5

Dias de los Muertos

There is perhaps no better proof that Halloween is a combination of the Celtic Samhain and the Christian All Saints’/All Souls’ Day than Central and South America’s Dias de los Muertos (‘Days of the Dead’). Here the Christian observance is stripped of the Celtic influence but combined with other local festivals, and the result is an event which bears only the faintest resemblance to Halloween. There is little emphasis on masking, house-to-house begging, bonfires, pranking, fortune-telling or parties; death is accepted and mocked, not feared. Nor is Dias de los Muertos strictly a Catholic holy-day – the proliferation of skull imagery, the seasonal foods and many of the local customs associated with it can only be attributed to the surviving influence of Aztec, Mayan and other Mesoamerican peoples and histories.

At its most basic, Dias de los Muertos is a period covering All Saints’ and All Souls’ Days that pays tribute to deceased loved ones. Sometimes it is a single day – El Dia de los Muertos – and takes place on 2 November, but typically it begins at sundown on 31 October and continues through to 2 November. It is celebrated in one form or another throughout most of Central America as well as in a few parts of South America, and it has also made inroads into North America, especially in those areas around the US–Mexico border and in cities with large Latino populations. Probably its most widely known icon is the candy skull, usually about the size of a golf ball and decorated with frosting (icing), glitter or sequins (although it may also have a child’s name written on it). The celebration also typically includes graveyard visits, while in the home an ofrenda, or special altar to the dead, may be constructed. The living feast on special foods, and favourite foods are placed out for returning spirits.

Considerable debate has raged recently over how much influence the Celts and Samhain really had on Halloween, and similar arguments occur over Aztec / Mayan / Purepecha vs Christian in regards to Dias de los Muertos. As with the Celts, much of our knowl edge of Mesoamerican history comes down to us via early Christian missionaries; however, these recordings are comparatively recent – dating back to the sixteenth century – and we also have a great deal of archaeological evidence. We know, for example, that the Aztecs had a complicated religion and a calendar of eighteen months of twenty days each, plus an extra period of five days at the end of the year (there is some speculation that the five-day period, which was essentially a time of rest, was translated to the modern Dias de los Muertos1). Included in their festivals were two in honour of the dead: Miccailhuitontli (‘Little Feast of the Dead’) and Miccailhuitl (‘Great Feast of the Dead’), held in the ninth and tenth months of the Aztec calendar, corresponding to August. Also celebrated in the tenth month was Zocotlhuetzi (‘Great Fall of the Xocotl Fruit’), a harvest festival. These festivals were celebrated with the manufacture of special foods (tamales) and decorations (flower garlands made of zempaschuitl, or yellow marigold); the ceremonies continued for twenty days, and formed one great celebration of the dead. Games in which young men climbed to the top of a stripped tree to reach an icon made of dough were played, and ancestors were honoured with prayers and feasting.

Another part of the celebration of the Great Feast of the Dead was human sacrifice. History may have clouded over whether the Celts included sacrificial rites during Samhain, but there’s no question that it was an important part of Miccailhuitl. At the climax of the festival, captives in special paper costumes were led to the tzompantli, or skull rack, which held the heads of those previously offered in sacrifices, and then were sacrificed by first being burned, then having their hearts cut out with a ceremonial knife. Finally the bodies were cast down the sides of the pyramidal temple, where the heads were removed and placed in the tzompantli.

Death, skull and skeleton iconography figured prominently in the art of both the Aztecs and the Mayans; figurines, pottery and sculpted reliefs all feature skull-faced gods and humans, and may or may not be associated with sacrifice. It seems likely that this proliferation of death and skull imagery became incorporated into modern Dias de los Muertos celebrations as the candy skulls and folk art of skeletons. The Catholics weren’t alone in using a system of syncretism: the Aztecs often incorporated the religious beliefs of conquered peoples into their system, and their great temple in Tenochtitlan even had a chamber (the coateocolli) in which they kept the paraphernalia of other religious systems.2

