Culture of death in Mexico: Psychoanalytic inquiry about mourning rites and the symbolic function of society

Mexicans and their historical relationship with death

Mexicans have dealt with death in a particular way. This is evident not only from their ancestral rites, but from the violent history and current conditions, where death is ubiquitous. Mexicans do not whisk away in the face of death, but rather, they coexist with death, as their traditions show. Mourning rites are characterized by their symbolism, deriving from a mixture between two cultures: 1) of different cultures before the Spanish intervention in Mesoamerica in 1521, and 2) the foundation of the evangelizing New Spain. Originally, Mesoamerican cultures possessed mourning and funeral rites, which lacked catholic components and, in opposition, were commanded by a circular view of life-death. Pre-Hispanic beliefs did not dissociate death from life. They “integrated death into their cosmogonic cycle as one more circumstance of becoming: death does not mark an end” (Rodríguez, 2009, p. 21). ³ Life was considered a transit stage, so some indigenous groups, such as the Mexicas, “did not cling to life, and it was easy for them to die, since it did not mean more than the end of a situation” (p. 22). People believed that all that is born lives on forever as energy, always capable of creating something new: “after death, what was left of vital energy remained among the ashes or remains, like bones, therefore great care was taken in the rites, to conserve said energy” (p. 23).

The oldest document in existence on pre-Hispanic beliefs about death and their funerary customs is La Relación de Michoacán (1540), in which the traditions of the Purépecha Empire are described. This Empire became the birthplace of the tradition of the Day of the Dead (each year, on November 2nd). Written by Jerónimo de Alcalá (1540), captivated by the complex ideas of the indigenous people of Michoacán, the men who came to conquer encountered people for whom mortality was not a consequence of the mere fact of being born, but was acquired through the incorporation of what springs from the earth (Mejía, 2004). This document explains the first funerary customs, in which the bodies were incinerated in order to perpetuate the cycle of energy, conserving the memory of the dead through the burial of their closest belongings. The Mexicas believed that there were four after-worlds to be reached, and the idea of resurrection rested on the assumption that the energy released in death remains among the living. The Nahuatls incinerated the bodies, since fire had the capacity to transform and liberate. The dead do not leave, they live with us, and their home will be the place where they are burned (Le Clézio, 2008).

Among the Mesoamericans, offerings were made, which could include some parts of the body, usually bones; the rest was burned or used for other purposes (Sánchez, 2016). They believed that the majority of the dead arrived at Mictlán (one of the afterworlds), where they lived in a similar way as they did on Earth (Denis et al., 2012). For that reason, altars included objects they might need in the afterlife. Food offerings were made every year, on a date when the dead were believed to return and coexist with the living.

It was not until after the arrival of the Spanish evangelizers that the Christian European model was imposed (Rodríguez, 2009). The first cemeteries, and consequently the first burials took place, since the church prohibited cremations. This was the first modification of the cult of the dead, as an import of the European model (Rodríguez, 2009). Along with it, burials proliferated: tombstones, masses, and prayers became customary, as new traditions for mourning. Fusing both traditions, it emerged what we now know as the Day of the Dead. The Christian custom of making offerings found its place in pre-Hispanic Mexico, where food was made during funeral rites (Rodríguez, 2009). The Mesoamerican festivity of the dead is preserved in date and in symbolism, but incorporated the Christian burials in the cemeteries.

This fusion also resulted in the festivity of the dead divided into two days. On the first day of November, “the small party for the dead” (Rodríguez, 2009) took place, where food offerings were made and people attended church. On November 2nd, “there was a great consumption of alcohol, everyone was given license to drink; and only in the great festivals of pre-Hispanic Mexico was this concession made” (p. 127). To date, in Pátzcuaro and Tzintzuntzan, the relatives of the deceased are summoned, as well as anyone who wants to be part of the commemoration. In cemeteries, a vigil takes place, filled with people eating and talking, “musical groups go through the corridors offering to play the melodies the deceased enjoyed” (Medina, 2004).

