All Souls, or the Day the Living Owe the Dead
2026-11-02
Gold-framed manuscript page painted like a Gothic shrine: in the centre a square stone tower spews red flames, naked souls stand among the fire, in a pool of water and on rocks, while golden-winged angels lift some of them up into a blue sky and a grey wolf-like beast prowls over a fallen body in the foreground.
Purgatory, folio 113v of the Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry, fifteenth century, Musée Condé, Chantilly. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Tomorrow is the second of November. Before it was a holiday, a day of flowers and traffic jams at the cemetery gates, it was a monastic decision taken at Cluny, a theology slowly built in the schools of Paris, and a business that helped to split Western Christianity. This is a historian’s walk through All Souls’ Day: Odilo and his decree, the birth of Purgatory, candles and bells, Finados in Brazil, the Day of the Dead in Mexico, the dance of the skeletons, and what all of this asks of the living.
“Nós ossos que aqui estamos pelos vossos esperamos.”
(“We bones that are here are waiting for yours.”)
— Inscription over the door of the Capela dos Ossos, Évora
Every year, on the second of November, millions of people do something that seems as old as humanity: they go to the dead. They clean a grave, put down flowers, light a candle, stand in silence for a moment and leave. It feels timeless. It is not. The date, the name and most of the gestures have a history, and a surprisingly precise one.
On this blog I keep separating three things that popular books love to blend into a single soup: what a Church actually taught, what ordinary people actually did, and what modern esotericists later said about both. All Souls’ Day is the perfect case. It is a Catholic feast with a documented founder, it is a folk festival with countless local forms, and it has been read, in the last two centuries, through Spiritism and the occult revival. Each layer is real. None of them is the same as the others.
All Souls’ Day is not a pagan survival in Christian clothing, nor a timeless instinct; it is a medieval invention of solidarity between the living and the dead, and every candle lit tomorrow still carries the question it was invented to answer: what do we owe to those who came before us?
[](#the-abbot-who-gave-the-dead-a-day "Jump to this heading")The abbot who gave the dead a day
The name we need is Odilo, fifth abbot of Cluny, born around 962 into a noble family of the Auvergne and abbot from the 990s until his death on 1 January 1049. Under him Cluny became the most important monastery in Western Europe, the head of a network of dependent houses spread across the continent.
Christians had prayed for the dead long before Odilo. Inscriptions in the catacombs ask for peace for the departed, and early writers such as Tertullian and Cyprian mention the practice. Monasteries kept their own days of remembrance: Benedictine houses commemorated their dead at Whitsuntide, Isidore of Seville’s Spain used the Monday after Pentecost, and Abbot Eigil of Fulda chose 17 December. What was missing was a single day, for all the faithful departed, fixed in the calendar.
Odilo supplied it. He ordered all the monasteries dependent on Cluny to hold, on the day after All Saints, an annual commemoration of all the faithful departed, with prayers, Masses and alms. The connection with the poor was deliberate: those who asked for a Mass for their dead were to give something to the poor, so that charity to the living and prayer for the dead became a single act.
From Cluny the custom spread to other Benedictine houses and then to the wider Church. The Diocese of Liège adopted it under Bishop Notger, who died in 1008. Rome and Italy took up the second of November only in the thirteenth century.
[](#998-or-a-little-later "Jump to this heading")998, or a little later
Tradition gives the decree a round and beautiful date: 998, two years before the millennium. In September 1998 the Vatican’s Congregation for the Clergy celebrated at Cluny the thousandth anniversary of the institution of the “Jour des morts”, and even that homily admitted that historians hesitate.
They do. The old Catholic Encyclopedia already wrote that Odilo established All Souls’ Day “probably not in 998 but after 1030”. More recent scholarship agrees. A 2023 article in the Cahiers de civilisation médiévale, studying an unpublished copy of Odilo’s Statutum de defunctis preserved in a manuscript from the Catalan abbey of Ripoll, speaks of the decree by which Odilo instituted the feast “around 1030”. The copy is from the second quarter of the eleventh century, which fits.
