How to Get Comfortable with Death With Día de Los Muertos

 

  

Note—Another blog perennial.

Despite sharing some key common imagery—skulls and skeletons—and some cultural and religious DNA, Día de los Muertos, the two day festival from Mexico, is not just a Latinx Halloween.  The two observations reflect two entirely different views of death—one reflecting terror and horror and the other welcoming acceptance.  That’s the shorthand for it anyway.  It is, of course, more complicated.  The Mexican holiday owes its unique vitality to the merging and mutual corruption of two cultures so alien to each other that at first the seemed totally incompatible.

The Aztecs were the new kids on the block.  Just the latest in a chain of high civilizations that had risen and fallen in Mesoamerica over a period of 4,000 years—the Olmec, Maya, and Toltec to name a few.  There were serious ethnic, cultural, and religious differences between these groups, but archeological evidence shows that they shared a view of the afterlife—a cyclical pattern of life and death that was continuous and in which the spirits of the dead were a protective presence to the living.  Under the right circumstances the living and the dead could communicate.  Death was not seen as something grim, but as a natural step in continuing existence.

  

Aztec human sacrifice customs were unspeakably horrifying to the Spanish.  But the practices of the conquerors and their priests against the native population were hardly less brutal.  

This belief manifested itself in many ways, including some that to European eyes seemed barbaric and brutal beyond imagination, especially the mass human sacrifices as practiced by the Aztec.  But, at least theoretically, those sacrificed were expected to undergo the knife in a state of religious ecstasy as they transitioned to the next life for the good of their people.  Of course, in practice, the Aztecs often used hundreds of their captured enemies for the rituals and they may not have been so sanguine to their fates.

 

                                      Mictecacihuatl, Queen of the Aztec Underworld, eater of the dead 

But beyond the sacrifices, these beliefs meant that ordinary people could communicate, even celebrate, with their lost loved ones.  The Aztecs expressed it in a month long festival honoring the goddess Mictecacihuatl, Queen of the Underworld, or Lady of the Dead. During the festival they first honored los angelitos, the deceased children and then those who passed away as adults. The Mictecacihuatl festival was held during the late summer period of the corn harvests, a natural time of bounty and celebration.

Enter the Spanish, their soldiers, and priests who conquered the mighty Aztec—with the significant assistance of other civilized vassal peoples who were tired of giving up their corn and sacrifants to the mighty rulers of Tenochtitlan—who had very different ideas.  The first order of the day, going hand-in-hand in making the conquered people slaves, was destroying all vestiges of the old religion and imposing Catholicism on them.  After all, saving souls of the savages whether they liked it or not was a central mission of the Conquest.

The Church, of course, had a lot of experience in this sort of thing.  Hundreds of years earlier it had encountered, squelched, and absorbed the pagan Celtic and Germanic peoples.  The Church had learned to adapt local customs that could not be obliterated and cloak them as Christian traditions by turning old gods into venerated saints.

The transformation of the popular Celtic festival of Samhain, for instance, had been transformed into All Saints and All Souls Days.  Similarly in Mexico they re-purposed the Mictecacihuatl festival and squeezed it down from a month to the same two days coinciding with the end of the European harvest season on November 1 and 2. 

Indio peons were expected to attend masses to honor their dead—a least those who had died as good Catholics.  And this the people did dutifully.  Indeed, at first they had no choice, but eventually they internalized the changes and accepted them. While the people accepted the masses, they brought their own interpretations to them, and they continued to hold onto folk traditions that stretched back to Pre-Columbian times.  

  

A home ofrenda with images of the Dead and gifts of things they enjoyed in life.  

Over generations those traditions blossomed into Día de los Muertos as we know it today—spilled out of the churches and into homes where ofrendas, welcoming altars to the dead, are gaily decorated with skeletons, skulls, orange marigold Flor de Muerto, candles, religious icons, photos and memorabilia of the dead and groan with gifts of sweets, favorite foods, and alcohol.  These altars welcome the spirits of the visiting dead.

  

                                 A Dia de Los Muertos mural by Diego Rivera.  

Then in many places families return the favor by visiting the cemeteries and picnicking on the graves of loved ones.  In some areas of Northern Mexico, the family might camp out there from the evening of All Saints Day, November 1.  There are many regional variations involving parades and special celebrations in the homes where someone has died within the year which are opened to all visitors who are fed with homemade tamales and other treats.

  

Artist Jose Guadalupe Posada popularized skeletons playfully cavorting in the 19th Century.  Chicano artist Carlos Cortes, a close friend and IWW Fellow Worker, commemorated Posada and his creation Catrina in this linocut poster for the Movement Artistico Chicano in Chicago. 

