CELEBRATING WITH THE LIVING DEAD

By Yolanda Lorge

November is the month the dead claim for their own. On the Day of the Dead celebration, the dead are the honored guest. Vibrant marigolds, papier-mâché masks, revelry, food and music are all part of the ancient pre-Columbian celebration. One of those typical Indian-Spanish intermarriages. Although the holiday is recognized throughout Latin America, it is most fervently embraced in Mexico.

Throughout Mexico, the living begin their preparations for that event long in advance of the feast. The dead are coming.

This religious festival commemorates the return of souls who once a year visit and share a special feast with their earthly families. On this day, the concept of death is not feared, but accepted; it’s even enjoyed – with representations of skulls, coffins, and heckling skeletons liberally used as decorative motifs.

Day of the Dead celebrations take place each year beginning on the evening of October 31 and ending on the evening of November 2. But unlike Halloween – the American holiday with Celtic roots- where ghoulish figures are meant to create a frightening atmosphere, this is a joyful celebration, also a time for reflection and recollection, of remembrance. It is a very moving pageant dedicated to the continuity of life.

It merges indigenous beliefs and Christianity and coincides with All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day. The idea that individual personalities continue after death and can intercede for the living with great powers fitted well enough with Spanish Catholic faith to survive the Conquest without much change.

Rooted in the ancient Aztec civilization, this tradition is deeply ingrained with beliefs in a mythical universe. To the Aztecs, death was not viewed as the end of existence but a gateway to other levels, other realms, where the souls of the death continued to exists. During the Conquest, the precepts became forged with Christian canon of eternal existence of the soul after death in heaven, purgatory, or hell.

This rich blend of Catholic religious observances and surviving Indian pagan beliefs has sustained the celebration for centuries.

It’s hard for other cultures to understand the duality of life and death, on the one hand mocking death, and on the other taking a stoic stance toward it. It’s a statement of fear as well as tenacity and endurance. This attitude is rooted in the ancient belief that life is simply a movement toward your own death. Death is simply a stage in the cycle of life.

The skull is a symbol of dead but also of renewal. It means that in this lifetime we’re already living in our death, but in a cyclical way. It doesn’t stop. The body may stop, but the spirit needs to live. To the Mexican, life is death and death is life. It is one unit, one part. That differs from the way it is seen in most Western civilizations, where life and death never meet. It’s that ritualistic life-death cycle that is particularly Mexican, and so haunting.

November 1, is when the souls of the children arrive home. On the next day, the souls of the adults are welcomed. By the evening of November 2, the souls have returned to the spirit world, the candles are put out, and families attend mass. Afterwards, everyone returns home to enjoy a sumptuous Feast.

Most of all, these celebrations for the dead reaffirm love and family bonds. As an elderly acquaintance said, “When you love them truly, the dead are never far from your heart. I carry my deceased wife’s memory in my heart each day and night. When I die, my children and grandchildren will welcome us both once a year, to our home. You cannot live without love!”