Aztecs and Zapotecs: The Day of the Dead and the Cosmic Phantoms of Malcolm Lowry

Nigel H. Foxcroft,University of Brighton

IntroductionInspired by a field-trip to Mexico in October – November 2010

for the Day of the Dead festival, this paper advances the thesis of my

2009 Malcolm Lowry Centenary International Conference paper on

“Souls and Shamans: The Cosmopolitan Psychology of Malcolm

Lowry” presented at UBC, Vancouver.1 Indeed, it gives further

consideration to the cultural, psychological, and spiritual links

between Lowry’s terrestrial, subterranean, cosmic, and aquatic

worldviews.

In assessing the interface between the material and spiritual

domains of the Aztecs and the Oaxacan Zapotecs, this research

examines the subconscious dimensions of the Mexican Day of the

Dead festival witnessed by Malcolm Lowry. In so doing, it

investigates various anthropological, cultural, and ethnographic

influences. With their sources in pre-Columbian, Mesoamerican

rituals, these stimuli are reflected in Lowry’s Under the Volcano

(1947), Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend is Laid (1968), La

Mordida (1996), and The Forest Path to the Spring (1961).

In analyzing his preoccupation with seeking atonement with

the spirits of the dead, this paper aims to clarify Lowry’s recognition

of the need to repent for the debts of the past and for the sins of

mankind. It also attempts to penetrate his insight into Mexican

cultural heritage by determining synergies in his worldview with the

cosmic, shamanic, and animistic concepts of the universe, reflected

in the divine consciousness of the Aztec and Zapotec civilizations.

2

From the Aztecs to the Zapotecs: A Psychogeographical Pursuit of the Spirits of Civilization

Malcolm Lowry’s multifaceted, prismatic perception of his

environment empowers him to encapsulate in his work an intriguing

combination of terrestrial, temporal images, on the one hand, with

celestial, spiritual dimensions, on the other. A reinterpretation of his

vision of the world reveals various anthropological,

psychogeographic, and psychoanalytical forces at work in his

complex approach to what was to become Jacob Bronowski’s Ascent

of Man.2 Furthermore, Lowry was intrigued by the ethnographic

research promulgated in The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and

Religion (1890-1915) by Sir James George Frazer (1854-1941), the

Scottish anthropologist, folklorist, and classicist. Indeed, in his letters

Lowry refers directly to this work – one which bears witness to the

commemoration of the souls of the dead by what Frazer calls the

“Miztecs of Mexico,” that is, the Mixtecs of Oaxaca and its environs.3

Entranced by the Mexican Día de los Muertos, or Day of the

Dead celebration which he observed in November 1936 in

Quauhnahuac – known today by its Hispanicized version of

Cuernavaca – Lowry launches his multi-layered novel, Under the

Volcano with a psychogeographical portrait of a city haunted by “the

ghosts of ruined gamblers”.4 In what transforms into a psychologically

profound vision of the world, perceived by an esoterically enigmatic,

Cabbala-inspired state of consciousness, the reader is propelled into

the inner depths of Lowry’s snapshot of civilization.5 However, it is a

domain in which dwell strange combinations of numbers and bizarre

coincidences of events which ostensibly determine the fate of

mankind. Gradually, we are exposed to a mind-set which fosters

beliefs akin to those held by both the Aztecs and, indeed, the

Zapotecs who endeavoured to predict five unlucky, unnamed days in

3

their 365-day solar calendar. Stimulated by the impact of a particular

American author and science critic, Lowry justifies his numeric beliefs

by declaring, in his correspondence, that he has known “of no writer

who has made the inexplicable seem more dramatic than Charles

Fort” and proceeds to surmise that the cosmos is composed of

certain immortal, mathematically-rooted patterns of existence.6

A prolific reader of world literature, Lowry was captivated by

travel. Following in the footsteps of D. H. Lawrence in pursuit of

adventure and cultural paradise, he was lured to Mexico twice – once

in 1936-38 and again in 1945 – lodging in the cities of Cuernavaca

and Oaxaca. Embarking upon a transcendental, supernatural quest

for the Garden of Eden, he traced the cultural and historical origins of

modern Mexico back to the Aztecs. Mesmerized by the cosmological

legacy which they shared with the Zapotecs, he drew upon his life-

long interest in social, cultural, and linguistic anthropology as a way

of comprehending the Spanish impact on Aztec civilization. Of

special appeal were the consequences for his Mexican Garden of

Eden of Hernán Cortés’s conquest and skilful subjugation of the

Aztec Empire in 1519-21. In this respect, Lowry was enthralled by the

ongoing dilemma facing the native Aztec and Zapotec civilizations:

how to preserve their heritage while adjusting to a new politico-

cultural, Hispanic environment – a situation which led to a fusion of

traditions in the Day of the Dead festival.