This festivity shows how Mexican mourning rites possess multiple dimensions, but most importantly they account for the belief in coexistence with the dead. On one hand, death is not feared, but on the other, it is considered alien and fascinating, as well as anguishing. This latter dimension involves a more ominous death in the Freudian sense of the unheimlich: the familiar that becomes unknown (Freud, 1919). In this fusion of cultures, ceremonies in community in cemeteries are essential. After the funeral banquet, people continue with their daily activities, having dignified the memory of the deceased. According to this vision, mourning implies death and birth at the same time, in order to preserve the continuity of the cycle of energy, which gives a profound sense of union and festivity, but also grief and sadness. This mixure is highly visible in each Mexican mourning ritual.

Funeral rite as culture of death: Affects, catharsis and the symbolic order

The deceased needs a territory whose ultimate expression is the cemetery (Bartra, 2007). The cemetery marks the territory that inscribes the name and the resting place of the subject, it becomes a symbolic territory. The funerary rite is destined to satisfy the memory of the deceased, by summoning the totality of the symbolic register against the advent of the ultimate real (Lacan,1959/2014). Lacan speaks of the impossibility of filling the gap left by the real with signifiers, unless the symbolic order is convened in its entirety, that is, with the help of the group, the community, the culturally organized support. ⁴ Bauab (2012) calls this the ‘‘subjective function of mourning’’, which refers to burial as a way of making the passage from loss to lack. ⁵ Through the community’s involvement in any individual’s mourning, death is socialized from a shared lack. Lacan explained mourning close to an “event”, since lack is something that emerges, loss occurs as a sudden disorder to subjectivity, where the the implication of the social symbolic element is needed (Hoffman, 2004; Lacan, 1968). This Lacanian approach to mourning allows us to think of it differently from a process, as a relocation of the subject towards lack, as the possibility to give a name to the lack and reorder one's own world without denying it, while also assuming it as part of oneself. Orozco and Soria (2017) also place mourning as an event, given that loss involves a violent disturbance in the psychic system of the subject, and its incidence brings something that constitutes a decisive, irreversible turnaround in the history of any subject. From the moment of the loss, nothing will be as before, which gives loss its overwhelming character, therefore making socialization essential.

The funeral rite constitutes a form of mourning rite, as a socialized and invested expression of grief for the death of the other-like-me, that is constructed through the ritual actions shared from the uniqueness of the encounter with loss. Funerary rites, from a historical perspective, may constitute the starting point of civilization. According to Morin (2011) “there is practically no archaic group, however primitive, that abandons its dead, or that abandons them without rites” (p. 23).

Affective manifestations during burials show how “the human corpse has already aroused emotions that have acquired social character in the form of funerary practices” (Morin, 2011, p. 23), a complex of emotions, shows the deepest disturbances that the encounter with death provokes. These manifestations are expected. Showing emotions while facing the deceased has become a social mandate, which, in Mexico, gave place to the profession of the plañideras, also known as lloronas: suffering women, that with their crying and despair, summon the painful affection of others. They scream and sob facing the coffin of the deceased, wrapped in large black shawls, their hands run back and forth through the accounts of a worn rosary (Muñíz, 2002). Mexico still preserves this tradition with high symbolic content. This practice and exercise of suffering is liberating, as manifestation of a shared catharsis mobilized by identification.

The catharsis summoned by the plañideras has an imaginary-identificatory aspect, ⁶ similar to the clinical findings of Freud (1983) that gave rise to the notion of abreaction, a psychic process of making the unconscious conscious, through release of affection. It is based on the Aristotelian notion of tragic reason, which has the purpose of purging, unloading and purification (kátharsis), “a relief accompanied by pleasure” (Aristóteles, 1970, 1974). Aristotle offers a poetic reading of the pleasure principle, of the satisfaction of discharge, the relief caused by the release of the pain shown to others. It is the essence of tragedy, “separated each of the species in the different parts, acting the characters, and not through the story, and that through compassion and fear carries out the purgation (kátharsis) of such affections” (Aristóteles, 1971, p. 20).

