As most of the world must know, what with Coco drawing crowds at multiplexes from Vincennes to Varanasi to
Vladevastok, Muertos, the Day of the
Dead, is one of Mexico’s two biggest festivals. The other in the tie for number
one is Christmas. The festival of the Three Kings, Candelaria, The Virgin of
Guadalupe, Easter Week, the entire liturgical calendar of saints, and all the
rest, as important as they are, have to compete for ranking beginning at number
3. The importance of Muertos has been
canonized —and I’m sure that is the wrong word— by UNESCO which has placed it
on its list of Intangible Human Cultural Heritage Events.
By the way, the holiday’s very
name, “Day of the Dead,” is a misnomer, for in the same way that Mardi Gras
transcends Fat Tuesday, the “Day” of the Dead lasts at minimum a week. The
multiple events of Muertos week –parades, religious plays, kids dressing up
like skeletons, costume parties, concerts, visits to cemeteries, special foods,
and all the rest, are worthy of a whole library of books. They exist. And if
the library is too far away, Muertos articles and images are likewise all over
the internet. Also by the way, Coco’s
depiction of the festival is pretty accurate to the way itis celebrated in
Michoacán, despite the overblown Disneyfication of its last half hour. The
village scenes are faithful to actual villages, and I even recognized two of
them, the area around the Plaza Chica in Pátzcuaro and the village of Paracho
that really does manufacture the best Mexican guitars.
The backstory
for the Day of the Dead is that the souls of the dead can be enticed to return
to their home turf to communicate with the living souls they have left behind.
The way-backstory is that this derives from an Aztec festival honoring
Mictecacihuatl, the goddess of death, who is the great-great grandmother of the
figure that modern Mexico knows as the Catrina.
The
way-way-backstory is that the festival derives from a concept prevalent long
before the Aztecs among many Mesoamerican peoples holding that death is merely
a new phase of life. And, human imagination being as anthropocentric as it is,
the pre-Columbian afterlifes have a lot of features drawn from peoples’ current
lives, only better, or worse, depending on the decedent’s prior accumulation of
merit.
Marxists might say that religion,
which they termed the opiate of the masses, employs afterlife as both a carrot
and a stick to influence the behavior of the living for the benefit of elites.
The Catholic Church, and most other Christian sects, while agreeing with influence would carp at elites. And most of the other religions
with which I am familiar, seem to concur, with the main differences being the
particulars of the post-life abode(s), and the nature of the chits that
validate entrance to same.
Among the pre-Columbian religions
it was understood, for example, that the house of death has many mansions, and that
a person’s life and manner of death determine in which mansion the spirit will
reside. Die by drowning and your spirit will reside in Tlalocan, house of the
Water God Tlaloc, who by killing you has become responsible for you. Die in
combat, or in sacrifice, or in childbirth, you are sent to Omeyocan, the paradise
of the sun. Deceased infants will live on in Chichihuacuahco, where there grows
a tree whose branches drip milk so that they will never go hungry.
People who die an
ordinary death (whatever that might be) go to Mictlan, the House of the Dead,
which presumably had features appropriate to the homes of middle class Olmecs,
Toltecs, Totonacs, Purhépechas, and the like. Note: my knowledge of these
things stands on squishy ground, and I am not confident enough of my footing to
venture any further than I have into the kingdom of detail.
I do presume to know that what
these departed spirits all have in common is that they are receptive to
persuasion to return from time to time to visit the living. That time used to
be in mid-summer, but the evangelizing colonial friars, who were horrified by
the bloody cult of death (their term) of the Aztecs, and desperately wanted to
Christianize the whole afterlife business, moved it to All Souls Day, November
2nd, which follows All Saints Day, November 1st, which
follows the Eve of All Hallowed Beings that every kid in America knows as
Halloween, and here in Mexico is lamentably encroaching on local Day of the
Dead customs.
But I
digress. Back to the Day of the Dead.
The locus
of the agents of persuasion for souls to come visit is the home altar, which
has to be decorated, and provisioned, with items that the departed will find
attractive. The most traditional ones are 
skulls: ceramic and candy.
Pictures of the deceased to remind
us, and them of what they looked like in this life.
Flowers: who doesn’t like flowers?
Preference is for the common ones from the home environment that reach their
peak in late October. The little white ones called nubes (Gypsophila paniculata) that grow
wild up on the meadows that line Calle Pípila.
The little orange flores de San Nicolás
(Piqueria trinervia) that carpet the area in front of our terrace and behind out casita.
Some showy blossoms from the oleanders on the hillside. And the
so-called
flor de muertos, the
cempasúchitl (Tagetes erecta), a burly orange marigold of
a certain size that are sold all over Oaxaca
the week before Muertos. I bought four little pots of them, and will
transplant them into the garden when the festival is over. Thanks to the
Church’s wisdom in moving the festival to the end of October, it coincides with
the end of the rainy season which is the absolute apex of yellow blooming wild
flowers including the
acahuales (Simsia amplexicaulis) that
surround our house.
An arch: entrance to the world of,
or maybe from, the world of the dead.
Food: I
mean, they are bound to be hungry after such a long journey, and if the living
take care to put out some of their favorite treats . . . For me the choice was easy, two of Linda’s
favorite delicacies, both quintessentially Mexican and Mexican in origin: aguacatl (avocado) and chocolatl.
A glass of
water: …since anyone who travels as far as the dead do is bound to be thirsty.
Liquor: For
them that take pleasure in drinking same. Mezcal
is the usual, but for Gringo wine drinkers . . .
Hard
candies: for the kids and the adults who never shed their sweet teeth
Favorite
things, as in These were some of my favorite . . .: prized tools of the trade,
comfy bits of clothing, peluches
(stuffed animals) . . .
Skeletons,
skulls, naked cut paper dancers in skin and bones without the skin, and any
other symbols of mortality are close at hand. We keep our favorite symbol, which
we lugged around for 40 years, outside the back door next to the garden where
Linda’s ashes repose.
It goes
without saying that the Church added a few decorative touches of its own:
A table set on three levels: to
symbolize Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven.
Icons: the Virgin Mary in one of
her guises – Guadalupe in most of Mexico, Juquila here in Oaxaca; crucifixes;
favorite saints; rosaries
Votive candles.
Pan de muertos: egg-rich sweet
bread, to symbolize Christ’s presence in the Eucharist and in the sense of
bread to break with friends or visitors.
Lázaro
Montesinos, who helps us with the garden, worked hard with (i.e., pretty much
instead of) me to construct this Muertos
altar on our front porch.
And if you happen to find yourself in these parts over the
next few days, I hope you will stop by to see it, and drink with me a toast to
the memory of . . . Another fine Muertos tradition.
On another and
very basic level, of course, whether or not souls can be so easily induced to
rouse themselves for a difficult journey, whether or not there is an afterlife,
whether or not there are even such things as souls, it’s nice to take a moment
every year to honor and remember loved ones who are no longer physically with
us, but who in this simple way are reassured — or reassure us — that they were,
and still are, meaningful to us, and are much loved, and intensely missed.
In
Memoriam, Linda Davidson, August 20, 1946 – October 24, 2017.
