St. Martha Brooch

I knew already about the appearance in the New Testament of St. Martha – she’s the one who asks Jesus to send her sister back into the kitchen to help her rather than letting her sit and listen to him. And she’s the one whose brother Lazarus dies and is raised by Jesus. I even knew that the Golden Legend recounts that she, Mary her sister, and Lazarus were put on a boat with no sails oars nor rudder together with a lot of other Christians and shoved off into the ocean by folks who found them irritating – and that they ended up in France where they converted a lot of the inhabitants to Christianity. But what has that got to do with this dragon she’s got on a leash?

Glad you asked! It turns out (per the Golden Legend again) that she went to a place called Nerluc and found that the folks there were being terrorized not by an ordinary dragon but by a Tarasque. To quote: “a great dragon half beast and half fish greater than an ox longer than an horse having teeth sharp as a sword and horned on either side head like a lion tail like a serpent and defended him with two wings on either side and could not be beaten with cast of stones ne with other armour and was as strong as twelve lions or bears; which dragon lay hiding and lurking in the river and perished them that passed by and drowned ships. He came thither by sea from Galicia and was engendered of Leviathan which is a serpent of the water and is much wood and of a beast called Bonacho that is engendered in Galicia. And when he is pursued he casts out of his belly behind his ordure the space of an acre of land on them that follow him and it is bright as glass and what it toucheth it burneth as fire.”

So Martha throws holy water on it and shows it the cross she’s carrying and it becomes docile. She unwisely then took it back to town on a rope to show everybody it was friendly now but the townspeople didn’t wait to test that hypothesis; they just whacked it. Afterwards they realized they had destroyed their claim to fame so they renamed their town Tarascon and to this day they hold two festivals a year where a big tarasque parades through the town. You can see pictures at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarasque.

Martha is the patroness of cooks housewives and waitresses (because of that thing with working in the kitchen to make supper for Jesus, right?). And it turn out she is also pretty kick-ass when it comes to weird monsters.