Los Dias de Muertos/The Days of the Dead

Crescit Eundo:The Health Reformation Has Begun

Aspartame Hero

November 01, 2005

Every culture must learn to deal with death as a part of life. In Taos, we are dealt more than our fair share of death. Each year in Mexico, at the end of October and the beginning of November, the living invite the dead to join them in a festival of communion. For a few hours, the dead are invited into the home to warm their cold bones. It is said that we suffer three deaths. The first occurs as the soul leaves the body, the second when the body is disposed of, and the third when we are forgotten. By keeping the memory of the departed alive, the third death does not have to occur.

In the book, “The Days of the Dead, Los Dias de Muertos,” written by Rosalind Rosoff Beimler and photographed by John Greenleigh, the chain of influences on the mourning rituals of Mexico are described:
“Today as in pre-Columbian times, life in Mexico is tinged with tragedy. Death has been both friend and enemy, catharsis and release. Through centuries of poverty, oppression, and violence, it has been ever present-sometimes tender, often tragic. The sense of being vulnerable and defenseless before a life full of dangers, demonic spirits and irrationality has made generations feel that to live is to suffer. It is submission to the brutality of the powerful and the arbitrary.”

Here in New Mexico, Los Dias de Muerto is often celebrated for only one day, November first or second, but in Mexico the celebration lasts several days, with preparations beginning days in advance. Cemeteries are cleaned and painted. Country people walk to town bearing great bundles of marigolds and purple cockscomb to decorate graves and altars. Markets bustle with buying and selling. Bakeries are full of breads in the shapes of skulls, crossbones, and skeletons. Sugar skulls are lined up in the candy store windows, and chocolate ground with sugar and cinnamon finds its way to sauces. Hot corn paste drinks are popular among the living and the dead.

Though Halloween evolved separately from the Days of the Dead, it is a close cousin, as the trick-or-treaters make their rounds in cities and towns. The “Days” are celebrated with a mixture of reverence, revelry, and defiance of death, with displays of mockery and humor, since everyone participates in this business of death.

On Oct. 27, the Days of the Dead begin, as departed spirits of those with no survivors and no homes to visit are received in the villages with bread and jugs of water set up outside the homes or near the corner of a church. Though the offerings may be meager, the orphaned souls will find something.

On Oct. 28, those who have died by accident, suicide, murder, or other violent means are received with offerings outside the home. These are considered malignant spirits with as yet unpardoned deaths. The decorated crosses along the highways of Mexico, and now New Mexico, mark the spots where souls have departed.

On the night of Oct. 31, the souls of dead children are shown the way home from the cemetery by the sprinkling of marigold petals, creating a path from the grave to the door. Altars are decorated with pictures, favorite foods, and toys. Living children are invited to partake of the food and to play with the toys.

By midday of Nov. 1, they too must be gone to make way for the Faithful Dead, the departed adults. Bells ring welcoming them home. It is through the adult who has passed away most recently that the family acknowledges other ancestors. Smells of copal and candles fill the homes.

As the sun goes down, the family moves to the candle-filled graveyard for an all-night vigil. Communing with the dead involves sipping hot drinks, telling stories filled with memories, and lighting candles on the gravestone, one for each dead soul. Some kneel or sit all night to pray, and food may be placed on the grave. Musicians stroll about playing the favorite tunes of the ghosts.

The following day is spent in the company of the dead, but by the evening of Nov. 2 they are sent on their way. They must not intrude in the land of the living for too long. Masked mummers scare away any stubborn or lingering souls. The living and the dead are left at peace with each other for another year.

When I first moved to Taos 20 years ago, I found the death carts and skeletons rather macabre. Friends, who were also Aztec dancers, educated me about this festival. They introduced me to the idea of creating altars each fall, and I found myself thinking about death more and more.