The dialogues provoke two passions in the spectator: compassion (affliction [Jammer], emotional shock [Rührung]), fear [Schrecken], shuddering [Schauder]), éleos and phóbos in Greek (Figueroa, 2014). Both are affections transmissible via identification, without the need of being consciously understood. Violent emotions imply in the spectator a purge that generates relief, security and pleasure. This has the function of bringing order to psychic life “so that impulses and irrational appetites are subordinated to what is superior in the soul, the intelligence” (p. 265). Greeks displayed the mantic and the cathartic (Rohde, 2006), as the double movement illustrated by the plañideras. The mantic is represented by a seer, able to have a contact with the dead, which are frequently called for. ⁷ The cathartic has the function of purification and expiation of sins. The rite assumes the affective-liberating side of mourning. It also addresses the fear of one’s death, interrogates one’s feelings in relation to the deceased, and restores the symbolic order. This general principle goes hand in hand with the cycle Mexicans exhibit in each mourning rite, which reestablishes the symbolic order of each subject and each society. The dead are reinserted into the life-death cycle, and the living subject assumes his/her loss. Unlike the melancholic, the mourner chooses to learn to live in lack, since both -the dead and the living- continue fulfilling their destinies inside the same cycle.

In his classic study on death, Childe (1986) narrates the discoveries of vestiges supporting the fact that the corpse is not abandoned, as well as attributing to funerary practices a role in the social order. Ariès (1977) relates funeral rites and how they have transformed throughout time, referring to the transformation of society itself. Funeral rites serve the purpose of being a universal therapy (Vincent-Thomas, 1993). The ritual becomes a symbolic requirement with two purposes: that of designating for the corpse a place of its own, and helping the survivors recover from their loss.

There are also practices referring to the avoidance of mourning, which Ariès (2007) points out as inaugurated in 1400 in a Europe commanded by religious designs, where the traditions of mourning vestments, silent prayer and processions proliferated. Ariès refers to the dryness of mourning as tamed death, a simplification of mourning where there is no longer liberating catharsis, but nervous crisis instead. ⁸ This silence has given way to a new form of shortened mourning in the current times, introduced by the new social orders, which from several sides opposes Mexicans’ approach to death. This indifference to grief implies the end of the sentimental culture, where the system proceeds to the devaluation of the past, and an eagerness to abandon traditions (Lipovetsky, 2009). Allouch (2011) recalls: “In the absence of rite in its place, its current savagery still has as a counterpart that death pushes mourning towards the act. To dry death, dry loss. Henceforth only a similar dry loss, only a similar act, manages to leave the dead in his death, in death.” (p. 9). ⁹

Allouch opens up a psychoanalytic interrogation of the traditional funeral rites in Mexico which locate around the body of the deceased, the commemoration of a change of status. In this way, mexican vision towards death is opposed to the predominant western studies during the 20th century that separate grief from mourning, conceptualizing grief as an individual, natural, and mental phenomenon, which leads to the idea of a fixed type of mourning, a sort of “normalized mourning” (commanded by any type of norm or external mandate), decontextualized, even organized. Its socio-cultural side -which involves traditional mourning practices- was considered separately, dangerously simplifying grief as an individual matter, independent from public life. Mexican vision towards death is closer to more recent approaches to the subject. As some authors have stated (Brinkmann & Holte Kofod, 2018; Holte Kofod & Brinkmann, 2017), “recent work within the sociology of emotions, anthropology, and history of emotions challenges this conception of grief as a universal and ahistorical phenomenon”. Mourning rituals and grief manifestations are not exclusively social phenomena, nor individual phenomena. In accordance, psychoanalysis also does not intend to normalize mourning, or turn it into a mandate or obligation. Any type of attempt to impose rules for mourning (psychological, from the superego, etc.) opposes grief, since any loss summons a disordered subjectivity. Mourning arises as a consequence, response and attempt for establishing a new order.

