The John Of Corpus Christi

The first Hairy John of the season appears today. The Sunday after Corpus Christi: the same procedure as every year. Hairy John will dance in the streets of Pollensa as will the eagles. To give him his proper (Catalan) name, John is Sant Joan Pelós. He is one of a handful of Johns who do their dancing stuff on the occasion of a Mallorcan fiesta. The Felanitx John comes out at midsummer. He's the island's head John, the best known of them all. His emergence for the midsummer fiestas of Sant Joan would seem obvious given his name, though he and other Johns do require some explanation. Sant Joan Pelós is a representation of John the Baptist, who was supposedly born on Midsummer's Day, i.e. 24 June; hence the fiestas.

This being the case, why is the John of Pollensa allowed out on the first Sunday after Corpus Christi? Moreover, why is he hairy?

To arrive at some sort of an answer - possibly - one needs to take account of the other protagonists in today's dancing procession in Pollensa. The girls with the eagles strapped to their waists in the style more commonly associated in Mallorcan folk tradition with the figures of horses may hold the key to the earlier appearance of Sant Joan Pelós in Pollensa.

An eagles' dance from mediaeval times was practised in Catalonia and Valencia, but its first documented staging in Pollensa comes from the eighteenth century, and the roots of it would seem to go back to the year 1614 and to Palma. During the Corpus Christi procession of that year, a giant eagle supposedly appeared. The Mallorcan version of the eagles' dance, based on old Catalan tradition, was thus perhaps developed because of the 1614 eagle. For reasons no one can really explain, it was Pollensa which took it upon itself to maintain the tradition: it is the only town in Mallorca with such a dance.

So where does Sant Joan Pelós fit into the story? Well, this may be on account of John the Baptist's association with the symbol of the eagle. From the point of view of religious interpretation, the eagle symbol when it has a halo is John the Baptist. John was responsible for his "soaring" gospel and is thus represented by an eagle. Another explanation is that the eagle symbolises the resurrection and ascension and so all baptised Christians.

Is this the explanation then? Well not necessarily, indeed many of the commonly held assumptions are open to question. Take, for instance, the eagle of 1614. There is an alternative version of events that places the appearance of a giant white eagle in Palma on 29 June. It was nothing to do with Corpus Christi, which had been on 23 May that year. An eagles' dance was as a thanksgiving response to the good fortune of the appearance of the eagle, as the crops would prove to be good.

Then, where Pollensa is concerned, there is the fact that Sant Joan Pelós did in fact once upon a time do his dance when all the other ones do: at midsummer. A further element in the conundrum is evidence which suggests that eagles were one of various images at Palma's Corpus Christi procession from at least the first half of the sixteenth century, so many years before the 1614 eagle arrived on the scene.

One also has to take account of the view that the image of Sant Joan Pelós is a relic from ancient history, a symbol perhaps of pagan ritual. This may fit with notions of midsummer but offers nothing to explain why he came to be associated with Corpus Christi. Except, and here is another version, he was associated with it and as long ago as the fourteenth century. All that time ago, he was to be found in Corpus Christi processions in Palma and quite possibly elsewhere.

The fact is that no one can state with certainty how the Pollensa dances came about. The Sant Joan Pelós and eagles' dance stories and legends are all open to varying interpretations. But here's another one for you. If there's any truth to the 1614 eagle version, why did the eagles' dance seemingly not take place in Pollensa until the eighteenth century? Was it in fact all something of a commercial enterprise? There are certainly grounds to suggest that the local weavers' guild was behind it. Pollensa's textile industry has a long history, and so were the dresses of the girls with the eagles, still made with the careful weaving of jewels into them, all part of a promotion? And might Hairy John have been included as an added attraction?

Who can honestly say. But as for why he's hairy. Well, have you ever seen an image of John the Baptist when he wasn't?

