Folk Horror MagpieSome of my favourites, the incredible folk costumes of the Máscara del Carnaval del Gallo de Mecerreyes, which takes place in January in Burgos, Spain.
The ‘carnival of the rooster’ is a performance in three acts. It begins with a lavish lunch where the masked figures, characters that have been passed down the generations and hold special significance to the village’s history, are introduced. Then at around 5pm: the the Corrida de Gallo or ‘Rooster Run.’
The ‘king’ holds the rooster and a brave volunteer from the crowd tries to snatch it and run, after which he is beaten by the ‘Zarramacos’ kings guards, who wear distinctive face paint and wield sticks. Finally the rooster (nowadays a fake stand-in) is then ritually slaughtered by the king, and revelry and the eating of sweet pastries returns the mood to a happy one.
The making of the intricate costumes is time-honoured, and the families of Mecerreyes keep to the tradition of using locally found natural materials such as animal bones collected from the hills outside the village.
The exact significance of some of the carnival’s more striking characters is lost to time, or perhaps kept only by those who keep them alive, but the rooster is often found symbolically linked to fecundity.
As this and similar carnivals throughout the Iberian peninsula take place at the beginning of the year it may have its origins in the types of magical performance that expel bad spirits and attempt to invoke fortune for a good harvest after the scarcity of winter. Such pagan survival rites were stamped out by the authoritarian Catholicism of the Franco regime, but are slowly being recovered and celebrated in all their terrifying majesty once more.