Todos Santos in Rural Tlaxcala: A Syncretic, Expressive, and Symbolic Analysis of the Cult of the Dead

by Hugo Gino Nutini

Overview

The cult of the dead, centered on Todos Santos, the All Saints Day-All Souls Day celebration, is one of the most important aspects of Mesoamerican Indian and mestizo religion. Focusing on rural Tlaxcala, in Mexico, Hugo Nutini presents a thorough description and analysis of the cult in its syncretic, structural, and expressive dimensions and describes its development from the original confrontation of pre-Hispanic polytheism and Spanish Catholicism, through colonial times, until the disintegration of the system of folk religions that is even now occurring.

The discussion of the expressive component of the cult of the dead is a crucial contribution of the study. Professor Nutini shows that symbolism can be an adjunct to expressive studies, but not an end in itself. In addition, he postulates a theory that may serve as a model for studies of the combination and reconciliation of religious beliefs in other contexts. Emphasizing folk theology, teleology, and eschatology, rather than the mechanical and administrative components more frequently studied in works on Mesoamerican Indian and mestizo religions, he concludes that the local system is monolatrous, rather than monotheistic.

Originally published in 1988.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691605784
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	07/14/2014
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #887
Pages:	494
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 9.90(h) x 1.10(d)

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Todos Santos in Rural Tlaxcala

A Syncretic, Expressive, and Symbolic Analysis of the Cult of the Dead

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By Hugo Gino Nutini

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1988 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-07755-0

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CHAPTER 1

SYNCRETIC BACKGROUND OF TODOS SANTOS: THE SPANISH-CATHOLIC COMPONENT

Inasmuch as the syncretic aspects of Todos Santos have been scarcely more than mentioned in the literature (see Carrasco 19 69:5 9 9; Madsen 1969:636), and its ideological and structural dimensions have not been extensively analyzed within the local and regional contexts (see Tax 1952; Wauchope 1969, vols. 6-8), in this and the following chapter the Spanish-Catholic and pre-Hispanic components of the cult of the dead will be discussed. It is important to have a clear picture of the religious elements that have entered into the syncretic equation of Todos Santos.

These elements will be delineated, the social and religious conditions in which they came to interact will be described, and I will advance a few ideas concerning the process that underlay them. The discussion is concerned primarily with rural Tlaxcala, but much of it applies to most regions of Mesoamerica.

The Origins of All Saints Day

The feast of All Saints Day and the liturgical celebration of All Souls Day have a long history in Western Christendom. The origins of these occasions in the Christian yearly cycle are uncertain, but by the fourteenth century they ranked immediately after Christmas and Holy Week in importance, and their celebration had been fixed on November ? for All Saints Day and November 2 (or November 3 if November 2 fell on a Sunday) for All Souls Day (Gaillard 1950:927-932). Since then, these two festivities have been inextricably interrelated in the liturgy of the Western church. At the onset of, perhaps even as a result of, the Reformation and the rise of modern science during the Renaissance, there was a significant decline in the ritual and ceremonial underpinnings of Christendom, but in the New World (more precisely, in the Catholic New World) the rites, ceremonies, and symbolic meaning of All Saints Day and All Souls Day have been reinvigorated and in many ways have achieved their maximum elaboration.

All Saints Day commemorates those individuals who in the service of the church have attained the rather ambivalent status of "sainthood." Although the transcendentally different natures of the omnipotent-omnipresent-almighty God of Christian monotheism and his underlings, the saints, may be clearly understood and explained by theologians, this has not been the case for significant segments of practicing Christians since probably the formative period of Christianity between the first and fourth centuries A. D. Indeed, there is plenty of historical evidence that for sizable segments of Christendom the proliferation of saints and their relationship to God have come to look suspiciously like polytheism and have led to practices that are incompatible with monotheism. Moreover, there are anthropologists (Linton and Linton 1950:13-21; Malefijt 1968:355-356; John M. Roberts and L. Keith Brown, personal communication) who maintain that the bulk of Christianity throughout the centuries has been practicing monolatry (or polylatry) and not monotheism — that is, that in behavior (psychologically) and practice (ritually and ceremonially), no transcendental distinction emerges between God and the saints, including the many manifestations of the Virgin Mary. This is certainly the case among traditional Mesoamerican Indians today. Most contemporary Mexican Indians have not internalized the theological distinction between God and the saints, even if they somewhat vaguely understand it, and in their actual religious behavior and practice God is little more than a primus inter pares, a more powerful deity than the many saints and the various forms of the Virgin Mary. Mexican Indians, and often rural Mestizos, often rank the village's patron saint higher than God the Father, God the Son, or God the Holy Ghost, or they center their Catholicism on the cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe, thus in effect abandoning the central tenet of monotheism.

