The Aztec's Day Of The Dead

An altar made on the Day of the Dead is the perfect image that has a balance of Aztec and Spanish elements incorporated in it. The Day of the Dead is a special celebration that remembers, honours, and celebrates the dead. It is a celebration of life, and a triumph over death. The Aztecs have been practicing this tradition for at least three thousand years before the Spanish arrived. To them, life was a dream, and it is only in death that did they wake. The Aztecs had a strong belief in the afterlife. For example, people who died in combat became champions of Huitzilopochtli, the sun god. There are festivals which honour ‘departed’ children in the ninth month of the Aztec calendar, and festivals for the adults in the tenth. Souls not selected by gods went to the underworld and has to pass through nine levels before reaching Mictlan, realm of Mictalntecuhtli and Mictalncihuatl, death god and goddess. Nowadays, the celebration begins on the 28th of October and ends on the second of November.
One element they had in common was the use of altars, temples, and statues to show their devotion to their gods. The Spanish realised that both they and the Aztecs celebrated and honoured the dead, and they used that to their advantage and ended up fusing elements of both cultures, which became the Day of the Dead that we know today. To make the tradition more connected to Catholicism, the Spanish’s religion, they shortened it from one month to two days, November the first and second, and made it so that it purposefully collides with their own All Saint’s Day and All Soul’s Day, which celebrates, remembers, and glorifies saints and the souls of the deceased that have not specifically been purified or reached