The Rest Is History - 264: Mexico: Day of the Dead

Episode Date: November 26, 2022

On the Day of the Dead you eat pan de muerto and exchange calaveras with your friends. This celebration is often claimed to have its roots in ancient Aztec traditions of human sacrifice. But is any of this true? Join Tom and Dominic to find out. Join The Rest Is History Club (www.restishistorypod.com) for ad-free listening to the full archive, weekly bonus episodes, live streamed shows and access to an exclusive chatroom community. *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. hello welcome to the rest is history and our ongoing world cup themed epic and dominic today we are arriving in one of the great powerhouses of the world cup mexico and mexico city's estadio azteca one of only two stadiums to have hosted the World Cup final twice. Guy, Tom, that's a good footballing fact from you. Did you know that? You don't normally come out with these stadium facts on this podcast.

Stadium facts, I've got it. And the other one is Rio de Janeiro's Maracana. Maracana, yeah. I hope I pronounced that right. Maracana. Maracana. I saw the squiggle in the wrong place. I briefly thought it was the Macarena, actually.

The Macarena. I wish you said the Macarena. Would have been even better. Anyway, so what have you got for us that is Mexican-themed? What aspect of Mexican history? We're in the autumn. It's very unusual to have an autumn World Cup. And in the autumn, in non-Mexican countries, you think of Mexico in the autumn,

and I think you think of one thing above all, which is the Day of the Dead. Do you think of mexico in the autumn and i think you think of one thing above all which is the day of the dead do you think of the day of the dead tom yes i do well those people who haven't been to mexico and don't know anything about the day of the dead may well remember the scene at the beginning of the james bond film specter have you seen this from 2015 tom where um the opening sequence uh oh, vaguely, yes, vaguely. And he jumps around, doesn't he? There's a big square and he jumps off buildings and things. Right. Well, James Bond always jumps around, Tom, I think it's fair to say.

So for those people who don't know, there's a long tracking shot through the procession, great parades and floats, people dressed as all kinds of sort of skeletons and demons and things. James Bond, it turns out, is wearing this fantastic skeleton costume with a top hat and a suit. Extraordinary costume.

And it's this incredibly sumptuous, exotic scene, clearly designed to be a quintessentially Mexican moment. It's very typical of you, Dominic, though, that you would go for James Bond when there's a much more obvious mainstream film, recent film that's featured around the Dead of the Dead, which is the Pixar film Coco.

I've never seen it, Tom. I've never seen it. Okay, so I really hate Pixar films. They kind of came in when my children were young, and so I just had to watch them over and over again, and so I have a deep, deep hatred for them. Crikey, you don don't often hear that and i kind of boycott them as a matter of principle and then i was on we've done it saturday review it's a kind of radio 4 review program and i saw that i had to do this pixar film coco and it was about the day of the

dead and i sat down absolutely determined to hate and despise it by the end i was in floods it's an absolutely brilliant and brilliantly manipulative film that's the genius of pixar it is i hated it i was but i was and that that kind of plunges into the heart of the myth and it's about people actually dying coming back from the dead all that kind of stuff so so i assume what the pixar film is playing on is exactly the same thing that the bond film, Spectre, is playing on, which is this idea of a sort of morbidity and an exoticism wrapped into one. So that idea of the Day of the Dead is something absolutely emblematically Mexican and is expressing something in the Mexican soul. Whenever you read any description of it, it's right there. So I Google Day of the Dead.

One of the first things that comes up is TripAdvisor. TripAdvisor says it's a 4,000-year-old tradition celebrated in Mexico on the 1st and 2nd of November every year. I read The Guardian. The Guardian has a feature. I know a newspaper very close to your heart, Tom. Must be true, yeah. The Guardian says the Day of the Dead, explicitly says the Day of the Dead dates back to the Aztec period. Okay, but might there not be an

alternative perspective that it's a christian festival tom do not anticipate the theme of this podcast sorry i'm one thinks of saint adilo of cluny so that thing that we that i talked about at the beginning the james bond scene the parade in mexico city the floats the costumes the great problem with all this is that there is no such, or certainly when the film was made, there was no such parade. It was a complete, I mean, this was the classic invented tradition, invented by the filmmakers. So there's no Day of the Dead parade.

