#deadly fall

Category: French culture / Breton folklore

Freely translated from Edouard Brasey’s “Encyclopedia of Fantasy Heroes” (the translation is really incorrect but the French notion of “merveilleux” is hard to translate so I’ll stick with “fantasy”)

Chapter 4: Travelers of the Otherworld

The Ankou

In Bretagne, the wraith that announces death is called the Ankou. He was first written about in the 18th century. He appears as a grinning skeleton, dressed in a large black cloak that only reveals his head and hands. He is armed with a scythe whose blade is turned upside-down, so that he can reap in a much wider way – and he uses a human bone to sharpen the blade. He usually stands upright on a cart with iron-wheels and creaking axles, the “karrik ann Ankou”, with two white horses, one skinny and lanky, the other fat and shiny. Sometimes the cart is invisible: you can only hear its sinister creaking. The Ankou is sometimes helped by two assistants who walk by the cart. The first holds the bridle of the first horse, while the other opens the field gates and house doors, plus throws in the cart the dead that the Ankou reaped.

If he points his bony finger at someone, it means they will die very soon. If he touches someone, the person will feel a cold chill and they will know it is time for them to die. The Ankou then takes his victims into the otherworld, located in the direction of the sunset, by forcing them to climb on his “bag noz”, his “night boat”. The Ankou is at the same time the “oberour ar maro”, the laborer/workman of death ; a ferryman of the dead similar to Charon in Greek mythology ; and the kind of the dead, of which he leads the macabre hordes. But sometimes, it is said that the Ankou is actually Death itself.

Every year, on All Saints Day (corresponding to the ancient holiday of Samhain), the Ankou and the dead come together, in an invisible shape, to the feasts the living prepare for them : tradition says that on Toussaint (All Saints Day), you must cook crêpes and curdled milk mixed with cider, and place it all on a white tablecloth while playing music. While the living can’t see the dead when they consume these offerings, many testimonies talk of plates, cutlery or chairs moving on their own. When the rooster sings, the gathering of ghosts disappears, leaving behind them a lot of leftovers the living can eat freely. Sometimes the Ankou is said to be the last dead of the year, working for twelve whole months before he is “dethroned” and replaced by a new deceased.

Other tales claim that in the depths of the Huëlgoat forest, in the Arrée mountains, there is a gaping opening to hell. The Ankou sits there, in a palace filled with thousands of candles, each of them corresponding to the life of a human being. Sometimes the Ankou blows on a candle, which causes the death of the corresponding person. Legend also describe how the Ankou can sit on the threshold of newly-built houses, waiting patiently for the first living being to cross it, so that he may take them away. This is why people, after building a new house, pushed an animal first inside, or placed an egg on the stone of the threshold. The Ankou takes away his “prey”, and the livings can enter the new house without fear.

THE OTHER CURSE OF THE PHARAOHS

Category: American urban legends / USA hauntings

I talked about the “curse of the mummy”, also known as the “curse of the pharaohs”. But you might be surprised to learn that there is “another” curse coming from old Egypt – a curse said to strike only a specific place in one of the most iconic American towns: Las Vegas.

Las Vegas is filled with the most extravagant and unique hotels and casinos you will ever see. And one of them is rumored to be cursed. Given we are speaking of Egypt, you won’t be surprised to learn that it is the Luxor hotel and casino: a towering pyramid structure standing over the Las Vegas landscape. The very outward shape of the casino has been known to make people feel unease: the enormous pyramid is entirely black, with no ornaments of any kind, just the opaque and dark imposing structure – and at night one beam of white light gets out from the top of the pyramid, like some occult scene from horror movies.

But even eerier is the dark history of the Luxor – which seems to be filled with a lot of nasty incidents.

The Luxor opened up on October 1993. 30 stories high, it is one of the biggest hotel-casinos of Las Vegas, and its beam was designed to be one of the strongest beams of light of the world, visible by pilots flying even hours away from California. As you can guess, the Luxor was entirely based around Ancient Egypt: the casino is pyramid-shaped, there is a sphinx statue near the entrance, the name of the casino can be found on an obelisk, and the inside is filled with Egyptian-looking statues and murals. The Luxor was created by the Circus Circus Enterprises (a big hotel-and-casino corporation from Nevada) during the brief “family-friendly” era that Las Vegas knew at the end of the 20th century: the Luxor, as a top-class hotel and casino, was designed to attract a wealthy clientele, but its unique theme and decorum was also prepared to appeal families seeking “theme park”-like fun, basically making the Luxor both a five-star hotel AND a true tourist attraction.

To list the incidents attributed to the “curse”, I will invite you to go backwards with me through time…

# 2012: Three guests of the hotel fell ill. They had contracted the Legionnaire’s disease, and it was found that the Legionella bacteria had somehow infected the water system of the Luxor. Bizarrely, after two guests fell ill, the water was tested but the Legionella was nowhere to be found: it was only after a third guest was infected (and in fact later died, the other two healed), that the Legionella was discovered.

# Also 2012: the elevators of the Luxor are not called elevators but “inclinators” because, due to the pyramid-shape of the building, they actually go in a diagonal way, following the slopes of the pyramid. In 2012, two airmen from the Nellis Air Force Base had a fight in the first-floor lobby of the western part of the Luxor. One of the two pushed the other against the inclinator door – which mysteriously opened, despite there being no cabin at the level of this floor: just the empty shaft. The victim fell 25 feet down, all the way to the basement of the Luxor. He was sent to hospital in critical condition.

# In June 2010, Las Vegas football player DeMario Reynolds and his friend, Jason Sindelar, a MMA fighter (Mixed Martial Art), got into a fight in a suite of the hotel. The fight started when Sindelar, drunk and angry, verbally fought with his girlfriend during a party organized in Reynolds’ suite. Reynolds asked Sindelar to leave the party, but it only made him angrier: he tried to hit his girlfriend, and grab her by the neck. Reynolds tried to restrain the fighter by pushing him down the bathroom floor. Then the fight was taken to the main bedroom, where the two men had a short fistfight. Sindelar finally left the suite, but not before returning shortly after, hitting Reynolds in the head and in the chest – after bringing Reynolds to the ground, Sindelar went all out on him, and other guests of the party called the hotel’s security. The injured Reynolds was taken to the Desert Springs Hospital, but he had died of his wounds before arriving there.

