by Sarah Murray
So here we find a different attitude to the fate of the body. Unlike the mummies of the Sicilians or Egyptians, these pieces of tomb art make no claims that the corpse will survive death—quite the opposite in fact. Corporeal decay is the whole point of these disturbing sculptures. And looking at these gruesome representations of putrefaction, you can’t help wondering why anyone would want to be depicted like that. Some suggest that these graphic displays were meant to emphasize the miracle of the Second Coming. Never mind the state of your remains, they seemed to say, come the Resurrection, Christ could put you back together again.
Visions of corporeal corruption also served as warnings of what was to come. “He that will sadly behold me with his eye, may see his own morrow and learn for to die,” reads the inscription on John Baret’s tomb. Most powerfully, perhaps, these marble figures speak of equality in death. Mortality, they say, cares not whether you’re a king or a pauper. Death is the ultimate enforcer of democracy.
Perhaps, like so many of us, these medieval nobles were grappling with the meaning of death, and trying to prepare themselves for it by picturing it. Did that help? Who knows? Still, whatever effect these tombs were intended to have on viewers, they betray a curious obsession for human decay. Their rotting bodies and corpses riddled with worms, mice, snakes, and other creatures make even the most disturbing of Oaxaca’s skeletal ghouls look benign.
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After it’s buried, a human body starts to deteriorate immediately. Soon, the corpse becomes a festering ecosystem. No frogs are present at the corporeal feast (the medieval sculptors got that bit wrong), but the body provides nourishment for a host of other organisms. Sir Henry Thompson, the Victorian champion of cremation, puts it eloquently: “Already a thousand changes have commenced,” he writes. “Forces innumerable have attacked the dead. The rapidity of the vulture, with its keen scent for animal decay, is nothing to that of Nature’s ceaseless agents now at full work before us.” Thompson might put it poetically, but putrefaction is not something many of us want to contemplate.
For the curious, however, here’s roughly how it goes: bodily corruption is categorized in several stages—putrefaction, black putrefaction, butyric fermentation, and dry decay. In the first part (self-digestion), the natural enzymes that inhabited the body while it was alive start attacking their host, breaking down the cells that keep us in one piece, generating a liquid that causes the skin to peel off and creates those unfortunate leaks that have precipitated so many funeral industry innovations.
Following in the footsteps of the human enzymes, invasive tomb raiders such as maggots, beetles, and mites also start to devour the body. Meanwhile, fed by the new supply of bodily liquids, the corpse’s bacterial colonies—what Mary Roach calls “the ground troops of putrefaction”—start to multiply. When we die, explains Roach in Stiff, these bacteria no longer feed on what we’ve just eaten. They feed on us, producing gas in the process. Since mechanisms the body normally uses to expel gas have stopped working, it builds up inside the body. This is what causes a corpse to bloat.
When most of the soft flesh has gone, it’s time for beetles to take over from the maggots, attacking tougher stuff, such as skin and muscles. Meanwhile, the body continues to dry out and, if in contact with the earth, it becomes covered in mold. Hair, which takes longer to decompose since it’s made of keratin, a protein, finally disappears—although in the right conditions hair can survive for centuries. Depending on where it’s buried, it can be months before the organic part of the body has disappeared, leaving only the skeleton.
In the light of all this, skeletal remains seem—to my mind anyway—the least disturbing state for a dead body to be in. And while everyone from medieval artists and Halloween revelers to heavy metal bands with names like Exhumed, Impaled Nazarene, and Obscene Eulogy might like to use skeletons to frighten their audiences, set next to decaying flesh, these bony frames don’t look so scary. In fact, with her feather boa and flamboyant hat, Mexico’s La Catrina makes being a skeleton look rather good fun.
No, it’s the process of reaching her state—the bit between the last heartbeat and the dry bones—that worries me. Having seen the grotesque cadaver tombs of medieval Europe and read the descriptions of the process of human putrefaction, I’m not drawn to the idea of being left below ground, my flesh slowly disintegrating at the hands of bacteria, maggots, and beetles. And while I’ve never feared of being interred alive, I now wish I hadn’t read the terrifying descriptions in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Premature Burial.” I’m becoming convinced that burial is not for me.
