In most places in the world, a photograph of someone who has died sits on a shelf. We glance at it now and then, dust it off, sometimes pause in front of it for a moment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In Mexico, at the beginning of November, the photograph comes down from the shelf and is placed in the middle of the house. In front of it appear a plate with the favorite food of the one who left, a glass of water, a sweet loaf of bread, orange flowers and candles. Not as decoration. As an invitation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For two days, the dead are not remembered. They are expected.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
D\u00eda de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead, takes place, in forms that differ from one region to another, at the end of October and the beginning of November, with the 1st and 2nd of November at the heart of the celebration. In many places the first of these days is dedicated to children who have died, tenderly called los angelitos<\/em>, \"the little angels\"; the second, to adults. The period coincides with the end of the maize harvest, the moment when, tradition says, the road between the worlds grows shorter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n UNESCO inscribed the celebration in 2008 on its list of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity and described it in a phrase that says a great deal: the transitory return to Earth of deceased relatives and loved ones<\/em>. Not a commemoration, but a return. The departed are not evoked from a distance; they are received as visitors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The whole ritual begins from there: if someone is coming to visit, you have to get the house ready.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The center of the celebration is the ofrenda<\/em>, the altar built inside the home, sometimes on several levels, like a staircase between worlds. On it stand the photographs of the departed and, around them, the things that belonged to them or that they loved: the food they used to cook, the drink they used to drink, their cigarettes, a book, a toy for a child.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Every element has a purpose. Water, for the one who has travelled a long way and is thirsty. Salt, which purifies. Pan de muerto<\/em>, the sweet bread with bone shapes on top. Calaveras de az\u00facar<\/em>, sugar skulls on which the name of the departed is written in colored icing \u2013 or, as a joke, the name of a living friend. Papel picado<\/em>, paper cut into fine patterns, which stirs at the slightest breeze and reminds us that the border between the worlds is fragile. Copal<\/em>, the resin burned as incense, whose smoke rises towards the sky.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And, above all, cempas\u00fachil<\/em>, the orange field flower we know as the marigold. Its color and its strong scent, tradition says, show the souls the way home. That is why the petals do not stay only on the altar. In some communities, families scatter paths of petals and candles from the cemetery gate to the door of the house, so that the soul does not lose its way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is a detail here that those who look at the celebration from the outside easily overlook: the path is made for someone in particular.<\/strong> Not for \"the dead\" in general, but for the grandfather who loved mole<\/em>, for the aunt who smoked, for the child who never got to grow up. The ofrenda is, in its own way, a portrait. The departed is described through what they loved to live.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On the night between the 1st and 2nd of November, many families go to the cemetery and stay there until morning. They clean the graves, cover them with flowers, light hundreds of candles, bring food, music, sometimes a group of mariachi. They talk to the departed. They laugh. They tell stories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At P\u00e1tzcuaro<\/a>, in the state of Michoac\u00e1n, Pur\u00e9pecha communities cross the lake in candle-lit boats towards the cemetery on the island of Janitzio, and in Mixquic, near Mexico City, the cemetery becomes, for one night, the liveliest place in the village.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To a European eye, used to the cemetery as a place of silence and black clothing, the image is disconcerting. But its logic is simple: if the departed really are coming to visit, there is no reason to greet them in tears. You greet them the way you greet any dear guest who returns after a year \u2013 with the table laid.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The celebration is often presented as a direct inheritance from the Aztecs, who did indeed have several festivals dedicated to the dead and a goddess of the underworld, Mictecacihuatl. Over these practices, after the Spanish conquest in the sixteenth century, were laid the Catholic feasts of All Saints and All Souls, on the 1st and 2nd of November. UNESCO itself speaks of the fusion of pre-Hispanic religious rites and Catholic feasts.<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is worth saying, however, that historians do not agree on the proportions. The Mexican historian Elsa Malvido<\/a> argued that many of the elements considered \"indigenous\" \u2013 bone-shaped sweets, sugar skulls, meals for the dead \u2013 already existed in medieval Catholic Europe, and that the emphasis on pre-Hispanic origins was strengthened in the 1930s, at a time when Mexico was building a national identity. The anthropologist Stanley Brandes,<\/a> in Skulls to the Living, Bread to the Dead<\/em>showed in turn that the history of the celebration is more complicated than a direct continuity with the pre-Hispanic world, and that the forms we see today were reshaped by Catholicism, by colonialism and, later, by the construction of Mexican national identity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We do not need to settle this dispute in order to understand the ritual. But it tells us something important about the nature of rituals in general: they are never \"pure\". They borrow, overlap, get rewritten and, sometimes, are invested with political meaning. What keeps them alive is not their proven age, but the fact that people continue to need them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The poet Octavio Paz, in The Labyrinth of Solitude<\/em> (1950), wrote that the Mexican frequents death, mocks it, caresses it, sleeps with it, celebrates it \u2013 that it is one of his favorite toys and his most steadfast love. It is a generalization, like any portrait of a people. But it captures something of the tone of this celebration: not defiance of death, but familiarity with it.