# May 2007: in the parking garage of the Luxor, a young food court employee left a coffee cup on top of his car. When he later returned to remove the cup, it exploded in his hand and killed him: a homemade bomb had been placed inside. Investigations led to the arrest of two men, who had indeed created the bomb and placed it in the cup – but they actually didn’t know the victim, and there was no evident motive for why they would do such a thing. Visibly, they just wanted to make a bomb and kill someone – anyone.

# September 1996: A woman jumped from the 26th story of the hotel and died. Her heavy injuries coupled with her lack of identification made it hard to identify her – she fell near the entrance of what was then the buffet, but by today has been completely reshaped into the new food court of the casino. We never knew who she was or why she jumped – all we know is that she clearly killed herself. The women of the 26th floor soon became a “ghost story” in Las Vegas, as everybody invented their own “legends” about the reason for her fall: the most famous of which claims that the woman was a prostitute who killed herself after discovering she had HIV. Still today people claim her ghost can be seen on the 26th floor.

# Beyond this woman, three more deadly falls were reported at the Luxor, two of which were suicides but one – a man jumping from the 10th floor – still of unknown nature (suicide? Accident? Murder?).

# But the oldest “ghosts” of the Luxor are said to be here since the building of the hotel. You see, William Bennett, the CEO of Circus Circus Enterprises in the 90s, built the Luxor in eighteen months at a very low cost. When you see how big and grand the construction is, you realize what it means: corners were cut. We know that when the Luxor actually opened, in October 1993, the construction wasn’t actually complete – some parts of the structure were still built, and some guests had to stay in unfinished rooms. We also know that during the first years of the hotel, the “inclinators” didn’t work properly – and soon people realized that the Luxor had been built in an unusual soft spot of the desert, meaning the pyramid was literally sinking in the ground. This led to the rumors that workers had died during the constructions – while there is no official death record of any worker during the building of the Luxor, the rumor claims that at least two men died during the building, but that their death was covered by Circus Circus Enterprises – some local media even went as far as claim it was seven men, and not two, that died. The rumor notably fed of the real fact that the construction of the pyramid had been a very difficult and dangerous process due to its unusual shape (coupled with the all the cut corners). Rumors claim that in the quiet part of the hotel the ghosts of the workers can still be spotted – and back when the hotel had a unique boat-riding attraction called the Luxor’s Nile Riverboat, some visitors claimed to have seen the dead workers inside the tunnels.

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All those incidents and ghost-sighting coupled together led people to believe that a “curse” had been placed on the Luxor. Why? Because of the very Egyptian model of the Luxor.

The outside pyramid is a reproduction of the Great Pyramid of Giza (well, it is only three-quarters its size, so a smaller replica), and the hotel contains the biggest and most accurate replica of the Tomb of King Tutankhamun known on American ground – carefully recreated down to every detail with the same materials originally used for the tomb. No need to tell you that Tutankhamun was THE big curse of Egypt, but strangely it is not this replica that is thought to have brought the curse, but rather the rest of the hotel: because the other “Egyptian decorum” are all noted to be basically cheap and inaccurate replicas. As such, it is thought that the curse was brought onto the casino due to being a mockery of a pyramid, and due to the creators of the site not understanding the meaning of the occult and mystic symbols they used.

For example superstitious people refuse to go play in the Luxor due to a pyramid being a tomb – and it is always bad luck to go gambling in tombs or near graves. Other point out that there is only one sphinx in front of the pyramid’s entrance, when Egypt belief claimed that before a palace or a pyramid you needed to build two sphinxes to ward off evil spirits and wicked influences. The constructors did so to replicate the “lonely sphinx” sitting in front of the Great Pyramid – but archeologists will tell you that if there is one sphinx today, it is because the other one was destroyed. The urban legend notably claims that the dark pyramid attracts malevolent energies, and that the only way to purify it would be to place an eye sculpture at its top.

THE “OTHER” HALLOWEENS

Category: Anglo-Saxon and American cultures (plus Christianity)

I talked about Halloween. I talked about its ancestor, Samhain. I talked about All Hallows Day and its “cousin” El Dia de los Muertos.

But there are much more other variations of Halloween and All Saints Day that I haven’t talked about, and that yet are needed to understand the evolution and existence of those holiday: a whole constellation of “other Halloweens” and even “other Samhains”. I’ll try to briefly list them all through this post.

1) All Saints Eve

Everybody knows that “Halloween” stands for “All Hallows’ Eve”. But originally this title went to the Christian celebration of the Eve of All Saints Day. And Halloween, despite its name, has barely anything Christian in it, mostly being a survival of Samhain. So, what is the “actual” All Saints Eve, from a Christian point of view?

All Hallows Eve, or All Saints Eve, is mostly a preparation for the upcoming All Saints Day (All Hallows Day), and thus doesn’t have many “traditions” in itself. The church service is called the Vigil of All Hallows, and is usually coupled with visits to the graveyard (to place candles and flowers, in preparation for All Saints Day). It is a time of praying for the dead, and also a time of fasting to prepare yourself for All Hallows: All Saints Eve is a non-meat day. This custom actually influenced a lot modern Halloween – it was because of the ban on meat imposed by All Hallows Eve that people consumed mostly fruits and vegetables, which led to the prominence of these same fruits and vegetables in Halloween. Most All Saints Eve traditions tend to be local. In Spain, priests have to toll the bell of their churches to remind people of thinking and praying for the dead. In Finland, people speak of the “valomeri” or the “sea of light” because everybody goes lighting up candles in cemeteries. And in Poland the tradition had the living Christians walk through the forest while loudly praying, in order to comfort the unrested or tormented dead.

If we leave Europe and go to America, the land of Halloween, All Saints Eve is… a bit different. Mostly because Christianity in America is mostly Protestant – and for Protestants, All Saints Eve is before all “Reformation Day”, the celebration of the start of the Protestant Reformation by Martin Luther – for a long time it was the habit for Protestant families to dress their kids as biblical characters or important figures of the Reform. Now, Christianity does not often meddle well with Halloween celebrations – especially in America where people are prone to be a more… “extremism” (plus there’s the fact Halloween became such a part of American culture). Some defend the idea that Halloween is just harmless fun for children and that it does not hurt in any way Christian belief ; while others are much more disdainful of this “occultism” and “mysticism” and are usually prone to handing out tracts on Halloween night about the wonders of Christianity. But a VERY American creation born of an attempt at uniting Christianity and Halloween – a “tradition” created by none other than the fundamentalist and evangelical churches (because who else would do such a thing?), is the “Hell Houses”. Imagine a “haunted house attraction”, but done by religious people using, instead of ghosts and monsters, the “horrors” of sin and vice, with the ultimate goal of “scaring into redemption”… It is a really weird and bizarre and VERY American thing, and while some of those houses can be quite ridiculous, others are known to be VERY disturbing, leading to yet again another Halloween scandal (they all come from America) about those Hell Houses that go “too far”. But I’ll let you search these lovely things by yourself.

