Notes
-- there's a recipe in my Betty Crocker Cookbook for chalupas. It had a nice photo so I tried it. It's delicious, if you are ok with fried food. I looked up the word, chalupas. It's boat and I'm guessing it's similar to the word, shallop.
Shallop: like Sun Shallop in the Goddess Embroideries from Russia... I was fascinated to find a game called, Lotteria , from Mexico. It's full of mysterious images, and one of them is labeled, La Chalupa. It's a picture of a beautiful woman in a canoe filled with fruit and flowers. I made a guess that this game dates from a time when THEY KNEW pre-Christian culture. Because I feel certain that La Chalupa matches up with the sun shallop. I keep thinking about the water beneath her canoe...
There was an old belief (maybe Old English?) that evil can not cross water. It shows up in the The Lord of the Rings movies several times... suppose people once thought that water is life (in Europe, not as today's slogan from the protest at Standing Rock, North Dakota.). What would be the most ancient word that we can find for "river"? I keep coming back to "mer" - sea...
I mean this stuff about the sun shallop explains why Santa flies through the sky in.a sleigh. Right? The sleigh is the sun shallop, I think... which tells me that THEY KNEW. What I want to know: what did they know about pagans?, and when did they know it? I found a quilt covered in red and white Auseklis in a resale shop. It was stuffed with polyester, so it was not very old, maybe 1940's, but the design and color told me that someone who made quilts knew what these symbols mean. How could they not know? This quilt said something loud and clear about apotropaic magic - attracting the abundance and holding off misfortune.
I'm seeing a coherent story pretty much wherever I look. I hope I can write a book about it. Maybe just a booklet, a picture book, something easy - I am intimidated by the work involved. I want to write an explanation that ties together most of the art of the 1700's - 1800's... a grand theory of European pagans hiding in plain sight all over the place.
But the more I think about it, the more I notice problems with pagans. Hidden underlying problems at the root of the environmental crisis. Too much fertility at the expense of the natural world. Culture wars (family values vs. freedom, and USA politics of conservative vs. liberal) based on assumptions that go back to European pagans. Not to even mention the Natzis and their misuse of the sun sign/swastika. I would have to write about the problems and it's a big subject that I want to avoid.
--I'm thinking that I need to update what I wrote about the Taraskon. Maybe I was wrong what I said, maybe the Taraskon is not a recipe for a drug. I'm thinking now that the Taraskon is really more of a fertility wish. The Taraskon has both breasts and a very phallic tail, you know, human fertility, plus symbols of crop fertility...
