Día de los Muertos: Mesoamerican Roots

It is mid-October. Mexico's annual remembrance of the Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) is fast approaching. This is our fourth autumn in Mexico. It has taken me this long to gain even a basic understanding of the rich cultural context that gives meaning to this powerful annual ritual whose roots extend deep into the cultural soil of Mesoamerica.

So let's start at the beginning. We have written about the vital role of geography in Mexico's cultural and political development. Mexico's vulnerability to the vicissitudes of natural phenomena—volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, cyclones from the Pacific, hurricanes from the Caribbean and Atlantic, floods and drought—conveyed to the land's early inhabitants a keen awareness that they were not in charge; in fact, they were at the mercy of la naturalezza (forces of nature).

World of Spirit and World of Nature

In their book, The Masks of the Spirit, Roberta and Peter Markman describe the theology underlying the Mesoamerican world view:

"Rather than imagining a god separate from his creation, the thinkers of Mesoamerica conceived of the divine as the life-force itself, constantly creating, ordering, sustaining, destroying and recreating the world" (p. 111).

Again the Markmans:

"Creation is seen in a series of organic metaphors that bring together seeds and bones, the sun and birth, man and plants in a complex web of meaning that suggests the equivalence of all life in the world of the spirit—a web of meaning that sustains the world of nature. Life in this world, the myth suggests, must be understood in terms of that underlying spirit." [emphasis added]

In Mesoamerican culture, then, the world of spirit, mysterious and inaccessible, was synonymous with the Life-Force, while the world of nature inevitably ended in death. Permanence was found in the world of spirit; the world of nature offered ceaseless change culminating in death, but a death that nonetheless offered passage to the world of spirit.

Addressing this theme, an Aztec poet wrote,

Let us consider things as lent to us, O friends,
only in passing are we here on earth,
tomorrow or the day after,
as Your heart desired, Giver of Life,
we shall go, my friends, to His home.

The conclusion is inescapable: beyond is the place where one lives. To the poet, permanence was to be found in the world of spirit; this world offered nothing more than flux ending in death.

The great question for Mesoamerican thinkers was to explain how the gap between the two worlds was to be bridged—put differently, how the existence of life and spirit was to be reconciled. Though life is transitory, humans nonetheless had to be enabled to participate in a ritual relationship with the source of the spirit (Life-Force) that animates human activity.

Their solution was a creator god who had no other characteristic than creativity itself. Located in the center of the world of spirit, he was known as Ometeotl (literally, two-god) by the Aztecs and Hunab Kuh by the Maya.

Rarely represented in figural form, Ometeotl played little part in ritual. But as the dual, bisexual god who ruled over the highest heaven of the Nahuatl cosmos, Ometeotl embodied a key Mesoamerican principle: duality, which recognizes the interdependence of opposites (light-dark, night-day, life-death, order-disorder, etc.). In China, this principle is yin and yang.

Creation Myths of Mesoamerica

The creation myths of various Mesoamerican people are more explicit tales that link this underlying duality to the creation of humans and the maintenance of their daily life. They are efforts to transform the vulnerability of their communities—completely dependent on the planting and harvesting of maíz, corn—into a secure realm.

Here's how the Maya document, the Popul Vuh, describes the creation of first man and first woman:

And so then they put into words
        the Creation,
        the shaping
        of our first mother and father.
Only yellow corn
        and white corn were their bodies.
Only food were the legs
And arms of man. 

                                     Popul Vuh

The myth makes explicit the dependence of human welfare on successful corn crops. First mother and father, in fact, are themselves made of corn. By extension, as sons and daughters of corn, so is the current community made of the corn they take in.

In the Aztec (Méxica) creation myth (Aztec Cosmovision: Stone of Five Suns), the gods must try five times to successfully produce beings capable of speech—and thus capable of praising the gods. In the creation of the Fifth Sun, Quetzalcóatl (Plumed Serpent) and a brother god descend to the Underworld to retrieve the bones of the previous population. Once back on the earth's surface, they grind the bones like corn and sprinkle the bone meal with their own blood to create today's people.

But even after the creation of people, there is still no sun. The gods meet in darkness gathered around a great fire at Teotihuacan. Two gods volunteer to throw themselves into the fire in order to create the Fifth Sun. One god is beautiful and haughty; the other is diseased and lowly.

The lowly god doesn't hesitate to throw himself upon the pyre when its heat is strongest but the haughty god hesitates, so the fire is less intense when he jumps. In this way, the lowly god who did not hesitate to sacrifice himself becomes the sun, and the haughty god who hesitated becomes the moon.

This sacrifice of the gods for humans at the moment of creation establishes the central idea that humans, reciprocally, are expected to sacrifice to the gods in order to assure the continued survival of the community.

The Cycle of the Sun: Birth, Death and Rebirth

Mesoamericans perceived the cosmos as centered on the human world, around which the sun revolved in its daily cycle, rising to the zenith of Heaven, then descending into night and the Underworld.

My favorite depiction of this spatial arrangement is at Toniná, in Chiapas, where the central staircase (horizontal stones at the center) represents the axis mundi connecting the Earthly plane (in the middle) to Heaven above and the Underworld below:

Spatial representation of Cosmovision at Toniná 

• Heaven (inverted pyramid above), with its thirteen levels; 
• Earthly plane (horizontal band at midpoint); and the 
• Underworld ( lower pyramid), with its nine levels. 

The god Ometéotl resided at the highest level of Heaven. The Underworld existed below the surface of the earth and was accessible through caves and springs.

The sun’s path was understood to begin at sunrise in the East and to pass through thirteen levels, or stations—six up to Heaven’s zenith at station seven, before descending through six more stations, for a total of thirteen. At sunset the sun begins its passage down through the nine levels, or stations, of the Underworld—passing its nadir at midnight before beginning its ascent of four more stations culminating in next day's dawn. Including the stations at the level of the earth—sunrise and sunset—the sun’s daily journey covered twenty-four stations, comparable to our own 24-hour day.

The passage of the sun through the Underworld was deemed perilous. Sunrise was not guaranteed—instead, ever present was the possibility that the sun might be devoured by the gods of the night and fail to rise. This primal fear led to various sacrificial rituals designed to assure the successful daily return of the sun. The essential duality—day-night; light-dark—is perhaps the most basic duality in Mesoamerican thought.

Passage of the Deceased through the Underworld

When humans died, it was believed that all but a few had to follow the night sun’s path and travel for a year through the Underworld before reuniting with the Life-Force in the Heavens. Warriors who died in battle and women who died in child birth went straight to Heaven.

The rituals of Dia de los Muertos address this Underworld journey of the deceased. Later posts relate preparations for Día de los Muertos and its ritual observances. For more information about books cited here, see Best Reads.