The Cosmic Phantoms of the Mexican Día de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead

In Aztec culture, death – as “a mirror of life” - is a symbolic

celebration, necessitating an offering, or sacrifice to satisfy the gods

and to nourish the souls of the deceased on their underworld journey

into the afterlife.7 It was deemed a great honour to be a sacrifice, for,

4

as Jacques Soustelle has claimed, it was “believed that each human

being was, by predestination, inserted into a divine order, ‘the grasp

of the omnipotent machine’”.8 The Aztecs cherished the eternal Ferris

wheel of life by practising the extraction of the pulsating heart of a

‘volunteer’, or, rather, a victim, with the intention of placating the gods

and, hence, sustaining the universe.

Associated with pre-Columbian, Mesoamerican rituals

connecting the living with the fallen, the Day of the Dead festival

derives its traditions too from shamanic and cosmic perspectives akin

to those preserved by the modern-day, animist tribes of northern

Mexico. In this respect, the Huichol (and the Yaqui) worship and

communicate with numerous gods and spirits, giving thanks to

Christian images, such as to the figurine of the Virgin of Guadalupe.

In Under the Volcano this effigy appears as “the Consul’s longing”

where it “was so great his soul was locked with the essence of the

place”.9 In Dark as the Grave the revival of Sigbjørn’s faith is

facilitated both by “the mediating influence of the dead” and by the

statuette “of […] the Holy Virgin” which attracts the attention of

Primrose and Sigbjørn “as a model ... dressed in bright print and

carrying in one hand a lamp”.10 Moreover, it precipitates an acute

“feeling of something Renaissance,” emphasizing the need for

cultural and spiritual renewal.11

Rebirth for Lowry is closely connected to movements of the

Pleiades (or Seven Sisters) star cluster which interfaces with the Day

of the Dead and the 260-day ritual cycle of the Aztec and Zapotec

calendar year. In this respect, Lowry informed the editor of the

Vancouver Sun of his following discovery regarding the Pleiades:

The Egyptians, the Aztecs, the Japanese all worshipped them. And the Festival of All Hallows, All Saints Day, the Mexican Day of the Dead etc. are all associated with the culmination of the Pleiades. It is

5

thought [...] that these universal memorial services commemorate a great cataclysm that occurred in ancient times.12

Furthermore, in Under the Volcano the Consul’s ex-wife, Yvonne -

shamed for eternity for her extra-marital affairs with Hugh and M.

Jacques Laruelle – ironically imagines “herself voyaging straight up

through the stars to the Pleiades,” as was the case with Merope, the

faintest of the mythical Seven Sisters.13 Hence, it is the Pleiades –

and the date of their first appearance in the sky - which link Aztec

and Zapotec beliefs, as has been suggested by Clemente Vicente

M.14

As a commemorative ritual, the Day of the Dead not only sets

the scene but also provides a key to comprehending the true

significance of Under the Volcano. Of pre-Hispanic, pagan-spiritual

origin, this festival - deeply rooted as it is in ancient Aztec civilization

– has been enriched by subsequent Spanish-Catholic influences.

Held on 2 November each year, it comes after the commemoration of

deceased children and infants on 1 November, known as the Day of

the Innocents, or Little Angels. With its bright masks and skulls, vivid

costumes, loud singing and dancing, and the display of orange

marigolds and the favourite dishes and drinks of the deceased

alongside their graves, this fete yearns to connect the living with the

spirits of the dead. These evocative images are reproduced by Lowry

in Under the Volcano which opens with Dr Vigil and M. Jacques

Laruelle reminiscing about Yvonne and Geoffrey Firmin, now

deceased, but immortalized in the events of the Day of the Dead. As

with the Consul, the Aztecs too believed that, on this very day, the

souls of the deceased – symbols of rebirth - journey back from the

underworld to greet the land of the mortals.