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Unpicking the cocktail of cultural, religious, and artistic influences behind Mexico’s Day of the Dead celebrations is no easy matter. The first connection is obvious. Falling on November 1 and 2, the festival is directly linked to All Souls’ and All Saints’ Days, celebrated by Catholics around the world, including Mexico’s former colonial rulers. In Spain on All Souls’ Day, families flock to cemeteries, as they do in Mexico, taking with them flowers and candles to put on the graves.
Yet the customs and skeletal iconography of Day of the Dead have roots in cultural phenomena that predate the arrival of the conquistadors and Spanish Catholicism. In the Museo Rufino Tamayo, one of Oaxaca’s loveliest museums, you can see the power of the skeleton in the pre-Hispanic imagination. Amid the artifacts on display are ten simplified Aztec stone skulls hanging on a wall in two vertical rows and, in a glass case, a decorated human jawbone.
Most startling is a ceramic figure seated on a throne. With an exposed rib cage, round staring eyes, and an ornamental crown, this is a pre-Columbian skeleton king. He was created long before the Black Death swept across Europe and at a time where no contact with that continent existed. Yet he wouldn’t look out of place in one of Guy Marchant’s fifteenth-century Danse Macabre woodcuts or amid today’s skeletal trinkets in the Mercado Abastos.
Skulls and skeletons appear in pre-Columbian sculpture. Take Central Mexico’s tzompantli (rows of carved stone skulls). You find them at Tula, the thirteenth-century capital of the Toltec empire, where there’s also a wall depicting serpents consuming human skeletons. These have the same “lanky limbs” and “prominent joints” as the skeleton dolls found in Mexican markets today, notes anthropologist Stanley Brandes. Of course, none of the irreverent humor of the Day of the Dead skeletons appears in these carvings—perhaps unsurprisingly so, since many are at sites where human sacrifices would have taken place. But the images may have left their mark nonetheless.
Meanwhile, the Europe’s Danse Macabre imagery made its way to the New World in the sixteenth century, when the conquistadors arrived, bringing with them their religious art.
In a museum at Toluca, in southwest Mexico, the decorations on a funerary catafalque (a raised platform on which high-ranking individuals lay in state) show animated skeletons, some dressed up and engaged in various activities—writing at a desk, firing a cannon, helping a nun to card wool, riding in a carriage, walking bent over a cane, and wielding a scythe. There’s no skeletal midwife assisting at the birth of a skeletal baby amid these decorative figures, but you feel she’d fit right in.
Both pre-Columbian and Spanish peoples held feasts for their dead. The Aztecs even created effigies from food. In one Aztec tradition, wooden images of people who drowned or died in ways that ruled out cremation were covered in dough and placed on altars. Meanwhile, in Europe, seventeenth-century Spanish Catholics baked special bread for the dead on All Souls’ Day, as well as small, sweet pastries known as panellets, or “little breads,” which are still prepared in Catalonia.
Yet the pink candy skulls, skeleton dolls, and Catrinas may owe their prominence in Mexican craft and culture to something darker, too—demographic catastrophe. For when the Spanish arrived on the continent, they brought with them their diseases—not only smallpox but also illnesses such as the flu that to locals, who had never encountered them, proved deadly. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in th
eir own version of the Black Death, indigenous American people suffered a series of devastating epidemics, wiping out huge chunks of the native population.
Writes academic David Stannard: “That is why, as one historian aptly has said, far from the heroic and romantic heraldry that customarily is used to symbolize the European settlement of the Americas, the emblem most congruent with reality would be a pyramid of skulls.” So equally important in fostering macabre imagery in early colonial Mexico was what Brandes calls the “ubiquitous presence of death.”
And perhaps there’s something more universal in the skull mania that breaks out in Mexico every November—our endless fascination for the human cranium. Skulls have physical and philosophical potency. As three-dimensional objects, they have a sculptural beauty. Each is unique. The three wiggly lines that appear where the cranium’s different sections meet are like fingerprints—no two are the same. But it’s their features to which we’re so often drawn—gaping black eye sockets, empty recesses, and grinning jaws that can’t easily be disassociated from the face of a living human.
