What is Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead)?
Day of the Dead is the holiday that most reflects the culture of Mexico.  In the pre-Hispanic Mexican culture, life/death is viewed as a single reality, and all of life is engaged in the perpetual process of creation and destruction.  Like people everywhere, Mexicans fear death, but we have a special relationship with it; we mock it, joke with it, tease it, dance with it, create art about it, and most of all honor it publicly.

When to Build your Altar (Ofrenda)

The tradition of Día de los Muertos is that on November 2^nd, the souls of the deceased can visit their beloved families in this world.  The lights of candles and petals of zempoaxochitil (marigolds) guide each soul to its own altar and house so they can celebrate and consume what has been prepared for them.  Altars are typically constructed on November 1st.  Many altars in private homes in San Miguel de Allende are open to the public on the evening of November 1st.

Materials for your Altar

• Cardboard boxes
• Papel picado – tissue paper with cut-out shapes
• Table to form the base of your altar
• White table cloth
• Photo of the person(s) to be honored
• White candles – 1 for each person to be honored
• Copal incense
• Flowers – zempoaxochitil (Marigolds) are the traditional flower used on the altar.   Zempoaxochitil is also known as the flower with 400 lives from the Aztec traditions.
• Sugar skulls or candies.  The sugar represents the sweetness of life and the skull the sadness of death.
• Food and drink.  Traditional meals and favorites of the departed are prepared and placed on the altar.  Some of the traditional foods you see in Mexico are tamales, agua fresca (fruit-flavored water) and atole (hot chocolate-flavored corn drink), tequila and pulque.
• Basin of water, soap and towel for the departed spirit to cleanse before joining in the festivities.
• Pitcher of water and glass to quench the thirst of the departed one.
• Photos of patron saints or the Virgin of Guadalupe

Step One:

Cover the boxes with paper picado.

Step Two:

Place the boxes on the table in 7 tiers forming a pyramid.  Each tier represents levels of the underworld.

Step Three:

Place objects on the tiers – photos, candles, flowers, sugar skulls, incense, water, food and drink.

Step Four:

Light the candles and incense then prepare a path from the front door to the altar with petals of marigold to guide your loved one to the altar.

Learn More about Día de los Muertos

• Watch a video of Día de los Muertos altars and images from San Miguel de Allende
• Read more about Day of the Dead traditions in Mexico.
• Read “Día de los Muertos: Transforming Ourselves Upward, and consider this as a time for inner reflection.

Dia de los Muertos in Mexico

Visit Oaxaca, Patzquaro or San Miguel de Allende to participate in traditional Dias de los Muertos celebrations. While you’re in San Miguel, stay at Casa Quetzal. Owner and artist Cynthia Price has a special Dia de los Muertos package for guests that include your very own altar-building kit and instructions for constructing an altar while you are in San Miguel. Visit the hotel now….

About the Author

Maria Teresa Valenzuela is an indigenous spiritual teacher and healer from an enduring lineage of shamanic healers and curanderos in the Sierra Madre of Chihuahua, Mexico. Taught the shamanic medicine way by her grandmother and father, she brings to her work a wealth of knowledge in Mesoamerican wisdom, myths, and traditional forms of indigenous medicine and healing. Drawing on her indigenous heritage, career as a registered nurse, life experiences, and traditional training as a “Mujer de la Medicina,” Maria Teresa serves as a unique bridge across traditions and cultures. She travels throughout the United States, Mexico, and Central America sharing her healing gifts and wisdom.

Maria Teresa conducts spiritual workshops, retreats and individual healing work using indigenous healing methods and visionary medicine plants.

Email Maria Teresa: laikaraiya@yahoo.com

The tradition of Día de los Muertos is that on November 2^nd, the souls of the deceased can visit their beloved families in this world. The lights of candles and petals of zempoaxochitil (marigolds) guide each soul to its own altar and house so they can celebrate and consume what has been prepared for them. The imagery in this video shows the beauty and magic of San Miguel de Allende during Day of the Dead.

