The dance of death

UNESCO Courier, July, 1984 by Miguel Rojas-Mix

EVERY year on the second of November Mexicans eat death. They consume it in the form of sugar skulls and savour it in confectionery. Children play with death, manipulating skeletons with string and making them dance. They amuse themselves with little figures called padrecitos ("little fathers"), which have a chickpea for a head, or make death jump out of a cardboard coffin like a jack-in-a-box. In fact, the whole country moves to the rhythm of an enormous dance of death: shop windows, cyclists, toys, couples dressed up in wedding costumes. Everything is transformed into a calavera, a word which in Mexican Spanish means not only a skull (as it does in Castilian Spanish) but a whole skeleton.

Eros and Thanatos, love and death. On the second of November death succumbs to the pleasures of life and calls on craftsmen to depict death in order to help those who mourn the dead. In other words death becomes a source of livelihood for the confectioners who fashion the traditional sugar calaveras and inscribe on the foreheads the names of relatives of their customers, and for the potters of Oaxaca, Santa Fe de la laguna and Michoacan who make incense burners for the altars to the dead or floral decorations for tombs. It provides a living for those who make the little black glazed bulls surrounded by candles and zempasuchitl flowers which are found at Puebla, multi-coloured images of souls, earthenware toys with skeleton drummers from Guanajuato, and coaches with musical skeletons from Metepec.

In death two traditions meet to form the basis of the Mexican identity--the indigenous pre-Cortesian tradition, and the Spanish. The former has left us marvellous artefacts such as skulls carved in rock crystal, the finest example of which is Coatlicue, the Aztec goddess of the earth and of life, depicted with a skull-like face. This tradition is preserved in the Mexican sense of life, which is quite different from that of the Old World. For the Mexican, death is not something frightful but a necessary prelude to resurrection. In the cosmic cycle it engenders life.

Death is also embraced in the European--especially the Spanish--mystical tradition, in the danse macabre evoked in the poetry of Francois Villon and the engravings of Holbein and popularized in Latin America through Baroque art. The calavera called in question the power and riches of this world. It is shown carrying away kings, bishops and peasants and thus restoring human equality. As the fifteenth-century Spanish poet Jorge Manrique wrote:

Popes and emperors

Prelates and poor shepherds

There, death treats them all alike.

In the engravings of Jose Guadelupe Posada death is transformed into an image of the Mexican people. The pelona ("bald one") as she is popularly called, goes off to the Revolution with Zapata, brandishes a sword, weeps, dances, eats spicy meat dishes, and gets drunk on pulque. Posada's skeletons are corrosive precisely because they form part of an ancient tradition of social criticism associated with death. In his La Quijotita su Prima (1818) Fernandez de Lizardi tells us that it was the custom on the second of November to send leaflets to politicians and people of standing anticipating the dates of their deaths and presenting an obituary notice. These leaflets which described how the "deceased" had lived were called calaveras.