The Weirdness Of Hairy John

So the story goes, in the summer of 1913 the eldest daughter of the former queen, Isabel II, one María Isabel Francisca de Asís Cristina Francisca de Paula Dominga de Borbón y Borbón, came to the Mallorcan town of Felanitx. It was a hot day and she was tired because of the travelling. Nonetheless, the mayor thought it would be a good idea if his royal guest was provided with some entertainment and so a youth of hairy appearance, accompanied by the music of local instruments, was commanded to dance in front of the princess. There are various ways that you can translate her reaction. One of the least offensive is that - suitably unamused in a royal fashion - she demanded to know who the jerk was who was doing the dancing. Royal personage or not, reaction to María Isabel etc. was unfavourable to say the least. The good people of Felanitx were outraged. From that time on, the hairy youth has not danced for anyone, other than for the people of the town.

It quite clearly isn't still the same hairy youth, but the hairy character is the same. He was and remains Sant Joan Pelós: Saint John the Hairy. So important is he that the Council of Mallorca is proposing that he be declared to be in the island's cultural interest. Hairy John has been around for centuries (since the seventeenth approximately) and this coming Wednesday, the feast day of Saint John (the Baptist), he will be prancing around in Felanitx once more, wearing his strange mask and then handing out carnations to the spectators. His whole demeanour, his whole idiot-dancing style, plus the flowers make him a dead ringer for a flower power hippy of the late 1960s, but hippy Hairy John, with his centuries of tradition, had long pre-empted the Summer of Love.

He isn't the only Hairy John. Pollensa has its own Sant Joan Pelós, but rather than come out at midsummer, this one makes an appearance for Corpus Christi. In keeping with the 24 June feast day, the Johns of Sant Llorenç and, unsurprisingly, the village of Sant Joan, do their bit at roughly the same time as the Felanitx John. The character is supposedly a representation of John the Baptist but its exact origins aren't clear. General consensus of opinion has it that it is all to do with a one-time pagan ritual and with an ancient sundance fiesta.

The fiesta of Sant Joan, for John the Baptist, for midsummer, for fire, for the solstice is a deep-rooted one in Mallorcan tradition, but as with other fiesta traditions it owes much to modern-day revivals. Though Sant Joan Pelós in Felanitx has more or less had a continuous presence in the town, he has only shot to real prominence in the last twenty years or so. And with this prominence has come the interest in the various trappings of the Hairy character, such as the Latin inscription - "Ecce Agnus Dei" (behold the Lamb of God) - and the carrying of a lamb.

The tradition is one that does appear to have been subject to new interpretation or perhaps a revival of something that goes back well beyond the start of the last century. Gabriel Llompart Moragues, a Mallorcan folklore historian, uses oral history to report that of the Sant Joan Pelós dance in Felanitx of the 1920s there was no recollection of a lamb having been held. It is speculated that while one hand carried the cross with the Latin inscription, the fact that the other was also placed on a hip was representative of the fact that at one time in the dim, distant past, the hand had been used to carry a lamb. Agonising over analyses of Mallorcan traditions is, at times, as much of a tradition in Mallorca as the traditions themselves.

What is clear is that, although at the very end of the nineteenth century Sant Joan was celebrated across the island, certain manifestations of the fiesta, notably the Hairy John dance, were confined to relatively few places. Another notable Mallorcan folkloricist, Antoni Maria Alcover, reported on the fiesta in 1899. He was attending the Sant Joan celebrations in Son Carrio, i.e. in Sant Llorenç, and said that Sant Joan Pelós performed his dance, accompanied by two demons. They headed for the monks' residence and apparently the monks had never seen the dance before. At the time, at the end of that century, very few people would in fact have seen it. Even back then there were attempts at revivalism. But when people did see it, they found it all, well, a bit odd. Perhaps the reaction of María Isabel etc. in 1913 was to have been expected, therefore.

Alcover makes a critical point, though. These attempts at revival were based on a tradition which he described as "primitive". For this reason, the dance was considered to be weird. The primitive weirdness is what was retained through the last century, albeit the dance fell in and out of fashion in those few places where it was performed. Nowadays, such weirdness is what makes the dance, what gives it the cultural interest that the Council of Mallorca is determined to preserve by making the declaration. There will be a lot of odd stuff going on for Sant Joan this coming week, but nothing will be quite as odd as the Hairy Johns.

* Photo from an old entry on Klaus's Photo Blog: http://mallorcaphotoblog.com/2009/06/25/the-dance-of-sant-joan-pelos/