The Mexican Day of the Dead: A Jungian Inquiry

Abstract

This hermeneutic inquiry explores the Mexican Day of the Dead using a close reading/active imagination methodology with a depth psychological perspective. It addresses the question, how an imaginal approach to death can deepen our understanding, and help bring meaning to our last, and most profound rite of passage. To explore this tradition venerating the dead, Jungian and archetypal lenses are applied to concepts of soul, death, and the afterlife, of both Mesoamerican and Spanish cultures at the time of the Conquest. The study emphasizes the cosmovision, eschatological mythology, and funerary practices of the Mexica, (Aztec) people; it compares and contrasts these with those of Spanish Catholicism in the sixteenth century. Death is pondered in Jungian terms, as an archetype of transformation, the soul’s telos, humankind’s greatest mystery, and the path to wholeness. The popularity of the Day of the Dead, and La Catrina, a uniquely Mexican death archetype, are explored as a compensatory response to the silencing that death has undergone in our modern culture.