The Vatican homily offered an elegant compromise: the final decree may be later and may gather several earlier measures, the first of which could go back to 998. That is possible. What matters for the historian is the order of things. The day for the dead was not born out of popular fear at the turn of the millennium. It was born inside the most powerful monastic network of its time, as a liturgical decision, and only afterwards became the people’s day.
[](#purgatory-before-purgatory "Jump to this heading")Purgatory before Purgatory
A day of prayer for the dead only makes sense if prayer can do something for them. That is the theological ground under the second of November, and it has a name: Purgatory.
The Catholic Church teaches that souls who die in God’s grace but are not yet fully purified pass through a purification before entering Heaven, and that the living can help them with prayer, alms, good works and, above all, the Mass. The scriptural passage most often cited is 2 Maccabees 12, where Judas Maccabeus has an offering made for fallen soldiers so that they might be delivered from their sin. Early Christian writers spoke of a purifying fire, using the Latin adjective purgatorius.
But an adjective is not a place. For a long time, Western Christians believed in a purification after death without imagining it as a third region of the other world, beside Heaven and Hell, with its own geography.
[](#le-goff-and-the-birth-of-a-place "Jump to this heading")Le Goff and the birth of a place
In 1981 the French medievalist Jacques Le Goff published La naissance du Purgatoire with Gallimard, translated into English in 1984 as The Birth of Purgatory. His thesis is simple to state and immense in its consequences: Purgatory as a place was born in the twelfth century.
Le Goff’s key evidence is the noun itself. The Latin purgatorium, used as a noun for a place of cleansing, appears only in the last decades of the twelfth century, perhaps between 1170 and 1180. He connected its emergence with the intellectuals of the Paris schools and with Cistercian monks, and with the great medieval narratives of journeys through the other world. Among them, he gave a central position to the Tractatus de Purgatorio Sancti Patricii, the account by an English Cistercian of a knight who enters Purgatory through a cave on an island in Lough Derg, in Ireland. Le Goff ends his book with Dante, whose Purgatorio he saw as the sublime conclusion of this long development.
His thesis has been debated and nuanced ever since, and some historians argue that the belief was older than the word. But Le Goff changed the question. Purgatory stopped being a timeless doctrine and became a historical object, with a birth, a vocabulary and a social function: it gave the living a lasting role in the fate of the dead, and it gave the Church a structure through which that role could be organised.
The Church’s own definitions are more sober than the popular image. The Second Council of Lyon, in 1274, defined the doctrine for the first time, and neither it nor the Councils of Florence and Trent described Purgatory as a third place or as a fire. Trent, in its decree of December 1563, explicitly asked preachers to avoid “difficult and subtle questions”. The flames of the frescoes belong to the imagination of preachers, painters and poets, not to the dogmatic texts.
[](#the-treasury-and-the-trade "Jump to this heading")The treasury and the trade
Once the living could help the dead, the next question was how. The medieval answer included Masses, prayers, alms and indulgences.
In Catholic teaching an indulgence is a remission of the temporal punishment due to sins whose guilt has already been forgiven. It does not forgive sin, and it is not a licence to sin. The Church explains it by the treasury of merit: the inexhaustible merits of Christ and the saints, which the Church can apply to the faithful. Indulgences could be granted for prayers, pilgrimages, visits to churches or good works, and they could be applied to the souls in Purgatory.
The problem was money. By the late Middle Ages indulgences were often tied to alms, the alms were often a fundraising method, and the requirements of contrition and charity were often forgotten. The Church recognised the abuse and failed to contain it. When Martin Luther attacked the preaching of indulgences in 1517, he was attacking the economic heart of the relationship between the living and the dead that Cluny had begun to build five centuries earlier.
The response came in stages. Trent confirmed the doctrine of indulgences while condemning the abuses, and in 1567 Pope Pius V forbade attaching indulgences to any financial act, even alms. In the twentieth century the old counting in days and years, which many had wrongly understood as time spent in Purgatory, was largely abolished. Today the Church still offers a plenary indulgence, applicable only to the souls in Purgatory, to those who visit a cemetery and pray for the dead between the first and the eighth of November, under the usual conditions. The link between the second of November and the cemetery is, in this sense, still a Catholic institution.
