Photo: JUAN MABROMATA / AFP / Getty Images
This February 2nd is celebrated the Candlemas Day, a popular religious and cultural festival in almost all Catholic countries. In the case of Mexico, it has elements of pre-Hispanic origin, which translate into the consumption of tamales.
According to Gisela von Wobeser, researcher Emeritus of the Institute of Historical Research (IIH) of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, as reported to the UNAM Gazette, it is one of the most important popular festivals of the Catholicism.
It is celebrated by all of Christianity, both in the East and in the Western Roman Church, and in it three great motifs converge: the memory of the biblical passage of the presentation of the child God in the Temple of Jerusalem
, which occurs 80 days after his birth, which occurred on 24 from December; the purification of the Virgin Mary after childbirth and the veneration of the latter, in her invocation of Virgen de la Candelaria.
The specialist in colonial history explains that the word candelaria comes from candela, whose definition is candle, for Therefore, its connotation is associated with light, which within Christianity has an important symbolic meaning: “It has always been associated with heaven, with the divine. Therefore, in plastic art, saints are represented with a halo of light”.
Therefore, in the case of Mexico, With a large part of the population linked to the Catholic religion, there are even those who, without being regular attendees of mass, share religious beliefs and, therefore, attribute certain miraculous characteristics of consolation to the child God blessed on February 2.
In addition, “many of our festivities have a costumbrista element and many, without being believers, share those traditional festivities such as Christmas, the Day of the Dead and, of course, Candelaria”, he sentenced.
Why tamales on Candelaria Day?
According to the Ministry of Culture in Mexico, the Tamale, main food in the Candelaria festival, also marks the beginning of the agricultural cycle.
Its protagonism is linked precisely because the tamale d on account of the cultural syncretism of Mexico when linked to the festive and agricultural cycles, present in the beliefs of various indigenous peoples of Mexico and in the Catholic religion.
The tamale is part of the gastronomy of various peoples, its origin is ancestral and in pre-Hispanic times it was consumed on significant dates and in rites dedicated to various deities.
Its name comes from the Nahuatl tamalli (“corn bun wrapped in leaves and steamed”) and since long before the Colonial period it has been consumed on February 2, Candlemas Day.
For Gisela von Wobeser, the native peoples had the custom of offering tamales in a festival called Huauhquiltamalqualitztli. “(This date) began the agricultural cycle in Rome and apparently the same thing happened in pre-Hispanic Mexico with these tamalizas that were made as an offering to the gods,” he highlights.
In this way, we are facing a syncretism in which They merged festivals as old as the Lupercales of Rome, the medieval Christians and the pre-Hispanic traditions of Mexico, and it persists to this day.
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