As soon as ten years after Hernán Cortés led the Spanish conquistadors to victory over the Aztec Empire (marching under a banner that read ‘We shall conquer under the sign of the cross’), missionaries were arriving in the New World and recording what they saw. Two in particular – Diego Durán and Bernardino de Sahagún – became fluent in the native Nahuatl language, and transcribed much of the existing history and lore. Durán watched newly Christianized natives make offerings to dead children on All Saints’ Day and to dead adults on All Souls’ Day, and recognized that Miccailhuitontli and Miccailhuitl had ‘been passed to the Feast of Allhallows in order to cover up the ancient ceremony’.³ Foods and drinks that had been prepared for the old Aztec feasts – chocolate, tamales, pulque (an alcoholic beverage) – were bequeathed to the new holidays. Some priests tried to make use of old rituals by incorporating them into the new Christian services: one, Pedro de Gante, noted in 1558 that ‘in all their adorations of their gods they sang and danced before the gods’, and attempted to create new songs for them that honoured God instead.⁴ The natives often hid their former beliefs under the guise of Catholicism, and some simply refused to give up their old religion, compromising only when it came to human sacrifice. Another observer, the farmer and author Carl Christian Sartorius, noted in 1858 that

with the Mexicans the festival of todos santos received a national colouring, dating from the aborigines, but gradually adopted by the Mestizoes . . . It is not the festival of the Roman Church, for this is here only a secondary consideration, it is an ancient Indian festival, which the prudence of the Christian priests, who found it too deeply rooted amongst the neophytes, added to the Christian holidays.5

Sartorius joins other Europeans in being bewildered by the mood of the celebrants as well:

Neither the Indian nor the Mestizo knows the bitterness of sorrow; he does not fear death; the departure from life is not dreadful in his eyes, he does not crave for the goods he is leaving, and has no care for those who survive him, who have still the fertile earth, and the mild sky.⁶

Ofrendas, or offerings, are one of the most important aspects of Dias de los Muertos. These altars vary slightly from region to region but almost always include a table or some sort of platform over which is spread a clean white cloth. On this offerings of food, drink and tobacco are placed for deceased loved ones; it is believed that even though the dead cannot physically partake of these items, they can still enjoy the essence of them. Photos of the deceased or of saints may be included and flowers (typically the yellow-orange zempaschuitl) are also arranged on the ofrenda, while their petals create a trail leading to the altar. Copal incense is often burned near the ofrenda, since the distinctive musky scent and the smoke are thought to help wandering souls find the offerings. Salt is almost always included, since it is considered purifying, and glasses of water are there to quench the spirits’ thirst after their long journey from the underworld. The food and drink are consumed by the family on 2 November, since they believe they have shared the food with their deceased loved ones in this way. The practice of the ofrenda may actually be Christian in origin, even though it includes figures created from dough (a common Aztec practice) and of course regional foods. It may have originated from the use of the catafalque, a bier typically covered in black cloth which was used in All Souls’ Day masses, and was sometimes described as being surrounded by candles and food offerings. The use of ofrendas was also recorded in colonialera Spain: in the Castilian province of Zamora, ofrendas were created for souls in Purgatory and employed during Easter and All Souls’ Day.

An ofrenda.

The town of Huequechula in the state of Puebla is host to a unique and spectacular form of ofrenda: these multi-layered constructions can reach ten feet in height, and are covered in white or pale satin. Decorations consist largely of photos of the deceased and small figures of angels, although the traditional zempaschuitl petals surround the base of the ofrenda and make a trail out to the street. Visitors to Huequechula are welcomed into the homes of those with displays and urged to make a small donation and to share food (typically bread and hot chocolate) with the family before leaving.

The zempaschuitl flower that is so important at Dias de los Muertos derives its name from the Nahuatl words for ‘twenty’ (zemposalli) and ‘flowers’ (xochitl), and was believed by the Aztecs to be a gift from Tonatiuh, the sun god, given to them so they would always have something beautiful and gold like the sun to mark the resting places of their late loved ones.7

