Ofrenda Ritual Offerings to The Dead

This column, Rite Thinking, will explore human spirituality in rites, rituals, holidays, and other spiritual practices. The question we’ll focus on is, what do these rites mean? What is their purpose and intention? I will explore, both here and in the column Primitive Ground, why this is the fundamental question.

Spooky Spiritual Harvest Rituals

Each year at harvest time, the ancients of the older cultures of the world say, the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead thin. The doors between these worlds open. In some cultures, people dress as spooks or demons and pay visits, and the “villagers” in their houses grant them offerings lest the spooks curse and harm, or “trick,” the house.

An Ofrenda to Pati and Her Spirit

Three years ago after my wacky Aunt Pati passed, I carefully put out her first offering.

I include my favorite picture of Pati, with her late husband and love of her life Henry. They stand glowing in the bloom of their youth and beauty, neatly dressed in mid-century splendor. Pati sports a traviesa* look that perfectly captures her spirit: mischievous, but serious, intense and in the moment. Keen intelligence, but with some vital, inner screw loose. Pati’s equilibrium was a few degrees off plumb.

I prepare for Pati a plate of beans de olla with white cheese, and flour tortillas, her favorite meal. No meat or anything– Pati was in food, and in many things, simple and pure. The plate of beans reminds me of Pati’s legendary, slow-cooked chorizo beans de olla: a simple traditional food, slightly twisted. Because she’d have wanted me to, I put out the simple, steamed, white rice preferred by Henry, who was ethnic Chinese from Hawaii.

My mother used to say, like elders do, “Try to remember them at their best.”

So I try to remember Pati in her best and finest moments, and her ideals. Something like: humor and wackiness in the face of racism, disease, and death. To hold to tradition but changing it up just a little to make it yours. To be serious, but make fun when things get too serious. I remember these as the ways Pati lit my path through the world.

When I do all these things, sometimes, especially after dark, I can feel Pati there with me.

Misunderstanding Rites and Rituals: Superstitions and Controlling Hidden Forces

Before we go any further, let me make passing mention of a common, mistaken interpretation of the spirituality of rites and rituals, particularly those that might seem strange. I’ll talk in greater detail about contemporary misunderstandings of rites later, principally in Primitive Ground. But let me offer just a few words here on one such mistake.

Many people think that rites and rituals lack deeper meaning or spirituality, but merely arise “because of superstitions” about the dead. These “superstitions” suggest rituals to allow us to “control unseen forces,” such as the dead.

This kind of thinking misses the point, entirely, about rites and rituals. Because there is something else going on in these rites and rituals, their spirituality or meaning, which is something far more profound than superstition.

Some traditional peoples pray, or used to pray, to the sun at dawn. Early anthropologist Sir James Frazer, advancing this “superstition” interpretation of dawn rites, maintained that these peoples prayed at dawn in order to make the sun come up. The prayer at dawn is a request to the god that makes the god bring about a result.

Think about it. If praying makes the sun come up, why do it exactly at sunrise? Why not pray at night when you’re cold or need a light? That would save on torches and candles. And why not use the rite in winter to make the days longer?

We now know that these ancient peoples well understood basic practical physics of fire and light, and the cycles of the sun and seasons, at least as well as our Eagle Scouts do. If particular ancients did not, the Darwin principle must have weeded those dudes out pretty quickly.

No Superstitions at My Altar

In the same vein, so you’re clear: I don’t think Pati’s spirit is “alive” just like Pati was. If she were, I would not put out the ofrenda. I’d text her. I put out the ofrenda because I know she is dead. And though I put out food “for Pati,” I don’t expect it to disappear overnight. If it did, I might tell my kids to quit messing with me.

And Pati might appear to me, but like spirits do. Not like a person would. If Pati actually showed up, I’d say, “Hey, I thought you were dead!”

So much for what the ritual is not. Now we’ll let the ritual itself show us what the ritual is, what it is thinking– in other words, what we’re thinking-feeling when we act it out.

Rites Forge Spiritual Connections

I’ve said, the fundamental question– the one we have to answer first– is: what do ghosts and spirits mean to us? What is the purpose of communicating with, in this case, the dead?

“Religion,” originally and primitively, means “re-linking” of something to us. Human beings, since time immemorial, have used rituals to forge spiritual connections. A connection is “spiritual” in the sense that it is not physical, and has deep and profound emotional and intellectual purpose or significance to us. So profound, and so deep, that in a way the rituals make us what we are.

This re-linking is, as we’ll explore in many future posts, at the very foundation of religion and community.* Ofrendas, in particular, are behaviors about the dead to keep them connected to us, keep them as part of our community. Indeed: these rituals can elevate our connections to our loved ones. The dead can become more important to us with their passing.

This primitive meaning of spiritual connection explains various features of the ritual.

Why Halloween and Day of the Dead are Harvest Festivals

I will talk about Harvest or Fall Festivals* at length, later, but for now, I offer these few remarks.

