Thursday, April 13, 2017

Cucafera

I forget how I found this one.  I must get my technology sorted - I need to track back and see how I found stuff.  Well, I found a new kind of dragon.  I'll ask my friend if he's ever heard of this one.  If it's new to my dragon expert, I'm going to feel so smug!

Cucafera - a fantastic beast from the parade on the Holy Days in Tarragona, Spain.  Cucafera is a much loved fat dragon who coughs up candies for children in the parade.  In this next link, in French, I learned that Catalan speaking children play a game just like "Simon says...". Except in their game, it's the dragon, Cucafera says...

https://seuils.hypotheses.org/tag/cucafera   a blog in French about translation and paratranslation
This page mentions two other cities where the cucafera visits:  Tortosa and Morella, Catalan, Spain.

It may not make sense now, but all my recent blog posts are going in one direction.  I'm researching fertility beliefs in European art and history.  I'm reading again my favorite book, The Dancing Goddesses by Elizabeth Wayland Barber.  I hope to discover something, or add to her work.  Sometimes it's easy - there's tons of evidence just everywhere.  Then there's puzzles that I can't figure out - maddening, because I can see people who know the answers online but I can't talk to them (mostly for lack of a good translator.)

Cucafera is similar to the Taraskon - I wonder if they are the same thing?  I was fascinated to find (somewhere in Wikipedia) that the ancient Romans named a large region of Spain after the Taraskon. If you want details, write me a message.  I kept finding lovely examples of pre-Christian fertility beliefs.  I have no idea what to do with all this history.  I have enough for several more of these messy blog posts.  I have the impression that no one reads this.  I'm keeping careful notes because it may clarify art history, and change the history of women.  It's a dectective work for me, plus I feel great, exhilarated by it all.

Next I'll write a bit about islands.  I was looking for some way to tie Saint Marina into the story.  I found some ancient history relating to the islands of St. Marguerit and St Honorat near Cannes, France.

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