The end of October/beginning of November each year brings us to a time to scare and be scared as well as re-connect with loved ones long gone. This would be Halloween for the scarry and Dia de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead, for the re-connecting.
While both holidays may be considered “spooky”, Halloween is seen as a night of terror and mischief revolving around darkness, death, ghosts, candy, and costumes.
Dia de los Muertos, on the other hand, is explicitly about the afterlife and remembrance whose festivities consist of color and joy.
The tradition of Halloween dates back thousands of years. The word itself means “hallowed evening,” and is known to early European celebrators as All Hallows’ Eve, paying homage to the saints. Eventually, it was shortened to “Halloween.”
The earliest known root of Halloween is the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain (pronounced sow-in). The Celts, who lived 2,000 years ago, mostly in the area that is now Ireland, the UK and northern France, celebrated their new year on November 1 – a date that marked the end of the summer harvest and the beginning of the dark, cold winter. Celts believed that on the night before the new year, the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead became blurred.
On the night of October 31 they celebrated Samhain, when it was believed that the ghosts of the dead returned to earth. The Samhain celebration involved several ritualistic ceremonies used by the Druids (Celtic priests)
to connect with spirits, including bonfires, jack-o-lanterns, and costumes, consisting of animal heads and skins, to disguise oneself from ghosts.
By 40 A.D. the Roman Empire had conquered most of the Celtic lands. During the 400 years they ruled this area, two festivals of Roman origin were combined with the Celtic Samhain. One was Feralia, a day in late October when the Romans commemorated the passing of the dead. The second was a day to honor Pomona,
the Roman goddess of fruit and trees, who is represented by the apple, which likely explains the tradition of bobbing for apples today on Halloween.
In 1000 A.D, the Christian church made November 1 “All Souls Day/All Saints Day”, a day to honor the dead. This is widely believed as the church’s attempt to replace the Celtic festival of Samhain with a church-sanctioned holiday. The All Saints Day celebration was also called All-hallows or All-hallowmas (from the Middle English Alholowmesse meaning All Saints Day) and the night before it, the traditional night of Samhain in the Celtic religion, began to be called All-Hallows Eve
and, eventually, Halloween.
The earliest known American Halloween celebrations, in the late 1800’s, consisted of large parties to honor the harvest, share ghost stories, sing, and dance. By the 1920’s, Halloween had become a secular but community-centered holiday, with parades and town-wide Halloween parties.
The centuries-old practice of trick-or-treating, children going door-to-door asking for candy, was also revived, it being a relatively inexpensive way for an entire community to share the Halloween celebration. Trick-or-treat costumes have transformed over the years from saints and angels to superheroes, witches and ghouls, politicians, and everything in between. Thus, a new American tradition was born.
Today, Americans spend an estimated $6 billion annually on Halloween, making it the country’s second largest commercial holiday after Christmas and one quarter of all candy sold in the U.S. is purchased specifically for Halloween.
The spiritual roots of Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) are associated with prayer and asking our spirit guides for support and protection. Dia de los Muertos is an ever-evolving holiday that traces its earliest roots back to the Aztec and Nahua people in what is now central Mexico.
Mourning the dead was considered disrespectful because in these cultures, the dead are still considered to be members of the community. It is up to their families to keep their memory alive.
Día de los Muertos is when the dead temporarily return to Earth to be by our side and has its roots in the Aztec festival for the Goddess Mictecacihuatl, also known as the “Lady of the Dead”.
In the mythology of the Aztec people, Mictecacihuatl ruled over the land of Mictlan, the lowest level of the underworld where the dead live.
Mictecacihuatl had power over all souls dwelling in the underworld and her role was to guard the dead and preside over festivals for them. She was thought to have a role in collecting the bones of the dead, so that they could be gathered by other gods and returned to the land of the living where they would be restored to allow the creation of new races. The fact that many races exist is because the bones were dropped and mixed together before they made their way back to the land of the living for use by the gods of creation.
The worldly goods buried with the newly dead were intended as offerings to Mictecacihuatl to ensure their safety in the underworld.
The Aztecs used skulls to honor the dead a millennium before the Dia de los Muertos celebrations emerged. Skulls, like the ones once placed on Aztec temples,
remain a key symbol in a tradition that has continued for more than six centuries in the annual celebration to honor and commune with those who have passed on.
Modern Dia de los Muertos festivals have also been influenced by Catholic Spanish traditions. Once the Spanish conquered the Aztec empire in the 16th century, the Catholic Church moved indigenous celebrations honoring the dead throughout the year to the Catholic dates commemorating All Saints Day and All Souls Day on November 1st and 2nd, and so absorbed the Aztec festivals to coincide with the Catholic holidays.
UNESCO officially made Dia de los Muertos part of the intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2008.
We’re looking forward to hearing your stories about which of these celebrations – or maybe a different one – that you take part in.
Comments