Nothing brings death closer than to lose someone really close. As MY someone, my sister, was dying, I often imagined a skeleton riding as a passenger in my car as I drove through streets of swirling and falling leaves in October. Sometimes he crawled, rattling his bones behind me, clutching the hem of my skirt with his bony fingers. For years, we painfully prepared ourselves for my sister's eventual death. I created altars of relatives already passed. She asked me to plan her funeral and, though it happened in Nashville, many miles from Mexico, I prepared an altar, minus the sugar skulls and skeletons, but including all her precious things, as well as food and drink. All were impressed more by the symbols of her life than by her body, which lay in state. I am grateful for this gift of the Mexican culture, in which living and dying are present in the everyday. It is really so for those of us who look to see.

Aspartame Hero

By Donna Voetee

Martin Luther lived 500 years ago in Germany. Stephen Fox lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Different men, different times, but not really so different in spirit.

October 31 mark ed488 years since the young monk nailed a list of grievances called the 95 Theses to the front door of a church in Germany. Luther, known as the Father of the Reformation, changed the world that afternoon in 1517, not with the sword, but with the pen. Whether Catholic or Protestant or innocent bystander, you must agree that the world was not the same on November 1st.

Stephen Fox is bringing the world's attention to 92 Documented Symptoms of Aspartame Poisoning. The Health Reformation has begun, appropriately, in New Mexico. The state's motto, Crescit Eundo, refers to a lightening bolt bringing light to the darkness. And when it comes to aspartame, how great is that darkness.

False Religion, Murderous Medicine Then and Now

Funny how Religion, Politics, and Medicine seem to be eternally inextricable in the cosmic battle between good and evil. The story of the struggle between truth and deceit, tyranny and liberty, health and disease, is told with these three Dramatis Personae. Politics is the Prince and False Religion and Murderous Medicine are the courtiers who vie for position of courtesan from generation to generation.

In Luther's time, False Religion was the favored mistress and the bastard offspring were indulgences, penances, and unquestioning loyalty to Mother Church that enslaved the souls of the multitudes who earnestly, albeit ignorantly, tried to work their way to heaven.

The printing press and resultant literacy of the common man exposed the raw truth beneath False Religion's pious visage. Spiritual liberty was hard won (and now too oft taken for granted), but the masses are still in trouble.

In this century, Murderous Medicine is sharing the Prince's bed and today the drug culture of Big Pharma is in its orgasmic glory at the fawning phallus of sycophant politicians who look on in pleasured silence while the greedy mistress fills their coffers with gold. She pours out her poison into the food, water, and medicaments of millions of trusting consumers who are killed or maimed yearly due to the same unquestioning loyalty their forebears had for her sister whore, False Religion.

And just like her counterpart half a millennium ago, Murderous Medicine is in trouble because of the power of the pen. This time, however, it is not parchment and the Wittenberg Door at Castle Church. This time the tools of liberty are pc's, email, gigabytes and Google spreading lightening bolts of truth-unstoppable, “growing as it goes” truth-that are coming to rescue of the innocent and ignorant.

The Unstoppable Truth About Aspartame

Luther's spirit of determination to spare people from lies and damn lies lives on in men like Fox, a New Mexico art dealer, who is challenging the most noxious drug, treacherously called a food additive, ever to be put into the world's food supply-Aspartame. Sold as NutraSweet, Equal, Spoonful, or Canderel, and ingested by unwary consumers in millions of gallons of diet soda, beverages, and foods daily, aspartame has caused thousands of documented diseases, prompting some to equate it to venom-ASPartame. Others call it Rumsfeld's Disease, referring to the former CEO of aspartame's manufacturer (G.D. Searle) and perpetual political operative, Donald Rumsfeld, the Courtesan Extraordinaire who was instrumental in getting aspartame on the market and accomplished by political intrigue what could not be done honestly and scientifically.

