A — documented

Tarasca

France
Tarascon, on the left bank of the Rhône (Bouches-du-Rhône), lower Provence

Tarasca — an amphibious monster lurking in a wood on the bank of the Rhône, which devoured passers-by and sank boats.

On the bank of the Rhône in the moonlight, with the towered town in the background, a woman in travelling dress leads by a strap the amphibious monster come out of the wood — a back of serrated plates, an equine head, webbed feet — and raises her free hand in the sign of blessing.

Variants and names: Provençal la Tarasca, French la Tarasque; the festival is the Fête de la Tarasque
What is told: An amphibious monster lurking in a wood on the bank of the Rhône, which devoured passers-by and sank boats. In the oldest version it is the offspring of Leviathan and of the Bonnacon of Galatia, half fish, with an equine mane, a back as sharp as an axe blade and a tail made up of one hundred and eighty-five vipers; in the rewriting that made it famous it has six legs and the shell of a tortoise. Saint Martha, arrived from Palestine, finds it while it is devouring a man, sprinkles it with holy water, shows it the cross and binds it with her own girdle. At that point the monster lets itself be led meekly into the town — and it is the populace, not the saint, that kills it. Since then the town has borne its name, and every year a great articulated effigy is carried through the streets.
What it was forthe author’s reading: It is the rite by which a town tells itself its own foundation and stages it every year. The processional dragon — which has many sisters in Europe, from Spain to Flanders — makes it possible to parade together the tamed chaos and the community that masters it, with the Church guaranteeing the victory and the young men of the town working the monster. That in the legend it is the populace that finishes off the beast, and not the saint, is not a detail: the town claims its own part in its own myth.
Where it is attested: The oldest redaction is the Vita sanctae Marthae of Pseudo-Marcilia, datable to between about 1174 and 1210; the version that went round Europe is the abridged one in the Legenda aurea of Jacobus de Voragine, around 1260. A processional dragon is already mentioned in a municipal deliberation of Tarascon of 1465. The standard ethnographic study: Louis Dumont, La Tarasque. Essai de description d'un fait local d'un point de vue ethnographique, Gallimard, 1951; on the relationship between King René and the festival, Noël Coulet, 1991. The festival is today a component of the multinational element on processional giants and dragons, proclaimed a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage in 2005 and incorporated into the UNESCO Representative List in 2008.
Caution: Grade A for the documentary core, which is of the first order: hagiographic manuscripts with a critical edition, fifteenth-century municipal deliberations, an academic ethnographic monograph. The things to be corrected are almost all in the tourist version. The first attestation is not the Legenda aurea but Pseudo-Marcilia, almost a century older. Saint Martha does not kill the Tarasca: she tames it. The date 14 April 1474 as the foundation of the festival by the will of King René is a nineteenth-century reconstruction, judged groundless by Noël Coulet in 1991, and a processional dragon is documented as early as 1465. The festival has not been unbroken since the fifteenth century: it has been suppressed, resumed and reinvented several times, and the present arrangement dates from 1946. The name of the town does not come from the monster: the place name is ancient and pre-Latin, and it is the legend that was born from the name, not the other way round. Finally the so-called «Tarasca of Noves», a Celto-Ligurian sculpture of a man-eating monster found in 1849 and kept at Avignon, has no documented relationship with the Tarasca of Tarascon: the name was given to it by the scholars of the nineteenth century, and ever since it has furnished the thesis of a continuous pagan cult with a material proof that proves something else.

Reality checkestablished

What has been established today.

There is no animal to be looked for behind the Tarasca, and that is not the point. What is established is the stratigraphy of the legend, which reads like a section of ground. The name of the place comes first: toponymy gives it as pre-Latin, and the etymological legend that derives it from the monster is a construction internal to the story. The oldest hagiographic text is of the end of the 12th century, not of the thirteenth, and is far more baroque than the version that later became canonical: the reduction to a beast with six legs and a tortoise shell is the work of the Legenda aurea, that is, of a successful editorial operation. The procession is documented from 1465, but its foundation by King René on a precise date in 1474 is a nineteenth-century learned invention. And the Celto-Ligurian sculpture of Noves, which is regularly exhibited as proof of a pre-Christian cult of the monster, was christened «Tarasca» by the archaeologists of the nineteenth century: the resemblance is real, the documentary link does not exist. What remains, and it is already a great deal, is a town that for at least five and a half centuries has carried its own dragon through the streets.

Pseudo-Marcilia, Vita sanctae Marthae, ca. 1174-1210; Jacobus de Voragine, Legenda aurea, ca. 1260; municipal deliberation of Tarascon, 1465; L. Dumont, La Tarasque, Gallimard, 1951; N. Coulet, 1991; Joconde record of the «Tarasca of Noves», Musée lapidaire, Avignon

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Tarasca

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