Celebrations

On April 26, a conversation was held about the Andean festivities, with an emphasis on "Pawkar Raymi" or Andean flourishing, organized by the Apu Cultural Promotion Association.

Our brother Alfredo Mires was invited as a speaker and worked on a dismantling around the concept of party, giving as an example the change in which the celebrations that were ancestrally linked, as a principle, to agriculture and the movement of the cosmos, have been falling:

"The now highly commercialized Halloween Festival is nothing more than an imitation of the ancient rituals of the Celtic culture, which were celebrated at the end of summer in northern Europe, when the animals were collected from the fields and taken to the stables to spend the winter. On this date, the Celtic god Samhain allowed the souls of the dead to return to their homes ... And as the deceased could seize the bodies of the living to resurrect, the living dirtied the houses and covered them with skulls and masks that could scare to the deceased and discourage them from returning.

This kind of transmutation also happened with the current Holy Week: the ancient Romans had inherited, from many other cultures linked to the earth, the Feast of Attis, the god of vegetation, dead and risen. This was from mid-March. On the 25th it was the Feast of Hilaria, the day of Joy, in which the arrival of spring was greeted.

For that party, the goddess Cibeles bathed naked in the river calling for the rain and the fertility of the fields: all the celebrants had to dress in colors and informalities and laugh as they celebrated: the earth was resurrecting after having endured the harsh winter: the days began to get longer than the nights.

The feast of the world, all over the world, was a celebration of joy: it was celebrated laughing."