And everything about the Day of the Dead in our sort of non-Mexican imagination, almost everything about it is wrong. So even the name of it, so it's called Dia de Muertos, but grammatically it should be Dia de los Muertos. So it's kind of occupies a gray area there. The date is contested. So usually it's celebrated on the 1st and 2nd of November,

but it could be a day or two earlier. And the reason it could be, we'll get into. It's sort of rooted in history. Now the tradition, so when you read anything about it, they will tell you that this is a holiday to honor the dead, that the Mexicans do. It expresses something very deep about their obsession with death. And this goes back to the Aztecs sacrificing people and all this.

That's the Incoate idea. This is the Incoate idea, exactly. That they will honor them. They will build altars. You'll build an altar in your home called an ofrenda with the favorite foods and the drinks of your dead loved ones. You will make a huge expedition to the graveyard with these things as gifts uh you will give gifts to your friends you'll give them things called calaveras which are candy sugar skulls you

will share a special bread called the panda muerto with your friends and family and you will write sort of mock epitaphs for for for people who alive. So you'll write these sort of jokey verses, and they're called calaveras literarias, so literary calaveras. So the other aspect of this is flowers. So you see the flowers everywhere, orange marigolds, which are meant to be the sort of symbol of death.

They're called in Mexico, sempa su chil, which comes from the Nahuatl word which means 20 flowers and it's called the flower of the dead so again that's sort of linked back to the the aztec past and in fact those marigolds are you familiar with the florentine codex of the 16th century yes we talked about it with uh camilla tanzant exactly so this great source this pioneering work of ethnography by franciscan friar in the in the mid 16th century so after the spanish conquest and he's talking about life among the the messica the aztecs as we would call them and he says they love these flowers and they

use these flowers in their religious rituals they're yellow they they're beautiful they smell very you know all this because he's writing about this for a european audience there's a sure you can sort of see why people would think some of this is is rooted in history and um and just to go into a couple of the details for people who are not familiar so our american listeners i would imagine will be much more familiar with this all this than our british ones or our australian ones because of course in britain mexican culture and Mexican food and all that sort of thing doesn't have anything like this.

But also, Dominic, also, I mean, not to preempt, but also we're not a Catholic country. Exactly. So I'm sure we'll come to the Catholic dimension of this fairly soon. So let's just dig into a couple of particular elements to this that our American, and indeed if we have any Mexican listeners, that they will immediately recognise. So I mentioned bread.

So a sweet, it's a kind of sweet bread, pan de muerto, a kind of pan dulce. And it's shaped like a bun and it's decorated with kind of almost like bones, you know, sort of pastry bones. There's a sort of rounded top of the bread and some people say it's like a grave, all of this kind of stuff. Sometimes the people say the bones are meant grave um all of this kind of stuff sometimes the people say the bones are meant to be the bones of the dead person so essentially i mean the um in the english-speaking world's equivalent is halloween well we will come to this what's it

got to do with halloween is the some kind of link i think you know more much more about halloween than i do so you will be able to i'm going to ask you about halloween so you've got the bread i mean we don't have a halloween bread do we in the british isles no um and indeed there is this frequently repeated story again if you google it if you look at any kind of i'm talking about history websites not just sort of generic travel websites they will say well this dates back to the aztec tradition of human sacrifice um so this is from one website. It says, a maiden was offered to the gods. They placed a still beating heart in a pot with amaranth,

and they had to bite it as a symbol of gratitude. And the story goes, and you can sort of see the implausibility of this, that the conquistadors, in their enlightened, kindly ways, disgusted with the cannibalism and the sacrificial nature of Aztec religion, they compelled the Mexicans to replace the heart that they would be biting with a bun. And that's the origins of the bun.

Tom, I can see you scoffing. You clearly are a revisionist and and and bred history terms you're clearly a well no it's just that it is it is a very popular theme that particularly on the internet yeah that christian festivals have their origins in pagan antecedents and we talked about that with ron hutton didn't we yeah we did it in our episode on christmas the idea that basically christian festivals are attempts to kind of dress up in christian dressing ancient pagan rituals yes this is a very popular theme and almost invariably rubbish well the mexican government the official mexican government website says that uh this is disagrees with you.

The official government Mexican website says this definitely is related to pre-conquest indigenous traditions. The National Institute of Indigenous People in Mexico also says, oh no, this is absolutely indigenous tradition. It's pre-Hispanic, all this kind of thing. So you've got the bread. And then the other element is the sugar the sugar skulls the calaveras so i i googled them for their for their origins one of the first things that came up was the website of top historian martha stewart the american cook yes and her website says cooking jailbird right correct and her website says, unequivocally, the sugar skull tradition can be traced back over 3,000 years ago.