From private to public loss: The role of identification as shared mourning

There are important connections between the support of traditional mourning rites in Mexico and the symbolic function of mourning for psychoanalysis: restoration of the symbolic order, continuation of the circle of life, saying farewell in presence of a body, socialization of the loss, identification with the pain of others, exacerbation of affect, among other elements.

During mourning, we are faced against the empty space, a solidified negative space. We might choose to coexist with it, exhausting every memory of the times that were. Any physical representation of the beloved, if any is left, might become a reminder, not only of the one we lost, but that we have also lost ourselves – or a version of ourselves – in losing them. As Barthes (2009) in his Mourning Diary expressed, the idea of our own death begins to be acceptable. Freud himself encountered death in its most violent forms, which he expressed in his letter addressed to Einstein in 1932 and in his article on war and death in 1915, from which he recognizes an “excess of death” that cannot be reduced to a psychological term. The multiple tasks that must take place before the definitive disappearance of the other and of oneself, transform subjectivity beyond its recognizable limits. Freud (1917) speaks of mourning as the reaction to the loss of a loved object, which involves the painful effort of separating ourselves from it. During the work of mourning, a review is made of each thought and expectation related to the lost one; ideally, each revision fractions the affective intensity of such memories. Freud (1916) remarked a resistance to abandon the loved ones, even when reality has shown their definitive absence.

Lacan’s (1959/2014) version of mourning involves an initial moment of stagnation of desire, and the role of the presence of others in order to configure a new space for it, which includes the social participation in rites. This perspective of mourning refuses to reduce it to a psychological process, and consequently to favor its pathologization. Lacan chose Hamlet, “the tragedy of desire” as the paradigm of mourning. In a paradoxical movement, Hamlet discovers his love and desire towards Ophelia only in face of her death, in the very moment he stands face to face with the pain and grief of Laertes, during the cemetery scene. Hamlet claims (Shakespeare, 1600/2018):

'Swounds, show me what thou'lt do:

Woo't weep? woo't fight? woo't fast? woo't tear thyself?

Woo't drink up eisel? eat a crocodile?

I'll do't. Dost thou come here to whine?

To outface me with leaping in her grave?

Be buried quick with her, and so will I:

And, if thou prate of mountains, let them throw

Millions of acres on us, till our ground,

Singeing his pate against the burning zone,

Make Ossa like a wart! Nay, an thou'lt mouth,

I'll rant as well as thou.

Lacan shows a Hamlet that embodies the culture of the mourning rite. A culture of the symbolic order commanded by mourning, based on shared pain, and also, on the catharsis put into effect. The disorder in loss, the incomprehensible, the distressing reality, leads to grievous manifestations and the search to give a name to the lack, initially, via identification with others. He expresses the basic conditions of the symbolic rite of mourning: presence of others, shared pain and affect, the presence of a corpse, and the assumption of one’s desire through the ritual. Following Lacan’s version, mourning is mobilized by the community, almost the same year Gorer (1965) highlighted how human societies have mourning rituals involving public manifestations. The mourning in Hamlet is parallel to the role of plañideras, with the addition of the symbolic function. The public manifestation of grief allows private mourning to manifest, in a ‘dialogue between mourners’ (Leader, 2011). The deceased unite the members of a community (Lomnitz, 2006).