Día de los Muertos is the holiday that most reflects the culture of Mexico. It is appealing to some foreigners and appalling to others. In the pre-Hispanic Mexican culture, engaged in the perpetual process of creation and destruction. Like people everywhere, Mexicans fear death, but we have a special relationship with it: we mock it, joke with it, tease it, dance with it, create art about it, and most of all honor it publicly.

The spirited Days of the Dead images that began in the Mexican popular culture are slowly being embraced in the U.S. Calacas, dancing skeletons, and other death images called muertos, adorn some of the most beautiful and sophisticated homes, north for the border. They are represented both, in folk art that is displayed and household items that are in use daily.

The ancient Aztecs considered death the beginning of liked, so the maximum aspiration for the culture was a glorious death. The most honored death, la muerte florida or the flowering death, could only be achieved by dying through ritual sacrifice to the Gods, dying in combat or dying in childbirth. They believed that all souls lived on after the forty day journey of death was completed. They returned to earth for one day each year, seeking nourishment, community and remembrance. It is important for Mexican families to maintain a good relationship with their dead relatives because it is the dead who bring good fortune to the living.

The Aztecs honored their dead with fiestas and rituals connected to the season of harvest. The ancient ritual calendar, still in use today, designates November 1st, the “Little” Feast for the Dead, as the day to pay tribute to the deceased children and November 2snd, the “Great” Feast for the Dead, to pay tribute to the deceased adults. Both days are celebrated with beautiful, artful and touching traditional altars created especially for the occasion – in homes businesses and cemeteries. The visible preparations for the celebrations begin in med-October. A great effort is made in the preparation of traditional foods and the altar, known as the ofrenda. Artifacts carried over from the pre-Colombian Aztec culture, but still relevant in modern times: candles, masks, flowers sugar skulls, papel picado, skeletons, traditional foods, favorite drinks and vices, copal incense, bread, handmade toys, children’s clothing, household images of saints and musical instruments are used to create the beautiful ofrendas.

The journey from Mictlan, the Aztec name for the underworld, is long, tiring and treacherous. A wash basin, town, soap and a mirror are placed near the ofrenda so the departed spirit can cleans themselves before joining in the festivities. A glass of water is always set out for the soul to quench its thirst. Other beverages served at the feast are agua fresca, fruit-flavored water and stole, the popular hot, chocolate-flavored corn drink sold on the streets of Mexico. Decorated sugar skulls are an essential part of the altar and, in the weeks preceding the holiday, women work around the clock to prepare the sugar creations sold in the famous sugar markets of Patzcuaro and San Miguel de Allende. The names of the departed are written on the sugar skulls, but also can be found in these mercados. Sweets are particularly essential for the muertitos, dead little ones, as are newly purchased toys. The abundance of coconut in brown sugar syrup, ensure that muertitos will need to visit a dentist upon their return to the other side.

Traditional meals, comprised of favorite foods of the deceased are set to in various clay pots. They might include the finest ears of the harvest corn, home-made tamales, rich mole chicken, chili adobe sauce, red rice, hand-rolled enchiladas, fresh tortillas and delicious fruits of the season. A dish of salt, symbolizing purification, is always included. The pan de muertos; rich egg breads made in the shape of animas are placed on the altars. They are decorated with sugar angels or baker’s clay images of Jesus and other saints and also bear the names of the deceased. It is believed that the soul can taste the food through the smells and that the spirit consumes the essence of the meal. When the spirit has had its fill, the feast is then shared with relatives and visiting friends.

The ofrenda is usually set up on a table or on a straw mat on the floor. Every item on the altar has some significance. The yellow marigold, called zempoazochitl in Aztec, is the flower of death, and the markets are transformed into brilliant fields of gold in the days leading up to the holiday. The marigold carries the smell of death, which leads the deceased home. Nube and magenta terciopelp, baby’s breath and win-colored coxcombe respectively, are also used. A copal incense burner, placed in the center, produces a pungent wordy aroma that also guides the dead to the ofrenda. Images of favorite saints and candles decorated with ribbons are placed on the altar, one for each deceased family member. As the candle is lit, the names of the departed are called out, as if to say “Come back home, my son, your family awaits you”. The flame of the candle lights the way. Family photographs and objects that the departed valued in the life are set out to give the dead the feeling of being home again. The dead care about the material things of their former life and are comforted by their favorite possessions. Huaraches, rebozos, straw hats, saddles and carving tools are some of the items you might see on a campesino altar. Silver jewelry, silk shawls and a statue of the bullfighter might be found on an urban altar. Newly pressed clothes are placed on a chair below a wall mirror. Just as in life, each soul has a bit of vanity and wants to be admired during the fiesta.