So people were Aztecs 3,000 years ago. I mean, the Aztecs didn't actually exist 3,000 years ago, but there you go, that they were making sugar skulls and exchanging them on the Day of the Dead. And, in fact, the more you Google, the more different. So some people say, well, actually, you know what? It's not actually Aztec. It a it's a mayan tradition or toltec you know the the the origins go right exactly further and further but the point the sort of the underlying point

of all this is that this is a dark and a is ultimately what we have now in coco inspector in mexican households is a is a, sanitized, 21st century version of a dark and ancient ritual that is bound up with human sacrifice and that expresses something about the Mexican soul, a kind of intense morbidity. The essence. Yeah, an intense morbidity. And actually, it also expresses something about Mexican political

and cultural identity that the post-conquest Catholicism and Europeanization is merely a veneer. And when you scratch that away, you get to the ancient inheritance beneath. Yeah, so it's like the Virgin of Guadalupe being actually a kind of ancient goddess or whatever. Exactly so. So that's what, 1530s? I think the – exactly. And of course, Tom, you know what I'm going to say. I'm with you.

I think all this is complete and utter nonsense. Let's take those two foodstuffs that are associated. The bread and the skulls. The bread and the skulls. So start with the skulls. The great issue with this is that people weren't making sweets out of sugar before the spanish conquest so it's complete nonsense most actual food historians think that these sugar

skulls originate in the 18th century when mexico was new spain the the spanish were whizzes molding things out of bread and marzipan they loved doing it they loved it they loved it well why wouldn't you do you like i would i mean i i've tom i've had breakfast at your house and i wouldn't describe you as a you're not one of life's you're not rick stein is that fair to say i think that would be fair to say but then again i've never actually tried to make a a skull out of marzipan maybe i'd be brilliant at it yeah you know there's always been a bit of a sort of and all the time i've known you there's a kind of quest there's a sense of a ring yes a yearning to express yeah my sense of the skull beneath the skin through the medium of cookery

this is your equivalent of alexander the great's pothos. It is. His yearning, his dream of something beyond. It is. That you as a patissier go... Yes. It's a dream that one day I will follow. But not yet. I think my stiff, uptight Anglo-Saxon nature has prevented me from following that dream. Okay, what about baking?

Like baking more generally, bread. Let's move on to the bread. Okay. Do you ever make bread? No. that's one thing i would never do okay well it gets that as a matter of principle just close your ears to the next section because it'll be of no interest to you no i'm interested in what other people do but i don't want to do it so all that stuff under the lockdown people baking bread yeah i despise that oh that's hard that's to say do not brave bread no okay right well fine

no she did the garden okay what do you do uh i was i think i was translating satonius well that says it all doesn't it i mean that's that's my idea of fun so so let's talk about bread so the panda muerto very important part of the Mexican Day of the Dead tradition. The ingredients of that bread are wheat, cane sugar, cow's milk, butter, eggs, and a sort of orange zest or something. And these things, basically, none of these things were present in. Oh, you and your bracing skepticism. So I have a quote here from Elsa Malbido from the Institute of Anthropology in Mexico City. And she said, I read i read this tom and thought of you she said if we think the day of the dead is a tradition of pre-hispanic origin that means we do

not understand anything since it is deeply roman you must be very excited by that go latin america so what's the story what's the real story um behind it so as you will know tom i imagine in medieval europe there was a tradition of eating special bread anyway on all saints day they would call it panda animus bread of souls and they would sometimes make it in the shape of people and all saints day is the first of november right so you've basically got all hallows eve is that right that's that's halloween that's halloween um all saints day or all hallows yeah and then all souls and all souls day was popularized by uh saint adilo of cluny right in the 10th century and it's the idea that um it's obviously the saints are in heaven but everyone else is in

purgatory yeah so it's a way of of focusing on them and their their purgative sufferings well i know you like a purgative suffering love it and you would therefore be at one with the great american historian stanley brands who is the world expert tom on, on the Day of the Dead. And his excellent book, which I commend to the listeners, Skulls to the Living, Bread to the Dead. Excellent title. That's a fabulous title. It's a very good title. So he's gone through all this, and he basically says,

in Iberia, in Spain, in the 1500s, All Souls Day was a massive, massive deal. So there would be a sort of catafalque in a church. There would be all sorts of candles. There would be shed loads of bread. People would bring in all this bread. With orange zest? With all this.

