Other wandering spirits
By Atención staff October 31, 2008 San Miguel de Allende


This article was conjured via Wikipedia, the final resting place of lexicographers and encyclopedists. Since such uncanny access to information can only be explained supernaturally, we assume the company has a data-demon trapped in a pentagram at headquarters, perhaps the very one whose omniscience allows Lucifer to keep track of temptations offered and accepted.

Funeral rites are at least 300,000 years old and predate modern homo sapiens. Neanderthals buried the dead with gifts of flowers, suggesting they believed in an afterlife.

Day of the Dead celebrations in Mexico can be traced back to the Olmec, Maya, Zapotec, Mixtec, P’urhépecha and Aztec. Their rituals celebrating the deaths of ancestors are perhaps 3,000 years old. In the pre-Hispanic era, it was common to keep skulls as trophies and display them during rituals to symbolize death and rebirth.

Similar celebrations in Latin America

Guatemalans celebrate Day of the Dead by building and flying giant kites in addition to the traditional visits to ancestral gravesites. They consume fiambre, a kind of meat and vegetable salad made only for this day during the year.

Brazilians celebrate Finados on November 2, a positive event when people go to cemeteries and churches with flowers, candles and prayers for the deceased.

In Haiti, voodoo traditions mix with Roman Catholic Day of the Dead observances. Loud drums and music are played all night at cemeteries to waken Baron Samedi, the Loa of the dead, and his mischievous family of offspring, the Gede.

Bolivians in La Paz celebrate Día de los Ñatitas (Day of the Skulls) on November 9. Pre-Columbian Andeans shared a day with the bones of their ancestors on the third year after burial; however, they only use the skulls today. Traditionally, skulls are kept at home to watch over the family and protect them during the year.

On November 9, the family crowns the skull with fresh flowers, dresses it up and offers cigarettes, coca leaves and alcohol in thanks for the year’s protection. Skulls also can be taken to the central cemetery in La Paz for a special mass and blessing.

Asian celebrations

In the Philippines, the very important November 1 holiday has a “family reunion” atmosphere. Tombs are cleaned or repainted, candles are lit and flowers are offered. Entire families camp in cemeteries and sometimes spend a night or two near their relatives’ tombs.

Card games, eating, drinking, singing and dancing are common in the cemetery.

European traditions

In many countries with a Roman Catholic heritage, All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day have long been holidays where people take the day off work, go to cemeteries with candles and flowers and give presents to children, usually sweets and toys.

In Portugal and Spain, ofrendas are made on this day. The play Don Juan Tenorio is traditionally performed in Spain.


From Poland to Norway, the tradition is to light candles and visit the graves of deceased relatives. In the Austrian Tyrol, cakes are left for them on the table and the room kept warm for their comfort.

In Brittany, people flock to cemeteries at nightfall to kneel, bareheaded, at the graves of their loved ones and to anoint the hollow of the tombstone with holy water or to pour libations of milk on it. At bedtime, supper is left on the table for the souls.

Navajo tradition

Navajo burial customs reflect the ancient traditions that death itself is not something to be feared. Instead, they feared the deceased would return to visit the living. Such visits are to be avoided at all costs, so Navajos are very reluctant to look at a dead body. Contact with the body is limited to only a few individuals.

Similar cultural traditions

Many other cultures around the world have similar traditions of a day set aside to visit the graves of deceased family members. Often included in these traditions are celebrations, food, beverages, prayers and remembrances.

Australia’s aboriginal culture was already 40,000 years old before Sumerians learned to bake bricks and sow grain. It may be the oldest continuous culture on Earth. They conceive of all things beginning with the Dreamtime when ancestral spirit beings formed the Creation. Dreamtime is also present and future, “the Everywhen,” in which every person exists in “All-at-once” time both before and after life. The spirit-child exists in Dreamtime and is only initiated into life by being born.

The Japanese Buddhist Bon Festival honors the departed spirits of one’s ancestors. The festival has evolved into a family reunion holiday over three days in August when people from the big cities return to their hometowns and visit and clean their ancestors’ graves. It has existed in Japan for 500 years and traditionally includes a dance festival. Funerals are almost always Buddhist ceremonies, though Japan has a mixture of Shinto and Buddhist beliefs. Deceased Japanese are cremated, with burial in a family grave and a periodic memorial service.

Buddhists regard death as an occasion of major religious significance, both for the deceased and for the survivors. It marks the moment of transition to a new mode of existence within the round of rebirths. All the karmic forces the dead person accumulated during a lifetime are activated and set about determining the next rebirth.

Chuseok is a major Korean holiday when people go where the spirits of their ancestors are enshrined and perform ancestral worship rituals early in the morning. They visit the tombs of immediate ancestors to trim plants and clean the area around the tomb and offer food, drink and crops to their ancestors.

The traditional Chinese Qingming Festival usually occurs around April 5 of the Gregorian calendar. Along with Double Ninth Festival on the ninth day of the ninth month in the Chinese calendar, it is a time to tend to the graves of departed ones. In addition, the seventh month in the Chinese calendar is called the Ghost Month, in which ghosts and spirits come out from the underworld to visit earth.

During the Nepali holiday of Gai Jatra (Cow Pilgrimage), every family in which a member died during the previous year makes a construction of bamboo branches, cloth, paper decorations and portraits of the deceased. Traditionally, a cow leads the spirits of the dead into the next land. Either an actual live cow or a construction representing a cow may be used. The festival is also a time to dress up in costume.