Not that Fox is the first or the loudest or the smartest to complain. Scientists and medical doctors have been adamant about aspartame's deadly effects for years:

Dr. John Olney told us how aspartame caused twenty-five times more astrocytoma brain tumors in lab rats;

Dr. Olney and Attorney Jim Turner provided enough evidence of Searle's shoddy science that the FDA called a Board of Inquiry;

The FDA investigation team, led by Dr. Jerome Bressler, was shocked at the inaccuracies and manipulated test data they discovered, saying they had “never seen anything as bad as Searle's testing”;

Dr. Louis Elsas begs pregnant women to avoid aspartame if they don't want babies with birth defects;

Dr. Russell Blaylock warns about aspartame being an excitotoxin that causes apoptosis and decreased higher order thinking;

Dr. H.J. Roberts tells his diabetic patients to avoid aspartame if they want to control their sugars, as well as medically documenting aspartame as an “ignored epidemic.”

Dr. James Bowen tells us that aspartame violates five elements of the Federal Law Against Genocide, Criminal Code, Title 18 Chapter 50A, Sec 1091-3

Thousands of ordinary, everyday people have added their voice to the chorus against aspartame. One does not need a medical degree or have to do double blind studies to apply common sense to the evidence and draw valid conclusions. Here are a few:

Mary Nash Stoddard began a Pilots Hotline to help pilots who had had seizure in the cockpit from diet soda;

David Oliver Reitz founded one of the best websites, www.dorway.com, after his health problems due to aspartame;

E. Bryant Holman began an Aspartame Victims Support Group;

Betty Martini founded Mission Possible and cofounded the World Natural Health Organization;

Jennifer Cohen, an 11-year-old girl, proved in a school project that aspartame breaks down into toxic methanol, formaldehyde, formic acid, and DKP with assays paid for with her own money.

Should we be surprised when Murderous Medicine drowns out these clarion calls from honest folk who have nothing to gain but the health and well-being of their fellow man? Not if names like Lind, Semmelweis, and Galileo ring bells. Lind knew about limes preventing scurvy four decades before the British navy listened; Semmelweis ordered doctors to wash their hands at his Austrian hospital and died banished from medicine; Galileo proved Ptolemy wrong and spent his life under house arrest. Today, Vitamin C, germs, and heliocentrism are understood even by kindergartners, and we marvel at the cognitive dissonance that kept people so stupid.



The EIB Agrees To Hold Hearings

Mr. Fox has persuaded New Mexico's Environmental Improvement Board to hold meetings next July to look at aspartame's swath of death and destruction and to consider its sordid political history, and hopefully make New Mexico the first state to ban it, thus doing the job the Federal Drug Administration should have rightfully done decades ago.

In the meantime, the consortium of drug dealers and murderers who have fortunes to lose and much to cover up should discussions about aspartame take place for the world to see, are launching a campaign of self-preservation. Words like “jurisdiction” and “constitutional issue” are being thrown about by the rats who see the water rising. They will undoubtedly squeal even more nonsensical gibberish as their Ship of Fools sinks, and even try to convince us that aspartame is safe, simply because the Prince and Murderous Medicine saith so. If we have learned anything about trusting the FDA and Big Pharma based on studies and “proof” of safety after recent headlines, e.g., Vioxx, it is don't.

Provided all goes well in New Mexico at the EIB and truth and justice do not become commodities, one day soon, Paul Block, the CEO of Merisant, the company that currently makes aspartame, will be categorized with the likes of Dr. Ian McDonald and Dr. Henry Garland. These two shills of the American Medical Association vociferously assured smokers that there was insufficient evidence “to warrant the assumption” that cigarettes had anything to do with the increase in lung cancer. (Dec. 1959, AMA Journal) Dr. McDonald even said publicly, “A pack a day keeps lung cancer away.”

Which Way, New Mexico?

Luther's legacy is that each of us can sit under the tutelage of a priest, rabbi, pastor, or imam, and worship any way we choose without being imprisoned or burned at the stake.

Will our health continue getting burned by politically protected liars and thugs who hide behind the mask of science and civility, waving their spurious studies bought with the blood and tears of millions of aspartame victims? Or will New Mexico live up to “Crescit Eundo” and be the lightening bolt of justice that “Grows As It Goes,” gaining power and momentum for all the country, and indeed, world, to see? We'll know after July of next year.

Finally, a warning. Reformations are perilous. History teaches us that somebody gets toasted. You smoke 'em, Mr. Fox.