Well, of course, once you've got the Columbian Exchange, you are going to have a lot more spiced, scented stuff. And of course, sugar. Stuff. Yeah, stuff that's the technical you know when you work in the kitchen tom as i often am under enormous pressure you don't have time to get me that stuff the techno bubble yeah get me a handful of stuff so he's gone through all the sort of records of guilds and things in places like barcelona mad, places that have all these records. And he has found, for example, the first mention that he can find of the Day of the Dead, Dia de los Muertos, in Catalan, comes from 1671.

And it's talking about people exchanging bread, people exchanging all this sort of stuff. So in other words, that's not happening in Mexico, that's happening in Spain. And you would think, okay, well, they must have obviously shipped that tradition over to Mexico, and then it went through various sort of evolutions and all this. But no, actually.

Wow, it's more complicated than that. It is much more complicated and much more surprising. So I think we should take a quick break. And then when we come back, Tom, we will be in the world of the 20th century, the Mexican Revolution, Graham Greene, and an attempt to replace shockingly father christmas brilliant don't go away i'm marina hyde and i'm richard osmond and together we host the rest is entertainment

it's your weekly fix of entertainment news reviews splash of showbiz gossip and on our q a we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our members club if you want ad-free listening bonus episodes and early access to live tickets head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Bienvenido we are talking the day of the dead and Dominic, in the first part, you set up this image of the day of the dead as an ancient pre-Columban tradition going back 2,000 years, 3,000 years, 6,000 years, 10,000 years, whatever. But I had always thought that it was essentially kind of introduced by the Catholics catholics uh by the spanish um when they arrived in mexico but the bombshell that you let off just before the the break was the possibility it may be even more recent than that yeah so it's a slightly misleading bombshell if bombshells can be misleading because i think um because i think what is certainly true is that when Mexico becomes, as it were, Christianized in the 16th century, obviously the Spanish import all their traditions, their calendar and so on.

And there is a kind of, those traditions do get kind of dyed inevitably by the indigenous traditions as well. They absolutely, they absolutely do. And that's actually the, you know, you're talking about the sort of in-cate sort of sense that you have if you're an outsider of Mexico and its cultural identity and its traditions. And that's exactly how most of us think of it, isn't it? It's this sort of syncretic fusion of sort of pre-Columbian survivals and then this's a veneer, but I would say it's a deeply Catholic country now. Yeah. But that it's died, it's tinged with, inevitably, with the culture of the land in which it's set. Let's just go into that a little bit. So the Day of the Dead, the All Souls Day, those traditions that in Europe are sort of split over three days, depending where you are, I guess, aren't they? Because we, that's All Hallows' Eve, all Souls' Day, all Saints' Day, I can't remember the correct order, you'll know. All Saints' first. Yeah.

And then all Souls'. So those traditions are clearly, they go over to Mexico, but there's absolutely no sense that they're more meaningful in Mexico than anywhere else. I mean, nobody sort of says, the Mexicans go crazy for this.

They can't get enough of it. They put their own spin on it. In terms of mentions of this as the Day of the Dead, the first you get are sort of in 19th century newspapers. In 19th century, they mention that people go in processions to graves. They mention that they have drunken parties. But that's what people are doing in Europe. But this is kind of, so this is the Mexican equivalent of the, you know, it's often said that all traditions in Britain are Victorian. Yeah, it's not true. But there's a kind of enough

truth there that it's quite a kind of funny observation yeah basically something as fundamental to mexican identity as the day of the dead is its roots are in the 19th century is that what you're saying but they're not no but in the 19th century people just treat this as another it's just another catholic ritual it's just one of many moments in the catholic calendar there's nothing remarkable about it when it it's mentioned, so historians look at it, they look for mentions in newspapers and so on, they say, oh, yes, this is the Day of the Dead, and people have gone and had a little ceremony.

But there's no sense that this is uniquely Mexican, that it is expressive of something in the national character any more than Easter, Christmas, any know, any other sort of festival. Where the turning point comes, Tom, is in the Mexican Revolution of the 1910s. So the Mexican Revolution is a subject I would love to do on The Rest is History. It is incredibly complicated. Are there lots of acronyms? No, not totally.