The Aztec custom of using papel picado in religious rituals continues, curtains of paper banners, papel de chino picado, with cut-out designs of skeletons, flowers, birds and coffins are hung behind the altar. Purple banners represent mourning and hot pink or bright orange signify the joyful return to the land of the living. In many parts of Mexico, families spread a floral carpet on the ground leading to their home as additional insurance that the spirit will not get lost along the way. The objects on the ofrenda are meant to share the pleasures of life with the dead. Pulque, beer or tequila is served as a reminder of their good times on earth. A smoker will be treated with a favorite brand of cigarettes and Coca Cola is inevitable. The ofrenda is an offering and a visual expression of the gratitude, love and veneration the family feels for the visiting spirit.

In the Mexican tradition, no soul is left unacknowledged. On October 27th, the souls with no living relatives are welcomed back into the community by hanging bread and water on the doors. October 28th is the day of the Accidentados, those souls that died in accidents or through violence. October 30th, Los Niños Limbos, the souls of the children that died in childbirth before being baptized and are thus free of sin. An Aztec legend tells of a paradise where a tree of human breasts provides mothers’ mild for the Angelitos. They enter the earth at noon on their day and must depart by noon the following day. On November 1st, the church bells toll to announce the arrival of the elder traveling spirits, the Faithful Dead.

At sundown processions of families arrive at the cemeteries laden with an abundance of flowers, overflowing picnic baskets, musical instruments and even boom boxes for entertaining the souls during the night long vigil of communion. Gravestones are cleaned, fresh plants and flowers are placed in the newly turned soil, and grave markers are given a fresh coat of colorful paint. The graves are extravagantly decorated with flowers, bread, foods and fruits. Families reminisce with the departed, recounting events of the past year. Candles flicker and the scent of copal incense penetrates the air. The dead walk among the living, dancing to the music of live mariachis. Some families pray the Rosary or red the Bible aloud. The following day the fiesta continues in a more social atmosphere of gossip, picnics, drinking and music. The celebration ends on the evening of November 2, but the memories linger in the souls of the dead who can return to the afterlife, knowing that they have not been forgotten by those they love. Viva México!

Learn More about Day of the Dead

• Watch a video of Day of the Dead with altars and images from San Miguel de Allende
• Learn how to build your own Day of the Dead altar
• Read “Día de los Muertos: Transforming Ourselves Upward, and consider this as a time for inner reflection.

Dia de los Muertos in Mexico

Visit Oaxaca, Patzquaro or San Miguel de Allende to participate in traditional Dias de los Muertos celebrations. While you’re in San Miguel, stay at Casa Quetzal. Owner and artist Cynthia Price has a special Dia de los Muertos package for guests that include your very own altar-building kit and instructions for constructing an altar while you are in San Miguel. Visit the hotel now….

About the Author

Maria Teresa Valenzuela is an indigenous spiritual teacher and healer from an enduring lineage of shamanic healers and curanderos in the Sierra Madre of Chihuahua, Mexico. Taught the shamanic medicine way by her grandmother and father, she brings to her work a wealth of knowledge in Mesoamerican wisdom, myths, and traditional forms of indigenous medicine and healing. Drawing on her indigenous heritage, career as a registered nurse, life experiences, and traditional training as a “Mujer de la Medicina,” Maria Teresa serves as a unique bridge across traditions and cultures. She travels throughout the United States, Mexico, and Central America sharing her healing gifts and wisdom.

Maria Teresa conducts spiritual workshops, retreats and individual healing work using indigenous healing methods and visionary medicine plants.

Email Maria Teresa: laikaraiya@yahoo.com

Photo credits: Susie Blauser – www.sanmigueldeallendephotos.com

For Day of the Dead, consider mourning and celebrating the parts of yourself that have died—or need to die.