Lest readers think that the syncretic nature of Catholicism in this region of the New World is a special case, two examples from other parts of the world may be cited. In their ranking and expressive analysis of the saints as conceived and practiced by Chinese Catholics in Hong Kong, Roberts and Myers (n.d.) found that the array of Catholic supernaturals (God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Ghost, several dozen saints, and half a dozen manifestations of the Virgin Mary) was similar to the Chinese pantheon of gods. The respondents conceived of these Catholic supernaturals as gods who have definite rankings and spheres of action. In many peasant communities in the West as well — in southern Italy, Sicily, and southern Spain — the saints are conceived as deities of sorts, with power in their own right and not infrequently arranged in arrays similar to classical polytheistic pantheons (Carrasco 1970:3-15; Pedro Carrasco and Angel Palerm, personal communication). Whether or not the distinction between God and the saints is understood or explictly made by these subsocieties, the fact remains that, in behavior and practice, these segments of Christendom are practicing monolatry, not monotheism. Indeed, at least in Catholicism, it may be difficult to be a theologically pure monotheist.

The feast of All Saints Day is in a sense democratic, in that it commemorates all the saints of God, canonized and uncanonized, known and unknown. It is a rite of propitiation and intensification, in which the church celebrates the external glory of God in the company of those who are closest to his perfection. The origins of the feast are lost, but there are indications that as early as the middle of the fourth century a day was set aside to commemorate the martyrs who had died before Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire (Hatch 1978:979). Specifically, May 13 commemorated all the martyrs of Edessa (an important early center of Christianity, now the city of Urfa in southeastern Turkey), and it appears that this date soon spread to the Western Empire. By the early seventh century, most bishoprics in the West celebrated on this day their own and other martyrs of Christendom (Duchesne 1955:120-132). Some scholars doubt that there is a connection between May 13 and November 1, and no one has determined how and under what conditions a feast of all the saints came to be celebrated on the latter date. Scholars also are not agreed as to when the category of "saint" or the status of "sainthood" appears in Christian theology and practice (Leies 1963:476). It is safe to assume, however, that there were no saints, as ritual and ceremonial objects of worship, until the beginning of the seventh century. It is reasonable to surmise an evolution from martyr to saint, but the social and religious conditions of this transformation and amalgamation are not at all clear (Schmidt 1954:215-243). In any case, by the beginning of the ninth century November 1 was widely celebrated as the day of all martyrs and saints in Western Christendom, and in the latter part of the eleventh century, during the papacy of Gregory VII, that date officially became All Saints Day, in the modern sense of the feast (Atwater 1958:15; Henning 1948; McDonald 1967, vol. 1:318-319). Since then, All Saints Day has steadily increased in importance as a ritual occasion in the yearly cycle, and in southern Europe, especially Spain, it developed elaborate proportions beginning in the early fourteenth century (Radó 1961:321).

All Souls Day and Associated Beliefs and Practices

All Souls Day, November 2, is a liturgical celebration of the Western church commemorating the "faithful departed" — that is, those who have died within the fold of the church. It is observed as a day for honoring and rejoicing with those who are in heaven, offering prayers for those who are in purgatory so that they may soon enter the kingdom of heaven, and, in general, supplicating with the dead to watch over the living and thanking them for past intercessions. All Souls Day is a yearly rite of propitiation and thanksgiving and, in the popular conscience, a veritable cult of the dead. Indeed, it is a form of ancestor worship somewhat reminiscent of the old Roman gods of the household, the lares and penates (the feast of Parentalia), from which it probably developed. Among the many organizational, ritual, ceremonial, and symbolic examples of syncretism as Christianity developed out of the confluence of Hebrew monotheism and Roman polytheism, All Souls Day is one of the clearest. Until well into the Middle Ages, the church was reluctant to establish a specific liturgical day for propitiating and thanking the dead. The reason for this reluctance was apparently the desire to dissociate the church from the persistent and tenacious pre-Christian rites and ceremonies of the cult of the dead and ancestors worship, widespread among all branches of Indo-European polytheism, which from the beginning the church regarded as "superstitious" and theologically impure (Maertens and Heuschen 1957:134-156). The efforts of the early church fathers (Augustine, Jerome, Athanasius, Boniface, Chrysostom) to render what they considered a theologically pure monotheism and to eradicate what they regarded as superstitious and heretic remains of the polytheistic past (many aspects of witchcraft and sorcery, rites and ceremonies associated with particular festivities and the cult of certain gods, the cult of the dead itself, and so on) indicates that a significant amalgam of beliefs and practices of the old and new religions already in being. By the beginning of the eighth century, at least in the circum-Mediterranean area, many aspects of Christianity had been significantly syncretized (Schaffler 1947:219). Despite these efforts and the efforts of subsequent theologians, as Christianity spread to more marginal areas of Europe, syncretism has placed a permanent mark on the practice of several aspects of the Christian faith.