2) Calan Gaeaf

I talked about Samhain in a previous post, and I tried to insist that while it was a Celtic holiday, indeed, it was mostly focused, localized and practiced by Scotsmen and Irishmen (plus the Isle of Man), not all of the British Isles. And yet there is this idea today that Samhain was practiced in the entirety of the Isles… This is because there is a slight confusion between Samhain and its “siblings”, the “other Samhains”. If Samhain proper was only for the Scots and the Irish, the other part of the Isles had their own festivals equivalent to Samhain. And Calan Gaeaf was “Samhain” for Wales.

Calan Gaeaf was the celebration of the first day of winter, on the 1st of November (in the bi-seasonal system of the Celtic year, autumn was just the first part of winter). It was a harvest festival, that allowed for grand feasts (as both the harvest was gathered, and the livestock was slaughtered for the winter) cooked by the women of the village, and for all sorts of games – usually also tied to the harvest. For example there was the “harvest mare” game: some of the last stalks of corn reaped would be twisted together in the shape of a mare, and the “player” would hide the mare under his clothes, before trying to sneak it back to his home in the village. If he could get the harvest mare to his home without being noticed by any of the women (preparing the feast in the village), he would be rewarded with beer and a place of honor at the feast’s table, while the mare was hung other the hearth. If he failed, he would become the laughingstock of the community.

And just like with “Hallowe’en”, the eve of Calan Gaeaf was known as “Nos Galan Gaeaf” – and was considered a “spirit night” (a Ysbrydnos in Welsh), one of the times of the year when spirits roam the country (and given the Welsh shared the Celtic concept of the Otherworld, we are talking about both the spirits of the dead and supernatural inhuman spirits). On this night, people avoided the places where spirits liked to hang out: crossroads, churchyards, stiles… A bonfire was lit around which children and women danced, and when the flames started to die out they all ran home: for it was said that when the bonfire of Nos Galan Gaeaf was extinguished, a supernatural creature would appear – sometimes simply a bad omen announcing disaster and death, other times an actual threat seeking the devour the souls of the wanderers, or the flesh of the last child to go home. For some this creature was “Hwch Ddu Gwta”, a black sow without tail but with the head of a woman, while for others it was “Y Ladi Wen”, “the white lady”, a female headless ghost. Before leaving, children and women had to place a ring of stones around the fire, with their names written on each stone: in the morning, the stones were checked. If a name-stone was burned by the fire, it meant good luck for the person “owning” the stone, but if a stone was missing it meant the person associated would die within the year.

Similarly to Samhain and Halloween, all sorts of divination games were practiced on Nos Galan Gaeaf. The apple-peel game I described previously was a common practice of the holiday, and so was the “mirror-gazing”: unmarried women had to look into a mirror in a darkened room to see the face of their future husband ; but if a skull appeared, it meant the woman would die within the year. A more traditional Welsh “divination game” was gender-divided: girls had to grow throughout the year a rose in the shape of a hoop, and go through the circle three times before cutting the rose – on Galan Gaeaf’s Eve, they had to place the rose under their pillow to dream of the future. Boys, meanwhile, had to cut ten leaves of ivy during the night, before leaving one behind them and placing the nine remaining under their pillow: not only would they dream of the future, if they touched the ivy they could also have visions of the witches living in the area.

3) Allantide

The “other Samhain” of Cornwall was known as “Kalan Gwav”, which literally meant “the first day of winter”, coupled with “Nos Kalan Gwav”, the Eve of the First Day of Winter, the 31st of October. It later evolved, under Christian influence, into “Allantide”, more well-known as Saint Allan’s Day. Due to overlapping with Allhallowtide, Saint Allan’s Day was also a day of remembering and praying for the dead, with churches of Cornwall ringing their bells to comfort Christian souls that had not yet entered Heaven (purgatory, hauntings, and other “intermediary states”). And just like with the other “Samhains”, divination games were common on this night: throwing walnuts in the fire to predict the fidelity of your partner (see the hazelnut roasting of Samhain), or pouring molten lead into cold water, to see form a shape that would indicate you the profession of your future husband.

Unique to Allantide however, is the tradition of the “Allan apples”. Allan apples are very large and glossy red apples, specially polished for the occasion. Before the day of the saint’s feast, entire markets selling only Allan apples were organized, because the tradition was to offer them to your friends and family, as they were symbols of good luck. Young girls would place these apples under their pillows to dream of their future husbands, while the children who went to bed without obtaining even one Allan apple would only know misfortune. There was even a local game of “catch-the-apple” that went as such: two pieces of wood are nailed together in a cross, the cross is suspended to the ceiling and candles placed at its four ends, and an Allan apple is tied up under the cross. The goal of the game was to catch the apple with your bare teeth – and if you were too slow or not agile enough, the hot wax of the candles would be poured on you.

4) Punkie Night

A last “British” variation of the Samhain/Halloween tradition – this time coming from the “West Country” (a name for a region of South-West England). Punkie Night was held on the last Thursday of October, and during this night children marched around the region with jack-o-lanterns in their hands (Punkie was an Old English word for “lantern”), while singing a song that went! “It’s Punkie Night tonight (X2) / Adam and Eve would not believe / It’s Punkie Night tonight!”. Other times, the children would rather go door to door asking and begging for candles, threatening those who did not gave them anything (a variation of the trick-or-treating). This begging had its own rhymes: “Give me a candle, give me a light / If you don’t, you’ll get a fright!” ; or “Give me a candle, give me a light / If you haven’t a candle, a penny’s all right!”. We also know that people usually placed “punkies” (jack-o-lanterns) in front of their farms, to ward off evil spirits, and that the processions of children would be led by two characters known as the “Punkie King” and “Punkie Queen”.

5) Mischief Night

Originally, Halloween was just the eve of All Hallows Day. But as Halloween became a proper holiday, not just the eve of a feast, it got its own eve. And Halloween Eve is known by different names across America: one of which is Mischief Night. It was called as such because on the 30th of October, people took the habit of doing all sorts of jokes and pranks, even going up to vandalism – not just children, but adults too! It is quite interesting to see that the tradition actually started in old England, but was not immediately associated with Halloween: originally “Mischief Night” was linked to the May Day and to the Green Man. However, as the celebration left the rural areas and reached the cities, Mischief Night was moved to the opposite end of the year: 4th of November, the eve of the Gunpowder Plot celebrations (5th of November). It then slightly shifted to the night before Halloween – and it is at this last date that it reached the USA and Canada.