The familiarity with death has become, according to Lomnitz (2006), one of the totems of Mexico, the poetry of Calaveras, the usage of images of skeletons in satirical/political cartoons, and sugar skulls, which simulate an Aztec Tzompantli or burial. Nowadays, the altares have been popularized. These offerings serve as a representation of continuous exchanges between the living and the dead (EFE Agencia, 2017). In a macro level of socialization, mourning rites constitute a national symbolic space for loss. Mexicans honor the dead, keeping alive their names and stories, preserving the culture of death. Learning to live with loss does not perpetuate mourning, but by recognizing this lack, the rest of society can live. Mourning exceeds the field of the individual and is also mediated by culture (Walter, 2006). What some authors call “transformative ritual” (Wojtkowiak, 2018) corresponds to the change of status in the subject, which could well be the subject facing the mourning rite. Therefore, thanks to the role of culture in mourning, “death transforms, rather than severs, the relationship with the deceased, who may be transformed by the ritual actions of mourners into an ancestor” (Walter, 2010. p. 7). Culture supports the individual: “individuals are shaped by their culture, but are not determined by it” (p. 6).

The “crypt” as perverse violent order vs social movements as a symbolic response

Given the violence that Mexico is going through in the last years, it becomes mandatory to raise Freud’s question about the subject and society facing mass deaths, including over 40 thousand disappearances (Comisión Nacional de Búsqueda, 2019). Families in search of the disappeared, form a collective cry for justice by denouncing their suffering, directed to multiple instances, since there is no Other ¹⁰ answering to their demands; “if the object suddenly disappears without a prior threat, it is the pain that prevails” (Nasio, 1996, p. 46). A space for mourning is required. There is nowhere to relocate the “open wound” that Freud described in melancholia in 1917. Sicilia (2012) describes a feeling of discomfort that resembles “extreme pain that is not pain, but suffering, abandonment, and helplessness that makes us seek the consolation of human beings and justice. These victims, I have accompanied them in “the torture of hope”.

This extreme pain belongs to the order of failed mourning, or a ritualization of suspended mourning. Many describe this period of uncertainty as “torturous” which “freezes” individuals and societies (Beder, 2002). Ritualization of pain takes place, while the symbolic status of mourning rites results ineffective. It can be described as an encrypted mourning, understanding “crypt” as a concept coined by Abraham and Torok (2005), which involves a form of fixation or disease of grief. In the crypt, the ego finds itself trapped in the contradictory obligation of keeping alive, at any price, the same thing that causes the greatest suffering. It consists in depositing a hope, a wish that is waiting to be fulfilled, as a bleak fixation, where the dead never dies. Orozco (2012) highlights the character of violent death as “a traumatic imprint on the survivors, which exerts a terrifying shock on their pain and grief” (p. 210). The violent way of dying, together with the absence of a body, indicates that the traumatic mark places a barrier in the way of mourning, encrypting the required symbolization. But even when there is a body to bury, perpetuated violence constitutes a condition for the inadequacy of mourning. Hence, beyond mourning (and alongside it), a mixture between tradition and claim emerges.

Facing the encryption of mourning, as a result of the perverse order of violence, Mexicans, in an attempt to mourn these massive losses, make multitudinous movements, to demand mourning conditions to be met. This could be read as a modification, in the current context, of the relationship with death. Freud (1915) anticipated this modification by stating that men would need to configure a new relationship with death, in the face of war and its horrors. There are different attempts of mourning and breaking the crypt, such as the commemoration of the massacre of Tlatelolco (October 2nd), or the massive funerals after the deaths in the earthquake of Mexico City in 1985. More recent examples include the demands for justice for the deaths at the ABC nursery, where 49 children died in 2009, accompanied by the children's “offerings” assembled each year by their parents, with sweets, toys, photos and children's stories, all while still demanding justice (Silla Rota, 2015), or the demand to bring back the 43 disappeared students of Ayotzinapa in 2014, a situation that can be described as a “violent repression” by the State that attempts to avoid leaving any trace of the disappeared (Orozco & Soria, 2015). These social movements arise from many demands of mourning that do not wear out, since there are no plañideras capable of crying for these losses and affects.

