war, the reading of them has at least been highly interested. The skepticism fostered by life under Francoist representations encouraged the emergence of a different kind of historian, and the three principal scholars of the Patum—Mossèn Armengou at the end of the Franco regime, Jaume Farràs i Farms during the Transition, and more recently Josep Noguera i Canal—have been progressively more critical of the historiography and less committed to a given line on the event; this ironic turn, of course, also reflects a change in dominant representations and Berga’s relationship to them. Based on their historicizing rereadings of earlier scholarship, their new primary research in local archives, and the comparative data available on Catalan Corpus Christi celebrations in other towns, we can reconstruct the early history of the Patum in its large outlines, and suggest the continuities of meaning over time which give the Patum its depth and richness.4
The Patum is an outgrowth of the late medieval Corpus Christi procession, particularly elaborate in Catalonia because when the liturgical feast was made obligatory in 1311, the King of Aragon had just come out of papal interdiction and urgently needed to demonstrate his orthodoxy and that of his subjects. These processions, in the first instance, paid homage to the sacrament of the Eucharist. The consecrated Host was carried in a raised monstrance under a canopy supported by the highest-ranking members of the community, clerical or secular. Around the Body of Christ, the entire Corpus Mysticum of which Christ was the head articulated itself. The various corporations and elements of the local community lined up in much-contested hierarchical order—and the feast thus immediately became an occasion for civic display and competition, both between and within cities. This assembly of the Church Militant, Christ’s kingdom on Earth, was complemented, insofar as local resources permitted, by representations of the Church Triumphant: allegorical figures or mobile tableaux of Biblical figures, saints, and all the company of heaven.
These representations, generally sponsored by guilds and confraternities, had to be acted by community members not important enough to be marching in their own persons; and they called upon the performance repertoires of that lower level of the community, sometimes incorporating older genres. As medievalists know, different vernacular traditions emerged from these processions, including both the English mystery plays and the Castilian autos sacramentales. In Catalonia, the procession featured entremesos, dances with masked performers and/or effigies animated by a carrier. Often these might be the emblem of a saint, such as the Lion of Saint Mark or the Eagle of Saint John, or the supporting figures of a Biblical tableau, such as the ox and the ass of the Nativity.
It took little time for the animal and fantastic figures to become dissociated from their liturgical occasions: for some scholars, an argument for their older and indigenous status. The verifiable contemporary reasons have rather to do with their popularity among festival spectators and the consequent disruptions of the procession’s solemnity. Because of the guild sponsorship and the popularity, however, the entremesos survived various phases of ecclesiastical repression, gradually moving to the head of the procession as entertainments safely distanced from the culminating Host or separating from the procession entirely and furnishing a parallel, secular celebration, in some cases moving from Corpus Christi to a community’s patronal festival.
By the time we have verifiable evidence of what would become the Patum—the first unambiguous document in the municipal archives dates from 1632—this separation has largely taken place. The entremesos consist only of the turcs i cavallets, the devils and angel, the drum, and the mule—still today the noisiest elements of the Patum—and they constitute a separate entertainment paid for by the city, known as les bolisies and later La Bulla—nouns deriving from the verb “to boil” and referring to a noisy, mobile assembly. The elements of the Bulla marched at the head of the procession and then performed separately in the main square of the town, the Plaça Sant Pere.
It seems clear that the Bulla and parallel celebrations of the period represent a popular response to the procession’s inadequate representation of the social body: they were born of a desire for inclusion—if necessary, through violent irruption. Both women and the lower classes were excluded from the procession, and its symbolic language was so ethereal, with its gold and silver and solar symbolism, so insistent on transcendence (and on wealth as the means to it), as to provide a very dubious account of humble corporeality—the liturgical point of the festival.5 The Bulla, with its firecrackers, bells, drum, and reputed provocations to immorality, restored sensuality to the social body.
In the seventeenth century, such festivals were still prestigious means of civic self-assertion in all the cities of Spain. Berguedan records show repeated municipal decisions, despite persistent poverty, “if other communities are dancing, to dance also in the present town” (quoted in Farràs i Farràs 1982, 73). In the eighteenth century, both ecclesiastical pressures and emerging rival forms of display induced festival decay—but not in poor, out-of-the-way Berga, where the bishop had been staved off with a good allegory, where no rival entertainments were available, and where the festival brought the peasants of the surrounding comarca to spend their money at the accompanying fair. La Bulla, indeed, expanded with Berga’s increasing importance in textile manufacture, acquiring a giant and an eagle during the course of the century. By 1790, the local notary’s response to a royal questionnaire identified the festival as distinguishing Berga from other towns and its entremesos as notable “antiquities” (Pedrals 1989, 9).
This status as antiquity is the next major construction of the festival for outsiders. In the letter of a soldier quartered in Berga in 1820 we see it as the “patum patena, a dance so called that from festivals immemorial is a custom in this town” (quoted in Sales 1962, 212). But contemporary meanings were clearly more important within the town. The word patum is onomatopoeic, related phonetically to other words illustrating the sound of a sudden impact: feet striking the ground, a blow struck, projectiles striking their target, and so forth.6 Notably, the morpheme pat-is associated, particularly in this region in the early nineteenth century, with popular disorder and local bands of bandits and irregular troops—the latter not always readily distinguished (Noyes 1992, 347–51).
The nineteenth century completed the partial domestication of the Patum’s disorder. New entremesos asserting authority and submission—giants, eagle, and dwarfs—were gradually incorporated in order to balance the rebellious performances of mule, Turks, and devils (the Christians and angels being, as they are today, merely nominal victors over the latter two). The town band—such as it was—not only enhanced the appeal of the festival but also set music against the noise of the drum: every entremes except for the mule and the devils now had a melody and a choreography to control it. The order of performances was gradually reshaped to highlight the contrasts of order and disorder and, to a certain extent, to contain the latter. The containment was never fully successful, and we may suspect that the Patum’s eventual symmetries result rather from the polarizing tensions between public, performers, and city.
In the 1890s, the final entremesos of the present Patum were incorporated as part of an attempt to dress up both the festival and the town for potential investors, tourists, and political patrons. The Patum had stabilized the Berguedan social body in representation at least, balancing an orderly upper body with an unruly lower one in an ongoing conflict that, rather than leading to the victory of one side, held the members together—in contrapposto, as it were. The dichotomy was reproduced at several levels of the festival: between procession and Patum, between entremesos, and between the elite spectators in the balcony and the working-class participants in the plaça. Then as today, the Patum’s syntax drew both connections and contrasts:
| Turks and Cavallets. A battle turned into a dance, where order triumphs in the choreography as well as in the mimesis. | Maces. A battle where the nominal victory of order is belied by the protagonism of the devils, who burn themselves out before St. Michael and the angel dare attack them. |
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Àliga. The dance of a hardsurfaced and crowned heraldic bird, which commands attention at the same time it holds the public at a
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