Souls Day Research Articles

Caring for herd animals in Isluga

Chapter 3 of the book Earth, Water, Fleece and Fabric, first published in 2002, is presented in this article. It is based on periods of fieldwork carried out between 1986 and the late 1990s. In the previous chapter of the book, it was suggested that camelid domestication arose from the taming of successive generations of animals as part of the daily practices of herding. Domestication was not a once and forall event in the distant past. The present article focuses on the thick description of Isluga people’s herding strategies duringthe 1980s and 1990s. Isluga is an Aymara community in the Chilean highlands, bordering with Bolivia. Caring for camelidsin this community constitutes a process whereby herders sustain and renew lasting relationships between human beingsand herd animals. Cycles of time and space are described in order to contextualisehow and where the herders look after their llamas, alpacas and sheep. All Souls Day marks the arrival of the rainy seasonand Carnival is the event which brings it to an end. The austral summer solstice occurs on the cusp between these two festivalsand coincides with the fiesta of St. Thomas. Isluga people call themselves the «children of Saint Thomas», in a tradition which is inscribed in the topography of their territory. The other season of the year is cold and dry. It is associated with the winds of St. James the Greater and St. Anthony of Padua.The annual cycle therefore unfolds in a calendar of saints’ days accompanied by atmospheric phenomena, which nurturethe pasture grounds. The herding activities take place in a volcanic landscape associatedwith land forms which are perceived to be animated and gendered. The earth is personified as the Wirjin Tayka or Pachamama and the hills as Uywiri. Isluga people engage with these beings on a daily basis. These land forms can serve as aviadores, «providers», associated with the fertility and wellbeing of camelids and sheeps. The composition of the herds of llamas and alpacas is analysed, as well as the classifications Isluga people make accordingto age and gender. Camelid nomenclature is based on the disposition of dark and light colours in the coat of llamas and alpacas. Isluga people use names for their camelids which are intimately related to birds and other beings in their surroundings.The dense description offered makes it possible to analyse the regenerative cycle of water, pasture and fleece in a comparative ethnography, in the light of themes developed in other parts of the book, from which this article has been extracted.

Immaterial matters in Solar Bones by Mike McCormack

Often compared to Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, Mike McCormack’s novel Solar Bones published in 2016 is built on tensions and paradoxes. The narrator of Solar Bones is a dead man coming back to his home and his village on All Souls Day 2008 to reflect on his life on earth. The one-sentence narrative sounds like a gasp between life and death, the past and the present, real facts and virtual facts. Just as this in-between status of the narrator is a key-feature of the novel, the narrative questions the meaning of place, embodiment, and life in Ireland at the end of the 20th century and the turn of the twenty-first century. The narrator’s death and his return coincide with the formidable end of the Celtic Tiger, so that the novel can be read as a dirge for Ireland, while the voice of the narrator, an ex-building engineer on a tightrope between the world of the dead and that of the living, implicitly questions what kind of future Ireland wants to construct. In Solar Bones reading becomes an exercise in balance between past and the future, materiality and abstraction, nature and constructs, life and death. And yet, for all its dramatic and morbid tone, this novel opens out moral, social, political and environmental perspectives and points at the need to draw lessons from the past in order to build a sounder future for the generations to come in Ireland.

Plato, Aristotle, Paris and Helen at the Last Judgement: the legacy ofAudi tellus, audi magni maris limbus

ABSTRACTThe twenty-four stanzaabecedarium, beginningAudi tellus, audi magni maris limbus(Montpellier, Bibliothèque de la ville, 6), stands at the beginning of a long tradition of similar songs of judgement. A closer study of the sources provides for a deeper understanding of the transformation of the original song into a versicle to theLibera meand by the thirteenth century the first two lines of the song were transformed into the beginning of an unusual litany asking ‘Ubi sunt’, which was again most often described in the rubrics as a trope to theLibera me, particularly on All Souls Day. Here, however, an unusual and varying cast of characters enter the text of the song and the liturgy, including classical philosophers, such as Plato and Aristotle, historic figures, such as Paris and Helen, and even the biblical heroes Samson and King David. By the later Middle Ages, the trope had been further transformed into a devotional song and was especially prominent in sources associated with the cloisters of theDevotio modernaand later in polyphonic settings by Caspar Othmayr, Jacobus Gallus and Orlandus Lassus.

The Flexibility of Fertility Preferences in a Context of Uncertainty.

The Flexibility of Fertility Preferences in a Context of Uncertainty.