[](#candles-bells-and-the-sound-of-the-dead "Jump to this heading")Candles, bells and the sound of the dead
The gestures we associate with the day are older than Odilo and broader than Catholicism. Christians placed lamps at the tombs of martyrs from the early centuries, and the candle came to signify the light of Christ. On All Souls’ Day the candle took on more meanings, sometimes overlapping: a light for the poor souls, an honour to the dead, and, in some places, a protection against evil.
The bell does the same work with sound. Church bells were tolled for the dead, and on the night of the commemoration they called the living to remember. In the sixteenth-century dole left by John Collet at Solihull, in England, still distributed on All Souls’ Day in 1826, the call to the collection was made by ringing the church bells. The liturgy kept its own sound: the sequence Dies irae, the great medieval poem of judgment, may still be used in the Office of the day, and every priest may celebrate three Masses, a privilege that began among the Dominicans in the fifteenth century and was extended to all priests by Benedict XV during the First World War, when the dead were too many and the churches too few.
Oil painting of two women in black mourning dress kneeling together in an autumn cemetery: the older woman, her head covered by a dark veil, embraces the younger one, who weeps on her shoulder while hanging a wreath of pale flowers on a simple stone cross; bare trees and fallen leaves surround them, and the signature “W. Bouguereau 1859” is visible at the lower right.
William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Le Jour des Morts (The Day of the Dead), 1859, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Bouguereau painted this scene in 1859, and it says something important. By the nineteenth century the jour des morts in France had become a family and civic ritual as much as a liturgical one. People of all ranks and creeds decorated the graves of their dead.
[](#soul-cakes-only-in-passing "Jump to this heading")Soul cakes, only in passing
The folk side of the season includes the old British and Irish custom of souling, when children and the poor went from door to door asking for soul cakes and offering prayers for the dead in return, and its Portuguese relative, the Pão-por-Deus. I told that story, and how it was later tangled up with Halloween, in All Hallows, or the Invention of an Ancient Night. Here it is enough to notice the logic, which is the same as Odilo’s: alms to the living in exchange for prayers for the dead.
All Hallows, or the Invention of an Ancient Night
[](#finados-in-brazil "Jump to this heading")Finados in Brazil
In Brazil the day has a short official name, Finados, and a long Portuguese one, Dia dos Fiéis Defuntos. It arrived with the colonisers and the missionaries, together with the whole Iberian apparatus of confraternities, Masses for the dead and burials in churches.
Its legal status is more recent than many people imagine. Law no. 662 of 1949 listed the national holidays without it. The second of November entered the federal list only with Law no. 10,607, signed on 19 December 2002, which rewrote the article of the old law to include it among the national holidays. The Federal District had already made it a holiday in 1997.
The custom, of course, is older than the law. On the second of November cemeteries fill with families, flower sellers wait at the gates, and candles burn on graves and at the foot of cemetery crosses. Masses are celebrated in cemeteries and parishes.
Popular Catholicism in Brazil has its own ways of caring for the souls. One of the best studied is the encomendação das almas, a nocturnal procession held during Lent and Holy Week in many towns, especially in Minas Gerais and the interior: groups go out at night singing mournful prayers for the souls in Purgatory, while people in the houses keep their doors closed and pray. Researchers describe it as a Catholic ritual reworked by Brazilians of African, European and Indigenous descent, and some local traditions warn participants not to look back, lest they see the souls following the procession. It does not happen on Finados, but it is the same belief: the dead need the prayers of the living.
Here the second layer, modern esotericism, also enters. In Brazil, Spiritism is a living religious presence, and it has its own reading of the day. In The Spirits’ Book, published in Paris in 1857, Allan Kardec devoted a section to the commemoration of the dead and funerals. There, the spirits say that on the day of the dead they gather in greater numbers at cemeteries because more people call them in thought, but that a heartfelt prayer is what sanctifies remembrance, and it can be made at home. This is not Catholic doctrine, and it is not medieval folklore. It is a nineteenth-century doctrine that took the Catholic calendar and gave it a new metaphysics. To understand Finados in Brazil, it helps to see both, side by side, without merging them.
