbol of the world and its vices, not as symbol of God's potential to save through sacrifice and mystery.…”

“…In another prayer, the "Prayer to Saint Death," (see below) there is a similar inversion of this power-when the petitioner at 17 Patrizia Granziera's article does a nice job of explaining the relationship between the maternal symbolism of Coatlicue to the more contemporary images of the Virgin. See [26]. For more on the later development of this symbolism to current Santa Muerte iconography, see [25].…”

Death with a Bonus Pack

“…In pre-Hispanic times it was used in reference to a goddess, generally the Coatlicue. See Granziera (2004); Gruzinski (1995); León-Portilla (2002).…”