In colonial Mexico, reports on Dias de los Muertos celebrations often painted them as raucous, with poorer Mestizos drinking in graveyards; in fact, in 1766, the Royal Office of Crime prohibited cemetery visits during the holiday and tried to control the sale of alcohol. The production of small sugar (or alfeñique) animal figures is recorded as early as 1763, but since similar figures are still sold in parts of Italy, and were known to be sold in Spain, this seems to have been a European custom imported to the New World. Alfeñique skulls, on the other hand, are not clearly reported until the nineteenth century. In 1841, Madame Calderón de la Barca recorded the first mention of candy skulls when she wrote of walking past the booths of vendors on All Saints’ Day and seeing the skulls ‘temptingly arranged in grinning rows, to the great edification of the children’.⁸ In an article from 1896, a visitor to a small Mexican village named San Elias mentioned not only seeing candy skulls for sale in the marketplace on 1 November, along with candy animals and ‘little dough images of a corpse’, but then seeing them placed on an ofrenda in a home, only to be eaten on the following day. This visitor also believed that ofrendas were constructed ‘solely by the lower classes, not by the rich’.⁹

By the twentieth century, visitors were flocking to Mexico solely to witness Days of the Dead rituals, and perhaps nowhere became more famed for its beautiful and intricate celebrations than the villages and towns in and surrounding Lake Pátzcuaro in the state of Michoacán. Pátzcuaro was once the centre of the ancient Purépecha Empire; the Purépecha (also known as the Tarascans) were contemporaries of the Aztecs but were never conquered by them. Dias de los Muertos in Patzcuaro begins on 28 October, as decorations and flowers are purchased from the tianguis or crafts fair. On 1 November on the Lake Patzcuaro island of Janitzio, the adults wake at sunrise and go to the small village cemetery, where the graves are decorated with zempaschuitl, pan de muertos (bread of the dead), fruits and candles, all neatly arranged on clean white cloths. Then the adults step out of the cemetery, and the ‘Vigil of the Little Angels’ occurs; for the next few hours, the children will watch over the graves and complete the decorating. During the rest of the day, preparations will be made for the evening ritual with the adults: the men use spears to hunt wild duck to be used in the food offerings (600 canoes can bring in 25,000 ducks in a day10). In the early part of the evening, boys will engage in a game called Teruscan, in which they ‘steal’ (with permission) food items left for them on the roofs and yards of houses. Ritual dances will be held in the evening, including one called the pescado blanco, which pays tribute to the lake’s native whitefish. Around midnight, the church bell begins to ring, calling souls back to earth, and the women and children return to the graveyard where they decorate graves and tombs with candles, fruit and candy; the men wait outside the graveyard fences. The beauty of the candlelit night-time cemetery, adorned with flowers and fruits, has become famous around the world; Patzcuaro draws an estimated 100,000 visitors for each Day of the Dead (around one-third come from outside of Mexico), and queues for the small boats that go to Janitzio are long.¹¹ The small whitefish that once provided much of Janitzio’s economy have been fished out for some time, but fishermen still perform with their traditional butterfly nets to earn tips from tourists, so Dias de los Muertos has become an important revenue source for Janitzio.

In some areas of Mexico, Days of the Dead begin on 28 October, as those who died in accidents are remembered. Trails of zempaschuitl petals can often be found that lead from spots on a road where a loved one has died in a car accident to the home altar. On 29 October, those who died a violent death are welcomed, and 30 October sees the return of babies who died before baptism (a small offering for these souls is usually created in a corner of the room, since these unbaptized spirits should not be allowed to approach the main altar). The last day of October marks the arrival of the spirits of children who were baptized, and 1 November is reserved for adults.

Day of the Dead altar, Janitzio, Michaoacan, Mexico.

In the southeastern Mexican state of Oaxaca, the indigenous people who once ruled the region were the Zapotecs, and the merging of their culture with the Spanish has given rise to Xandu Ya, or All Saints’. The Tehuanos, descended from the Zapotecs, set up ‘All New Saints’ altars for the celebration; they honour the memory of anyone who has died in the previous year, provided that at least 40 days have passed between their death and 30 October. Preparation of the altar is an activity shared among friends and neighbours, who may provide some of the food and drink (these include atole de leche, a traditional drink made from corn starch and milk). The altars are prepared in the form of stepped pyramids, with each level representing a different phase of life, as is held by Zapotec beliefs. One local belief is that souls return in the form of butterflies, and so any appearance of a butterfly during Xandu Ya is meaningful. The observance ends with the lighting of fireworks. The Tehuanos also visit graveyards throughout the week, and may hire musicians to play music by the side of their loved ones’ resting places.