In England, Mischief Night went by many different names: Micky Night, Trick Night, Corn Night, Tick-Tack Night, Chievous Night, Mischievous Night, Miggy Night, Mizzy Night… And in some areas of Yorkshire, it was even seen as a coming-of-age ceremony for thirteen years old boys. In Northern America, the celebration got several other names, such as “Goosey Night” or “Mat Night”. In Maryland, it became known as “Moving Night” due to the common prank being to steal or switch various furniture and items found on house porches ; it was tied to another common name of the Night in rural areas, “Door Night”, due to rural pranksters often stealing the “doors” of the fences surrounding fields, or the small wooden doors of courtyards. In Northern and Western states of the USA, as well as in Ontario (Canada), the name “Cabbage Night” (or in French “Nuit de Chou”) is also common, due to the vandals usually raiding gardens and farms for cabbages (preferably leftover cabbages or rotting ones), before using them for all sort of mischiefs.

Today, the pranks of Mischief Night mostly include “toilet pappering” yards and buildings (wrapping them in toilet papers), throwing powders or eggs at cars and houses, writing on windows with soap, smashing pumpkins and jack-o-lanterns, spray-painting buildings, or setting up small fireworks – even though the tradition of throwing rotting cabbages or rotting fruits at people still survives in some area. Mischief Night also has a nasty history of arsons, that started in the 80s when people started setting garbage ablaze or creating big fires in cemeteries ; while in the 2010 New-Orleans saw a new form of Mischief Night appear as carnival/Mardi-Gras like parades ending up in vandalism-filled riots.

6) Devil’s Night

THE MUMMY’S CURSE

Category: Egyptomania / Urban legends / Egyptian belief

 When I say “mummy”, you say “curse”. It is part of popular culture: everybody knows that if you open the tomb of a mummy or disturb the corpse of ancient Egyptian ruler, a curse will fall upon you. I can’t count the number of movies, novels and short stories that use mummies as supernatural forces and vengeful undead preying on those that desecrated their eternal rest.  But what started this trend? What caused the apparition of this trope in medias? Well, it was a very mediatized case that is still well-known to us today: the curse of Tutankhamun.

In 1922, an event shook the world of archeology, and shaped Egyptology forever: the now famous archeologist Howard Carter discovered and open the tomb of the pharaoh Tutankhamun. It was a world-turning event that marked history… and it was also an event that was soon rumored to have unleashed a curse.

The first incident of the “curse” was actually reported in December 1922 (the tomb having been opened the previous month) by an Egyptologist, James Henry Breasted, a co-worker of Carter. He recalled to a newspaper how after opening the tomb, Carter sent someone to his house to send a message – and upon arriving the messenger heard a cry that he would describe as “faint but almost human-like”. Upon entering the house, the messenger saw that a cobra had broken into the birdcage of Carter’s canary-pet: the snake was still in the cage, with the bird’s corpse in its mouth. Now this incident mostly bothered the “locals” and the “superstitious”: you see, the snake, especially the cobra, was the symbol of the Egyptian pharaohs. It was the “uraeus”, the snake pharaohs wore on their crown, and which was supposed to come to live if the king was ever threatened – the cobra would spit poison on fire on the aggressor. Similarly, cobra-headed goddesses were charged with protecting the person of the pharaoh. As a result, seeing a cobra sneak into the house of the archeologist and killing his pet was interpreted as a sign, or a vengeance – especially since the snake broke into the house the same day Carter broke into the Pharaoh’s tomb, his “eternal house”.

However there was no real talk of a “curse”. The “curse” only began on April 1923 upon the death of Lord Carnarvon. Of his full name George Herbert, Fifth Earl of Carnarvon, he was the man who had financed Carter’s expedition and the exploration of the tomb. He got a nasty mosquito bite in Egypt, which he later slashed by accident when shaving: this led to a blood poisoning which left him gravely sick. During his sickness, the novelist Marie Corelli wrote a letter that was published in the New York World newspaper, in which she explained how it was said and believed that anyone who intruded a sealed Egyptian tomb would suffer a “dire punishment”: two weeks after the letter was written, Lord Carnarvon died. His death, coupled with the letter, couple with the canary incident, led to a huge mediatization of the “curse of Tutankhamun”: all the newspapers wrote about how the curse that had been found inscribed in the tomb, promising punishment to all those who would desecrate the grave, had made its “first victim”. It got so big that Benito Mussolini himself (yes, THE WW2 dictator), who was quite superstitious, asked the Egyptian mummy he had stored in the Chigi Palace to be removed immediately. Fuel was added to the fire by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who beyond his novelist activity was a very active paranormal enthusiast dabbling in Spiritism, and he studied the case of the “curse”, even publicly making the theory that the Earl had been killed by elemental spirits that were set to guard the tomb by ancient Egyptian priests. And when the corpse of Tutankhamun was autopsied, it was found that the mummy had a lesion on the left cheek – which was equated by media with the mosquito bite that killed Carnarvon (however the corpse of the Earl was never dug-up to verify if the two heals matched).

The curse struck three more times. First “victim”, professor La Fleur, a Canadian archeologist and close friend of Carter. Second “victim”: a railroad financier known as George Jay Gould the First: on May 1923, he died in the French Riviera after getting a nasty fever. His link to the curse? He had gotten his fever around the same time he entered the tomb of Tutankhamun, not as an archeologist but as a simple “visitor”. Third victim: death of colonel Aubrey Herbert, Lord Carnarvon’s youngest half-brother, from a sepsis due to a botched dental operation. The rumor of “curses” became even wider thanks to an anecdote recalled by the anthropologist Henry Field, who had visited the tomb with Breasted (see above) and had friendly relationships with Carter: in 1925, he told the press about a curious story that happened about a friend of Carter, the entrepreneur and philanthropist Sir Bruce Ingram. Sir Ingram had received as a gift a paper-weight made of a mummy hand, and on the wrist was a scarab-adorned bracelet on which was written “Cursed be he who moves my body. To him shall come fire, water, and pestilence.” Soon after receiving the gift, Sir Ingram’s house burned down, and as he attempted to rebuild it, a flood happened. Two parts of the curse were realized – the third however was never completed. By 1925, two more deaths were listed by the press as “victims of Tutankhamun”: professor Hugh Evelyn-White, a collaborator of Carter and one of the first men to enter the mummy’s funeral chamber, who hanged himself after a severe depression ; and Archibald Douglas Reed, the radiologist sent by the Egyptian government to make radios of Tutankhamun’s mummy. Both men died in 1924.

