Day of the Dead and the History of Inter-Dimensional Interactions:

A man pushes a bike with a large skeleton wearing a gauzy dress riding it; a deathly man navigates stilts along the crowded dark streets and narrow grass around the edges of San Francisco's Garfield Park; a woman wears a giant canvas on her back for people to write messages to the dead. Going to the procession in San Franciso's Mission District year after year on Dia de los Muertos helps me make better friends with death, merge into it without a seam, with a sense of the potential for enjoying the afterlife, especially if we have processions like this one on that frequency plane.

And why not? As much as we thoroughly enjoy such things here, maybe we will put on whatever dreamlike costumes there, and it may be all it will take is the imagination to do it.

Not only San Francisco but cities anywhere there is Mexican heritage may be celebrating the same way, joining the living and the dead at this nodal point of vertical energies moving between the planes, continuing the eerie joy of Halloween into something more sober and loving, hauntingly, transcendently beautiful, and emotionally moving. And the tradition is also shared under other names by cultures all over the world, sometimes instead, in August, the original time for the Aztecs to celebrate the interactions across the veil.

The procession, like many other uses of the candles, skulls, flowers, costumes, relics, statues, and drums, is based on an Aztec celebration that lasted for the entire month of August, but which was moved to the first days of November to correlate with the Spanish Christian tradition which took advantage of the three days of the traditional Celtic Samhain idea that the veils between the worlds are most thin at the exchange between October and November, at night.

Samhain became known as Halloween, and has been used not only for fun costume parties, a pagan New Years for manifesting visions of the future, but also for Satantists to have ritual blood sacrifice, their main holiday of the year to feed the energy of pain to their demonic Reptilians who must be appeased. Their rituals are probably more core to the tradition of the sacrifices the priests called for in Aztec days, torturing people daily anyway to appease the vampiric creatures the priests claimed would withhold the sunrise without it.

The Satanists, who are far more common and well-placed in society's higher stratosphere than most people realize, hiding their practices in secret societies, behind-the-scenes political and religious meetings, and the trappings of wealth and success, feel the sacrifices aid in accruing power.

The end of October, beginning of November are the days the entities were felt to be most into feasting, during their time of easy access, and they had to be appeased. This included ghosts, and thus people carry gifts for them on the Day of the Dead not only to honor loved ones, but for protection.

The Aztec and Spanish traditions based on ancient Celtic ones merged into the Day of the Dead Processions. In San Francisco, there are a relatively low number of Hispanic participants, and it looks something like a Goth club might if the dancers smiled and looked at each other. The drums and horns play repetitive, trance-like celebratory music that gets people dancing in the streets for the procession that goes on for an hour or so, but eventually seems timeless, as it throws us into the realm beyond time and space, into the non-local imagination of mortality dancing so closely with immortality. The paint wears off of each, to reveal the invisibility of both, the illusions of the flesh and the beauty of the bones.

Transcendently beautiful people who throw themselves fervently into putting together exquisite costumes help make the event a huge draw, with flirtations, stunning visuals, a party in the streets more creative and level-headed, and unique than Halloween.

It's moving, a heartfelt invitation for the dead in our lives to come see how much we love them, and remember and communicate with their spirits. Some celebrants have no belief in the continuation of the spirit after death, but they adore the parade, and process their feelings about the inevitability of death just as strongly. It can evoke tears to see the altars, reverence to see children silently gazing at candles while holding pictures of their dead parents, and irreverence to see a three inch red shiny cowboy hat stuck on an angle of a marcher.

Something about seeing friends dressed as they will look when dead, their faces skeletons, makes us appreciate our fleeting chance to spend time with our loved ones around us. We don't take them for granted, when we see their future painted on their faces.

Every four years, Day of the Dead and the election intermingle, and in Obama year, the sketchiness of the gang violence in the Mission engendered a growing police presence. The end of the event was a large congregation of police, with an arrest, and a planned arrest of a man who took pictures of the original arrest. The crowd was shouting Let Him Go! And for whatever reason, the man was released to cries of thanks.

This procession is sponsored by official groups in the city, however, which is much different from the struggle the Dia de los Muertos had to go through when the Spaniards tried to shut it down altogether, before the compromise of changing the date to make it correspond to All Souls' Day. Their original attack upon Aztec celebrants were ghoulish, as they chopped off body parts and heads left and right.

