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Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.

My name is Robert Lamb.

And I am Joe McCormick, and we're back with the fourth and final, I think. Is it the final for now? I mean, death is always final business. Yeah. But I don't know. We're going to see. We have a fair amount of notes here, and it kind of comes down to if we will get done with them.

In a way, it's kind of like the log. Once the log is burned to completion, then it's over.

But maybe we won't burn all of the log.

I see how it goes. Meli Yeager there, yeah. But I was going to say, this is the fourth and potentially final part in our series on personifications

of death when death becomes not a process or an abstract concept but a person or an embodied

character probably won't do a full recap of what we covered in the last episodes because it's

been a lot of ground at this point if you are new to series, you probably want to go back and listen to the earlier episodes first.

Yeah, because we break down some basic categorizations and concepts that we then return back to again and again as we break down other examples and so forth.

So I flagged this when we left off at the end of the last episode, but today I wanted to come

back and talk about a specific example of a death personification that I found really

interesting.

So I was reading a paper about this character, specifically, this is a feminine death personification that is actually, according to some scholars, the matron deity of one of the fastest growing new religious movements in the Americas.

And this figure is known as Santamerte, which means Saint-Muerte, which means Saint-Def, or Holy Death, in Spanish.

Rob, I've got some imagery for you to look at in the outline here.

Would you say in common appearance, a fairly typical in some ways grim repress, a female grim reaper, kind of a skeletal figure, clothed and enrobed in a way

with a garment covering the head, kind of a veil or a hood. In one representation we have here,

she's drawn with a halo around her head, or at least kind of an aura around the crown coming

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