Howard Carter himself was far from being superstitious – he disdained all those sensational rumors and this silly belief in whatever curse the tomb supposedly had. He notably called it “tommy-rot” and “foolish superstitions”. When his diaries was released, we learned that in 1926, Carter saw a jackal while working: not only was this jackal the exact type of beasts corresponding to the god Anubis (see my post about him), but it was the first time Carter ever saw a jackal since working in the Egyptian desert (which was 35 years up to now). And yet, he did not thought of it as a “sign from the Egyptian gods” or a “warning of the curse” – for him it was just an event like another. Howard Carter died sixteen years after the opening of the tomb, in 1939, aged 64, from a lymphoma caused by Hodgkin’s disease – but despite this seemingly natural death, many believed or theorized that he was prematurely killed by the curse. It should be said that between Gould’s death and Carter’s, many more “victims” had been identified as proofs of the “curse”: 1926 saw the death of both the nurse that had treated Lord Carnarvon during his disease and the Egyptologist Georges Aaron Bénédite, who died in Luxor of a congestion soon after visiting the tomb of Tutankhamun. In 1928, Arthur C. Mace, an archeologist part of Carter’s team (and who helped Carter destroy the wall protecting the funeral chamber) died of a combination of pleurisy and pneumonia, while in 1929 Richard Bethell, Carter’s secretary, died in his bed at 35 years old of no obvious causes – it was theorized at the time that he had some sort of vascular accident, or maybe was smothered by someone. And finally, in 1935, James Henry Breasted himself died in New-York, at 70 years old, of an infection.

You’d think the “curse” would have stopped with Carter’s death, but oh no! Many more deaths were added to the list. In 1967 Mohammed Meri, head of the Department of Antiquities of the Egyptian government, died of a brutal cerebral hemorrhage soon after signing a treaty allowing the moving of Tutankhamun’s treasure to Paris for museum expositions. In 1969, the widow of Lord Carnarvon died. She was aged of 92 and died of natural causes – but given who her husband was, it must have been the curse! 1972, Gamal Mehrez, successor of Mohammed Mehri, also died of a cerebral hemorrhage soon after signing another treaty allowing a Tutankhamun exposition in London. And in 1980, lady Evelyn Herbert, daughter of Lord Carnarvon, died at the age of 79 years old: she was recognized by the press as the “last survivor of the Tutankhamun curse”.

Now… no need to tell you that a lot about this “curse” was invented or exaggerated. You could already see that a lot of natural deaths were attributed to the “mysterious working of the curse”, despite the obvious. Many members of the groups that discovered or entered the tomb lived long and healthy life – lady Evelyn Herbert herself died only 57 years after the opening of the tomb, and that despite being one of the first people to enter the funeral vault!  If we return to the “origins” of the curse, we should mention that the very basis of the media frenzy, the element that all the newspapers relayed, how a “curse” was found engraved in the tomb… is entirely false. No curse was found engraved, painted or signified in the tomb of Tutankhamun. The very concept of the curse came from previous cases (that I’ll describe below) that were “projected” on this one, or from side-sources… Such as for example Marie Corelli’s letter. But let’s speak about it: this letter that brought forward the whole idea of a “curse”… Well, already we know that Marie Corelli was not an historian or an Egyptologist, but just a novelist – and her “letter” was actually much more imaginative than scientific. And her only reference was a book, already quite obscure at the time, even more today, that was never recognized by the authorities on the question as a reliable source.

Now, while everybody talked about the “curse”, not everybody did so out of superstitions. Many people tried to explain the curse “rationally” by presenting “scientific” explanations: how the group might have used arsenic-laced candles, the presence of rye ergot fungus in the tomb, how the oil used by the embalmers on the mummy might have turned into acidic gazes, how the funeral chamber might have been radioactive… A very popular theory for a time was the one of the exposition to a deadly virus that might have been kept in the tomb for several millennia – a theory fallen flat today. Another just as popular insisted that some toxic fungi might have grown in Tutankhamun’s tomb (which had been noted by Carter to be quite humid, with a mixture of dust irritating the lungs and entire groups of molding fungus disfiguring some of the paintings). But even then, with all those factors taken into account that could have “facilitated” the deaths (not counting the natural health dangers of expeditions in Egypt at the time, and the predisposition of some people to their special deaths – lord Carnarvon was prone to frequent and severe lung infections for example), it should be noted that on the 58 people who were present at the opening of the tomb, and then of the sarcophagus, only eight died in the dozen following years. If there is indeed a curse, it must be a quite slow one.

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Tutankhamun’s curse wasn’t the only “mummy curse” existing – it was just the most famous and most mediatized one. But there were many others. Zahi Hawass, the famous Egyptian archeologist, got personally involved in two of them.

The first one happened when he was still young and worked on the excavations of Kom Abu Bilo (where the ruins of the town of Terenuthis dwelled) – he transported one day several artifacts out of the site, and on the very same day his cousin died. One year later, day for day, it was Hawass’ uncle who died, and three years later day for day, his aunt. He only considered it to be a curse possibly related to the Egyptian artefacts when he explored a tomb later and found in it the writing “All people who enter this tomb, and who will make evil against it and destroy it, then the crocodiles will be against them in waters, and the snakes against them on land ; the hippopotamuses will be against them in water, and the scorpions on land”. Hawass, of his own admission, is not superstitions, but all of this still gave him a certain respect for the mummies, that he tried to avoid disturbing as much as possible – a decision that was later confirmed by another incident. Years later, he was implied in the transformation of mummies from Bahariya Oasis to a museum: it wasn’t just any mummies however, it was the two corpses of children. Starting from the very night he moved the mummies, Hawass was plagued by nightmares involving the two dead children – and these bad dreams only stopped when the mummy of their father was reunited with them in the museum. This is notably what led him to his personal beliefs: mummies should not be exposed or put on display, by nature it is something wrong, but in the greater scope of things it is a “lesser evil” when compared to the even more dangerous and disrespectful option of letting people walk into tombs as if they were museums.