Former guardians of the brain and the organs of the senses, skulls also seem to represent the spiritual nucleus of the individuals who once occupied them—so much so that, at times, we can’t help talking to them, as Hamlet does when he addresses the skull of Yorick, the king’s jester. “Where be your gibes now,” Hamlet demands, “your gambols, your songs, your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now to mock your own grinning?”
Modern artists often play on our powerful association with skulls. In Picasso’s prints and paintings, they become abstract shapes, particularly in his cubist work. Yet the staring black eyes and toothy grins have the same striking impact as they would in a more realistic depiction.
More recently, of course, it was not only the 8,500 gems he used that brought Damien Hirst, the prominent British artist, global media attention when in 2007 he unveiled his spectacular diamond-encrusted skull, a work entitled For the Love of God. Unlike the candy craniums in Mexican markets, Hirst’s creation (which eventually sold for £50 million) has genuine teeth and dazzles so brightly that it’s hard to gaze upon. Still, the artwork sparkling with diamonds and the Mexican calavera sparkling with sugar crystals both take as their inspiration the same object—the remains of a human head.
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One evening, I head down the hill from the Hotel Azucenas into town to see what’s going on. Well, that’s not quite accurate. I’m actually driven by the thought of a large margarita, and I remember from a previous visit that they make excellent ones at an open-air bar opposite the nineteenth-century French bandstand in the Zocalo, an elegant colonial square just south of Avenida Independencia. The bar’s still there. And I’m not sure how much tequila the barman put in my drink, but for the rest of the evening I seem to be part of a Danse Macabre of my own.
Heading off in search of a restaurant, I run into a procession of students dressed in skeleton, devil, and monster outfits cavorting wildly, whooping, and screaming as they proceed down the cobbles accompanied by a small band. Meanwhile, in the Zocalo, just in front of the church on one side of the square, a stately open-air dance is taking place to the sound of a large brass band orchestra. Elegant old couples in their Sunday best shuffle around alongside mad-looking devils in bright red outfits and a host of skeletons, including one in a white bridal outfit and straw hat.
The dancers move with measured precision to the slow tangos and bossa novas of the band. Every so often, a man in a suit holding a microphone interjects with announcements and everyone stops to watch individual couples perform in front of the band. Finally, just before the last dance, prizes are awarded. Appropriately enough, one of the devils wins a microwave and the skeleton bride gets a set of saucepans.
Meanwhile, inside the cathedral, a choir and an orchestra are performing Mozart’s Requiem Mass. The music has reached that dark and urgent moment when the choir sings at full volume. With the doors of the great building wide open, trumpets and cheering from the festivities in the plaza outside blast down the nave and rattle around the transepts, competing with Mozart for attention. Every so often, great bangs—which I’m hoping are fireworks—bounce off the ancient stones. I almost expect to see a red devil hanging off one of the church’s huge chandeliers. The mad musical cacophony continues throughout the night, with skeleton dancers romping through the streets to the music of an assortment of brass bands, student orchestras, and drummers.
You might think dancing and death would make unlikely bedfellows. But in some cultures, dancing is at the heart of the funeral itself. I first encountered this at an Ashanti funeral party in Kumasi, a city in southern central Ghana. In a big open enclosure, tents and seating were arranged on all four sides with a shrine in the middle covered in white fabric and decorated with flowers commemorating the deceased.
Visitors arrived dressed in fabulous outfits in red, for members of the immediate family, and, for everyone else, a stylish matte black fabric printed with glossy black designs. For the women, flamboyant dresses and large turbans were de rigeur, while the men looked magnificent in toga-style robes. They’d be the African equivalent of ancient Greek senators if it weren’t for the occasional pair of Gucci sunglasses or Rolex watch.