The Tehuanos also have a local legend that is strangely similar to the Breton story of Wilherm Postik, about a man who did not honour his ancestors but drank instead. When he encountered the souls of the dead carrying away their offerings, only his mother held a stone instead of fruit and bread. The man ran home to build an altar to his mother, but he was too late, and was found dead three days later.

In Mexico City, Dias de los Muertos is not just a traditional observance, but is also a commercial enterprise, an artistic endeavour and – on occasion – a government project. In 2000, for example, the local government organized a large event called ‘Offerings of the Millennium’, which included contests, museum exhibits, historical displays and musical performances. Art galleries and museums, including the Diego Rivera Museum, exhibit folk art and special ofrendas, and street vendors sell papier mâché toys of skeletons playing musical instruments, eating, mourning one another and just about any other everyday activity imaginable. There are also chocolate and candy skulls for children, and tall candles, copal and zempaschuitl for adults.

Calaveras (the Spanish word for skulls) are a form of satirical short poem focusing on death and the macabre popular around Mexico during Dias de los Muertos. Calaveras originated in newspapers in the nineteenth century, and first took the form of fake poetic obituaries of then-living public figures, often government officials. Sometimes they poked macabre fun at an entire profession, as in this one entitled ‘Neighbourhood Barber’:

You performed many miracles
With beards and hair,
So you don’t care that
You’re underground:
You gave some cuts
To people passing by,
And now for your stupidity
You’re wrapped in a shroud,
With a razor and some scissors
To trim calaveras.12

In some areas of Mexico, children go through their neighbourhoods on All Saints’ or All Souls’ Eve reciting calaveras in exchange for small rewards of food. The calaveras also gave Dias de los Muertos its most famous artist in the person of José Guadalupe Posada, whose delightfully morbid engravings often accompanied the short poems in newspapers. Posada’s etching ‘La Calavera Catrina’ of 1913, which depicts a wealthy woman in a flowered hat rendered as a skull, is possibly the single most famous work of art associated with Days of the Dead; Diego Rivera later used Catrina as the centre piece of his mural ‘Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Park’, and Posada’s work was also influential on the muralist José Clemente Orozco.

Twenty-seven miles southwest of Mexico City is Mixquic, where Dias de los Muertos is celebrated with one of Mexico’s few other examples of begging children: during the evening of 1 November, groups of children go from house to house offering prayers, ringing a bell and begging gifts of food. On 2 November, children also engage in calavereando or ‘skulling’ – going from house to house and asking for ‘a little skull’ (a treat).13 Tombs in Mixquic are decorated with mosaics made from the petals of zempaschuitl and other flowers. The mosaics, of course, often feature skeleton imagery.

José Guadulupe Posada, La Calavera Catrina, 1913, zinc etching.

In the central Mexican state of San Luis Potosí, one of the main ethnic groups are the Teneks, who are descended from the Mayans but were cut off during the Aztec conquests. The Teneks celebrate All Saints’ as Xantolo, a name derived from Nahuatl pronunciation of the Latin word for ‘saints’, sanctorum. Some Tenek people don’t visit cemeteries during the time of the festival because they believe the spirits of their loved ones are in the homes, visiting the ofrendas; others visit on 2 November, when they bury small bits of food in their loved ones’ graves. Arches are an important part of Xantolo, and are constructed both outside the home and inside, as part of the ofrenda. The arches, which represent the thirteen skies found in Aztec beliefs, are made of leafy local branches bent into a curve and decorated with zempaschuitl and another local flower called olotillo. Coins are included on the altar so that the dead can pay for passage across the Chicuachuapan River in the underworld; however, candy skulls don’t appear in this region. On 2 November, the trail of zempaschuitl petals that led visiting souls to the ofrenda is swept away and replaced with a new trail so that the spirits can find their way back to the afterlife. Visitors to a home are offered food (which has been prepared from pigs, turkeys and chickens that the homeowners purchased in February), and they are expected to drop a small piece first as an offering to the earth. The Tenek also practice traditional dances at Xantolo in masks they have sculpted themselves. Characters may include grotesque representations of devils and skeletons. Since women do not take part, female parts are played by male dancers. The dances take place at both the home and the cemetery, and are circular in form, expressing a belief in the circle of life and death.