The frequent use of skeletons and skulls is meant as a reminder that we are all mortal and will someday join the dead.  The popular 19th Century artist José Guadalupe Posada who depicted calacas—skeletons—cavorting gaily is credited with popularizing that sort of imagery which is continually re-interpreted by folk and fine artists. Particularly popular is the image of Catrina, the lanky, skeletal female figure bedecked in sumptuous clothing and giant ornate hats, who serves as a reminder that death is a fate that even the rich can’t avoid.  Catrina is also seen as an embodiment of old Aztec goddess Mictecacihuatl.  Other countries of Latin heritage have significant All Saints and All Souls celebrations, but outside of Mexico and adjacent countries with significant Mexican populations or cultural influence, none celebrate Día de los Muertos in this unique way.

  

Catrina, a wealthy skeleton woman is a common Día de Los Muertos icon and often decorates Ofrenda altars along side scull, candles, marigolds, and treats for the dead.  

The images were popularized in the United States by the 2017 Disney animated film Coco which unlike some previous productions from the Mouse House was sensitive and respectful of the culture it depicted. 

The U. S. with a large and growing population of Mexican descent or origin is one place where the festival is widely celebrated, particularly in the Southwest and border regions.  But with large population shifts moving north into the old industrial cities of the Midwest and Northeast and into rural and small town communities, the custom has spread, adapting to new circumstances. 

Anglo children are introduced to the Festival, stripped of religious significance, as part of their cultural awareness curriculum now in many schools but threatened by Trump/MAGA anti-DEI crusades.  Street festivals featuring revelers painted to look like skeletons are popular in cities like San Diego and draw many non-Mexicans.  This year American observances may be threatened extra-judicial kidnappings and aggressive violence against communities by ICE and Border Patrol sweeps.

 

Members brought photos, memorabilia, and gifts to dead loved ones to a Día de los Muertos ofrenda at a Tree of Life UU Congregation's observation a few years ago. 

The spirituality of Día de los Muertos and its unique view of death and the relationships between the living and the dead appeals to many in this country looking for new religious experiences.  Many non-Catholic churches now have Day of the Dead services or host family gatherings.  It is commonly observed in many Unitarian Universalist congregations which strive to navigate the tricky ground between respect and cultural misappropriation.  My church, the Tree of Life Unitarian Universalist Congregation in McHenry, Illinois had regular Day of the Dead services for well over a decade.

 

The Real Dope on Halloween Myth, Lore, and Legend

All of the familiar icons of American Halloween were present in this early 20th Century card.

Note—Our annual Halloween post.

Halloween traces its origin to the Celtic harvest festival Samhain.  It was one of the four festivals that fell between the Solstices and Equinoxes and which celebrated the natural turning of the seasons.  Samhain was particularly important because it was the gate in time to the death and starvation season of Wnter, as well a time to celebrate the recent harvest. 

This association with the death of winter also extended to the spirit world, which was considered to be closer to the mortal plane than at any other time of the year.  The Celtic priests—the Druids—marked the occasion with the lighting of bonfires and with gifts of food and drink for the spirits of the dead.  Some consider it also analogous to a New Year’s celebration launching a new cycle of the seasons.  It was popularly celebrated by the peasantry long after the Druids passed and well into the Christian era.

Details of actual Druid practices are practically unknown but widely imagined as in this illustration of a supposed ritual at Stonehenge.

Too popular to squelch, as with many pagan observances Catholic Church co-opted the custom as All Saints Day on November 1.   In rural regions Samhain customs continued to be observed on the evening before the Holy Day—which came to be known as All Hallows Eve, or Hallowe’en in Scots.

Immigrants from the British Isles brought some of their customs with them to the New World, but Halloween does not seem to have been widely celebrated colonial America.  The Puritans spent a lot of time trying to squelch other pagan customs like the May Pole dances associated with the spring Celtic festival of Beltane, but for all of their obsession with witchcraft, usually associated with those who continued to keep the old pagan traditions, there is no evidence of suppressing Samhain or Halloween.

These types of colorful greeting cards from around the turn of the 20th Century were  evidence of the growing popularity of Halloween while helping to spread it and create many of the iconic images still associated with it.

In fact, there is little mention of Halloween in America until the second half of the 19th Century.  By the 1880’s and ‘90s greeting card companies were printing colorful post cards featuring images of witches, black cats, skeletons, and pumpkin Jack o’ Lanterns—all of the classic images associated with Halloween.  Period photos from around the turn of the 20th Century show both adults and children in costumes, most commonly some variation of witch or ghost themes.   

A few scattered newspapers began reporting ritual begging on Halloween by masked youths accompanied by general hooliganism, threats, and acts of vandalism.  This was probably introduced by the wave of poor “country” Irish immigrants that began after the Potato Famine and continued through most of the rest of the century.  The ritual begging in costumes and general hooliganism more closely resembled rural Irish Wren Day—St. Stephen’s Day December 26—customs than those celebrated in either England or Scotland.