As with prayers offered at dawn, harvest festivals occur at a specific spiritual moment. Harvest festivals have for millennia celebrated the bounty of the earth. That bounty sustains the community for the long winter ahead, and originally, through to the next year. Harvest is the time for the community to come together, to renew their bonds, and as a community, to celebrate. Rituals involving the dead such as ofrendas are attempts to strengthen our spiritual bonds with our ancestors. So they occur alongside the other harvest rituals and festivals we use to strengthen and expand community.

Why Ofrenda Rites Dwell in Spiritual Details

What I put out for Pati is quite specific: the plate of beans; the white rice Henry loved. I even cook these exactly as she liked them, with a certain kind of cheese and oil. I might obsess over these details.

Why? So that I can recall Pati more completely. Master poets, novelists and playwrights use details to evoke a person in full, a person in their concrete totality. Detail in art and ritual is an ancient, creative way of calling full, entire realities to mind– that is, of evoking a real, complete person.

So too, a specific picture of Pati’s mischievous eyes, taken on a particular day and time, can through its detail, evoke the complete Pati. How she was loony and formal and loving and strange, all at once, in her own way. An ofrenda, like a poem or a novel, uses details to bring fully to mind, to conjure, Pati in full. This in turn, is because to re-connect to Pati, I must connect to her as the entire person that I loved.

Why We Remember the Dead “at their Best”

I also call up Pati’s ideals by remembering her at her best.

An ideal is something universal that we can all share. In Pati’s case: the importance of humor, of being spiritually serious, but with levity. Pati punctured pomposity with her left hand, while saluting formality with the right.

I remember Pati as a set of ideals, “at her best,” to connect Pati to the ideals of a living community of souls. Here let me borrow one idea from a somewhat obscure German philosopher, Friedrich Schelling, and another a more well-known idea from more well-known classical philosopher, Aristotle.

To connect to something spiritually, says Schelling, we must conceive of that something in a way that makes its connection to other spiritual things, possible. He speaks of academic disciplines in this way; I here apply the same idea to how a specific rite or ritual makes a spiritual connection, makes spirituality, possible.

We picture the dead at their best, their most powerful, their most divine, their most perfect– in their bloom, as it were. Evoking the dead at their best makes possible a connection with their ideals, so that their ideals may become part of our ideals.

Communities are, in a way, made up of their ideals. This is Aristotle’s idea. What we really are as a marriage, as a family, as a community or as a nation, is in a way, the sum total of our ideals. Ideals give us an image of ourselves at our best, most powerful and pure, most divine, give us a mark to aim at in our lives. Ideals forge us, link us, into a community.

This also explains why sometimes, during an ofrenda or any other rite involving the dead, like a wake or funeral, we might see the value of the dead more clearly, than when they were alive. Because we see them in a purer way. We might say things like: “I never really, until I stood here at the ofrenda, realized what Pati meant to me.”

Ideals and Details Put Together Make a Human Essence

My ofrenda calls to mind both Pati as a specific human being, and as an abstract set of ideals. These are opposites, you might say. But such is life. Pati as with all people, is the unique living fusion of these two things: particular details and universal ideals. Combine these two ingredients and you get what you might call an essence*. Pati had a unique view of the world, ideals to be sure, but tweaked to her personality. Her unique qualities, if you had asked her, she’d say were not “extras” but essential to life. When we recall the dead, we might recall this unique combination of particular and universal. How they embodied, in their own way and style, their values.

In this way, people are ideals, come to life. A particular person embodies human ideals in their own, unique way. You might call this combination of details and ideals, a person’s “essence.”

Since the ofrenda ritual captures both of these sides of Pati, the structure of the ritual distills my experiences of Pati into this kind of “essence.” And when I sense Pati’s essence, it helps me find my own essence, because of the resonances I feel to her. Essence resonates with essence. (This is an idea we will explore later in connection with rituals about love*.) Pati’s essence, the particular and ideal fused into a harmony, helps me to understand that I should strive to be such a harmony.

Closing Remarks: Rite Thinking About
Spirituality

You’ve now got some idea of what I mean by “rite thinking” about spirituality in rites and rituals. Future posts will look for the spirituality, or meaning, of other rites, rituals, and so -called “superstitions” in the same way. Next time, I think I’ll talk about ghosts.

Resources and References

*Stay tuned to the above-asterisked and underlined phrases. I hope they will soon become links to other posts! You’ll see this happen when the asterisks disappear.

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics. The classic translation by W. D. Ross can be found at http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.1.i.html

Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough.” This is where Wittgenstein most directly discussed his views spirituality of rites and rituals, and what these rites and rituals are not about. A helpful overview discussion can be found at https://histanthro.org/bibliography/generative/remarks-on-frazers-golden-bough/.

Friedrich Schelling, On University Studies. A difficult work because of its situation within a particular form of post-Kantian idealism, but a great read nonetheless.