The Aztecs themselves were conquerors, and were known to sacrifice as many as 20,000 people at a time to the gods, planning to conquer the entire world in order to feed the sun to keep it from dying out. The vampiric serpentine gods who told them such tales are reportedly the Reptilians described all over the world throughout history.

They are echoed in current reports of people seeing shape-shifting beings who perpetuate the state of war in order to eat human suffering, and who have been seen physically eating humans, and drinking their blood. They are often seen to be humans in power, who have the royal blood said to be the hybrids of the ancients.

The Aztecs themselves ate their prisoners of war live, favoring the hearts. The return of the serpent "gods" who perpetuated the violent sacrifices of conquest and war were in a strange way an understandable continuation with the unfortunate, cruel attack of the Spaniard Christian warriors thought to be the feathered serpent and his minions.

The irony is that Cortez was thought to the returning serpent god who was opposed to sacrifice. However, the opposition of one god against another was the Good Cop Bad Cop routine that fostered more fighting and thus more sacrifice.

The Aztec religion was based on the sun, as was Christianity, Jesus being one of over 16 Messiahs crucified in the same story with one detail after another matching, and all related to the procession of the sun throughout the seasons.

The Aztecs sacrificed to a monsteress who was torn in two by warring gods, half of her becoming the sky, the other half the earth, and she needed a constant supply of human hearts, and living, happy ones existing within humankind just wouldn't do. They had to be adrenalin rich ones torn from bodies in terror. The life force in the blood rich with fright is said to be needed to keep Reptilian-hybrid humans looking normal, rather than shape-shifting into their other dimensional appearance. Because of the thinning of the veils, the shape-shifting can happen more easily at Halloween and Day of the Dead, adding to the tradition of the ghoulish costumes, the tradition of seeing monsters appear out of the dark.

In Aztec history, cannibalism was reported to be performed as a ritual, by nobles and successful warriors, not by the masses as nutrition. The knew the blood contained life force energy and were feeding on it, as well as feeding the entities on the other dimensions who drank in the energy of terror.

By A.D. 43, Romans had taken over Celtic territory and ruled it for 400 years; two festivals of Roman origin were combined with the traditional Celtic celebration of Samhain and the Day of the Dead.

The Celts believed interdimensional beings were were able to mingle with the living during Samhain, on Oct. 31st, and the days close to it, and the souls of those who had died during the year traveled into the otherworld. People sacrificed animals, fruits, and vegetables. They made bonfires to honor the dead, to help them on their journey, and to keep them away from the living. On Samhain, ghosts, fairies, and demons were thought to interact with humans more easily, the veil between the realms being so thin, and the fairies and demons were most often depictions of grey aliens, which are a type of Reptilian.

Catholic feasts honoring saints were substituted, reminiscent of a Christian feast day from the 9th century. November 2nd was made All Souls Day-- the living prayed for the souls of all the dead on that day, rather than just the saints.

All Saints Day, or, All Hallows (holies), continued the Celtic traditions. The evening before was considered the time of the most intense activity in and mimicking the supernatural frequencies. All Hallows Eve was a time of the wandering dead, but fear had come into the picture, and the ghosts were seen as evil, and placated by setting out gifts of food and drink. All Hallows Eve became Hallow Evening, became Halloween.

Halloween traditions come from the Celtic Day of the Dead. People started dressing like evil creatures, performing antics in exchange for treats.

Otherworldly spirits were felt to cause trouble, especially with the crops, but they made it easier for the Celtic priests to make predictions, so they built huge sacred bonfires, where the people burned crops and animals as sacrifices to the Celtic deities. Celts wore costumes told each other's futures.

The Day of the Dead is a beautiful honoring event, now, and though Satanists and Reptilians are still exchanging their treats with each other during that period, behind the scenes, the majority of people have progressed beyond the sacrifice mentality. The tradition has been healed in many ways by the warmth of the heart beating out the willingness to rip out the heart.

Maybe the sacrifices have just become more covert-using war, for example, as a method of inducing fear and adrenalin filled bodies to offer life force energy to the otherworldly creatures who feed on it.

And many people have indeed found that emotions at that time of the year often become violent and destructive, devastated, shocked. Maybe something triggers that just at the time for it to feast.

But marching and dancing and singing, costumed up, with people from all over the world, on the Day of the Dead leaves me with a sense of strength and invulnerability, love, admiration, and belonging. Leaping into celebratory songs about death and mortality and the continuation of love beyond death is one of the most wonderful things life has to offer.