To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.
- John Henry Newman

For two weeks, a cluster of mom-and-pop vendors in the Plaza Civica in San Miguel de Allende, a few blocks from our house, have been selling human skulls, fruit, bones, plates of food like tamales and enchiladas and chicken molé, and skeletons in coffins—all in pastel colors and made of sugar, and all no larger than the palm of your hand.

These are tokens of Day of the Dead, one of the most solemn and, paradoxically, one of the most cheerful fiestas on the Mexican calendar.
The candied food goes onto home altars; real food, tequila, Coca-Cola, candles, and armloads of orange marigolds and chamomile are taken to the family plot at the cemetery on la Día de los Muertos. They are placed on gravestones with pictures of the departed, and everyone sits and reminisces about—and with—the dead person. All day, with candles blazing, children running around, and people quietly chatting and chuckling, the dead come alive again.

The pervasive religion of Mexico teaches that one lives a good life, and then one goes to heaven to be with God and the angels. But Day of the Dead is about the dead returning to earth and gathering with the living in the most inclusive and complete of family reunions.

The specific Christian feast is All Soul’s Day, directing the faithful to pray for the repose of those who have gone before us into eternity. Its sensibility, though, is pre-Christian, perhaps prehistoric. This is ritual rooted in a tradition that transcends religion, and goes to a kind of universal “earth spirituality.”

We can join in this most mysterious commemoration by internalizing its essence. In this way, Day of the Dead can become for us an occasion for reflecting not only on our own mortality, but on how we can “die” each day to the personal past of ourselves and be reborn into a new, higher sense of Self.

This year for Day of the Dead, I am considering building an altar not to a dead relative, but to myself—the part of me that has already died or needs to die. I am thinking about making an altar for all the dead dreams of the past and for the past itself.

On my own Day of the Dead altar, I will be placing a number of never-fulfilled aspirations, laying them at last to rest. In with the candy skulls and sugar-fruits are going those two manuscripts that never got published, the friendship that never was cultivated and finally died on the vine, the relationship of my early years that somehow never reached a proper closure. Among the photos of my mother and father and brother—all in heaven now—I will be setting the illusion of chatting in a TV studio with Oprah about my newest book, the fantasy of explaining the differences between religion and spirituality to Larry King, and the daydream of impressing Charlie Rose.

There with the candles and marigold petals and the shot-glass of tequila will be my musings about winning the lottery, touring the temples of India, going on a cruise to Alaska, seeing a Shakespeare play at the Old Vic in London, dining on the Orient Express en route from Paris to Istanbul, being recognized by Brad Pitt with a tight handshake and a big bear-hug, flying first-class to Rome.

Into the little sugar coffin I will set my dreams of slipping easily into a pair of size 32 Levi 501s and of swimming laps for 30 minutes without stopping to rest, and of growing two inches taller. Mingled in with the plates of imitation enchiladas I will be laying my regrets over past failures, my irritation over having to wear reading glasses, my frustration with the arrogance of literary agents, my depression over not having been asked to stand up in public and receive the applause of my peers for my obvious and stellar accomplishments, my sinking disappointment that my cousins, all the family I have left, do not stay in closer touch with me.

All these things I am releasing may yet come to pass in my life, but they haven’t happened up to now, and holding onto them in a kind of personal fantasy future only makes me feel sour and brittle. Letting go of them is liberating and, ironically, seems to open up the possibility of having newer, ever better things come flooding into my experience.

The wisdom of Day of the Dead is that all things—us included—have a season; when the season is over, the leaf needs to fall and the spent flower needs to dry up. But its additional wisdom is that the ‘dead’ flower contains a seed that also drops to the ground to become the glorious story of the next season.

And the miracle is that the seed will create not just another flower, but a whole bush of flowers. That is a future—not a fantasy—that we can count on.

About the Author
Joseph Dispenza is a founder of LifePath in San Miguel de Allende. He is the author of several books, including God On Your Own: Finding a Spiritual Path Outside Religion, and is a Spiritual Counselor in private practice. joseph@lifepathretreats.com