Sugar Skull

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Day of the Dead / Día de los Muertos Sugar Skull

for the Illustrators Guild of Ireland exhibition, Superstition

Each year, around time of El Día de los Muertos, the sky over the Mexican mountain village of Anguangeo becomes a flurry of orange as millions of monarch butterflies flutter in an endless stream into a few remote groves of firs in the hills above the town.

Locals have long believed the monarchs are the returning spirits of their deceased relatives, mysteriously arriving at the same time each year, coinciding with the Day of the Dead. Aztec tradition holds that the souls of the departed will return as butterflies. The link between myth and the monarchs’ annual return spans centuries.