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n If you have read, in this library, the articles on Obon<\/mark><\/a>, the Japanese summer ritual,<\/a> and on the ancestor altars in Chinese homes,<\/a> you have probably already recognized the common thread.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Japan, the departed are called home with welcoming fires and seen off with lanterns. In China, they have a permanent place in the house, on the altar, and are visited at the grave in spring, at Qingming. In Mexico, they are expected once a year, with the table laid, with flowers and with music.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In very different religious and cultural settings, people have arrived at surprisingly similar gestures: the dead are called, symbolically fed, visited, escorted back or kept in a place within the family. As if, by different roads, these traditions had arrived at the same intuition: the dead do not simply disappear from the family. They change their place; they do not lose it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The tone differs. Obon often has a quieter, more contemplative tone. In Chinese traditions, the relationship with the ancestors can become part of the daily rhythm of the home, through the altar, the offerings and the days set aside for remembrance. D\u00eda de los Muertos, by contrast, brings colour, noise and humour \u2013 the sugar skulls laugh, and in the calaveras literarias<\/em>, the satirical verses published for the occasion, death makes fun of politicians and public figures as if it were a member of the family.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But the gesture underneath is the same: giving the one who has left a place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The anthropologist Claudio Lomnitz, in Death and the Idea of Mexico<\/em>, observes that in Mexico death has never been merely a private matter. For centuries it has been a place where the community recognizes itself. Perhaps that is why the ofrenda is not made alone, in silence, but as a family, with children who arrange the flowers and learn, without being told, the names of their great-grandparents.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the systemic perspective and in constellation work we meet an idea that comes very close to this ritual: that every member of the family has the right to a place in the story of the system, including those who have died or about whom the family has stopped speaking. Forgetting, secrecy and exclusion can go on shaping the way a family tells its own story. The ofrenda does exactly the opposite of forgetting. It puts the departed in plain view, with their name and their favorite food, and tells them: you were here, you mattered, you still belong.<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You do not need to believe that souls really walk along the path of petals for the ritual to work. Perhaps the ofrenda is not made for the dead. Perhaps it is made for the living, who need, once a year, to say aloud the names of those who are missing and to find that, at the table, there is still room.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Perhaps the dead do not disappear from a family. But sometimes they need the living to set a place for them again.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n If you were to prepare an ofrenda<\/em> for someone dear who is no longer here, what would you put on it? What food, what object, what song?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Is there someone in your family who is no longer spoken about? What would happen if you said their name, at least once a year?<\/p>\n\n\n\n What does the difference look like, for you, between remembering someone and expecting them?<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00cen cele mai multe locuri din lume, o fotografie a cuiva care a murit st\u0103 pe un raft. O privim din c\u00e2nd \u00een c\u00e2nd, o \u0219tergem de praf, uneori ne oprim o clip\u0103 \u00een fa\u021ba ei….<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4127,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[455,64],"tags":[57,325,370,331],"class_list":["post-4142","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-gesturi-cu-sens-blog","category-blog","tag-ritualuri","tag-ritualuri-moderne","tag-ritualuri-pentru-prezenta","tag-ritualuri-si-pelerinaje"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuliavs.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4142","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuliavs.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuliavs.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuliavs.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuliavs.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4142"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/iuliavs.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4142\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4143,"href":"https:\/\/iuliavs.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4142\/revisions\/4143"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuliavs.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4127"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuliavs.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuliavs.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuliavs.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}The ofrenda <\/mark><\/a><\/em>\u2013 a table laid for those who are no longer here<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
The night in the cemetery<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
A ritual with two roots \u2013 and an honest debate<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Three cultures, three ways of saying the same thing<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
What remains of a ritual like this<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Three questions for you<\/h4>\n\n\n\n