Andabamos pol-os caminos;
E agora que somos mortos
Andabamos por entre os hortos
Tocando nas campanillas
E commendo pimentos ...*
-- Song of a troop of revenants in Manzaneda, Trives (Orense, Galicia) cited in Claude Lecouteux's Phantom Armies of the Night
The Seven Sisters rise high in the Southern Arch reminding us that the time for donning the mask and shroud has come. The celebrations which stretch from Oct. 31st through the beginning of November, known to most as Samhain, All Hallows Eve, the Day of All Saints, Hallow’een, and in Latin countries, Dias de los Muertos, are a time for reconnecting with those of us who have passed on to the next stage of the pilgrimage, who walk the Summerlands, as the Spiritualists say, beyond the thin veil of shifting materia that gives us the illusion we are solely heirs to a body demarcated by the bounds of flesh.
Our remembrance of the customs that attend this time have been blurred by Victorians like James Frazer, whose fear and fascination with sex and death put all of our ancestral traditions on the defensive. However, the work of more recent scholars has begun to untangle the knots of understanding that have obfuscated potent alternative understandings, and provide a much healthier insight into on our relationship with the ancestral dead.
