For those brought up in a world of liturgical calendars, All Souls’ Eve and All Saints’ Day were shrouded in terrifying solemnity with visits to the cemetery. But the night before, the expected and ritualized autumn banquet was served, which was celebrated in a home that was already dark and sheltered from the first cold weather. This feast could be called by various names in different places, but the essence was the same. From Zamora to Girona, from the Hurdes of Extremadura to the Canary Islands, from Salamanca to the Asturian mining basin, all the houses had on the tablecloth roasted chestnuts, figs, walnuts, quinces, chorizos or other local sausages, new wine or cider, sweet potatoes, panellets (small cake typical of Catalonia, Aragon, the Valencian Community and the Balearic Islands made of almond dough, sugar and egg and covered with pine nuts) or saint’s bones. On the other side from the ocean, a complete banquet was even cooked in honor of those who left, leaving behind a memory of the palate that was recovered and tasted in the very place where their remains rested, as still happens in Oaxaca, Mexico, a festival with an enormous symbolic load that connects with the very essence of humanity.
The answer to all these coincidences lies in the anthropology of religion and, by extension, in the history of food itself, and is collected in the book The Golden Boughby James George Frazer. These erudite texts explain how the majority of religious beliefs, whether pantheistic, pagan, polytheistic or monotheistic, distant in space and time – Egyptian, Greek, Celtic and Christian cultures – coincide at a crucial point that begins with the discovery of agriculture and nature’s cycles of life and death. The burial of a seed and its resurrection in the form of an edible plant begins symbolic thinking.
For centuries, man buried his dead believing that death was the end. He deposited their bodies underground and looked up to the sky in fear. Hunger, cold, and disease claimed lives that had barely reached their zenith. During the Neolithic, the tribes that wandered through mountains and roads looking for food, fighting vermin or collecting berries to eat, became sedentary. The seed of a cereal buried in the earth multiplied and filled the fields with the joy of abundance.
The towns grew around cereal and legume crops, the fire and the piece of meat gave way to more elaborate preparations that were cooked in clay pots or in the bottom of a hollow gourd. The human being saw, then, that time and the seasons repeated themselves, that everything was cyclical, that what dies today is reborn tomorrow. Like a grain seed, the body of his ancestors rested underground, preparing for a new life in the afterlife: resurrection and eternal life. Their buried bodies were the seed that sowed the fields that would feed the living. An eternal connection was thus established between life and death.
All the cultures of old Europe, and even the Mesopotamian and Egyptian ones, were filled with cosmogonies in which the gods of agriculture, such as Osiris or Ceres, were reborn from their tortured and fragmented buried bodies to feed humanity. Food, death and resurrection came together to overcome the fear that was known to be mortal. Its trail spread throughout all agricultural cultures, such as Greco-Roman or Celtic. The people of the cold who inhabited the forests of Ireland, Spain or French Brittany knew that nature offered them its last fruits around the month of November before winter slowed life down. With the change of season, festivals and tributes to their dead followed one another to ward off death and obtain good harvests. Funeral songs, fires, food for the living and the dead, collective drunkenness, stories of the buried occurred in a magical night in which the food offered collectively acquired a symbolism and rituality that still endures.
The Romans even brought flowers to their deceased during Saturnalia, a time of harvest, to remind the afterlife that the here and now needed bread to live. Christianity in the 9th century varnished these pagan and ancestral beliefs and made them its own. All the saints who spread the Christian faith were venerated on All Souls’ Night: the rosary was prayed, the dead were touched in the darkness and, above all, the desired nuts such as walnuts and chestnuts, secular food on the table, were eaten. of poor and rich, because potatoes and corn had not yet arrived from America to alleviate the famines of the old continent. Thus, with a chestnut as an offering, the presence at the table of those who were no longer there was conjured: a chestnut for each soul that left purgatory. Sweet potatoes and some sweets with pine nuts were also roasted as small sacramental breads. Because the panellet It is nothing other than the bread that invites us to take communion, like the ritual of Jesus at the Last Supper, to communicate with our dead. That’s how it is and that’s how it will be in Ireland, where the American Halloween started; in Catalonia, where castanyada encourages roasted chestnuts, sweet wine and panellets before the cold and darkness of winter reaches us; in different parts of the Cantabrian coast, Castilla y León and Extremadura with the Magostos, a festival of Celtic origin that celebrates the harvest of chestnuts, where they are eaten around the fire, and in many other parts of the planet, where the dead and the living sit together in communion.
#Halloween #magostos #castanyadas #funeral #banquets #chestnut #common #fruit