In this never-ending search, mourning traditions in Mexico have been incorporating the disappeared in order to deal with these losses. During the current year’s Day of the Dead celebration, family members of the disappeared dedicated altars to their lost ones. One of the altars was installed in a Forensic Medicine Center, were family members stayed to pray for the disappeared (as well as the dead), and to give information to people who might be looking for a family member but are unsure as to how to begin this process (López, 2019). In this way, altars serve not only as a place to honor and pray for the deceased, but also to share information, stories and pain. The offerings and altars are set up at the cemeteries, on the streets, in front of courthouses, and in the center of many cities. The community participates, they rise up demanding a place for rites, for mourning, with claims of justice that never stop.

During 2019, there were several movements that mixed rites with demands for justice for the victims of disappearance, as well as those killed by violence throughout the country: offerings, full of photographs, for missing women (Solís, 2019), offerings with pink crosses scattered in front of municipal courthouses in commemoration of women killed by violence (Hernández, 2019), an altar dedicated to “los matados” (the killed) in the state of Morelos (Albarrán, 2019), the “mega-offering” dedicated to femicide victims that summoned society across the country to take photos of their deceased relatives (Gómez, 2019), as well as the altar with stories and candles to remember the victims of the “dirty war” in the 70’s, which claimed thousands of victims (Arellano, 2019). The cemetery has ceased to be the exclusive location for altars. One goes to the altars not only to commemorate a life, but to make appeals and demands. The offerings themselves have incorporated elements so that the fusion between mourning and demanding justice can be noticed, which has transformed the Day of the Dead from what it traditionally was.

Before such conditions the community has no other resource than its traditions, its rituals, typical of their cultural history, to face and to mask the death of one of its members (Orozco, 2012). The traditions are revived, there is a mass rite, which seeks to face death but also denies it, since the disappeared person is not dead. The idea of the disappeared implies the impossibility of giving a name to the lack, since there is no locatable lack (Soria, 2014).

Violence results in the “elision of mourning” (Orozco, 2012) because it puts a barrier to mourning, and even more, ensures that mourning will not be enough for an alleged closure of the wound, complicating the rearrangement around lack. It is a type of violence that destroys the psychological and moral integrity of those affected, threatening their capacity for subjectivation (Girard, 2005; Wieviorka, 2005). Lacan (1959/2014) would speak of the phantasmatic production ¹¹ of the deceased in terms of eliding mourning. When the dead does not finish dying, the living will not be on the side of life (Maris, 2012). In a similar way, Boss (2002, 2004) uses the term “ambiguous loss” to designate these situations of unclear loss, when the person can’t be verified as dead or alive. Ambiguous loss involves confusion, inability to grieve, ambivalence, and defiance towards the idea of closure -since there can be no closure when a body is missing. It would be considered a situation of stress with the potential to debilitate the individual, since it does not allow for a possible resolution: only the pain of ambiguity prevails. Nowadays, Mexicans are facing new violent conditions of death with a courageous response they have always known: socializing loss, trying to reinsert the symbolic order as opposed to the perverse order of violence. Therefore, this allows a different search for subjective reorganization, to relocate the subject in relation to his lack, facing a loss that will never find closure. Nonetheless, this situation will not plunge the subject into depression or melancholia. As long as the subject remains active in relation to their loss, as shown by the new manifestations of grief, the possibility of the inscription of mourning prevails. Mexicans have preserved tradition, but have been incorporating social movements to keep memory alive, until they can bury their dead. There is no doubt that the current context in México is representing an important challenge for psychology, psychoanalysis and other disciplines that address the issue of the contemporary violent conditions which the subject faces. In particular, the Mexican subject faces death in a cultural configuration in which traditions regarding death are maintained, enriched by new mass manifestations that demand for the conditions for mourning to be met, which is also a demand for the rearrangement of life in relation to a void that does not provoke an impossible living, but gives space to desire once again.