The scary Halloween scene from Meet Me in St. Louis illustrated both the street begging and hooliganism associated with it in the early 20th Century.

Rowdyism by boys and young men was reported in big cities and small towns alike and often included setting small bonfires of junk in roadways; tipping or stealing outhouses; pelting houses with eggs, rotten vegetables, or manure; letting horses and livestock loose from barns and pens; and sometimes blocking chimneys so that houses would fill with smoke.  Sometimes significant damage was done.  The Halloween scene in the classic MGM musical Meet Me in St. Louis shows a rare screen glimpse at the rowdy shenanigans most Americans associated with the celebration.

As it spread, customs for observing the holiday varied regionally. Communities started to organize activities to keep the kids and hooligans off the streets, with mixed success.  Parties with games such as bobbing for apples and the telling of ghost stories were fairly common.  

Parties for children with wholesome games were a popular alternative to the hooliganism associated with Halloween but failed to stop it.

Animated films of the ‘20’s and ‘30’s such as Walt Disney’s 1929 Silly Symphony The Dancing Skeletons showed the popularity of the holiday and light-hearted images of death, witches, and black cats.  The Skeletons perhaps show a tip-o’-the-hat familiarity with the Mexican customs around The Day of the Dead which is celebrated on All Soul’s Day.

Walt Disney's 1929 Silly Symphony cartoon The Skeleton Dance  helped make them an enduring Halloween image.  It also borrowed heavily from Mexican Day of the Dead imagery.

The custom of trick or treating seems to have spread slowly.  It combined the ritual begging with toned-down tricks that were a little less extreme than the wild rampages reported earlier.  What progress it was making was largely interrupted by the Depression years when families had little extra money to spend on treats and by the sugar rationing of World War II.

Trick or Treating spread rapidly in the post-World War II years.

Trick or treating was still far from universal until after World War II when it became a topic of popular radio programs like the Jack Benny Show and Ozzie and Harriet. 

In 1947 the popular children’s magazine Jack and Jill published a story on the custom of Halloween begging and described it in detail, spreading the practice widely and with amazing uniformity.  By 1951 the practice was widespread enough that a Philadelphia woman, Mary Emma Allison and the Reverend Clyde Allison decided to channel the energy to constructive purposes by introducing Trick or Treat for UNICEF to support the work of the United Nations international children’s relief.

In the 1950's stores like Woolworths were one-stop Halloween shopping centers.  Inexpensive costumes, masks, and gear replaced homemade costumes and candy companies promoted their sweets for treats instead of homemade popcorn balls, cookies, and apples.

By the mid 1950’s with the strong support of the candy companies and the introduction of cheap masks and pajama style costumes for children, the practice of trick or treating had become ubiquitous and had even taken on a feeling of a long standing practice.

Halloween has been increasingly identified with horror/slasher films like John Carpenter's 1972 Halloween starring Jamie Lee Curtis and its sequels including the Academy Award winning turn for Jamie Lee Curtis Halloween Ends.

What started with ghost stories and the like, soon spread to all types of horror, and fueled by the growing popularity of increasingly violent Hollywood slasher films.  Gore became and more and more common theme and showing horror films for the whole month of October in theaters and on TV was standard by the early 1970’s.

Adult carousing has made Halloween a rival to New Years Eve and St. Patrick's Day for the party-till-you-puke crowd.

At about the same time the first generations of trick or treaters grew up but continued to enjoy the dress-up and parties of Halloween.  It is, year by year, an increasingly popular adult holiday, incorporating many of the features of various world masquerade festivals with macabre twist.

Halloween is now the second most widely celebrated holiday in the United States and is an economic powerhouse, generating sales second only to Christmas.  Popular American media has spread the customs of trick or treating and celebrating gore around the world, often supplanting truly ancient celebrations of Halloween in the Celtic countries.

Fundamentalist opposition to Halloween might be swimming against the cultural tide, but increasingly schools and some municipalities skittish about the complaints have substituted a bland harvest festival or banned any kind of celebration.

The resurgence of Christian Fundamentalism in the U.S. has led to a counter movement to strip the “Satanic” festival from public schools and the wider community.  Although they get it wrong—there was never any connection between Satanism and Halloween—the Fundies, ironically, at least recognized a religious tradition hiding under the commercial hoopla.  

Modern Wiccans and other neo-pagans practice a wide variety of largely invented Samhain and Halloween rituals.  By some accounts Wicca is the fastest growing religion in the U.S.

At the same time re-invented “traditional” paganism like Wicca, one of the most rapidly growing religious movements of the last decades, has striven to recapture the nearly lost significance of the holiday’s roots in Samhain—and sometime invented traditions on flimsy or non-existent evidence.

Go thou and celebrate as thou wouldst.