A curated monthly dose of lifestyle, culture, and rhythm from San Miguel de Allende.
Sagrado NO.8A launches in San Miguel de Allende with handcrafted ritual objects drawn from sacred iconography, devotional tradition and the divine feminine.
Editor’s note: Sagrado NO.8A was founded by Sophia Hanvold, who is also the Founder and Editor in Chief of SAVANT. We’re telling you up front.
Walk into any tiendita in San Miguel and you’ll find them stacked near the register. Veladoras in glass, a saint printed on the label, a few pesos each. They burn on kitchen windowsills and on the ledges of the Parroquia and outside doorways on the anniversary of somebody’s death. Nobody calls it design. It’s just what you light.
Sagrado NO.8A, officially launching this week in San Miguel de Allende, starts from that same impulse and then takes it somewhere else entirely.
The brand makes handcrafted ritual objects out of natural, locally sourced wax, poured and finished by hand here in the city. The iconography pulls from three places at once: sacred imagery, devotional tradition, and occult symbolism. The result reads as ceremonial without asking you to believe anything in particular.
The brand is direct about this, and it’s the whole thesis: Sagrado NO.8A is not a candle company. It makes objects for everyday devotion.
That’s a slippery phrase until you think about what it actually covers. Lighting something before you start writing. Lighting something when someone leaves. Lighting something at a dinner table because the people around it matter. Prayer counts, but so does the version of prayer that has no god attached to it. The ritual belongs to whoever is performing it.
Which is a more generous position than most of this category takes. The “wellness candle” has been thoroughly colonized: cheap wax, a mood word on the label, a paragraph about intention written by someone who potentially has never had one. Sagrado NO.8A goes the other direction, into imagery that’s older, stranger, and rooted in the place it’s made.
The collection is organized around women. Saints, rebels, witches, artists. The idea is a modern sanctuary for women who broke something on the way to becoming themselves.
Founder Sophia Hanvold traces it back to the most recognizable figure in Mexican iconography, and to an argument about what she originally was.
“Before the Virgin of Guadalupe was a religious symbol, she was a symbol of protection and of the divine feminine. She was also the image carried on the flags of the Mexican independence movement, which began here in San Miguel de Allende, and she has become some of the strongest iconography in Mexico. For me this is about returning to the divine feminine, and about giving something back to the place I now call home.”
Sophia Hanvold, founder of Sagrado NO.8A
The independence detail isn’t decoration. Hidalgo’s banner came out of this region, and the image on it has been doing political work ever since. A brand made in San Miguel that reaches for Guadalupe is standing on top of a very local piece of history.
A portion of proceeds from every sale goes to organizations working with women and children in Mexico.
The collection comes in four sizes: 10, 20, 38 and 60cm. The largest is roughly two feet tall, less a candle than a piece of furniture with a wick. It’s the statement object, the one that anchors a room. The 10cm is built for a suitcase, for the visitor who wants to take San Miguel home in a form that fits in hand luggage. The two middle sizes are the ones you’ll actually live with.
There are two wax options. Straight 100% beeswax, and a beeswax and coconut soy blend that cures to an off-white with a chalky, mineral surface. The blend reads like carved stone more than wax, which is either a happy accident or a very deliberate one.
Visit their website here for full product details and to order. www.sagrado8a.com
Two of the stockists aren’t just selling the pieces. They’re making their own.
Poser Creative collaborated on a run with rose quartz set into the heart of the candle, so the stone sits inside the wax and is revealed as it burns down. The reference is literally underfoot. San Miguel sits on a bed of quartz and silver, a geology we’ve written about before and the reason people keep insisting the ground here does something to them. The collaboration puts a piece of it back into the object. A candle that gets more interesting the more of it you use.
The pairing makes sense beyond the stone. Poser Creative is Larissa Noble’s sound healing studio, a practice built on crystal bowls. She was already working with quartz. This just changes the state it arrives in.
Rachel Horn is doing her own version, dipped in gold and silver leaf. Metallic surface over the wax, which pushes the pieces further toward reliquary and away from anything you’d casually light.
The team is small and the credits are worth reading.
Pablo Cervantes leads production and craftsmanship. If the name is familiar, it should be. Cervantes is the industrial designer behind 3DN, the San Miguel studio that produced the plinth that held the World Cup trophy at the final in July. He went from a pedestal watched by a billion people to wax poured by hand in a studio twenty minutes away, which is a fair summary of how making things actually works in this city.
Daniel M. Larsen handles brand creation and creative direction. Other work of his includes Bekeb and Mestiz, two of the strongest visual identities to come out of San Miguel in the last decade.
Sophia Hanvold founded the brand. She is also the founder and editor in chief of SAVANT, which is why you’re reading a disclosure at the top of this page.
Sagrado NO.8A is available in San Miguel at Rachel Horn Boutique, Suki Palomina, Mixta and Poser Creative, and online at sagrado8a.com. The rose quartz pieces are exclusive to Poser Creative and the gold and silver leaf versions to Rachel Horn.
Sagrado NO.8A is on Instagram at @sagrado8a. 3DN is at @3dn_sma.
A curated monthly dose of lifestyle, culture, and rhythm from San Miguel.
