Tarasca: ritual monster of Spain

Let us now revisit our original assumptions. First, we note that for the participants in Hacinas Carnival the Tarasca is a figure of fun and joy, but it also exudes a strain of aggressive misogyny that many female residents, not to mention tourists, find somewhat unsettling. In the spirit of feminist currents in Spain, a group of young women protested in 1992 to town officials and, when rebuffed, sought to build their own female monster, which they intended to use to attack boys and men. While their plan was never carried out, and indeed met with stiff opposition from officialdom and, especially, from older women, some of the younger, more modern girls find the Tarasca appalling, and they told me so without compunction. Accordingly, today the festival tends to polarize the sexes as well as the generations. Also, many children are frightened by the gigantic mock-up with its snapping teeth and foul breath, and many of them burst into tears at the roaring of the demons. But despite these negatives--or perhaps because of them--the Tarasca breaks down boundaries between things normally kept separate in the mind: humor and terror, man and beast, order and disorder, old and young, life and death, and so on. In so collapsing opposites, the Tarasca causes people to pause and to think about and question everyday reality in the non-Carnival universe. All these observations of course support the structural arguments of our four theorists above and in particular seem to corroborate Bloch's concept (1992) of the regenerative power of "rebounding violence." However, there are three specific features here that need psychological amplification beyond simply confirming the work of previous theorists. We must first note that like most grotesque fantasies, the Hacinas monster combines disparate organic "realities" into a bizarre and monstrous image that by its very oddness and the resulting "cognitive mismatch" captures people's attention and sparks the imagination, especially that of children (Konner 2002, 222). The Pentecostal beastie combines equine, reptilian, and bird-like features with a giraffe's neck, an elephant's bulk, an impossible number of legs, the usual human malevolence, and the satyr's insatiable lust. The monster also combines cognitive antitheses in a way that reinforces cultural biases while at the same time undermining them--a typical paradox of the Monstrous in ritual and art (Andriano 1999). In the Hacinas festival the integrated themes are those of bodily mutilation, sexual abuse, cannibalism, death, and decay. All these themes come together in certain compelling Iberian traditions: misogyny, costumed parading, religious revitalization, ritual displacement of aggression onto external objects, spontaneous street theatre. All forms of aggression are visually embodied in the image of the mystic beast, as happens every day in the classic Spanish bullfight pitting man against raw nature (Mitchell 1991). Peremptory male sexuality both parodied and glorified, women both raped and rescued, children both terrified and liberated. As Bloch has argued in the aptly titled Prey into Hunter (1992), the narrative of the Tarasca rite, turning victim into victimizer, enables the community to "absorb the vitality" of the external threat and thereby to regenerate itself and to transcend everyday reality. We may make a third, psychoanalytic, observation. As with all such fabulous and scary images, the Tarasca provokes regressive responses that probably go back to the primary organization of the mind before the advent of speech. In this childhood environment, sensations are limited to visions and primary emotions, and the world is experienced largely through the eyes and mouth. Psychoanalysts of childhood have called this the phase of oral/visual primacy. It may explain the locus of aggression in typical monster imagery: the rending teeth, the gnashing jaws, the cavernous belly. It would also help us understand the terror at being devoured by a giant predator during the ritual or, as Bloch puts it (1992, 101), "the horrifying possibility of being consumed" as an essential aspect of ritual process. The snapping mouth as well as other incorporative morphological features of the Hacinas monster, for example, the bulging belly, give an animated shape to primordial fear, with its dynamic mixture of oral, erotic, and self-identity themes. This is exactly what Bloch refers to as the "consuming" threat, the evil that "bites" and "eats" before succumbing to the power of the good. The Tarasca exemplifies both childhood anxieties and the residual fears of adults; and so the festival evokes passionate intensity in all age groups. As Turner might have put it, the "pressure points" that find expression in Hacinas are those between sexual desire and guilt, terror and curiosity, good and evil, purity and corruption; the tensions are those between old and young, death and re-birth (emerging anew from the Tarasca's belly). All of these themes are probably universally encountered and thus constitute the "core" of rituals everywhere by "reenacting the creation ot moral life" (Bloch 1992, 47). Although the Tarasca frightens children and makes them bawl and run away, it also stimulates their cognitive growth and offers ultimately a sense of safety provided by a united and victorious community. Some child psychologists such as Denyse Beaudet (1990) and Jean Piaget (1962, 229) have surmised as much. Piaget says that unconstrained mental operations caused by shock or disorientation provide Spieltaum: an imaginary playground where youngsters experiment with ideas. Bruno Bettelheim says that such creativity permits children to give anxieties tangible form: these can then be distanced and defeated (1976, 120). This projective process, beginning in infancy, of course continues in adulthood, not only in dreams and fantasy but in community rituals, where it reaches apotheosis as Bloch has so persuasively argued. Finally, we must address the misogynist theme that is so marked in the Spanish festival. Many anthroooloeists have noted the theme of the treacherous siren in Spanish folklore, a theme that corresponds to the female models carried aloft on the Tarasca's spine in Granada, Toledo, and other places. One observer, Stanley Brandes, was impressed with the pervasiveness of this specific male anxiety in the Andalusian town of Monteros. In his book on male folklore, Metaphors of Masculinity (1980), Brandes records a number of popular aphorisms that warn men to protect their fragile manhood from duplicitous females or suffer emasculation (one urges men literally to keep their penises in their pants or be castrated). In my own fieldwork in Seville Province, I found the eating/castration theme paramount in male folklore and I have recorded numerous Carnival ditties warning men and boys against the vagina dentata and other forms of female sexual aggression (Gilmore 1987; 1998). Literary scholar Louise Vasvari (1991, 3) refers to the "gastro-genital equivalence" symbolism of Spanish versification, which she identifies in writings dating back to the Middle Ages. Given all this evidence, we may conclude that with its defining misogynist theme and its female/monster imagery, the Spanish Tarasca embodies a dread of feminine sexuality that colors the Spanish male subculture. In particular, in the Hacinas case, the misogynist element combines a devouring theme along with the castration threat in the attack on the boys' genitals and in the liquid thrown onto the crotch, symbolizing, one may conjecture, semen and blood. While these themes are probably universal, their annual apotheosis in visual tropes, public rites, monster effigies, and masques may be specific to Spain. Both appalling in its ferocity and ennobling in its ultimate function as sacrificial object, the Tarasca is one of countless projections of universal human mental shadows as an embodiment, a visual metaphor, as James Fernandez has shown in his classic paper on the role of tropes in culture (1986). Like the other monsters of the world, the Tarascas of Spain are man-eaters and rapists, both lascivious females and priapic males; their toothy (and in Hacinas smelly) oral symbolism is at the same time lurid and hypnotic to the crowds that fight them. As an aspect of local pride, the beast calls forth reverence as well as repugnance. Frightening and also endearing, the Tarasca embodies the human imagination in all its whimsy, grotesqueness, and terror.