Sant Antoni: The accidental and unofficial saint of Mallorca

While the celebrations for the saint are lavish in only certain villages and towns, they are ones, as Munar pointed out, to which people from other municipalities go in order to experience them - Sa Pobla is the prime example.

Apart from this celebratory aspect, he highlighted the roots of the worship. The tradition of Sant Antoni had been brought to Mallorca along with the 1229 conquest. The celebration, in popular terms, was to result from a Christianisation of primitive cults for the fertility of crops and animals. Taking place only a short time after the winter solstice and when the days were short and the land was sleeping, Sant Antoni celebrations were for awakening the land by fertilising it with the ashes of bonfires.

This centuries-old occasion brought with it the ‘dimonis’, the demons, who were representative of fears but who were also like shamans. They weren’t really evil. In fact, the carrying of a cane by demons - a sexual element - was instrumental in what happened in times past; the fiestas would end in orgies. Another erotic feature was the ximbomba, not played by demons but otherwise intimately associated with the old tradition.

While the cult of Sant Antoni was imported, ostensibly for reasons of worship alone, it was a deeply rooted culture that transformed the celebration into this quasi-Christianised custom with unmistakable nods in the direction of distant pagan rituals. It was, therefore, popular culture that came to develop the fiestas far more so than religion.

In one respect, however, the tradition that was created after the conquest can be seen as accidental. In 1230, Jaume I provided a house and hospital for members of the Antonine Order. The Hospital Brothers of Saint Anthony was a congregation that had been founded towards the end of the eleventh century by Gaston of Valloire in the Dauphiné in southeastern France. In Saint Antoine l’Abbaye, as La-Motte-Saint Didier was renamed, the relics of Saint Anthony were said to have been used in curing ergotism - St. Anthony’s Fire.

In 1230, Jaume was every bit as interested in having the Hospital Brothers because of what had become their speciality - treating ergotism - as he was in worshipping the saint. The ‘Life of Anthony’, written in Greek around 360, was a very well-known work in the Middle Ages. The worship had therefore been long-established. Allied to the cures for ergotism, Anthony was foremost among saints venerated by the conquerors.

Yet curiously, as things were to turn out, the ‘Life of Anthony’ was essentially a treatise on asceticism. The legend of his life in the desert, his ascetic life, was why he came to be known as the father of monasticism. But this was a life, as revealed by the texts, which provided advice on overcoming sexual temptations. These were temptations which clearly came to be ignored at the time in January when he was celebrated.

The feast day, January 17, and the eve of the feast, it might be argued, were convenient hats on which to hang a winter fiesta pleading for the rebirth of the land and all that grew on it and lived on and from it. As to demons, the legend would have crossed the sea with the Hospital Brothers. Saint Anthony’s encounters with demons in the desert caves were indeed the stuff of legend. Did these, therefore, give popular culture a justification for demons becoming protagonists for the fiestas, when the demons were in fact a continuation of old, pre-Christian rituals?

As a saint, Anthony offered a potent mix for the religious and for the ordinary folk. He could cure, he could confront demons, and he offered patronage of farmers and animals. The fiestas, as they were to become and are nowadays, present the contrast of the dark forces of Sant Antoni Eve and the light of the day with its blessings of animals.

Felip Munar’s advocacy of a public holiday was unlikely to ever get very far. One reason, I would suggest, was Palma. Although the city has its associations with the saint, they are nothing like as strong as they are in various villages and towns. Sant Antoni is the saint for the ‘part forana’, intimately linked to a rural Mallorca and not an urban Mallorca. If one looks for explanations as to the Mallorcan culture, then Antoni is an essential ingredient. But his are roots not really shared by a city which has Saint Sebastian, three days after Anthony.

There was undeniably a Sant Sebastià cult well before the Palma plague miracle of 1523, and it was the case that the saint was once celebrated widely across the island. But Anthony came to dominate for all the reasons that are associated with him. Unofficial he may be, but Antoni is Mallorca’s saint.