There's a lot of characters. In which case I'm willing to do it everybody dies pancho via is in it there's you know zapata great characters the americans pile in there's lots of moustaches there's lots of moustaches if you like a moustache if you like a sombrero and a machine gun in combination yeah i do and this is the revolution for you let's go for it but what you have with the revolution of the 1910s um like it's so much sort of latin american politics in this period you have an intense anti-clericalism um and you have the development afterwards uh by the sort of post-revolutionary regime so you have a succession

of basically you have a succession of generals from the northern province of sonora taking power in mexico and they're often very very aggressively secular because they want to you know they see that as modernity and and they want to take possession of the church's lands i guess they do all of that and what they want to also cultivate they they start to cultivate a new culture a new idea in mexico that's based on sort of indigenous pride so not his Hispanic, not European. And they reject the sort of Europeanization. They see that actually as 19th century as too conservative,

all this sort of thing. What's the famous painter married to the other famous painter? Frida Kahlo. No, the other one, the man. Diego Rivera. So when I was in Mexico, there was this amazing fresco done by Diego Rivera. So when I was in Mexico, there was this amazing fresco done by Diego Rivera.

Yeah. And it showed Cortez as a grotesque syphilitic, kind of green with knobbly knees, which apparently is a sign of someone with syphilis. And I think, is that painted in the palace? I can't remember where it is. It's a very kind of syphilis infecting the healthy body of pre-Columbian culture. Exactly right. Exactly, Tom. So Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, that when people think about from outside Mexico, think of Mexican art, they think of that art created between the 1920s and 1940s or so the sort of fantastic murals showing indigenous scenes the bright colors that sort of overt rejection of european influence and the sort of celebration of the indigenous and

the european is is presumably it's not just the church it's also the upper classes exactly right exactly so what you have two two huge figures in this so the first one is um a revolutionary general who becomes president at the end in the second half of the 1920s and that is a guy called plutarcho elias cayes plutarcho plutarcho what a great name that is yeah so he interestingly he his anti-catholicism is partly fueled by his own background because he's illegitimate and he feels that you know the church has scorned him their hierarchy kind of looked down on him and that sort of drives it he is the founder of what's called the institutional revolutionary party that held power for 71 years in mexico you know they had

elections but they just won them all yeah so it's like japan um exactly or indeed Britain. And he... Yes. Maybe until... Yeah. Maybe that's going to end fairly soon. Before the next election is the test, right? So, Caius really pushes this anti-clerical campaign. He strips the church of its power over education. He bars priests from being involved in politics.

And this is one of the things that really launches this war, called the Cristero War. So the Christians in the rural heartlands of Mexico, they had a slogan, Viva Cristo Rey, Long Live Christ the King. And they basically launch an uprising against Caius's government. This is the context for Graham Greene's novel, The Power and the Glory. You must have read that, Tom. No, I haven't.

Oh, of course you don't have. You've got a blind spot with graham green i read um brighton rock right thought it thought it poor never bothered shocking i know i would take because tony tony our head of goldhanger he loves he loves he's always on us he's always on say he's always say i think the first time i met him he said you must do an episode on graham green i played a dead bat to that you didn't say i thought it bore no i well no because i was far too respectful at that point yeah you really wanted to get the podcasting geek presumably i did i said yes of course we must i love brighton rock absolutely anyway sorry anyway the power of the glory is a brilliant book about this priest kind of trudging across Mexico in the context of this war in which basically if he's caught, he'll be killed.

And 100,000 people were killed in this war. This is not some piff. This isn't the Falklands. You know, this is a massive deal. My knowledge of 20th century Mexican history isn't great. Right. But the sense I do have is that the wars were not piffling. No, not at all.

And it has a massive effect on the church. So in the 1920s, there had been about 5,000 priests in Mexico. By 1934, there are only 334 serving 15 million people. By 1935, 17 of the states of Mexico have no priest in them at all i had no idea so that sort of you think of the anti-clericals and the spanish civil war this is that but how many are there now more many they've come back i think they've come back yes exactly a bit like the beavers in canada right so the beavers in canada verge of extinction but now coming back the theme of another of our Rest is History

World Cup episodes. So Mexican Catholics and beavers very kind of... Priests, no priests, because presumably the people do stay Catholic. Yes, they do. But to quote the American historian Donald Mabry, he says, by 1940

the church in Mexico had no corporate existence, no real estate, no schools, no monasteries, no convents, no foreign priests, no right to defend itself publicly or in the courts. Its clergy were forbidden to wear clerical garb, to vote, to celebrate public ceremonies, or to engage in politics. That's extraordinary, isn't it? That makes Thomas Cromwell look positively kindly. Yeah, it does. So what they replaced that with is this cult of the indigenous.