Contacting the Dead: The Impact of Shamans and the Cabbala

6

Motivated by his encounters with Charles Robert Stansfeld-

Jones (1886-1950), alias Frater Achad, Lowry portrays the Consul of

Under the Volcano as a “dark magician in his visioned cave,”

regularly consulting Elizabethan plays and “numerous cabbalistic and

alchemical books”.15 Indeed, the Consul possesses an esoteric,

hermetic knowledge acquired by an assumed, shamanic ability to

contact “the spirits of ancestors and the controlling forces of the

natural world, or gods” in his trance-like state of consciousness.16 On

his mystic crusade - a spiritual mission to discover death in life and

life in death – he attempts to use the wisdom of the Cabbala to

aspire, hallucinogenically, to a higher dimension of supreme truth

and salvation by opening sacred portals connecting the natural and

supernatural realms.17 It is through meditation and the imbibition of

mescal and pulque – an ancient, sacred, ritualistic, alcoholic drink

produced from the agave – that he transforms into a witch-doctor or

shamanic priest, attempting to perform ecstatic “rituals of

supernatural communication”.18

Seeking a harmonious cosmic order, the Consul endeavours

to maintain a balance between the material and spiritual worlds. He

aims to confer with the gods to avert misfortune, as did the Aztecs

and the Zapotecs.19 On the one hand, Mercia Eliade (1907-86)

assumes that a “primitive magician, the medicine man or shaman, is

not only a sick man, he is, above all, a sick man who has been cured,

who has succeeded in curing himself”.20 However, in the Consul’s

case, his dabbling with the laws of nature has culminated not in an

attainment of the transcendental power of love, but in the loss of “the

knowledge of the Mysteries”.21 Unfortunately, he has become a victim

of his own cabbalistic magic, as Lowry reveals when he explains:

The garden can be seen not only as the world, or the Garden of Eden, but legitimately as the Cabbala itself,

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and the abuse of wine […] is identified in the Cabbala with the abuse of magical powers […] à la Childe Harolde.22

From Cuernavaca to Oaxaca in the Quest for the Elixir of LifeAs with the Consul in Under the Volcano, a priest on a

pilgrimage, Lowry too embarks upon a quest for the Holy Grail of

Central Mesoamerican civilization. In his search for veracity,

enlightenment, and redemption, he endeavours to cure the world by

discovering a shamanic elixir of life.23 He is enchanted by Oaxaca to

which he travels, referring to it in his letters as “the most lovely town

in the world & with some of the most lovely people in it”.24 On his

expedition he encounters the multilingual Zapotec, Juan Fernando

Márquez whom he befriends and whose shamanic phantom he later

retraces to Oaxaca. According to Douglas Day, as well as being a

messenger for the Ejidal Bank and a dipsomaniac linguist, Juan

Fernando possesses the expertise of a doctor, translator, adventurer,

and chemist – that is, all the skills which our Consul is attempting to

master.25

The real-life figures of Márquez and Fernando Atonalzin of

Lowry’s “Garden of Etla” serve as models for the fictional Juan

Fernando Martínez.26 In Dark as the Grave Martínez, a former friend

and guardian spirit of Sigbjørn Wilderness, is the joint reincarnation

both of the legendary Juan Cerillo and of Dr Vigil in Under the

Volcano. Indeed, it is Martínez whom Sigbjørn pursues on his return

journey with his wife from Vancouver to Cuernavaca to exorcize the

ghosts, or phantoms which have been plaguing him since his last

visit to Oaxaca.27 Whereas Primrose encourages him to attain a state

of harmony with life, Martínez enables him to do so with death and,

paradoxically, with the natural environment, providing a cathartic

medium for spiritual transformation, as a phoenix of renaissance.

