The Mam can hardly be blamed for fulfilling a necessary role that ultimately benefits everyone. As Fernando Cervantes writes, "European notions of good and evil, personified in the concepts of god and devil, implied a degree of benevolence and malevolence that was totally alien to Mesoamerican deities" (Cervantes 1994:42). Both death and life must dance together on the world's stage or neither could exist for very long. The Mam image represents the transformative power of death to engender new life.