Text/Junyan Qiu Xi Zhai
Halloween is coming, a traditional festival in the West. October 31, the eve of Halloween, is also the most lively time of the festival. Legend has it that on this night, various ghosts and monsters will dress up as children and blend into the crowd to celebrate halloween together. In order to get along better with ghosts, humans will also dress themselves up as ghosts for fun.
In Mexico, November 1 and 2 are also their most important annual day of the dead. However, this is not the same as the traditional Halloween celebration and celebration theme, and it is known as Mexico's "Qingming Festival". Why? Let's take a look.
The Day of the Dead is a combination of Native American culture and Spanish culture. The native Indians believed that only by treating the undead well and letting the undead go home happily for a festival, in the second year, the living would be blessed by the undead, free of disease and disaster, and the crops would be harvested.
After the Spaniards came to the Americas, they combined Halloween in the West, the Day of the Dead in the Indians, and some funeral and sacrificial customs to create today's Day of the Dead.
Today, in Mexico and other Latin American countries, November 1 is a "Young Spirit Day" to remember the deceased child, and the 2nd is a "Spirit Day" to remember the deceased adult.
Both the Day of the Dead and the Qingming Festival commemorate the deceased relatives and friends, so the way of commemoration is also very similar to the Qingming Festival.
Although the Day of the Dead begins on November 1st, on the eve of the Day of the Dead on October 31, Mexicans will bring sacrifices to the cemetery with their entire families to guard the spirits, pay tribute to their deceased relatives, and spend the night with the departed souls. After the church clock had been struck exactly 12 times, the Day of the Dead arrived and people welcomed the undead home.
They set up altars in their homes to welcome the souls of the deceased back home to rest. It is filled with many offerings to guide the souls of deceased loved ones back home: water, food, family portraits and candles (one represents a deceased loved one). If there are children who have died prematurely, some toys are also placed on the altar.
In front of the altar, the Mexicans will also light a koba incense made of resin, and the koba incense will emit a burst of smoke and emit a burst of fragrance, all the way to the sky and to the "land of the dead". It conveys people's praises and prayers, purifying people's hearts with its unique breath. This is also very similar to the incense given to deceased relatives during the Qingming Festival sacrifice in China.
In Mexico, marigolds symbolize the rays of the sun. So from the altar to the tomb site, the petals of marigolds are sprinkled all the way, so that the splendid "flower of the dead" builds a bridge between the real world and the "land of the dead", a road home to visit their loved ones, to guide wandering souls back to their resting place.
Although both the Day of the Dead and the Qingming Festival need to pay tribute to the deceased, unlike the solemn and sad atmosphere of the Chinese Qingming Festival, Mexico believes that the dead relatives have just gone to another world, and they will return to the real world through a bridge made of marigolds on the Day of the Dead to visit the living family, so although they are paying tribute to the dead, they have no sorrow.
They sang and danced, even stayed up all night, celebrating the festival with their dead loved ones through carnivals, and in this way they commemorated their deceased families.
People who attend the Day of the Dead basically dress themselves up as "skeletons". The ancient Native Americans believed that the skeleton was a symbol of death and rebirth, so the skeleton not only represented death, but also symbolized the origin of life. People would wear masks or makeup, paint delicate skull patterns on their faces, and wear clothes printed with white bones on their bodies to parade the streets with floats, dancing to indicate the return of the Holy Spirit.
For those who are still living in the world, the Day of the Dead achieves a "reunion" with deceased loved ones, allowing them to reach a connection with the undead beyond life and death, so that they will never forget the people who left.
If there is one sentence to sum up the Mexican Day of the Dead, it is a national carnival to commemorate death.
The 90th-time Oscar-winning animated film "Dream Quest" takes family, dreams, death and commemoration as the theme, and it is the Mexican Day of the Dead as the background of the story.
From an animated film perspective, this is a very straightforward story with "death" content at its core. It looks at "death" through the eyes of children, and the protagonist, the little boy Miguel, inadvertently walks across the marigold bridge and comes to the "land of the dead" on the Day of the Dead. He found that deceased loved ones lived happily here, but if they were forgotten by their relatives in the real world, they would disappear forever in the "Land of the Dead".
Finally he understood the truth: death is not terrible, it is important not to forget the deceased relatives.
"The deceased is in the coffin, the living are reveling", in the animation, people in both worlds are celebrating the Day of the Dead, looking forward to reuniting with their families in another world, not so much the Day of the Dead is a one-sided commemoration of the deceased by the living, but rather a two-way activity in which the living and the deceased of another world rejoice together.
Octavio Paz, a famous Mexican writer and Nobel laureate in literature, said:
"For people in New York, Paris or London, death is something they don't easily mention because the word burns their lips. Mexicans, however, often pay lip service to death, ridiculing death, sleeping with death, and celebrating death. Death is one of the most beloved toys of Mexicans, the eternal love of Mexicans. ”
This also shows the Mexican philosophy of life: death shows the highest meaning of life; it is the opposite of life, and it is also the complement to life.
Is it more meaningful to commemorate the day of the dead through revelry to commemorate the deceased loved ones than halloween, which is now full of commercial atmosphere?
Feel free to present your views in the comments section.