"Traditional Day of Dead refreshments and wine will be served"

We searched online for a suitably striking image of Aztec human sacrifice or cannibalism to accompany our post and came up empty. Hence a gratuitous cute kitty pic of Tiny this morning on high alert just after running an intruder off her territory.

"A festive and social occasion, the holiday welcomes the return of those who have died and recognizes the human cycle of life and death," gushes the latest email invitation to Harvard alums (we were Design School MLA '98, for the record), this one from the university's divine Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology and its devilish Divinity School:

Originating with the Aztecs, the Mexican "Days of the Dead" today are a unique blend of Aztec and Christian rituals.

Join us for an evening at the Peabody Museum for a live puppet play, presented by ImaginArte of Mexico City. The play "Mictlan," recounts the Aztec story of the re-peopling of the earth.

Isn't that special? A unique blend of Aztec and Christian rituals. Moral equivalence rules. We assume the re-peopling of the earth took place in the wake of the Aztecs' ritual dispatching of their friends, relatives and mortal enemies via cannibalism and human sacrifice.

The play will be followed by a discussion with Professor Davíd Carrasco, Neil L. Rudenstine Professor for the Study of Latin America at the Harvard Divinity School.  Traditional Day of Dead refreshments and wine will be served during the program.  The Peabody's permanent Day of the Dead exhibit will be open for touring along with its annual, temporary offrenda.

When you say "Traditional Day of Dead refreshments," are you talking body parts, Professor Carrasco? What is the proper wine to go with decapitated heads and chopped-off finger tips? Or are we overreacting to your glossing over the Aztecs' heart of darkness in the name of multicultural kumbaya? As we said in our response to Harvard's kind invitation:

Can you say "White Guilt" whitewash? Also, the one thing I cannot tolerate at "festive and social" occasions is puppet shows.

Long after the intruder had retreated, she kept careful watch to assure the coast was clear.

If we're looking for puppets, we'll attend violent demonstrations of peace-loving leftists. We met with Diana Eck of the Divinity School faculty -- head of the Pluralism Project -- a few years back when a team of three of us Design School students consulted her in connection with a Carl Steinitz studio project to design a Hindu community to fit into the traditional New England village of Petersham. Here's the essence of what she told us, from the blurb of the website of her book, A New Religious America:

"The United States is the most religiously diverse nation in the world," leading religious scholar Diana Eck writes in this eye-opening guide to the religious realities of America today. The Immigration Act of 1965 eliminated the quotas linking immigration to national origins. Since then, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, Jams, Zoroastrians, and new varieties of Jews and Catholics have arrived from every part of the globe, radically altering the religious landscape of the United States.

We were struck with Professor Eck's recent response [unfortunately, the article gives no date, but it appears to have been published in late 2000] to a Beliefnet interviewer's question regarding what religious trends surprised her:

The growth of the Islamic community. They see a growth to 6 million Muslims, 1,200 mosques, and a doubling of the mosque attendance rate. All of us have some sense there are more Muslims here than before, but the dimensions of this, that make the Islamic population virtually equal to the Jewish population in the United States, are arresting.

"How aware are people of this trend?" asked Beliefnet:

My hunch is that people are not very aware. Most people know that immigration has changed the face of America in the last 20 years, and they're aware of Latino and Hispanic immigration and recognize how that has changed the Catholic Church and Protestantism across the country.

But I think people are less cognizant of Islamic and Hindu and Buddhist and Sikh communities. There are some reasons for this. One is that the early mosques and temples for the first 20 years or so were not particularly visible. You could drive by a mosque in a storefront and not notice there was a new form of religion in your community. But now we do have very visible landmark religious institutions that give us a visual clue.

"What worries you about where we're headed? What do we need to be concerned about?" asked Beliefnet:

If you ask what my fear is, it's that if our diversity becomes isolated enclaves in which we really do not allow ourselves to encounter one another and don't take on the difficult task of creating a positive pluralism in which we're engaged with one another, we may end up with communities that are more isolated.

Intimations of Londonistan? The Parisian Intifada?  'Wonder if she knew how cataclysmically charged her intimations were? We'd love to hear a scholarly debate between everyone-is-beautiful, in-their-own-way Diana Eck and the sadder-but-wiser Robert Spencer, whose new book The Truth About Muhammad: Founder of the World's Most Intolerant Religion is the talk of the 'sphere [via Little Green Footballs].

Comments

[pb]

Tinyvigilante is my favorite picture yet.

Get those cats unfixed and sign me up for some kittens!

[AskMom]

One recent halloween, Starbucks abandoned the ever-popular ghost, cat and pumpkin merchandise for a new-age celebration of the day of the dead, complete with strange coffee mugs and weird, off-kilter candies. Sales plummeted and this year we have American style stuff back, although with a bit of a twist to it.
Money talks and multiculturalism walks would be the motto, I guess.

[goomp]

Diana Eck and her fellow non comprehending "everyone is beautiful in their own way" multi-culturalists is so far away from the reality of human nature that only personally experiencing the terror of evil cultures will bring them to reality. Only the discipline of a culture enables humans to live a semblance of an ordered life and to feel that barbaric cultures are just as happy to live under as the judeo-christian culture is pure stupidity.

[ScottSA]

Its telling that multicult promoters have to whitewash the truth in order to sell their product. Not only do they produce a false product, but they also emphasize only one tiny aspect of the product: the long-suffering "festivals".

I bet none of these 'traditional' celebrations involve pyramids, peon hearts and knives made of volcanic glass.

[Gayle Miller]

There is no form of human beauty to compare with that of Tiny, Baby and my exquisitely handsome Sam and the beautiful but dingy Tim! And they don't have to work at it. They just ARE. A lesson tucked away in there somewhere, don't you think?