Day of the Dead
DAY OF THE DEAD. The feast of All Saints Day and the liturgical celebration of All Souls Day have long histories in Western Christendom. The origins of these occasions in the Christian yearly cycle are uncertain, but by the fourteenth century they ranked immediately after Christmas and Holy Week in importance, and their celebration had been fixed on November 1 for All Saints Day and November 2 (or November 3 if November 2 fell on a Sunday) for All Souls Day. Since then these two festivities, most commonly known as the Days of the Dead, have been inextricably interrelated in the liturgy of the Western Church. At the onset of, perhaps even as the result of, the Reformation and the rise of modern science during the Renaissance, there was a significant decline in the ritual and ceremonial underpinnings of Christendom, but in the New World (more precisely in the Catholic New World) the rites, ceremonies, and symbolic meaning of All Saints Day and All Souls Day have been reinvigorated and in many ways have achieved their maximum elaboration.
Development of the Observances
All Saints Day commemorates those individuals who in the service of the church have achieved that ambivalent status of "sainthood." Although the transcendentally different natures of the omnipotent-omnipresent almighty God of Christian monotheism and its underlings, the saints, may be clearly understood and explained by theologians, this has not been the case for significant segments of practicing Christians since probably the formative period of Christianity between the first and fourth centuries CE.
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