Tales of “mummy curses” were in fact sometimes retroactively recognized – it should be remembered that not only were those not quite famous before Tutankhamun, but also the hieroglyphs were only translated in the 19th century, when Egyptomania and the quest for mummies had begun much earlier. But given there was no knowledge of these “curses”, people just told this as weird incident and spooky stories. Such a record dates from the 17th century: a Polish traveler bought two mummies in Alexandria, and brought them with him on the ship that carried him home. But during the journey he had several disturbing visions of the ghosts of the mummies, and the sea became very stormy. The fear of the specters and the worrying disturbances of the sea led the Polish man to throw the mummies overboard to get rid of them and their “evil” – and as soon as he did that, the sea became calm again.

But now let’s speak of the real thing… The curses themselves. “Everybody knows that the Egyptians protected their tombs with curses, so that anyone who disturbs them may die”. That’s “common knowledge” – but often “common knowledge” can be quite false. Now, these curses DID exist, yes, but they were not as common as one may think. Mostly because ancient Egyptians did not even thought that someone in their right mind would try to steal from a tomb or desecrate the corpse inside: Egyptians had a very strong death-culture with strict funeral rites and a complex mythology of corpse-protecting gods – in fact the very action of writing about desecration of graves was seen as a dangerous thing to do (because it might give idea to other people). Most of these tomb-curses are found in private tombs (aka the tombs of the wealthy and powerful) from the Old Kingdom (aka the “Era of Pyramids”, the oldest of old Egypt), but they are very vague : they speak of the gods judging impure men entering the tomb and refusing their future offerings and prayers, of the dead putting fear of themselves in the heart of those that do evil to the coffin, of wicked rulers trying to desecrate the tomb ending up heirless… In the following eras of Egypt (Middle Kingdom and New Kingdom), the curses became less numerous, much rarer – but much more… “intense” and more specific. Frequently the god Thoth and the goddess Sekhmet were invoked in those warnings texts, and the promise of inevitable death and incurable diseases made the bulk of these execrations.

THE HEADLESS HORSEMAN

Category: American literature and European folklore

Everybody knows the “Headless Horseman”. He is an archetypal character of ghost stories in America. But do you really know the Horseman?

The actual character of the “Headless Horseman” everybody knows thanks to American media comes from a short story of Gothic literature, written by Washington Irving and published in 1819: “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”. This story depicts a fictional version of the actual town of Sleepy Hollow, renowned in-universe for its creepy atmosphere and numerous ghost stories – a “haunting” town filled with stories of spells and supernatural, in which mysterious events and strange sights are an everyday matter. Most famous and dreaded of all the ghosts said to haunt Sleepy Hollow, and the “leader” of the dark aerial powers of the town, is the “Headless Horseman”, a Hessian trooper during the American Revolutionary War, decapitated by an American cannonball: since his skull had been shattered into pieces scattered across the battlefield, his comrades simply buried his headless body in the cemetery of the “Old Dutch Church” of Sleepy Hollow (as Sleepy Hollow is located near Tarry Town, a formerly Dutch settlement). Ever since, the headless ghost has been said to ride around Sleepy Hollow, seeking his lost head and doing malevolent things to whoever crossed his path. The main protagonist of the story, Professor Ichabod Crane, happens to meet a headless rider at night and manages to flee the ghoul, before disappearing from town – but unlike what many people mis-remember today, it isn’t actually the ghost of the Horseman. Rather, what the story strongly implies and hints is that this “Headless Horseman” is just a costume that was put on by a mischievous love rival of Crane, who played with the professor’s naturally superstitious and frightful nature to drive him out of town. The real mystery of the story is not who the Headless Horseman was – but rather what happened to the professor Crane, last seen fleeing for his life, and then vanished into thin air.

This story became MASSIVELY popular, and like everything Irving wrote, part of America’s classical literature. The story (and the Headless Horseman) were notably popularized by two film adaptations: one, animated, by Disney in 1949, and another, live-action, by Tim Burton in 1999. All these adaptations notably worked into “shaping” the Sleepy Hollow story into a Halloween one. The original text of Irving had no clear mentions of Halloween – it was however a Gothic ghost story, whose climax happened during the night of an autumnal harvest feast in which guests had exchanged creepy stories, and the fake Horseman uses a pumpkin to imitate the action of holding a human head. Of course, this led people to reinterpret the story as Ichabod Crane meeting the Headless Horseman during Halloween night, and the Horseman as wielding a Jack-o-lantern as a head replacement/weapon. Some people even rewrote the Horseman’s death to be on Halloween – when in the actual text, the Hessian soldier was said to have died in the Battle of the White Plains, in October yes, but the 28th only.

But here is the thing… While everybody refers to Irving’s story for “building” the Headless Horseman myth, and associates the Headless Horseman with Sleeping Hollow, in truth Irving did not “invent” the legend. The figure of the Headless Horseman is far older than the “Legend of Sleepy Hollow”. Irving always did extensive research before writing his texts, and never invented anything out of thin air: and so it is highly probable he created the legend of Sleepy Hollow’s horseman based on actual ghost tales going around the area. After all, we know that before Irving brought him to America, the “headless horseman” was a traditional European ghost. Scottish and English tales thrived with headless ghosts – not always riders (for example, due to the use of decapitation, numerous royal ghosts in old castles were said to carry their head in their arms), but sometimes riders indeed. These tales of “headless riders” usually depicted these ghosts as warning apparitions, ill omens that people should not ignore – in fact, these tales often depicted men too proud or too arrogant to read the supernatural signs, and ignoring these warnings about their impending downfall.  There were even tales of ghosts riding headless horses, or of entire carriages with headless ghosts, drivers AND passengers! It is variations of the “death coach” myth, or Coiste Bodhar (silent coach), about a black coach with a headless driver that appears to people about to die or who know someone who will die.

The headless horsemen didn’t stop to just the British Isles: they also existed in Germany, where headless horsemen were just a recurring type of ghosts. They were the spirits of sinners, doomed to wander and haunt the earth until they had atoned from their sins – and they did so by doing good deeds for the people they met along the road. However, once the service was given, you should NEVER thank the headless spirit by shaking his hand – it would mean your doom, for the physical touch of a headless rider is deadly. Rather, the living person should take a tree branch between them and the ghost – so that the branch would wither and die, but not them.