And that's where you get Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and all this kind of stuff. And the most famous example of that is their attempt to get rid of, well, I said Father Christmas before the break, but they would have said Santa Claus because they see Santa Claus. It's Yankee. Yankee imperialism. And do you know who they tried to replace him with, Tom? Chippy Totec. Not far off. The Flayed one. The Lord of the Flayed. Who was in the World Cup of Gods, wasn't he?

Crashed out in the first round. Because he goes around wearing the skins of people he's flayed to death. They tried to replace him with perhaps an equally Christmas. Have that come down the chimney. An equally... An equally implausible purveyor of gifts to small children.

Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent. Yes, who was... Cortez is traditionally said to have been mistaken for, but wasn't. But wasn't, exactly. So by this point caius had given way to his successor who was a guy called um lazaro cardenas and cardenas his administration was very keen on the idea they said basically if we get rid of santa claus we don't

like coca-cola we don't like you know american influence if we get rid of santa claus we place him with quetzalcoatl then that that would teach children about Mexican history and return us to our pre-colonial traditions. So unbelievably, in December 1930, in the National, you mentioned Mexican stadiums, in the National Stadium in Mexico City. So was that at the Estadio Azteca that we mentioned at the start of the show? No, sadly, Tom, it would be a beautiful link if it had been at the Azteca Stadium. But it wasn't because that wasn't built until the 1960s. So it was a national stadium, it was called, in Mexico City. So they build a pyramid inside the national stadium,

and then they basically encourage all the children of the city to assemble in the stadium. And at the top of the pyramid, a man dressed as the Feathered Serpent distributes presents to them. So it would be like building kind of a replica of Stonehenge in Wembley. In Wembley. And a man and a druid. Sacrifices someone.

Yeah, or somebody dressed as Woden. Amazingly, this didn't take off. People were too loyal to Santa Claus. So it didn't work. But the weird thing is actually, so this then led me down, I'm going to put inverted commas around the words research. I think it's fair to say

because I'm not an expert. People may have worked out already I'm not a great expert in Mexican history. But it led me down something of a rabbit hole because there is a strange subset of history

about people who think that Quetzalcoatl was somebody else. So for example, the Mormons believe that he was Jesus. Yes. So the third Mormon president, John Taylor in the 1880s, said that we can come to no other conclusion other than that Quetzalcoatl and Jesus are the same being.

Because both were feathered serpents. But the history of the former has been handed down to us through an impure source, which has disfigured and perverted the original incidents and teachings of the savior's life and ministry. D.H. Lawrence, he was a great enthusiast for all this kind of business. So I know you're down on green.

Are you also down on Lawrence? Yes, down on Lawrence too. I had to do the rainbow for a level. Didn't like it. Gibberish. I have to be honest with you. I'm not a massive D.H.

Lawrence person. I just think there's so much it's so overwritten so self-indulgent and there's just excessive uses of the word loins yes which he uses multiple times a page and all that yeah yeah it's just too much isn't it anyway this has nothing to do with there the dead but in he went to mexico he wrote his book the plumed serpent and he has this sort of weird it's this weird fantasy in which a weird fantasy in dh lawrence yes surely not in which the catholic church it's kind of a preview of the cristeria war actually in which the catholic church is outlawed in mexico and replaced by the worship of quetzalcoatl which completely takes over this is his sort of for a

man who basically spent the first years of his life hanging around pubs in mining villages in North Hampshire or whatever, this was all a bit much. Anyway, listen, the Cardenas period, so Lázaro Cardenas, the president, it's under him that they really, really push the Day of the Dead. And in fact, that woman I mentioned earlier from the Institute of Anth dead and in fact that woman i mentioned earlier from the institute of anthropology in mexico city elsa malvido she says the altars in people's homes all that stuff that you would think is a you know a survival of an ancient past all this stuff is basically invented in the 1930s so dominic that's really interesting because it's around the same time that the theories that