8

Sigbjørn is also aided by a ritualistic, voodoo cross which is depicted

as a means of enabling the spirits of the dead, transformed into

gods, to communicate with the living.28

In his quest to uncover the genesis of the indigenous Zapotec

civilization, Sigbjørn’s trip to the high priest’s palace entails a

physical descent to Mitla’s prehistoric, cruciform tombs, right down to

the subterranean Column of Death. Indeed, derived from “Mictlan”,

Mitla represents the land of the dead.29 On a simultaneous,

metaphysical journey, Sigbjørn is transported to the underworld of

Zapotec mythology. Luckily, he is to survive the potential perils of the

lunar eclipse, Maximilian’s Palace (transposed to Oaxaca from

Cuernavaca), and the temple of Mitla (“the City of the Moon”).

Indeed, it is in the romantic setting of the Hotel La Luna on the Playa

La Boquilla near Puerto Ángel on Oaxaca’s Pacific Coast that he is

reunited with Primrose, who is portrayed as a lunar-goddess

reborn.30

Enshrined in the worship of the deities of the Sun and the

Moon, as is evident from the excavations of the pyramids at Monte

Albán (dating back to 500 B.C.) and at Teotihuacan (to 100 A.D.),

these cosmic enigmas and ancient rituals captivated Lowry who

modestly acknowledges that he “did, however, live in Oaxaca for a

time, among the ruins of Monte Albán and Mitla”.31 Named after a

Mexican tree whose wood and flowers are white like the moon at

night, Monte Albán, or ‘White Mountain’ - as well as being a

significant socio-economic and political centre - was famous too for

its astronomical Building J, enlivened by the veneration of Zapotec

gods.

Conclusion

9

With their roots in the rituals of ancient Aztec and Zapotec

culture and civilization, as illustrated by the Mexican Day of the

Dead, Under the Volcano and Dark as the Grave provide us with a

mirror of Malcolm Lowry’s cosmic and shamanic phantoms. In his

strife for cultural healing and spiritual regeneration, by entering “the

soul of a past self” through Sigbjørn Wilderness in Dark as the

Grave, he comes to terms with the haunting spectres of his

psychogeographic heritage. He does likewise in The Forest Path to

the Spring when, having conjured up an animistic cougar, or puma,

Sigbjørn confronts the wild forces of existence by means of a

shamanic flight back to his Lowrian Wallasey childhood.32 The use of

the pan-Mesoamerican shamanistic practise of nagual - whereby a

human being is transformed magically into animal form - is

reminiscent of the Consul’s afterlife companion, or guardian angel, in

Under the Volcano where “somebody threw a dead dog after him

down the ravine”.33 This action provides the Consul both with

protection against evil spirits and a means of conveyance to the

supernatural underworld, in accordance with Aztec and shamanic

customs.

