BOLIVIA CELEBRATED DAY OF THE SKULLS

THE DAY OF THE SKULLS IS A COLOURFUL COLLISION OF
PRE-INCA RITUALS FOR DEATH WITH CATHOLIC BELIEF

LA PAZ (CNN - AFP) - Bolivia's Catholic church has called on the faithful to stop using human skulls at special Mass celebrations, a practice they link to occult powers. The Bolivian Episcopal Conference asked the overwhelmingly Catholic nation to cast aside the growing trend of seeking protection from bad luck by making offerings of coca, cigars or drinks to human crania. As much of the world celebrated Halloween and Mexico held its Day of the Dead at the weekend, Bolivian bishops had another festival on their minds, the Day of Skulls. This Día de los Ñatitas reaches its high point each year in early November - just a week after the Catholic All Saints Day, and this year it has fallen on November 8.

Known locally as Ñatitas, the festival, which is believed to be pre-Colombian; the "ñatitas" - or "flat noses" in the local Aymara indigenous language - are human skulls that are revered by thousands of Catholic indigenous Bolivians who believe they protect them from evil, help them attain goals and even work miracles. All of the "ñatitas" have names - but they do not necessarily correspond to those of the people they originally belonged to, because these skulls - which are not necessarily from relatives or loved-ones - are sometimes exhumed and sometimes passed from hand to hand. They spend most of their time indoors but are paraded in the city's main public cemetery every year at this time. The rite is now a blend of Catholic and indigenous beliefs, but has its roots in ancient rituals for the death practised by the country's Indian groups such as the pre-Inca Aymara and Quechua, but the Roman Catholic Church does not feel comfortable with such a collision of beliefs. La Paz's Archbishop Edmundo Abastoflor warned that many of the skulls in fact belonged to unknown people, obtained by grave robbing and later conserved, donated or even sold. Archbishop Abastaflor urged practitioners of the Andean ritual to let the dead rest in peace.

WHAT DO THE VEDIC TEACHINGS TELL US?

yajante sāttvikā devān / yaksha-rakshāmsi rājasāh
pretān bhūta-ganāmś cānye / yajante tāmasā janāh

Men in the mode of goodness worship the demigods; those in the mode of passion worship the demons; and those in the mode of ignorance worship ghosts and spirits.

"Bhagavad-gītā As It Is : 17.4"

... and those who are in the mode of ignorance, in darkness, worship dead spirits. Sometimes people worship at the tomb of some dead man. Sexual service is also considered to be in the mode of darkness. Similarly, in remote villages in India there are worshipers of ghosts. We have seen that in India the lower-class people sometimes go to the forest, and if they have knowledge that a ghost lives in a tree, they worship that tree and offer sacrifices. These different kinds of worship are not actually God worship. God worship is for persons who are transcendentally situated in pure goodness.

"Bhagavad-gītā As It Is - Purport in Chapter 17 - Verse 4"