Wooden devil mask (accented with porcupine quills) from Dias de los Muertos.

In the southeastern state of Yucatán, once home to the Mayans, All Saints’ is known as Hanal Pixan and includes many pre-Hispanic elements. Here the souls of children are welcomed on 31 October and dismissed on 7 November; the adults arrive on 1 November and depart on 8 November. The offerings include traditional Mayan foods like the drink el balche, and mucbil chicken, which is cooked by being buried. Many of the decorations centre on green crosses representing the ceiba tree, which the Mayans believed was the highway that ran from heaven to the earthly plane and then to the underworld.

These traditions are dying out in many areas of Mexico, and various institutions are now attempting to preserve them by holding ofrenda contests each year. These contests usually have several divisions, including traditional and free-style, and also provide an attractive way for tourists to experience Dias de los Muertos.

Just to the south of Mexico, in Guatemala, Dias de los Muertos is celebrated with barriletes gigantes, huge kites which are flown to guide the dead back for the festivities. The kites, which are constructed from bamboo with intricately painted coverings, can be up to seven metres in length and are also presented at contests and fairs. Guatemala also celebrates the holiday with many traditionally Mayan practices, including rituals conducted entirely in Mayan.

Dias de los Muertos is celebrated much more quietly through the rest of Central and South America. In Nicaragua, families spend the night beside the graves of dead loved ones. In Ecuador, food might be eaten next to a grave in the belief that the dead spirit is sharing the meal. In Brazil, Dia de Finados takes place only on 2 November and involves simple cemetery visits.

Dias de los Muertos has also begun to appear in more and more American communities, especially those with large Spanish-speaking populations. In communities near the US–Mexico border, it is celebrated in traditional ways, with visits to the graveyards, prayers and feasts. However, in more urban areas, it has become an increasingly cross-cultural and commercialized activity. In San Francisco, a procession and altar exhibit have been held each 2 November since the 1970s; the event takes place in the Mission District and draws 20,000 participants. Celebrations are still small in New York City, with few community-wide events; according to Brooklyn-based author Salvador Olguin, ‘The Mexican community here always celebrates this as a private party.’14 Cities like Houston and Los Angeles hold a number of events, some of which charge admission, and which typically feature ofrenda exhibits, folk art, musical performances, face painting and workshops for children.

A contemporary Aztec dancer on Dia de los Muertos.

Halloween has begun to intrude on Dias de los Muertos celebrations, with mixed success. Trick or treat is now practised in parts of Mexico, although the classic phrase has been replaced by the local version: ‘queremos Halloween’ (‘we want Halloween’). Skeleton and witch costumes are popular, and sometimes the costuming and begging even extends from 30 October to 2 November. The day is occasionally referred to as Dia de las Brujas (‘Day of the Witches’), and children may be required to perform a small song to obtain a treat. Trick or treating in Mexico seldom involves homes, but is instead conducted around shops.

As Halloween in Mexico began to catch on, both political conservatives and Mexico’s Roman Catholic Church lashed out. In 2007, a columnist in a conservative magazine, Yo Influyo, called on teachers to ‘eradicate’ Halloween and to ‘defend our culture’.15 That same year, the Archdiocese of Mexico proclaimed:

Those who celebrate Halloween are worshipping a culture of death that is the product of a mix of pagan customs. The worst thing is that this celebration has been identified with neo-pagans, Satanism and occult worship.¹⁶

Strangely enough, the statement from the Church made no mention of Dias de los Muertos.

In 2005 Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez also called for a ban on Halloween, but for unique reasons: he described the festival as a ‘game of terror’ and said that the American celebration was about ‘putting fear into other nations, putting fear into their own people’.¹⁷ Apparently jack-o’-lanterns bearing anti-government messages had been found around the capital, Caracas, shortly before Chavez’s statement, although he did not specifically refer to this Halloween trick.