As a culmination of Malcolm Lowry’s moral and spiritual

trajectory, it is the sensuous lyrical novella of The Forest Path to the

Spring which offers us a Utopian, harmonious glimpse of his

aqueduct across the domains of the living and the paranormal

underworld of the dead. Spanning the natural environment and the

cosmos, it shrouds the fluvial, transformational emblem of Eridanus,

the “river of life: river of youth: river of death”.34 Cascading from Dark

as the Grave, Eridanus - the mythological gateway to Hades - acts

as an axis mundi. “Imbued with a life-force or soul,” it bridges all

three levels of the shamanic cosmos, as does the Day of the Dead.35

In this respect, many Mesoamericans visualized the underworld as

10

rotating on its axis at sunset, transformed from being a subterranean

realm into the night sky. Hence, the stars and other celestial bodies

were perceived by the Aztecs and Zapotecs as “inhabitants of the

supernatural otherworld”.36 In The Forest Path we witness a rebirth in

Man’s relationship with his environment: we are beckoned to heed

the aquatic, centrifugal rhythms of an elliptical universe,

reverberating in the Chinese concept of the Tao, the Way.37

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Endnotes

1 Funding by the University of Brighton - in the form of the award of a one-semester research sabbatical - is acknowledged as having made possible this paper, an earlier version of which was delivered at the 2009 Malcolm Lowry Centenary International Conference, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, 23 – 25 July, 2009.2 Bronowski (1908-74) and Lowry were Cambridge contemporaries, both actively involved with the literary magazine, The Experiment (1928-31), to which Lowry refers in his letters: see Grace, Sursum Corda!, I, 70 and 120. He directly cites Bronowski, the eminent mathematician, biologist, and science historian (I, 75).3 Lowry, Sursum Corda!, II, 364 and 379. See also Frazer, 377. 4 Lowry, Under the Volcano, 9.5 The Cabbala, or Kabbalah refers to mystical Jewish teachings based on an esoteric interpretation of Hebrew scripture.6 Lowry, Sursum Corda!, I, 315-16.7 Miller and Taube, 74.8 Soustelle, 112, quoted in Wutz, 66.9 Lowry, Under the Volcano, 204.10 Lowry, Dark as the Grave, 262 and 115.11 Ibid, 263. 12 Lowry, Sursum Corda!, II, 367.13 Lowry, Under the Volcano, 202-03, 216, 335, and 373-74. See Doyen, 112 and Grace, “The Luminous Wheel,” 162 and 165. In Lowry’s 1949-50 screen adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night (1934) we are reminded of Lowry’s vision of being “borne straight upwards into the night sky and the stars” as an “eternal reminder also that our being and will are elsewhere” (Mota and Tiessen, 241-42). In his correspondence Lowry writes of “the seven sisters & the myth of the Lost Pleiad” as being “the one cedar in the seven firs” (Lowry, Sursum Corda!, II, 367).14 Interview held at Monte Albán on 6 November, 2010.15 Lowry, Under the Volcano, 151, 206, 33, and 178. Treatises on science and magic by John Dee (1527-1608), the mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, and adviser to Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603) spring to mind. Lowry studied the Judeo-Christian metaphysical system of the Cabbala, participating in occult, magical practices with Stansfeld-Jones in the hamlet of Deep Cove near Dollarton: see Bowker, 321, Day, 294-95, and Lowry, Sursum Corda!, I, 529 and II, 201-03, 356, 360, 798, and 799.16 Reilly, 374. See also Mellors, 131.17 See Reilly, 374.18 Ibid. It seems that the Consul - like Lowry himself – confuses mescal, the alcoholic spirit distilled from the agave plant (the genus of the aloe, or maguey) for mescaline, the psychedelic drug made from the peyote cactus. See Mellors, 132 regarding shamanic “spiritual excursions”.19 Aztec Gallery Guide. See also Miller and Taube, 138.20 Eliade, Shamanism, 27, cited in Spivey, 8 and 183. See also Tucker, “Towards a Shamanology” and Dreaming with Open Eyes.21 Epstein, 27.22 Lowry, Sursum Corda!, I, 595.23 According to Mellors, a “healer of spiritual (i.e. psychological) and psychosomatic disorders,” the “shaman tends to be a member of the community who, having survived his own physical and/or mental illness, seeks to cure the ills of others” (131 and 133).24 Lowry, Sursum Corda!, I, 183.25 See Day, 242-43 and Bowker, 235. 26 See Day, 240-44 and Lowry, Sursum Corda!, I, 176 and 187. In his essay, “Garden of Etla” Lowry praises the Zapotec Fernando Atonalzin as representing “a people possessing a high degree of civilization and cultural genius,” including an “old Zapotecan religion” (45 and 46).27 Lowry himself was constantly troubled by memories of Paul Fitte, his university friend who committed suicide in 1929: see Bowker, 97-100 and Lowry, Sursum Corda!, I, 3, 83, 85, and 93, and II, 701, 856, and 858.

28 In his correspondence Lowry refers to voodoo as “a religion, to be regarded with reverence, since […] it is […] based upon […] the supernatural as a fact that is fundamental to man himself” (Lowry, Sursum Corda!, II, 364).29 See Spence, 49 and 110, cited in Sugars, 155.30 Sugars, 158.31 Lowry, Sursum Corda!, I, 315.32 Lowry, Forest Path, 246 and 226, and McCarthy, Forests of Symbols, 206. According to Reilly, “Classic period Maya kings validated their right to royal power by publicly proclaiming their ability to perform the shamanic trance journey and transform into power animals” (374). 33 Lowry, Under the Volcano, 376. For further information on nagual and shamanic human-animal transformation, see Reilly, 374-75. 34 Lowry, Dark as the Grave, 261. See also pp. 26-27 and Lowry, Forest Path, 231.35 Reilly, 374.36 Ibid, 375.37 See Lowry, Forest Path, 285-86, Interdisciplinary Encyclopaedia, and Tao/Dao - The Way.