At each new arrival, the drummers started beating frantically on their instruments and, to greet the most important visitors, a dancer would come forward to offer a welcome, prancing in front of them in a kind of ritualized bowing and scraping. As the party got going, the dancing and drumming intensified, with set pieces in which individual dancers would become wrapped up in strange, sinuous movements, placing their feet slowly and deliberately on the ground as if marking out their territory (this low-impact dance, creating maximum visual effect with minimal physical input, is sensible, given West Africa’s hot, humid climate). When inspired, members of the assembled crowd would join them.
Best of all were a group of Muslim guests (one of the female members of the deceased’s family had married into a Muslim tribe). The men were elegantly attired, carrying metal sticks and wearing long, heavily pleated smock-like shirts in colorful striped fabric. With white caps or more luxurious velvet floppy hats, they gave the appearance of a medieval band of minstrels. The smock shirts came into their own when the men started dancing. “They dance with their dresses,” said the woman next to me, and she was absolutely right. As they twisted and turned, the lower half of the smocks fanned outward, turning their wearers into spectacular human spinning tops.
In the 1930s, British anthropologist Godfrey Wilson came across funerary dancing when studying the death rites of the Nyakyusa people of East Africa. Wilson found the events “very jolly” compared to funerals back home, with the men obliged to dance on and off in the days leading up to the burial ceremony. There was lamenting, too. But as the female mourners’ wailing trailed off, the men’s dancing intensified, with more and more joining in, all wearing skirts and ankle bells. The idea, explained Wilson, was to frighten off evil spirits as the deceased headed off to the next life.
Some might dance for their dead. But Madagascans actually dance with them. Like Day of the Dead, Madagascar’s famadihana or “bone turning” ceremony is a riotous occasion. But unlike the skeletal figures dancing through the streets of Oaxaca and other Mexican cities, the bones being paraded around in Madagascar are real.
Every five or seven years after the death of a relative, during the dry season in July and August, the Merina people of Madagascar take their dead out from their resting places and wrap the bones in silk to keep them warm. Rather touchingly, if a husband and wife have reached a certain stage of decay, their bones are combined, reuniting spouses separated at death. Families eat, drink, and then dance around with their ancestors hoisted up onto their shoulders, occasionally tossing them exuberantly up into the air before eventually returning them to their tombs. It’s a great big seven-year party for the dead.
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Every evening
when I return to the Hotel Azucenas, it’s good to see the picture of my father on its colorful decorated altar, to say hello again to the figure standing in the wintry Dorset landscape. On November 2, hundreds of families will be doing the same thing beside the graves of their difuntos. In Oaxaca, unlike other places in Mexico where all-night vigils are more common, this final part of the Dia de los Muertos takes place during the day. And for many Oaxacans, the place to go is the Pantéon Général, the town’s main cemetery.
The Pantéon Général sits at the edge of town, removed from the hum of the city’s traffic. Here, the streets still cleave to Cortés’s grid but grand stone plazas and ornate classical façades have given way to small shops and low-slung dwellings whose adobe walls are decked out in bright colors. Surrounded by tall trees, the cemetery has a huge four-sided cloister with buttercup yellow walls and a hundred arches. Inside, the graves are a hotchpotch of grand mausoleums of white marble, plain tombstones, and simple rectangles of raised earth whose sole decoration is an iron cross.
When I arrive on the morning of November 2, the place is alive with activity. A full-blown street market has been installed outside the gates with dozens of stalls selling snacks, fruit, drinks, cheap plastic toys, and plenty of flowers. Next to the market is an amusement park with all kinds of rides for children. Meanwhile, people pour in through the cemetery gates clutching great armfuls of flowers or wheeling them along in plastic bins on rollers with water slopping about inside.
The cemetery looks glorious. Beneath a lucent sky, the white marble gravestones and tombs are decked out with bright orange marigolds and maroon amaranths. Inside the cloister, visitors crowd around the spectacular sand floor paintings that are another part of the Day of the Dead tradition. Hundreds of people are here, ambling through the cloisters or wandering down the avenues of the cemetery itself. Some haul around buckets of water filled from standpipes dotted around the place. Everywhere, people are hard at work scrubbing headstones with sponges or carefully picking out the letters of inscriptions with new gold paint. It’s a spring cleaning for the dead.