But the most famous European incarnation of the Headless Horseman myth stays without a doubt the dullahan of Irish mythology/folklore. The Dullahan is a dangerous supernatural entity from the Otherworld, which means that it is at the same time a fairy, a ghost and a demon (Irish people did not really draw the line between inhuman magical creatures such as fairies and supernatural manifestations of humans such as ghosts). The dullahan is a headless rider on a black horse, with a whip made of a human spine in one hand, and his own cut head in his other hand – it is a horrible head, with a disturbing grin going from ear to ear, and constantly moving eyes that spy on everything around him. Meeting him means that you will surely die, for if he calls out your name and catch you, he will take away your soul and leave your corpse behind: the saying went “when the dullahan stops riding, someone will die”. Some variations of the legend even have him being the driver of a “death coach”, appearing as a wagon made of human bones and human skin, with candles placed in skulls to light it up.

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Interestingly, Sleepy Hollow isn’t the only “classical” literary manifestation of a Headless Horseman in American. Forgotten today but popular in his time, there was a novel called “The Headless Horseman” and written by Mayne Reid, which was serialized from 1865 to 1866, and took place in Texas. “The Headless Horseman or a Strange Tale of Texas” takes place after the War of Mexico, and tells the story of the “Southern belle” of the Poindexter plantation, who is courted by two men and torn between two possible love options: Maurice Gerald (dashing and wonderful, but poor) and Cassius Calhoun (arrogant and aggressive, but rich!). What could be a simple love story becomes more complicated when the belle’s brother is murdered, with all clues pointing to Gerald, and when a strange headless horseman is sighted at the edge of the plantation…

THE PARCAE

Category: Roman mythology

In Roman mythology, the Parcae (plural of “Parca”) are the three goddesses embodying destiny – it is their will that decides the shapes and events of the life of both mortals and immortals (gods and humans). They do not decide the individual actions of people, there is still a form of free will, but they decide important events of life: when someone is born, when someone dies, or if someone is destined to partake in a great war… The gods fear and respect them, and none have power over the Parcae – not even Jove/Jupiter, king of the gods, is just an herald and servant to the Parcae’s decrees. No one can change their decisions, no amount of prayer can make the Parcae change their will, and what they did can never be undone. They are described as weaving sisters who manipulate the literal “threads of life”.

Originally, the Romans only had one goddess of fate, “Parca Maurtia”, who worked close alongside a goddess of birth known as “Neuna Fata”. But this duo would become a trio when the Romans discovered the Greek Moirae, and decided to reuse them for their own mythology.

The first of the three Parcae is Nona, an adaptation of Neuna Fata. She was the Parca who “spins the thread from her distaff onto the spindle”: understand, she takes care of birth and the beginning of life. It was said that she appeared most notably during the “dies lustricus”. This “day of lustration” or “purification day” was the naming ceremony of a Roman baby: it happened nine days after a boy’s birth, but eight after a girl’s birth (because Romans believed girls aged and matured faster). By receiving a name, the child was identified as its very own individual, part of the family yet detached from its mother, and by extension it became deserving of its own fate: on the dies lustricus, Nona would appear and determine the child’s lifespan. It was so important that the ceremony of writing the new name of the baby was called “Fata Scribunda”, “The Written Fate”. She was called Nona, the “ninth”, because she also acted as a goddess of pregnancy: mothers called upon her during the ninth month of their pregnancy, when birth was to be due.

The second of the Parcae is Decima, whose role is to “measure the thread of life with her rod”. She sometimes gets confused with Nona when it comes to determining the lifespan, as sometimes people with short lives are said to have been “ill-gifted” by her. Generally poor Decima has little personality to herself as she was created to fill the gap between the other two, to match the “three goddesses” pattern. We can theorize that, like her Greek equivalent, her role might have been to give people good and bad things across their life.

The last of the Parcae is Morta, the “iron-hearted” sister, whose job is to “cut the thread of life”: she is an adaptation of Parca Maurtia, and she is an entity of death. It was believed she was the one who decided the way a human would die, and was often associated with stillborn infants. No one can die until she cut their thread: in fact, in Statius’ Thebaid, the story is told of how a living man accidentally ended up falling into the underworld, and yet did not die since the Parcae hadn’t cut his thread – and similarly, characters in Roman theater could sometime say that their life had been prolonged by Morta out of pity: “white-robed Morta” can promise to those she likes the gift of old age.

Mind you, these different functions were not always clearly cut, as poets and writers liked to depict them as all three being spinsters with distaffs, instead of just Nona, while others claimed that on a man’s day of death, the three “harsh sisters” came, with no postponing of the meeting and no one being able to not answer their call. Daughters of Nox (the Night) and Erebus (Darkness), living in the underworld alongside ghosts and chthonian deities, Mors (the Roman equivalent of Thanatos, and by extension the Parcae’s brother) is usually depicted as their helper or assistants: when it isn’t Morta who cuts or tears apart the thread of life, it is Mors who does so with his sword – and when Hercules manages to subdue Mors (the myth of Herakles vanquishing Thanatos), it is described as him “stretching the wool on the distaff of the Parcae”. In their abode, they engrave in steel and bronze the fate of the entire world, the destiny of each individual, mortal or immortal – and no one and nothing can erase or destroy those archives, not even Jove’s own lightning. According to Ovid, they were the ones who established the law according to which any person who eats the food of the underworld would be forced to stay forever among the dead, and according to Statius, when Orpheus managed to bring back Eurydice from the world of the dead, it was the Parcae’s task to accompany her in order to “repeat their task” of giving her a new life.

In art, a classical iconography was formed over them. The Parcae were usually depicted with a form of headgear, be it a crown of gold, a crown of oak branches, or even a veil over their head. The Romans usually invoked the Parcae alongside Apollo, as both were “seers” and deities able to see into the future: they were also given the sacrifice of black sheep, the same types of animal killed for the Furies (the Roman version of the Erynies, a monstrous trio of goddesses of revenge and punition, who were said to dwell alongside the Parcae in the Underworld – a description of it even claims that the Furies sit by one side of the throne of the ruler of the underworld, while the Parcae sit by another).

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Also called the “Black Sisters” (in their grim and darkest form), the “Triple Goddesses” or the “Elysian Sisters” (for some believed they could grant the prayers of the souls reaching the Elysian Fields), the Parcae took part in numerous myths – some inherited from Greek mythology, others entirely invented by Roman authors. In many of these myths the Parcae notably act as prophets for the gods.

