2023-08-01 11:00:09
The cult of souls It is in many cases a tradition deeply rooted in popular culture.
San Juan researcher Cristina Krause says that in our province the devotion to the souls is carried out in two well differentiated spaces: the house, constituting a kind of domestic worship, and the “chapels” that are erected in the place where the person who later died scallop. This conceptualization is part of what is called popular religiosity, a topic already referred to in previous writings. We can say that this religiosity is more experiential than doctrinal and is lived by the people as a whole. Violent death and other circumstances of the social environment generate these cults. The so-called “chapels” arise according to the situations and are generally built by relatives of the deceased or pious people.
An incipient cult is the one that is rendered to the soul of Ruperto Leonardo Suárez, who died in a traffic accident that occurred in December 2014. The extinct man was heading to Mogna on his motorcycle, it suffered a mechanical failure and its driver continued his journey walking on the shoulder and carrying his motorcycle on his back – it was night – when a truck ran over him. The place of the “chapel” is located on Route 40, towards Jáchal, before reaching the Talacasto Station. The “chapel” or grotto is located on the side of the route, well inside the artery. There the brother of the deceased, Domingo Suárez, with great sacrifice, built a ramada and the so-called grotto, inside which he placed a cross. Next to these constructions he raised three grills and placed an “iron”, which acts as a sailboat. The candles are inevitable in the cult of the souls, since the named Cristina Krause interprets that “the candle is, for the microcosm of San Juan, the mythical symbol of life…”. “The dead by means of the candle assumes the status of a living person”. Don Domingo told us that “there are many people who stop, light candles and say a prayer.” This popular cult also generates a social facet, since passers-by tend to make barbecues in the barbecue areas. The most frequent request, Don Domingo tells us, “is that they ask him to go and come back safely…”.
For him Prof. Edmundo Jorge Delgado
Master in History
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