Day of the Dead symbols

About day of the Dead symbols

Día de Muertos is kept in Mexico at the end of October and on 1 and 2 November, when, in the belief of the families who keep it, the dead come home to visit. The pages here follow its symbols: the Ofrenda (altar) set up to receive them, the cempasúchil whose petals mark their path, pan de muerto, papel picado, Copal, the sugar skull and La Catrina, the monarch butterfly, the Xoloitzcuintle and the Alebrije. It is a holiday of its own and a living one, and several of its best-known images are younger than they look; each page says which.

A festivity of Mexico’s Indigenous communities

UNESCO first proclaimed the “Indigenous festivity dedicated to the dead” in 2003 and inscribed it on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2008. As practised by Mexico’s Indigenous communities, it commemorates the brief return of dead relatives to Earth. It falls at the end of the yearly cycle of maize, and families lay petals, candles and offerings along the path from the cemetery to the house. UNESCO adds that in these communities the dead are divided by cause of death, age, sex and sometimes profession, and each has a day of their own.

The days follow an order. In Hidalgo, María del Carmen López Ramírez of the state’s autonomous university gives the popular reckoning: the souls of children arrive on the night of 31 October and leave at midday on 1 November, when the adults come, and the visit lasts until midday on 2 November. INPI writes that the ofrenda for the children, the angelitos, is made on 31 October, with white flowers and food without chilli.

Two calendars meeting

The Library of Congress describes Día de Muertos as formed in colonial Mexico, where All Souls’ Day mingled with several Indigenous celebrations of the ancestors; its name means “Day of the Dead” but also “Day of the Ancestors”, and the form “Día de los Muertos” was rarely used in Latin America before the 1960s. UNESCO calls the festivity a fusion of pre-Hispanic rites and Catholic feasts. Before the Spanish, the historian Eva Martínez Román explains, the Mexica had no single date for the dead but several festivities through the year, and where the soul went depended on how a person died: those who drowned to the paradise of Tlaloc, warriors and women who died in childbirth to accompany the sun, and those who died of age or natural causes to Mictlan. INPI sums up the ofrenda the same way: Europeans brought the flowers, wax and candles; Indigenous people added the incense burner with its copal, the food and the cempasúchil.

A holiday of its own

The Library of Congress calls Día de Muertos “a related but different holiday” from Halloween, popular across most of Spanish-speaking America and above all in Mexico. The Halloween symbols keep the two apart, and so do these pages. The historian Agustín Sánchez González regrets what he sees as a growing symbiosis between La Catrina and the Halloween of the rest of the world.

Older and newer

Some of the symbols are very old. Copal was offered in the Templo Mayor of Tenochtitlan, and Sahagún recorded in the sixteenth century the Mexica belief that a dog carried the dead across a river of the underworld. Others are recent. Posada’s skull in a flowered hat was first printed in October 1913, named Calavera Catrina in a book of 1930, and given her long dress by Diego Rivera in a mural of 1947. Pedro Linares, a cartonero in Mexico City, made the first alebrijes in the 1930s, in UNAM’s account; the Museo de Arte Popular has paraded monumental alebrijes since 2007. Mexico City’s Day of the Dead parade was first held in 2016, inspired by the opening scene of the James Bond film Spectre (2015), in which the agent chases a villain through a parade of giant skeletons. And the origin of pan de muerto is disputed: INPI looks for it in pre-Hispanic offerings, while Martínez Román dates it to the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century.

Where the symbols meet

The symbols cross over. In Oaxaca alebrijes are carved from copalillo, the wood of a copal tree, CONABIO notes. A toy dog, the izcuintle, goes on the children’s altar, INPI writes, to help them across the river to Mictlan. The monarchs arrive in the forests of Michoacán and the State of Mexico around 1 and 2 November, and the Purépecha, UNESCO records, consider the butterfly the soul of the dead.