Music and Ritual in the Procession of All Souls Day in Seville Cathedral (14th – 17th centuries)

The All Souls Day’s procession is one of the highlight ritual events associated with the Omnium Sanctorum and Commemoratio omnium fidelium defunctorum festivities, which have a clear theological connection and a unified liturgical treatment. The ceremonial apparatus of these two feasts in Seville Cathedral derived from the rank, first and second respectively, they had in the Sevillian calendar. The procession had a strong emotional impact on citizenship, reflecting the influence of the doctrine of the Purgatory, and this translated into a gradual increase in private endowments that accumulated over time. In this article special emphasis is placed on the spatial -dramatically transformed in the second half of the fifteenth century- and sensory aspects of the procession’s itinerary, with particular attention to the sound elements that identified it. The idiosyncrasy and deployment of resources pertaining to this procession gave a unique character to all the two hundred and eleven processions that circulated annually through the interior of the Cathedral of Seville in the early eighteenth century.

Mourning rituals – Between faith and personalisation: changing ritual repertoires on All Souls Day in the Netherlands

In the Netherlands a remarkable new repertoire of mourning rituals is occurring: secular All Souls celebrations. These rituals on the one hand stand in a long ecclesial tradition, but on the other hand have a highly personalised character. At the same time we see the traditional repertoire of mourning rituals change. What is the relation between faith and personalisation in those rituals? And how can ecclesial liturgy meet the needs of contemporary mourners when trying to cope with bereavement? This article explores these questions on a theoretical and empirical basis.

A Phenomenology of Absence: Benjamin, Nietzsche and History in Cees Nooteboom'sAll Souls Day

Contemporary Berlin novels commonly anchor representations of post-unification Berlin within an ethics of remembering in which the city's mottled topography is frequently portrayed as a historically saturated site. Invariably, this historical focus is supported by an aesthetics in which representing Berlin is concomitant with an ethical obligation to address in some form the city's pasts. It is argued in this paper that through an engaged comparison of Walter Benjamin's theory of critical pedestrianism with Nietzsche's "The Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life," Dutch novelist Cees Nooteboom's novel All Souls Day questions the possibility of representing the city as a discursive space in which the past and the present can mutually co-exist. Nooteboom's text offers a singular and unique perspective on the ethical burden the recently unified cities faces in the post-unification era, namely the obligation to remember the division and pre-division German pasts, by questioning whether it is at all possible for the city to fulfill this duty of historical remembering.

Bill Litigation and the Observance of Sundays and Major Festivals in the Court of King's Bench in the Fifteenth Century

The attitudes of medieval people toward Sundays and Holy Days have always been of interest to historians. They have been studied from at least five different perspectives. Max Levy, for instance, explained how Sunday developed from a day that commemorated Christ's resurrection, but was originally a working day (dies dominica), to a day of worship, contemplation, and rest. Initially no (servile) work was allowed, but exceptions were accepted because of necessity, like harvest work, or because of good intentions, like concern for the common good or for a pious cause. Others looked at the stance of the Church, analyzing the protests against the non-observance of Holy Days as well as the objections raised to the observance of Holy Days from the clergy or from laymen, or concentrated mainly on the work ban and its implications for working life in the Middle Ages. Willard and Haskett studied the observance of Sundays and Holy Days in government departments like the Lower Exchequer or the Chancery to see to what extent the working of the English government was affected. Legal historians, however, have not shown much interest in how the courts observed Sundays and Holy Days, mainly because everything seemed to have been settled since the late thirteenth century. Paul Brand recently stated that it had “clearly become the general practice by the second half of the reign of Edward I for the Common Bench and King's Bench not to sit on Sundays,” or on All Saints Day (1 November), All Souls Day (2 November), the feast of the Purification (2 February), Ascensiontide, and the feast of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist (24 June), all of which fell within term time.

Consorting with Saints: Prayer for the Dead in Early Medieval France by Megan McLaughlin