For Hindus, cremation became popular because the soul cannot enter a new body until its former one has totally disappeared. Cremation was the fastest way to expeditiously dispose of dead bodies.

The African custom of burying the dead under the floor of a house is animist and without a set ritual. Mournful lamentations may work up to a frenzy of sorrow, heightened by alcohol, of which drummers and singers partake freely. Sometimes the deceased in Ghana rest in elaborate “fantasy coffins” shaped like fish, boats or even airplanes. In some cultures, traditional rituals include visits to ancestral graves, leaving food and gifts, and asking for protection. 

Ancient funeral rites

Primitive Greeks were buried on desert islands or outside town to secure them from disturbance and prevent contagious disorders. In ancient Rome, the eldest surviving male attended the death-bed, where he attempted to inhale the decedent’s last breath.

PACEMD director recognized as “Hero of Emergency Medicine”

COMM PACEMD H Hall The PACEMD Program in Mexico began in 1996 as a collaboration between Darryl Macias and Haywood Hall (center).

The American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) announced its recognition of Haywood Hall, MD, ACEP ambassador to Mexico, as a “Hero of Emergency Medicine.” The campaign, which is part of ACEP’s 40th anniversary, recognizes emergency physicians who have made significant contributions to emergency medicine, their communities and their patients. 

“Emergency physicians are on the front lines of America’s health care system, providing the essential community service of emergency care,” says ACEP President Linda L. Lawrence, MD. “The dedication, passion and commitment Dr. Hall has shown embodies the vision of ACEP’s founders and the ideals of our specialty.”

Dr. Hall is also founding director of the Pan American Collaborative Emergency Medicine Development (PACEMD) and MedSpanish Programs, an Ashoka Fellow, initiator and co-founder of the University of New Mexico Master’s in Public Health Program and an emergency clinician at Taos Holy Cross Hospital and Valley Baptist Medical Center (Harlingen, Texas). He is a recognized medical-social entrepreneur who has dedicated himself to developing the specialty and improving emergency health care in Mexico, along the US-Mexico border and in Latin America. He has worked tirelessly to give more than 450 medical students, residents and CME physicians outstanding medical Spanish training though the MedSpanish immersion program in San Miguel de Allende www.PACE-MedSpanish.org 

A journalist’s final story: Bob Kelly dies at 79
By Beth, Brian and Bruce Kelly and Linda Lowery

Robert Francis Kelly, an advocate for persons with disabilities and their families since 1970, contributing writer to the Guadalajara Reporter, Mexico News and Atención San Miguel, and a past Chicago Sun-Times reporter and public relations executive, died at age 79 in the early morning hours of Wednesday, October 22, in Angeles Hospital in Querétaro of an infection that began in his heart valve.

He is survived by three children, Brian, Beth and Bruce, three grandchildren, Jack, Sean and Sarah, and his partner, Sue Beere.

Born in Parkersburg, West Virginia, Bob loved Chicago and traveled back once or twice a year to visit his kids and grandkids. He and his wife raised their family in Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago, and for most of his life that was home. In his early years as a reporter he was southwest Michigan bureau chief for the South Bend Tribune. Later, he worked for over 20 years as an executive vice president of New York-based public relations firm Carl Byoir and Associates. 

Bob began his advocacy career in 1970 with the Illinois Council for Children with Learning Disabilities, for which he served two terms as state president. He was named by the late Governor Richard Ogilvie to a task force that developed the first mandated school program for children with disabilities from three to five years of age. He also served as national public relations chairman for the Association for Children with Learning Disabilities.

In 1986 he became a member of the board of PARC, now Aspire, based in Westchester, Illinois. His son, Michael, lived at PARC home, an intermediate care facility, from 1979 until his death in 1999. Bob served two terms as chairman of PARC’s board of directors and for 15 months was acting president and chief executive officer through June 1995. He remained active with PARC until his move to San Miguel. 

Bob never lost his enthusiasm or his eye for a good story. When he moved to San Miguel he found one story after the next. He not only covered serious subjects such as the water situation, but he also wrote about everything from gourmet chocolates, local musicians to the culinary side of San Miguel. He knew the difference between publicity and news, fact and fiction, and was staunchly old-school in his insistence that journalism should have a solid connection to telling the truth. 

Devoted to the environment, Bob was the president of Save the Laja. Devoted to his three grandchildren, he wrote a book for them about Lonzo, an imaginary lizard that lived under his bed in his home on Calle Sierra Gorda. He was planning to give the books as gifts this coming Christmas. 

Bob loved San Miguel, the Chamber Music Festival and gourmet meals with friends. He enjoyed chatting about his stint as a movie star, making fun of his “starring role” as an extra in the Antonio Banderas film about Pancho Villa. 

He could not write an email that did not contain a pun or at least one witty remark. “It’s been a usual tranquil San Miguel week,” he wrote just a few days before his illness struck. “Electric out, computer down.”

So many of us in San Miguel loved him and will miss him. He would not want tears. Bob always got on with it. He lived his life, and seemed, from our selfish point of view, to leave too soon. Every Day of the Dead we will include a photo of him with his wild white hair, precisely ironed shirts and sly smile that resembled Jack Nicholson’s. We will miss his enthusiasm and laughter.