Carnival and Other Christian Festivals: Folk Theology and Folk Performance

I. Demons and Dragons (Catalonia)

. Demons and Dragons () W   and a clawed, bare-breasted serpent danced with devils, punctuating the night with fleeting visions of a world that we’ve been trained to think is hellish. Around the edges of the square, a crowd watched safely from behind a barrier of temporary metal railings.Where the circle of railings peeled back on itself, allowing devils guarded passage between an offstage alley and the square, I caught the eye of Marc Torras, the city’s archivist and pyrotechnician. He invited me inside the barrier. Squatting on the cobbled pavement, in the space of beasts and monsters, I could see more clearly: masked demons, dressed in fiery red and yellow suits, with fireworks in their hands and on their heads; winged, fire-breathing dragons , papier-mâché monsters each borne by a single man whose legs and feet alone were visible; the serpent, fanged and red-eyed, her flesh and breasts the pallid green of slime, likewise hefted by a single bearer. A long-necked giant mule, made of olive cloth stretched over a wooden frame, requiring several men to carry it, dropped its neck and, spinning, scattered a vicious circle of sparks. A bare-chested man in furred trousers and a bearded mask, topped with high, curving mountain goat’s horns, briefly had the arena to himself. A flute played. Pan spoke to us, his voice amplified by loudspeakers. Most spectacular of all the monsters was the ox, a whirling, fire-spitting beast designed by Torras from two bulky pieces of an old ribbon-making loom, itself known as an ‘‘ox.’’ The bearer’s legs could just be seen amid the ambient flashes of light and thick clouds of smoke (Fig. .). Rockets shot into the air from the roof of the town hall. The smell of explosives was pervasive. When at last the show was over, the barriers were removed and the audience pressed into the heart of the square, now illuminated by streetlights. Devils, women, men, and children linked arms to dance in one big counterclockwise whirlpool to the joyous music of a band. I was in Manresa, in the foothills of the Pyrenees above Barcelona, for the  +      . Ox of fire. Manresa, . city’s annual festa major (major feast day).What I had seen, that Saturday evening , was the mostra del correfoc (preview of the fire-running), a preliminary display of the pyrotechnics that would be unleashed in full force on Monday night, when devils and monsters would run through the city streets, no longer separated by barriers from onlookers but licensed to attack. Posted notices warned citizens to board their windows and to remove their cars from streets that lay along the route of the fire-running.1 Manresa’s festa major is celebrated on the last weekend of August, within a day or two of the city’s patronal saints’ day. Manresa has three patron saints, Agnès, Fruitós, and Maurici, jointly known as els Cossos Sants (the Holy Corpses). The relics of these Roman martyrs were transferred to the city’s new cathedral from the neighboring parish of Sant Fruitós de Bages, where they had been languishing in relative neglect, on  August .2 In  Manresa’s guild of wool dressers, weavers, and tailors were given permission to celebrate the anniversary of that date with ‘‘dances, games [or plays], illuminations and other things that may occur to them to solemnize the festival.’’3 Given the sponsoring guild, we can assume they wore elaborate costumes. The ‘‘illuminations [luminarias]’’ may only have been decorative lights or processional candles, but ‘‘a great snake [culebra] . . . blowing great flames    +  of fire from its mouth’’ had fought ‘‘many armed men’’ in royal festivities in Zaragoza as early as . Pyrotechnics (to simulate artillery) and a firebreathing griffin as large as a horse had appeared in the same venue in . Demons and dragons were part of Barcelona’s Corpus Christi procession by , and during the same period, ‘‘little mortars and bombs’’ were being detonated for Corpus Christi in Manresa.4 Given the conjunction of ‘‘illuminations ’’ with ‘‘games’’ (jocs), it is tempting to think that light was partially provided, in this first of Manresa’s festes majors, by fireworks and fiery monsters. Until recently, the relics of the Cossos Sants were still borne through the city streets in an annual religious procession, preceded by the same spectacular figures that for years had led the...