christian festivals are pagan festivals in reality start to become popular. And it reflects an assumption that this is how states can operate. It is clearly an entirely 20th century one. In an age when the state is powerful. Yes. So the idea that a Christianized Roman empire would bother Christianizing, I don't know, Saturnalia or whatever yeah that they would they would have the power and the kind of conceptual framework to do that yeah and it probably is that so that it that is they're probably drawing on you know the example of what's going on in mexico and well i'm sure people the 1920s and 30s is an age when people are amounting spectacular

kind of public rituals, aren't they? I mean, you just think about Hitler and his rallies. People are mounting these rituals that are deliberate kind of blends of modern and ancient. And it's easy to kind of then project that back and think that people have always been doing this. So the fact that it is in the 1930s and it's at an age of anti-Catholicism, that explains, I think, why you get the playing up of so many of the non-Catholic, non-obviously Catholic elements. The playing up of the skulls, the playing up of all this, the indigenous nature of it.

But obviously, it's still fundamentally, I mean, the dates and the concern with the afterlife. Yeah. It's entirely Christian. Yeah, it is. I think that's fair to say. I think that is fair to say. I think basically what you would say, if you were stepping right back from it is you would say it's a medieval spanish christian dressed dressed up in feathers that's been dressed up in 20th century

in a 20th century green feathers the green feathers of quetzalcoatl exactly but let's go back end by going right back to where we started, which was the James Bond. So in the film Spectre, Bond is dressed in this fantastic outfit. He has a top hat. He has the skull and he's got this sort of girlfriend who she's also incredibly beautiful, but she has this sort of, it would amaze you to hear that Tom.

She has this sort of skull mask and everybody has this sort of skull mask. And that now that costume, that is 19th century because actually you will see there that question first of all you will see it in diego rivera's one of in one of his murals that you were talking about so a mural called the dream of a sunday afternoon at alameda central park it's a it's a sort of satire of the world before the Mexican Revolution. So rich people are kind of promenading in the park, but on one they're having a fine old time but actually there's death in their souls that's key part of ribera's mural but he actually got that idea everything has everything you know there's layers upon layers he got that idea from a 19th century cartoon so by a guy called jose guadalupe posada who was writing in the mid-19th century who filled his car he was critical of the 19th century regime of the dictator at the time

porfirio diaz and he filled his stuff with skulls and skeletons and his most famous character was called la calavera garbancera who which is a upper class woman in a very flowery kind of French style hat. The Frenchness is obviously bad. Yes. For reasons to do with the last emperor of Mexico that we did that wonderful episode on. French, French poor behavior in Mexico in the 19th century.

She's called, now this woman today, she's called, she's known in Mexico as Katrina. She's incredibly elegant and all this, but her face is a skull. And you know historians now say well this cartoonist he was obviously influenced by the idea of the dance of death you know the dance of the dead from the sort of medieval and renaissance dancing macabre interestingly he's also mocking the 19th

century mexican fashion at the time which was for posh women to deny their mexicanness to make themselves look european to whiten their faces so they look like skulls so they look like skulls so it's so it's the day of the dead is ultimately uh an anti-french yeah like all good like all good traditions so in other words that opening scene inspector james bond is dressed as ultimately a 19th century political cartoon of an aristocratic mexican woman love it um people the people inspector who are out there in the um in the streets they are enjoying a procession that doesn't exist in reality and never had existed and insofar as there are authentic elements in that scene they're not

indigenous they're actually medieval Christian, and they acquired their current flavor from the kind of anti-clericalism of the late 19th and early 20th century. But there's a huge sort of twist to all this. So most people, when they saw that film, actually Spectre was not a great James Bond film, but a lot of people said the best thing about it was that opening scene, the pre-credit sequence with Bond in Mexico.

And because of the interest in it, the Mexican government decided that they would do that parade after all. So the year after it came out, they launched the first Dia de Muertos parade in the center of Mexico City, which was attended by a quarter of a million people. And they have

been doing Day of the Dead parades in Mexico City ever since. That is so genius. And in a thousand years' time, when scholars are trying to tease out the origins of this ancient Aztec procession through

the heart of Mexico City. By an Aztec novelist called Ian Fleming. The mystery. Yes, it will take so much effort to tease out the truth. Donny, that was brilliant. Muchas gracias. Yes, that's de nada, Tom. You're very welcome.

So we've got all kinds of treats coming up on The Rest is History. The podcasting equivalent of sugar skulls and sweet breads. Haven't we, Tom? Yeah. We invent all our own traditions on the show. Uh, and we will,

um, look forward to seeing you next time. Bye. Bye. Hasta luego. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community,

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