#in which we discuss la santa muerte and narco saints and mention the baron briefly before eventually cycling back to coyote

[bonesandpoemsandflowers]

so what's really fun about some of the Latino American folklore, especially around the US/Mexico border, is that the occult looks edgy to outsiders sometimes and very much isn't, but then also: it is.

by which I mean, like I often do, that the Holy Death prayed to is not primarily a sinister figure. prayers to La Santa Muerte are often for love and romance and healing and protection. or prosperity, even! perpetual concerns of your everyday type person. but then, also--and you're a liar if you don't admit this is true: La Santa Muerte is, at the same time, also a saint for criminals. no organization is entirely full of true believers and this is true there as it is elsewhere, but it's also totally true that there is a lot of very sincere narco occult iconography and it's also true that there are certain rituals undertaken with great faith. and not all of those rituals are nice. but then, also, the vast majority of prayers and altars are so on are nice. and this kind of duality happens all over the world, but it happens especially feverishly in parts of Latin America.

There's some mostly very recent attempts to distinguish some of La Flaca's specialties. La Santa Muerte clothed in red for love and passion. La Santa Muerte clothed in white for protection and purification. In gold for prosperity. In green for luck. In black for--heyooo--both sending curses and breaking them. In black for protection from violence or for violence, victorious.

In most of your more fusion type religious systems with more readily apparent African syncretism, where you have the Barons and the Ghede instead of La Santisima in all her colors, sometimes the divide is easier and more readily apparent. That is: Papa Ghede is a chill guy, good with healing kids, and Baron Samedi very cool and sexy and called on for healing as much as he is for fertility as much as he is protection from curses as much as he is for cursing the unrighteous unless he likes them better than he likes you, but then there's, like, Baron Kriminel, who is not called upon for, say, downloading ebooks or dealing in metaphors.

But to wrangle this back around, I was actually thinking about the kind of people who, in this day and age, do a lot with coyote. or Coyote, if you will, though not necessarily Old Man Coyote, who has his own culture specific thing going on.

And Coyote is criminal but kind of lower stakes criminal, because, again, immigrants crossing the border desperately searching for a way to provide for their families are big on Coyote. That is: there's crimes and then there's crimes.

Which is to say: Coyote isn't one of the narco folk saints, exactly. There are patron folk saints of, say, murder, and he's kind of just not associated with that. And he's not usually the emblem of a criminal organization, not a guy getting a lot of group prayer or ritual even if he happens to be a namesake or a mascot. To me, Coyote is a patron saint of small time hustlers. Subsistence hustling, if you will.

(And this is a fun time to look at real life animal behaviors: coyotes aren't really pack hunters the way wolves are. They can hunt in packs, and then do. But whereas most wolf tactics require at least two wolves, and often more, a lot of coyote tactics are solo endeavors. Are most magicians coming at this with an ethologist perspective? Not officially. But centuries of human observation will skew stories a certain way.)

And is a coyote a good omen, or a bad omen? Is a coyote allied person a good person or a bad one?

The only real answer here is unsatisfying to most people: it depends.

Like the black cat in hoodoo, Coyote is a multifaceted figure and he's one thing to most people and another, perhaps, specifically, to the conjurer. Mages like black cats and coyotes and other liminal shading to controversial figures and symbols. Magic thrives on ambiguity.

So it is my personal observation that a lot of people who are into coyote in a certain way are just prone to being a pain in the fucking ass. Myself included. Nothing illegal inherently, but a certain inclination to be really, really unnecessarily fucking annoying. "Well, ACTUALLY--" type shit. General antiauthoritarian type shit. Maybe a little bit of built in lying. An often indulged urge to present themselves as other than they are.

Which brings us to what I'm actually thinking about here, which is that I was creeping the socials of one of the few occult practitioners I respect--though of course I don't agree with him on everything--and I found an old series of screenshots I remembered fondly. Local PD for this guy managed a small drug bust. Among the items seized and displayed on official PD twitter was an icon of La Santa Muerte. Just your typical nice little saint statue. Sure.

And our guy here, who actually does run an official small time church focused on La Santa Muerte, tax exempt and everything, but who is also a coyote guy, this guy starts arguing with the cops on twitter about the way they're displaying the statue. Calling them disrespectful, would you do this with a statue of any other saint or are you just being racist pigs, etc etc. In nicer language. I think he threatened to call a lawyer. He might actually called a lawyer, idk.

And local PD backs down! And apologizes! and deletes the post.

(Coyote is also associated with eloquence and persuasion)

Well and good and righteous and hurrah, right?

But the fun part, of course, is that if you know this guy, you know that he might be 10000% sincere but also maybe not because he hates cops not for all the normal reason but also because he was a big time weed dealer back in the day, and now that he's a respectable family man, being annoying to cops is, like, one of his most prized hobbies.

If you know this guy, you know he had FUN. this was ENRICHMENT wandering right into his enclosure.

one time a baby bunny tried to jump directly into Ernie Dog's mouth.

this was a little like that.

But what always struck me about being very coyote about this interaction is that is certainly a way to get ATTENTION from cops...

that I know of this had no particular consequences for this conjure man. this time. but that's very coyote, too--it works until it doesn't.

and all of that is to say that every so often it occurs to me that I don't have to open my mouth about something, you know? which is a valuable lesson. but also. sometimes you WANT to open your mouth. because a baby bunny is trying to jump into it.

apart from all this and for very different reasons, I've been thinking about how coyote folklore lends itself so well to the idea of the double agent. coyote becomes an organization type guy when he's in the business of infiltrating. much to think about, artistically. much to think about. maybe he's not a working dog after all, exactly. maybe he is a coyote...