Hope and Horror on the Day of the Dead

If James Bond careening through Mexico City in Spectre tells us anything, it’s that the city is bursting with life on Día de los Muertos, the day it celebrates its dead. In macabre costumes and skeletal faces, painted and embellished with glitter and beads, locals take to dancing in high-spirited street festivals that pulsate with more gusto than Mardi Gras.

But not this year.

As is the way of everything 2020, Mexico City is moving its parade online, streaming virtual events from inside a stadium and recording studios without the public. In this way, the homage to the triumph of love over death, to the gates of heaven being thrown open to allow the dead live again will still be celebrated.

Homes will still be spiffed up and an ofrenda or altar made and decorated with candles, flowers, fruit, and traditional foods, in a blending of Aztec and Spanish Catholic beliefs. Hot cocoa, sugar skulls, and toys await the spirits of children, little treats after their long journey from the spirit world. Families may still visit the cemeteries, clean the tombs of loved ones and have a quick socially distanced picnic while they await the arrival of their dearly departed.

Of course, the first to arrive each year ­– the angelitos, the deceased children — are exempt from the masked and distancing rules that bind the rest of us. They’ll be reunited with their parents for 24 hours before the spirits of adults arrive to enjoy offerings of mescal and cigarettes and, in turn, bestow on their loved ones protection, blessings, and much needed good luck for the coming year.

These graveyard festivities in Mexico are vastly different from the night of scary monsters and malevolent ghosts that will afflict other parts of the world. Sitting on graves six-feet apart, painted like they’ve been six-feet under, welcoming spirits with open arms is a far cry from the supernatural rampaging across the rest of the Western world the night before.

Halloween, a tradition with roots in the Celtic Samhain, the day the harvest season ended and winter began, was, for the imaginative Celt the time when a portal opened between worlds. Open portals naturally called for lighting bonfires and donning devilish garb to ward off nefarious phantoms. Today, it piques people’s obsession with the macabre and fosters mysterious pastimes, including rolling out the Ouija board, dressing up as witches, and disemboweling pumpkins. And who doesn’t love a good midnight scare in a graveyard?

For others, the notion of spirits walking the earth is met with fear and superstition. We squirm at the prospect of death, but we are fascinated by its grotesquery. We tend to perceive the continued existence of the soul or consciousness as a perversion of the natural order: if something dead has arisen or if something is here and not in heaven, then that must be very, very bad indeed.

Spiritualism, which emerged out of the New York Protestant community in the mid-1800s, espouses the belief that death is not the end and that communication with the spirits of the deceased is possible. It swept through the Capitol and administrations from Lincoln to Coolidge. It influenced men of letters and men of science, such as evolutionist Alfred Russel Wallace, and Carl Jung, before being destroyed in a maelstrom of opportunists, frauds, and parlor tricksters. With that, went all hope of mainstream acceptance of the survival of consciousness.

Despite today’s scientific reductionist culture, which the Dalai Lama says, perceives absence of evidence as evidence of absence, many leading names in the scientific community continue to study these phenomena, and increasingly make the case for consciousness not being an emergent property of the brain and thus not ceasing to exist when the brain dies. Among them are medical doctors, Dr. Eben Alexander, Dr. Raymond Moody; biologist Rupert Sheldrake; anesthesiologist Professor Stuart Hameroff, and Dr. Emily Kelly of the University of Virginia.

Today, achieving widespread acceptance of survival would take a miracle, but perhaps someday, our consciousness will expand beyond what we think we know, and we will realize that sensing the spirits of the dearly departed is a natural state of being, both here and in the hereafter. One day, their visit may be accepted in the mainstream, not as perversions but as evidence that our loved ones are alive in spirit and have dropped in to say, “I’m here, and I love you.”

Ultimately, the message of the ancients, of religions, and increasingly of men of science is one of hope — the hope that neither we nor love ever die and that we continue to have a relationship with those who have passed from this world. In this, we can transcend our smallness and see our connection to each other, to all things, and to something far greater than ourselves.

In the meantime, let us paint our faces and dance around our living rooms until this world reopens. As the portal between worlds opens, let us welcome the living and the dead with open arms and open hearts, and celebrate, at least for one day, the triumph of life over death.

Karen Frances McCarthy MA CSNU is a Spiritualist medium, former political journalist, and best selling author of Till Death Don’t Us Part: A True Story of Awakening to Love After Life (White Crow Books 2020).