[](#dia-de-muertos-and-the-question-of-origins "Jump to this heading")Día de Muertos and the question of origins
Black-and-white relief etching of a grinning female skeleton seen from the chest up, wearing an enormous wide-brimmed lady’s hat piled with ostrich feathers and large flowers, with the artist’s signature “Posada” at the lower right.
José Guadalupe Posada, La Calavera Catrina, zinc etching, c. 1910–1913. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
No version of the day is more famous today than the Mexican Día de Muertos, celebrated on the first and second of November, sometimes with neighbouring days: ofrendas with the favourite foods of the dead, marigolds called cempasúchil, sugar skulls, pan de muerto, visits to graves, and the satirical verses called calaveras literarias.
Its origin is a genuine historical debate, and a heated one. One view, long taught in Mexican schools, sees it as the survival of Mexica and other Mesoamerican rites for the dead, fused with the Catholic feasts during the colonial period. The other view, defended by the historian Elsa Malvido of Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History, traces the festival to medieval Europe, pointing to similar altars, skull-shaped sweets and bone-shaped breads elsewhere in Catholic Southern Europe and Latin America. Some scholars argue that the strong “Aztec” framing was largely shaped by post-revolutionary nationalism, in the era of Lázaro Cárdenas, when indigenismo became part of official culture. Many historians today speak of syncretism and of a tradition that changed over time.
What is not in debate is the recognition. In 2003 UNESCO proclaimed the “Indigenous festivity dedicated to the dead” in Mexico a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity, and in 2008 it was inscribed on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, “as practised by the indigenous communities of Mexico”. The wording matters: UNESCO recognised the practice of communities, not a theory of origins.
[](#posada-and-the-catrina "Jump to this heading")Posada and the Catrina
The most famous face of the Mexican day was born as a joke against the rich. José Guadalupe Posada (1852–1913), printmaker and illustrator for popular broadsides, made a zinc etching of a female skeleton wearing an extravagant European hat. The image is usually dated around 1910–1912, and its first certain publication is a broadside of 1913, printed by the Vanegas Arroyo family for the Day of the Dead.
Posada’s target was the upper-class women of the Porfiriato who imitated European fashions: underneath the hat, death. The name Calavera Catrina was attached to the image only in 1930, when it first appeared in a book, after the French-born artist Jean Charlot had helped rediscover Posada. Diego Rivera then placed her, full length, at the centre of his mural Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in the Alameda Park (1946–1947), and turned a satire into a national symbol. The Catrina we see today, painted on faces and sold in every market, is a twentieth-century creation built on a print that mocked vanity. In that, she belongs to a much older European family.
[](#memento-mori "Jump to this heading")Memento mori
Memento mori, “remember that you will die”, is not a feast but an attitude, and it runs underneath the whole season. It is the voice of the epigraph, the inscription at the door of the Chapel of Bones in Évora, built in the seventeenth century by Franciscan friars who lined its walls with the bones of thousands of people taken from the city’s monastic cemeteries. The chapel is not a horror show. It is a sermon in bone, from the age of the Counter-Reformation, addressed to everyone who enters.
Oil painting on wood of a human skull resting in a stone niche beneath a large transparent soap bubble in which faint reflections float; to the left a red-and-yellow tulip stands in a vase, to the right a smoking urn, coins are scattered on the ledge, and two putti sit on the arch above.
Jacques de Gheyn II, Vanitas Still Life, 1603, oil on wood. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Open Access (CC0).
The painted version of the same sermon is the vanitas, a genre of still life that flourished in the Netherlands in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with Leiden as one of its centres. The name comes from Ecclesiastes 1:2, vanitas vanitatum, “vanity of vanities”. In Jacques de Gheyn’s panel of 1603 every object speaks: the skull, the bubble that will burst, the cut tulip, the smoking urn, the coins that cannot be taken along. The vanitas is Protestant and Catholic, scholarly and domestic, and it has nothing to do with Purgatory. It does not ask the viewer to pray for the dead. It asks the viewer to remember that they will join them.
[](#the-dance-of-the-dead "Jump to this heading")The dance of the dead
Woodcut of a bent old man with a long beard and a walking stick being led by a grinning skeleton who plays a stringed instrument as he guides him towards an open grave in a churchyard; an hourglass stands on a wall behind them.
