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The All Saints Day: death as an object of worship and celebration (with Mexico on the horizon)

La Calavera Catrina Garbancera or as an illustration of 1913
cartoonist Mexican Jose Guadalupe Posada (1852-1913).
La Catrina, thus named by Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, is an ironic metaphor
high social class before the Mexican Revolution, and ended
becoming the symbol of death on the Day of the Dead.

The ancient Christian celebration to honor the dead is rooted in the persecution of followers of Christ by the Roman emperors, persecutions reached the climax in the fourth century, under Diocletian, Maximian, Galerius and Constantius. The canard that Christians practiced black magic, cannibalism and incest did say the historian and politician Tacitus (55-120) in the spirit of these nests the odium generis humani (I hate the human race).

Detail of the reliefs of the sarcophagus
Paleochristian San Justo de la Vega

representing the persecution of early Christians.
(© National Archaeological Museum, Madrid)

The early Church, the victim of such persecution, felt a duty to honor their martyrs, and by that time established the Sunday before the feast of Pentecost as a day for reverence to the victims of imperial edicts, which would soon elevated to the status of saints. It was Pope Gregory III in the eighth century, who established the deadline of 1 November as All Saints Day, and gave them a chapel at the ancient basilica of St. Peter's in Rome.

In recent decades, this event has been declining replaced in many countries, especially the American Halloween, "while others pointed out is a special day. This happens in Mexico, whose famous Day of the Dead, which UNESCO declared the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity (along with other Indigenous Festivity dedicated to the dead, behold here) is just updating an old pre-holiday Christianization.

Transient recently recovered a book he admired Octavio Paz, who had read years ago, a book that the author devotes particular attention to the mexicanidad: The Labyrinth of Solitude .* His third chapter, "All Saints Day of the Dead" aims, precisely, to explain the reasons for this event that transcends the Mexican Christian tradition.

"The solitary Mexican loves fiestas and public meetings. Everything is an opportunity to meet. Any excuse is good for pir interrupted the march of time and celebrate with feasts and ceremonies men and events "" says Paz, and continuing. "We are a village ritual. And that trend benefits our imagination as much as our sensibilities, always tuned and alert. The Art of the Party, reviled almost everywhere, is preserved intact among us. "

Octavio Paz.

And some pages later falls squarely, with his admirable literary style, in the conclusion to which now covers the passer: "Death is a mirror that reflects the empty gestures of life. All that motley confusion of acts, omissions, regrets and tentative-works and leftovers, which is every life, in death as no meaning or explanation purpose. Facing her life is drawn and immobilized. Before crumble and sink into nothingness, becomes immutable form sculpted and no longer changes but to disappear. [...] To the ancient Mexicans opposition between death and life was not as absolute as for us. Prolonging life in death. And vice versa. The death was not the natural order of life but an endless cycle phase. Life, death and resurrection were stages of a cosmic process, repeated insatiable. "

And then, after some considerations about it and linked with the Christianization of the Mexicans, insists on the validity of those old beliefs: "The Mexican's indifference to death is nourished by its indifference to life. The Mexicans not only postulates the irrelevance of dying, but of the living. Our songs proverbs, folk festivals and thoughts expressed in an unmistakable way that death does not frighten us because 'life has cured us of ghosts. " Dying is natural and even desirable, the sooner the better. Our indifference to death is the other face of our indifference to life. Kill for life, ours and others, is worthless. It is natural that this happens: life and death are inseparable and each time that the first loses significance, the second becomes irrelevant. Mexican death is the mirror of life of Mexicans. To both the Mexican closes, ignore them.

Mexico: Patria y Muerte ,
Photo of Joseph Michaels.
(© Flickr)

Contempt of death is not at odds with the cult that you profess. She is present at our parties, our games, our loves and our thoughts. Dying and killing are ideas that rarely leave us. Death seduces us. The fascination exerted on us perhaps our brother outbreak metismo and fury with which we break [...].

Moreover, death will come to life, stripped of all its vanities and pretensions and became what it is: bones picked clean and a ghastly grin. Is a closed world with no way out, where everything is death the only valuable is death. But we say something negative. Sugar skulls China paper skeletons colorful fireworks, our performances are always popular mockery of life, an affirmation of the nothingness and insignificance of human existence. We decorate our homes with skulls, eating the day of the Dead bread and bones pretending songs and jokes entertain us in the death laughing bald, but all of that boastful familiarity does not exempt us from the question we all ask: what is the death? We have not invented a new response. "

sugar skulls decorated
one of the characteristics of
Day of the Dead in Mexico.
(Source: http://www.taringa.net/posts/info
/ 3832239/El-Dia-De-Los-Muertos.html)

Al passerby, these considerations about idiosyncrasies of the Mexican people make you reflect on the meaning of violent deaths that occur in Mexico, of which almost daily realize the media. Do you have anything to do with that indifference to the death referred to by Octavio Paz, or is it something alien to it, a simple and ordinary crime linked to trafficking diverse and opposing clans? In any case, the words of the Mexican writer seem significant to understand certain attitudes, or at least try. Few like him have gone so deep into the Mexican soul.


* Octavio Paz: The Labyrinth of Solitude . Mexico, Fondo de Cultura Economica, second edition, revised and enlarged, 1959. The issue that has driven the passer is the ninth reprint, 1981.