In the contrast between the cults of the Mexican Santa Muerte and San La Muerte in the Guaraní-Creole region of Argentina and Paraguay, a particularly significant element emerges concerning the role of nocturnal animals and their transformation into religious symbols. In both cases, this is not merely an iconographic detail, but rather a process of meaning-making involving perceptions of darkness, death, and the invisible world.
The presence of the owl in devotion to Santa Muerte, and that of the caburé owl in the universe of San La Muerte, does not follow a codified theological logic, but rather a fluid symbolic system rooted in folklore and local magical-religious practices. In the Mexican case of Santa Muerte, the owl has progressively stabilized as a recognizable iconographic attribute, to the point of becoming almost an “official” element within the saint’s iconography. This process is linked to the strong urban expansion of the cult and its growing public visibility, in which statues, home altars, and commercial representations have contributed to standardizing a series of symbols.
The owl integrates perfectly into this system because it belongs to an already layered imaginary within Mesoamerican and colonial culture, where nocturnal animals are frequently associated with death, witchcraft, and communication with the spirit world. The owl thus becomes an ambivalent creature, capable of embodying both hidden wisdom and the role of messenger between worlds. In Santa Muerte devotion, this ambivalence translates into a stable and visually coherent presence that reinforces the idea of a liminal divinity capable of seeing and acting in the dark.
In the context of Argentina and Paraguay, by contrast, the caburé owl does not acquire an equally codified iconographic form within the cult of San La Muerte. Its presence is more widespread at the folkloric level than at the representational one, more closely tied to oral storytelling and magical practices than to the production of fixed images. The caburé belongs to a Guaraní-Creole symbolic universe in which animals are not merely natural beings, but agents of power, often inserted into the circuits of shamanism, witchcraft, and practices of attracting partners or protection.
Within this context, the caburé is perceived as a being especially charged with power, capable of exerting influence over other birds and acting as a mediator of invisible energies. This ability makes it compatible with the symbolic world of San La Muerte, though not to the extent of becoming a fixed or universally recognized attribute. The difference between the two cases concerns not only the bird itself, but the overall structure of the cults.
Santa Muerte has, over time, developed a public, expansive, and relatively standardized iconography in which symbolic elements tend to stabilize and become immediately recognizable. The cult of San La Muerte, by contrast, preserves a more discreet dimension, often individual or secretive, linked to practices of personal devotion, portable objects, and forms of oral transmission. In this context, the absence of a stable iconographic bestiary does not constitute a deficiency, but rather a structural characteristic of the cult itself, which privileges the power of the sacred object over its public representation.
It is precisely within this difference that the role of the caburé acquires particular significance. More than as an iconographic figure, it operates as a shared mental image, as a condensation of symbolic qualities that include nocturnal life, the ability to move through darkness, a connection with hidden spaces, and the perception of nonhuman knowledge. Even when it is not represented alongside San La Muerte, the caburé remains available as a symbolic resource, activated within magical or narrative contexts.
Its possible association with the underworld or with dark cavities should not be understood in a strictly zoological sense, but rather as part of an analogical logic typical of popular systems of thought, in which whatever is hidden, silent, or nocturnal tends to be perceived as close to the world of the dead or invisible forces.
From this perspective, the comparison between the owl and the caburé concerns not merely two birds, but two different ways of constructing the relationship between the visible and the invisible, between image and practice, between public cult and reserved devotion. On the one hand, Santa Muerte organizes a symbolic universe in which elements progressively stabilize into a shared iconographic grammar; on the other, San La Muerte maintains a more fragmented structure in which symbols circulate without needing to stabilize into definitive forms.
The nocturnal animal, in both cases, functions as a privileged mediator of this tension, but with different results: iconic stabilization in the Mexican context and folkloric fluidity in the Guaraní-Creole sphere. What ultimately emerges is not a direct correspondence between symbols, but a structural convergence.
The owl and the caburé belong to the same semantic field of night, threshold, and invisibility, but they are integrated in different ways according to the historical, social, and ritual dynamics of each cult. In both cases, however, they confirm a fundamental characteristic of religious systems: the capacity to transform elements of the natural world into structures of meaning capable of mediating the relationship between life, death, and power.
Guest contributor, Luciano Martucci, is an Italian anthropologist and ethnographer who studies shamanism, folk healing, traditional medicine, and religion in Latin America. He is the author of El Gauchito Gil, de bandido a Santo and “Yo soy del San”: El culto a San La Muerte, and “Devoti Violenti.” Follow him on Facebook and Instagram.
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