Hans Holbein the Younger, The Old Man, from The Dance of Death, designed c. 1526, published in Lyon in 1538. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Open Access (CC0).
The late Middle Ages gave memento mori its most theatrical form, the Danse Macabre: the dead, or Death itself, inviting representatives of every rank to dance to the grave, from pope and emperor down to labourer and child. Its message is equality before death and the vanity of earthly glory.
The earliest recorded visual example was a mural painted in 1424–1425 at the Cemetery of the Holy Innocents in Paris. It is lost. In the abbey church of La Chaise-Dieu, in the Auvergne, Odilo’s own region, a fifteenth-century Danse Macabre survives on the walls of the north aisle: emaciated dead figures, not tidy skeletons, pulling the living along in three panels, the powerful, the bourgeois and the common people. The abbey dates the panels to around 1450; other studies propose a somewhat later date, and the work is unfinished or worn in places. In Lübeck, Bernt Notke painted a celebrated Totentanz for St Mary’s Church in 1463; it was destroyed during the Allied bombing of the city in the Second World War.
Hans Holbein the Younger turned the theme into a book. He designed his Dance of Death in Basel around 1526, and the blocks were cut by the master cutter Hans Lützelburger. The series was published in Lyon in 1538, with biblical quotations above each scene and French verses by Gilles Corrozet below, under the title Les simulachres & historiees faces de la mort, without naming Holbein. His Death no longer leads a chain of dancers; he comes upon each person in the middle of their own surroundings and activities, as he does with the old man led to the edge of his grave.
[](#three-layers-no-soup "Jump to this heading")Three layers, no soup
It is worth stopping to separate what we have seen.
The Catholic layer is precise: a day fixed by Odilo, probably around 1030, and a theology of purification, defined at Lyon and Trent, that gave prayers, Masses, alms and indulgences their meaning.
The folk layer is plural: soul cakes, Pão-por-Deus, ofrendas, candles on graves, nocturnal processions in Minas Gerais. They share the Catholic calendar but have their own lives and explanations.
The modern esoteric layer is the most recent. Kardec gave the day a new metaphysics in 1857, and popular occult books have projected Celtic or Aztec antiquity onto everything. Some of these readings are serious doctrines; others are inventions. None is the “original meaning” hidden beneath the feast.
Mixing them produces the familiar story of an eternal night of the dead, Celtic, Aztec and Christian at once. The history is less mystical and more interesting.
[](#the-brothers-who-are-no-longer-in-the-room "Jump to this heading")The brothers who are no longer in the room
There is one more tradition of remembrance I want to mention, discreetly, because it is public. Freemasonry also remembers its dead. Masonic writing speaks of brethren who have died as having “passed to the Grand Lodge Above”, and many lodges hold memorial meetings, often called Lodges of Sorrow, for members who have died during the year. Provincial Grand Lodges report them openly on their websites. I will say nothing about how they are conducted. What matters here is their meaning: an order that values fraternity does not stop counting a brother when he leaves the room.
Odilo would have understood this. His decree joined the living to the dead by an obligation of memory and charity, and a lodge’s memorial does something similar in its own secular and fraternal language. In both, the dead remain part of the community, and the living are asked to keep them there.
[](#a-candle-for-tomorrow "Jump to this heading")A candle for tomorrow
Tomorrow the cemeteries will fill again. Some people will pray for souls in Purgatory, as the Church teaches. Some will talk with their dead, as Spiritists believe. Some will build an altar with marigolds and photographs. Many will simply clean a grave, leave flowers and go home quietly. Each of them inherits, knowingly or not, a decision taken in a Burgundian abbey a thousand years ago, a word coined in twelfth-century Paris, and a long Christian argument about what the living can do for the dead.
The skeletons of La Chaise-Dieu, Holbein and Posada give one answer: remember that you will die. The bones of Évora give another: they are waiting for yours. Odilo gave a third, the gentlest: pray for them, and give to the poor in their name.
All Souls’ Day is a medieval invention of solidarity between the living and the dead, and the candle lit tomorrow still asks the question it was invented to answer. What do we owe to those who came before us? At the very least, a name spoken aloud, a moment of silence, and a little charity to the living in their memory.
--
Chamber of Reflections
Home