254 BOOK REVIEWS Consorting with Saints: Prayer for the Dead in Early Medieval France. By Megan McLaughlin. (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. 1994. Pp. xii, 306. $32.50.) By "early medieval" Dr. McLaughlin understands the period between the mid-eighth century and ca 1 100. The thesis of her book is that, during it, prayer for the dead followed a distinctive pattern which differed from what came before and followed after and which reflected current social, economic, and cultural structures. By 750, people were no longer participating directly in most rituals for the dead but sought to be associated with clerical, and especially monastic, devotions on behalf of die faithful departed. The consequence was an age of ecclesiological symbolism; a prime manifestation was the collective service which spiritual communities undertook on behalf of the dead. After 1100, this rapidly changed. Prayer for die dead became dissociated from the context in which it had been performed and, in line wiüi the commercial emphasis of later medieval society, became more of a commodity . If it became theologically more sophisticated, it also became more numerical and even mechanical. Dr. McLaughlin's monograph has solid merits. She offers a conspectus, much needed by Anglophone readers, of the recent historical study of the commemoration of the dead. Such study was promoted in the second half of die nineteenth century by Delisle in France and the Monumentists in Germany until, in 1890, Adalbert Ebner published his still useful survey of commemorative practices up to Carolingian times. Relative neglect followed until after World War II, which was followed by a major revival, especially but by no means only in the Münster-Freiburg school. In her first two chapters, Dr. McLaughlin discusses the funerary ceremonies that followed die death of an individual, and then prayer for the dead collectively and the continuing commemoration of individuals. The core of the book, and its strongest part, is constituted by two further chapters on the laity and liturgical communities, noting the different treatment of humiles and potentes. A long final chapter on the ideology ofprayer for the dead is less successful because more couched in generalities. Dr. McLaughlin's principal contention is that early medieval rituals for the dead were primarily "associative," that is, their symbolism exhibited the complex relationships that bound the intercessors with the dead and the divine. She has surprisingly little to say about die biblical citations and references which suggest more individual preoccupations. Perhaps the most often attested is Christ's mysterious saying about the mammon ofiniquity (Luke 16:8), which was used to suggest how the tables might be turned upon a corrupt world by diverting its goods to endow and to win a part in the prayers and good works of the monks. Abbot Odilo of Cluny's statute about AU Souls Day ends with the thought that everyone in God's household should offer according to his means lest he share the fate of the slothful servant who hid his BOOK REVIEWS 255 talent in a napkin. A just balance between the individual and the social is difficult to strike. However, it is probably significant that confraternity with an older black-monk monastery does not seem to have established any such solidarity amongst confratres as would mark the Third Orders of the later medieval mendicants. H. E. J. Cowdrey St. Edmund Hall, Oxford The Church in Western Europefrom the Tenth to the Early Twelfth Century. By Gerd Teilenbach. Translated by Timothy Reuter. [Cambridge Medieval Textbooks.] (New York: Cambridge University Press. 1993. Pp. xix, 403. S79.95 cloth, S22.95 paperback.) This is an outstanding translation of an outstanding book; it was published originally in German as Die westliche Kirche vom 10. bis frühen 12. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 1988). English readers will be especially grateful that Professor Reuter has updated and expanded the bibliography in accordance with English practice as well. Tellenbach's masterful survey of the history of the tenth- and the critical eleventh-century history of the Church deals with the Church as both an institution and as a spiritual body in eight chapters·. "Western Christendom and its environment in the tenth and eleventh centuries " (1), "The church and...

Todos Santos in rural Tlaxcala: a syncretic, expressive, and symbolic analysis of the cult of the dead

The cult of the dead, centered on Todos Santos, the All Saints Day-All Souls Day celebration, is one of the most important aspects of Mesoamerican Indian and mestizo religion. Focusing on rural Tlaxcala, in Mexico, Hugo Nutini presents a thorough description and analysis of the cult in its syncretic, structural, and expressive dimensions and describes its development from the original confrontation of pre-Hispanic polytheism and Spanish Catholicism, through colonial times, until the disintegration of the system of folk religions that is even now occurring.The discussion of the expressive component of the cult of the dead is a crucial contribution of the study. Professor Nutini shows that symbolism can be an adjunct to expressive studies, but not an end in itself. In addition, he postulates a theory that may serve as a model for studies of the combination and reconciliation of religious beliefs in other contexts. Emphasizing folk theology, teleology, and eschatology, rather than the mechanical and administrative components more frequently studied in works on Mesoamerican Indian and mestizo religions, he concludes that the local system is monolatrous, rather than monotheistic.Originally published in 1988.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Pre-Hispanic Component of the Syncretic Cult of the Dead in Mesoamerica

the global configuration of the Catholic-folk-pagan religion. This article analyzes the pre-Hispanic component of the cult of the dead that, together with a structural and ideological equivalent of Spanish-Catholic origin, coalesced into a syncretic institution by the middle of the 17th century and has permanently marked the communal and regional discharge of folk Catholicism until the present. In a wider sense, it contributes to the study of syncretism, particularly of its native and folk components, as a historical process stemming from the confrontation of Christianity with many religions of the world. Todos Santos, Dia de Muertos, Dia de los Muertos, Dia de los Difuntos, and Dia de las Animas Benditas are the most common names by which the combined liturgical feasts of All Saints Day and All Souls Day are usually known in Mexico and most of Latin America. After Christmas and Holy Week (Easter), All Saints Day-All Souls Day is the most important celebration in the annual cycle of folk Catholicism in Mesoamerica. Of all the areas of Christendom, it is probably in this culture area that the ritual and ceremonial elaboration of Todos Santos acquires its maximum expression. The folk manifestation of Todos Santos extends well beyond the traditional feasts of All Saints Day and All Souls Day as practiced in orthodox Catholicism and in most regions of Mesoamerica it acquires significant social, economic, demographic, and even recreational dimensions. Todos Santos is a time of homecoming, remembering and propitiating the dead, cementing and intensifying one's kinship and compadrazgo (ritual kinship) relationships, and sacralizing, albeit temporarily, interpersonal relationships on a communitywide basis. During the period elapsing between five days before and seven days after the first and second of November (the heart of the celebration) the country and the city come together, the little community becomes the cosmological center of existence, and individuals and families are renewed by remembering their roots and paying homage to those who have departed. For a transient moment, the living and the dead are joined in shared existence.