Making Peace With The Devil: Sant Antoni

The lights dim. The theatre is about to begin.

Trays of flames and pots of fire hanging from palm trees play shadows onto the brooding enormity of the church. Organ music, a phantom of the opera, a Hammer house of horrors, throbs menacingly. A disconnected voice, deep, sombre and threatening, a Vincent Price of Catalan, warns of "foc" and "dimonis" that await the "mureres". Then a sybil-like lullaby from within an aura of bright white and silver seeks to calm fears before ...

The fires crack into life, lit by spears of tridents. They explode, whizz and bang. Now it is the demons' time. The fire time. The spooks and ghouls are roaming, racing, pressing their grotesque faces into those of the innocent, the witnesses to this ritual, this paganism. They brandish their tridents, whirl them like hammer throwers in this Hammer horror, spitting burning rain.

Primal screams and spirits, awakened from a permanent living death, collide in this maelstrom caused by the most basic element, this hell of fire. Their horrid masks that glare unseeingly into the awed expressions of the innocent are looking nevertheless. They seek the innocents and find them, spiriting them away into their purgatorial, incendiary orgy.

The beating of drums. Incessant. Rhythmic. Calling out to the living to pass over into the world of the satanic majesty of the profane acolytes of the devil, calling them to jump, writhe and be blessed with the showers of accursed droplets of flame. An innocent is grabbed, he is taken, then another. And then others, entranced by the pulsation and the offers of fiery temptation, come forward and leap and dance under firefalls.

The children have been taken! They have become one with the demons. But have they? Some taunt the devils, mocking their horns, stabbing towards them, making them dance ever more and chase with their burning prongs. We are witnesses to this, but suddenly we look elsewhere. For the church is aflame.

From its towers tumble hailstones of white flamelets. As Muro church falls, so falls Muro church in sheets of sheer pureness, a purging and exorcism of the devilry below. The drums cease, the demons are still. It is over.


This was Muro on the eve of Sant Antoni, an intimate spectacular of Mallorcan tradition at its most extreme, its most bestial and its finest. There is more than just a slight sense of the macabre about Sant Antoni, a feeling of "The Wicker Man", of folkloric degeneracy. And Muro does it well, better perhaps than its neighbour Sa Pobla. The event is more confined, more focussed, but no less frightening.

Once the demons have gone, there is the folk music. And the "ballada popular" of all ages raising their arms and legs in the gentility of the ball de bot. Small children, older children, adults, young and old, all together, unashamedly moving in time to the chords of musicians, themselves of different generations, dancing in front of the church and town hall in a communal expression of tradition. These different generations, such as with the kids who dance with the demons. Can there be anything more magical, more imagination-inspiring than to jump around under the falling flames of the demons while the drummers beat? Can there be anything more determined than Sant Antoni to prolong local traditions?

The kids will want to be demons when they are older, they will want to be the musicians inspiring the ball de bot. It is perpetuation. Of tradition. You hope that it doesn't stop. The permanent living death of the demons of Sant Antoni is a permanency that is never disrupted as part of tradition.

And perhaps in older age, these kids might become "glosadors", such as the old woman with her frankly male-masturbatory style of penetrating her ximbomba instrument and issuing a most God-awful caterwaul as she relates some raunchy tale, incomprehensible to anyone but the most Mallorcan of aficionado. She is one of the side-shows of Sant Antoni, on one of the many squares that later give way to the less traditional - the rock, the indie, the hip-hop.

In this more contemporary vein, however, there is, at an event such as Muro's Sant Antoni Eve, the local television. IB3. They spoke to me but presumably didn't reckon on an interview that wasn't going to be given in Catalan. But they did film us. We Brits. With our sobrassadas being toasted on the embers of one of the fires in front of the church. Later, we had a beer in a bar by the church square, and there it was - coverage of Muro's Sant Antoni on the telly, replete with us, twelve, fourteen of us.

We didn't really count though. And that is the sadness of Sant Antoni. The most astonishing of the fiestas, but it is one for the Mallorcans. No one else.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.