Yareah Magazine

Silvia Cuevas Mostacero

(Bilingual article)

Back to school! First things first. I want to apologise publicly for missing my commitments to this magazine. As we always do when we start a new year, I’m completely determined not to miss a single issue again. I only hope my new resolution doesn’t last as the “going to the gym” one…

Before the summer we were travelling around the U.S.A. and, although we didn’t finish the trip, we are changing from Paradise, since once of my readers (Juan Carlos) protested vehemently. It seems he doesn’t like the States much and he thinks two articles devoted to it are more than enough. Anyway we will have to go back one of these days… but in the meanwhile we are back to Spain!
This summer we have been in my father’s village. I am keeping its name to myself because I don’t want to spoil all the paradises I visit. And this one is part of my being.
The words that come to my mind when I think about the North of Spain are: “green”, “rain” and “cows”. And we sure had all three of them!
The best thing about Cantabria is...

... that you have the beaches and the mountains very near. And one of my favourite activities is walking through those mountains full of water and life. Houses are scattered all over the mountains, isolated most of them, conforming to their dwellers’ dry character.
The native Cantabrian mythology is connected with Celtic and Roman mythology which became partly related with legends from the Cantabrian Mountains. In most cases, passed from parents to children through oral tradition. As in many places, the Romanisation and later incursion of Christianism transformed the sense and representation of these pagan rites, resulting in religious myths.
Cantabrian people have not only telluric and natural divinities, but also fabulous beings with different aspects that people feared or adored and have legends and histories on their own. There are many of the them in Cantabrian mythology, yet among the most representative are the Ojáncanu or Ojáncano, his wife the Ojáncana, and the Anjana. The first creature embodies the evil among the Cantabrians and represents the cruelty and the brutality. This giant cyclops is the Cantabrian version of the Greek Polyphemus that appears in other Indoeuropean mythologies. Many of the stories in which he is involved include kidnappings of princesses or good or well-meaning people. He took them to his cave and torture them in all the ways he can imagine. And his wife, the Ojáncana, is even worse, because she includes children among her victims!
The Anjana fairy is the antithesis of them. She lives doing good and helping people when they get lost.
I wonder why the Anjana hasn’t got a male counterpart…

Read more:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantabrian_mythology
 
¡Vuelta al cole! Lo primero es lo primero. Quiero disculparme públicamente por no cumplir mis compromisos con esta revista. Como siempre se hace

Leer más:

http://www.atc.unican.es/~rafa/mitologia.html

Bio:

http://www.lacoctelera.com/silviacuevas/perfil/blog

*Yareah magazine es una revista cultural fundada y dirigida por el escritor Martín Cid: http://www.martincid.com
**Created and edited by the writer Martin Cid: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it