# Ovid recalls a unique myth in which, during the Titanomachia (the war between the Titans and the Olympians), the Parcae warned Styx (the goddess of the underworld river, and an ally of Jupiter) that Saturn (Kronos) had found a monster born out of Terra (Gaia), half-bull in the front, half-snake in the back. Anyone who would take out the guts of the creature and burn them in a fire would be destined to vanquish the Olympians: to avoid that, Styx snatched the monster away from Saturn and locked it up in a “black grove” behind a “triple-wall”.

# In Ovid’s version of the myth of Phaeton, the Parcae warned Jove one day by giving him a prophecy according to which the day when the land, the sea and the heaven would burn in flames, would be the day when the world could potentially be destroyed. When Phaeton loses control of the chariot of the Sun his father and scorches the world, Jove understands that the prophecy is about to be realized, prompting him to kill Phaeton.

# When the great hero Meleager was born, the Parcae appeared: Nona said he would be noble, Decima that he would be brave, but Morta, looking at a brand burning in the hearth, said he would live as long as it took for the brand to be consumed. Meleager’s mother took away the piece of wood from the fire and kept it protected in a chest for many years, until her son was adult… But after a series of disastrous events in which Meleager killed his own uncle, his mother’s brother, she was so struck by grief she threw the piece of wood in the fireplace, in which it burned: and Meleager burned like the brand his life was attached to.

# They were the ones who prophesized that Thetis’ son would be greater than his father, prompting the gods who lusted after her to marry her to a mortal king – giving birth to the great hero Achilles.

# According to Pseudo-Hyginus, all those that managed to escape from the realm of the dead did so only because the Parcae agreed for it to be: Ceres in her quest for her daughter Prosperpina, Liber Pater (Dionysos) when he rescued his mother Semele, Hercules when he brought up Cerberus, Asclepius when he became a god, Mercure (Hermes) who acts as a traveler between the world of the dead and the living, and Castor, Pollux, Leda… All had to get a specific permission from the Parcae.

DIA DE LOS MUERTOS

Category: Mexican culture

El Dia de los Muertos (The Day of the Dead) is one of the most famous holidays of Mexican culture. The actual origins of this celebration are heavily discussed and debated, but what we can say for sure is that it started out as an adaptation of the Christian Allhallowtide (All Saints Day + All Souls Day), moved to the Mexican culture through Catholicism, but then evolved on its own, influenced by the local culture, and departed from the Christian holiday in many ways.

While still an holiday to remember and pray the dead, during which families and friends of the deceased visit their graves, it lacks the “solemnity” and the “sadness” of traditional Christian “Hallowmass”: rather, el Dia de los Muertos is a joyful holiday, a day to celebrate the dead rather than mourn them – with a very festive and humorous approach to death (for example, people will talk about funny events that happened to the deceased, or recall hilarious anecdotes about the one who passed away).

Traditionally the Day of the Dead happens around November 1st or 2nd (after all, it started out as All Saints Day, on the 1st of November, and All Souls Day, on the 2nd), but some regionalized celebrations can move the “day” to October 31st (making it overlap with Halloween) or even to November 6th. And often the “Day of the Dead”, despite its name, actually takes place over several days, becoming a true festival: for example the 1st of November will be the “Dia de los Inocentes” (day of the innocents), to commemorate children who died, while the 2nd will be dedicated to dead adults.  Specific traditions of the Dia de los Muertos change from region to region, and even from city to city, but there are still some recurring traits.

For example: the ofrendas tradition (ofrenda=offering). During the Day, people build altars to the memory of the dead, on which they leave the favorite food of the dead, alongside pictures of the deceased and various memorabilia: not only do these altars help the prayers of the living reach the dead, but they also encourage the dead to visit their living kin during the Dia. Toys are given to dead children, while altars for adults have bottles of alcohol – some people even leave pillows and blankets so the dead can rest after their long travel from the afterlife. These altars can be found everywhere: inside one’s home, in public places, near graves… In fact, these altars can be decorated with a type of flower that people usually leave on the graves of their departed loved ones: the “cempasuchil”, the Mexican marigold, also called the “Flor de Muerto”, Flower of the Dead – their strong scent and bright orange petals are thought to attract and guide the dead towards them. It is around these altars that families and friends gather, celebrate the memory of the deceased, recall the funny anecdotes I talked about before – or even dance! Some people think that you need to dance with shells on your clothing during the Dia, so that the noise of the dance will wake up the dead.

Beyond giving offerings to the dead, gathering to honor their memories and cleaning up their graves (which can lead people to sometimes stay all night long in the cemetery), food is another big part of the Dia de los Muertos. A lot of food is prepared for the celebration: some will be eaten by the living as they gather together, while the rest will be placed on the altars of the dead as offerings. And then eaten by the living. Because you see, dead can’t eat physical food – rather, what the spirits of the deceased do is that they will eat the “essence” or the “spirit” of the food. But will be left behind the “leftovers”, looking like untouched food, and that people will be able to eat without offending the spirit (who already had its meal) – the only difference with “regular” food is that, according to Mexican belief, this “spirit-eaten” food will be without any kind of nutritional value and basically leave you unfed. Traditional Day of the Dead food includes tamales (corn-dough steamed in a corn husk or banana leaf and then stuffed with herbs, fruits, cheese or meat, you decide), candied pumpkins, “pan de muerto” (the “bread of the dead”, a soft and sweet bread covered in sugar and decorated with shapes evoking bones), and sugar-calaveras (sugar skulls, as the name say, skulls made of sugar). The “calaveras” (the skull/ the dead head) is in fact the main symbol of the Dia de los Muertos: people put the skull symbol everywhere in their decoration and their food, as said above they eat skulls made of sugar or chocolate, and people can even wear masks shaped like skulls. However, unlike “European” skulls which are designed to look grim and realistic, the “Mexican” calaveras typically tend to be ornate, beautiful and colorful – again, everything in this celebration is loud, bright and vibrant, and so the skeletons are not here to spook you but to bring a type of joy and fun to the whole celebration.

The habit of children to put on masks or costumes of skeletons even led to the a tradition known as the “calaverita” (small skulls): in big cities, children put on their costumes and go door-to-door asking for some candies or a bit of money (again, an overlap with the trick-or-treating tradition of Halloween). A confusion which is not helped by the fact that, beyond Mexico, the Dia de Los Muertos “bled” into the neighboring country, the United-States, in which Halloween is a very important celebration: today, Dia de los Muertos celebrations can be found in most Southern states, ranging from Texas to California passing by Arizona and New-Mexico.

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However, unlike what one could be led to believe, el Dia de los Muertos isn’t all about food and booze. It is also about literature!