CC Liu, Pfc. Sandoval, Ashley Wells, Seth Auberon, Wisdom Quarterly; LAdayofthedead.com
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| Remember them. What shall we offer the dead to help them in the afterlife? (LADM) |
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Carlos Lopez Estrada and Elizabeth Rian are in complicated love in DED! (DED! team)
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| In Buddhism, Yama is considered the "king of the dead" and Mara is death's personification. |
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| Death (Mara), Aztec style, Native American, Hollywood Forever (ladayofthedead.com) |
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| Hard Day of the Dead (DOTD) rave (best and worst of laweekly.com/Timothy Norris) |
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Just as the U.S. appropriated Mexico's
Cinco de Mayo, the fifth of May as if it were "Independence Day" to have another Fourth of July to celebrate, now we are set to take over
Dia de los Muertos, Mexico's
Day of the Dead to double our Halloween pleasure.
Celebrating is great, appropriating other culture's treasures, not so much. But that's the U.S. for you, an amalgamation and "best of" from all over the world. Remembering and honoring the dead is not unique to any country. Many Buddhist and European lands have traditionally recognized the need to give the dead their due. Japan has
Obon or the Bon Festival, for example, and Europe has many similar Catholic traditions.
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| The Dead can be grateful, East Troy, WI (AP) |
They are our ancestors, our ghosts, our poltergeists, our haints, haunts, and hagiographies to be written. (A haint is a spook, a haunt a presence, and a hagiography is a biography that makes one out to be a saint).
How bad has this appropriation gotten? Disney, Inc. attempted to patent the phrase "Dia de los Muertos" to promote a Hollywood movie and related merchandise.
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| Corpse of a GHOST? So pasty one fades into the salty sand (chugginmonkeys.com). |
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Nine abodes of beings 
(
navasattavasa): places where beings such as humans, animals,
devas (fairies, astral beings, shining ones), ghosts (
petas), and
brahmas (gods) are reborn, as well as the realms of boundless space, boundless consciousness, nothingness, and the most rarefied plane of existence of all in Buddhist cosmology, the so-called "base of neither-perception-nor-non-perception" (see
Minor Readings and Illustrator by Ven. Ñanamoli,
Pali Text Society, London, p.92).
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| Bon Festival or Obon is celebrated by Orange County's large Japanese-American population. |
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| Can we stop killing people with U.S. drones? Death is funny on Halloween and Day of the Dead, never funny the rest of the time. Can we stop carrying out terror attacks, subterfuge, and the toppling of governments the CIA, corporations, or the NSA don't like? (AP) |
Celebrating is great, appropriating other culture's treasures, not so much. But that's the U.S. for you, an amalgamation and "best of" from all over the world. Remembering and honoring the dead is not unique to any country. Many Buddhist and European lands have traditionally recognized the need to give the dead their due. Japan has Obon or the Bon Festival, for example, and Europe has many similar Catholic traditions.
(navasattavasa): places where beings such as humans, animals, devas (fairies, astral beings, shining ones), ghosts (petas), and brahmas (gods) are reborn, as well as the realms of boundless space, boundless consciousness, nothingness, and the most rarefied plane of existence of all in Buddhist cosmology, the so-called "base of neither-perception-nor-non-perception" (see Minor Readings and Illustrator by Ven. Ñanamoli, Pali Text Society, London, p.92).
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