More than the other two great branches of monotheism (Judaism and Islam), Christianity has been unable to divest itself completely of the polytheistic beliefs and practices out of which it arose. Christian theologians have always insisted on an ideologically pure monotheism, and ever since the church became an imperial force in the middle of the fourth century, it has successfully obliterated any deviations that smacked of polytheism, pantheism, monolatry, and other deviant supernatural conceptions. (It should be noted in passing that, once Christianity became an imperial religion, it successfully resisted any attempts to go back to its folk origins.) Nevertheless, the syncretic aspects of Christianity have manifested themselves in many contexts and segments of Christian worship, and theologians, sometimes to their embarrassment, have had to accommodate rituals, beliefs, and behaviors with a distinctly polytheistic, pantheistic, or monolatrous character within a strict monotheistic ideology (Leies 1963:389-403). The often marked dichotomy between theology and practice appears to be a constant from Christianity's folk beginnings to its imperial maturity during the first half of the sixteenth century. As the ritual and ceremonial core of Christianity in the West began to wane, and religion more and more began to resemble a kind of moral philosophy, as a result of the Reformation, the rise of science, and the general secularizing trends that these processes engendered, the dichotomy tended to disappear. In several areas of the New World, however, it persisted and was even widened by the new syncretic transformation that Catholicism experienced in its confrontation with several full-fledged polytheistic systems.

Although prayers for the dead were encouraged from earliest times, the church, for the reasons given above, was slow in giving liturgical recognition to the rites and ceremonies concerning the dead that probably had been going on for centuries in many parts of Christendom. However, Pentecost Monday was dedicated to the worship of the dead in Spain by the middle of the seventh century. For reasons that are not known, November 2 was set aside for the commemoration of All Souls Day, a practice that was well established in the Cluniac monasteries in northern France by the middle of the eleventh century and throughout the Western church, by the turn of the twelfth century — that is, not long after November 1 had officially become All Saints Day (Kellner 1908:326-331). Unlike All Saints Day, however, All Souls Day never acquired official liturgical status — further evidence that the church was unwilling to formally sanction a celebration so pregnant with pagan elements and unchristian evocations. All Souls Day came to have liturgical status only by custom. Nonetheless, by the second half of the fifteenth century All Saints Day and All Souls Day were liturgical feasts celebrated as a unit and ranked among the three or four most important occasions in the yearly ritual cycle of Western Christendom (Kellner 1908:348-351).

What the church was up against throughout the Dark and Middle Ages is well known; the situation has been replicated several times during the past five hundred years in the context of the expansion of Western European peoples throughout the world, and it is best exemplified in the ethnohistorical record of the spiritual conquest of Mesoamerica and the Andean area. With specific reference to All Souls Day (but equally applicable to a number of other Christian domains), many beliefs and practices of pagan origins or corruptions of orthodox Christian beliefs concerning the dead were associated with this celebration and ancillary concerns. Throughout Western Christendom, these beliefs and practices survived at most levels until well into the sixteenth century. With the onset of secularization in Western society, they were displaced to marginal areas and to the lower levels of the social order, but they can still be found in the most traditional folk communities in the circum-Mediterranean area and perhaps in other parts of Europe.

Among the best-known beliefs and practices that were associated with the All Souls Day complex and were relevant to a cult of the dead, the following may be mentioned: during the vigil of November 2, the souls in heaven came back in spirit to bless the households where they had died. On November 2, the souls in purgatory came back in the form of phantoms, witches, and toads, lizards, and other repellant animals in order to scare or harm persons who had wronged or injured them during their lives. Food offerings were made to the dead in the cemeteries, ritually disposed of by those concerned after the souls had symbolically tasted the food. Special food offerings were made to prominent departed members of the household, consisting of a dish or a drink that he or she had particularly liked. Garments that had been worn by particularly good or pious members of the household were displayed on the family altar, so that the souls would rejoice upon contemplating such a display of affection and become effective protectors of their living kinsmen. The way to the house was marked by recognizable signposts of flowers or other decorations, so that the returning souls could the more easily find their earthly homes (Maertens and Heuschen 1957:161-163). This veritable cult of the dead during the Dark and Middle Ages had probably changed little since Roman times.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• Contents, pg. v
• List of Illustrations, pg. vii
• Preface, pg. ix
• Introduction, pg. 2
• 1. Syncretic Background of Todos Santos: The Spanish- Catholic Component, pg. 38
• 2. Syncretic Background of the Cult of the Dead: The Pre-Hispanic Component, pg. 53
• 3. The Syncretic Transformation of Todos Santos: Structure and Process, pg. 77
• 4. Traditional Structure and the Ritual and Propitiatory Specialization of the Cult of the Dead, pg. 114
• 5. The Celebration of Todos Santos: From All Saints Day to the Octava of All Souls Day, pg. 144
• 6. Offerings to the Dead and the Household Altar, pg. 169
• 7. Physical Forms and Symbolic Meanings of the Ofrenda, pg. 197
• 8. The Decoration of the Graves in the Cemetery: Expressive Display and Symbolic Meaning, pg. 236
• 9. Public Aspects and Sociological Implications of the Cult of the Dead, pg. 275
• 10. The Ideology and Belief System of the Cult of the Dead, pg. 301
• 11. Provenance and Amalgamation of Elements in the Syncretic Process, pg. 343
• 12. The Transformation of the Cult of the Dead since i960, pg. 359
• 13. The Expressive Approach, pg. 377
• Conclusions, pg. 398
• Notes, pg. 417
• Glossary, pg. 436
• References, pg. 445
• Index, pg. 455