British artist and exile Genesis P-Orridge called the Joujouka music “as profound and spiralling as DNA. This is the raw genetic material of all sacred music.” Timothy Leary said, “Here is religious intoxication which pre-dates the Vedic soma-psychedelic scholars, ten thousand generations older than Buddha and Christ. Oldest blood-seed ritual. Fierce, unstoppable unity dance of life, ancient, pre-human mutational congregation, fertility worship, source of totem, shameful seed of evolution.” In the 1950s, The Master Musicians would perform to an international crowd in Brion Gysin’s 1001 Nights café in the International Zone in Tangier, the area known as the Interzone in William Burroughs’ work. "We need more diabolic music everywhere" Burroughs himself declared after hearing them. Timothy Leary proclaimed the Master Musicians to be "a 4,000-year-old rock ’n' roll band”.
The intrinsic value of the Bou Jeloud rites is to create a healing trance setting. That healing element of trance rituals still continues on in Ibiza through a combined lineage descended partly from the Moors, and partly via the ‘freaks’ who started making their way from Europe and the US to Goa, the Portuguese fishing colony on the coast of India, back in the 1960s. By the 1990s, that Goa freak community had expanded, taking in new generations who pioneered the modern electronic version of psychedelic trance party culture.
Today, there is a whole community who have grown up on the Goa-Ibiza trail. Their Ibiza rituals are less about pipes and flutes, as they were with the Moors, since the drum is now more usually the basic instrument for outdoor parties on the island. Tribal drumming at sunset can still be witnessed, for example, on Sundays at Benirràs (itself an Arabic name given by the Moors), a beach on Ibiza’s northern coast, and is another example of this kind of outdoor ritual. The psychedelic trance parties in remoter parts of the island is yet another.
Drummers at Benirràs gather from all corners of Ibiza and perform together in a climax of rhythm as the sun sets. It’s not unusual for small groups of drummers to appear in the island’s bars and superclubs from time to time as well. However in very recent years, i.e. since about 2008, the presence of drumming communities has started to be less prevalent on the island, as times have changed and the hippie community which celebrated the ancient traditions has begun for the first time to go more underground, or even to move on.
The Moors famously boosted the agricultural economy of Ibiza with their superior irrigation systems. But they couldn’t resist using the island as a renegade base from which to storm the Christians of Catalonia, Pisa and Tuscany, which coups de main saw Ibiza pillaged in 1114 by a Papal-sanctioned Catalan and Pisan naval incursion. Moorish domination nonetheless prevailed through several dynasties, during which time they laid the grounds for some incredible musical styles and traditions (especially when accompanied by natural mind-altering substances such as marijuana). The traditions were extensive and contemporary Ibiza clubbing practices are in many ways just a 21st century translation embracing many of the ritual aspects of that culture.
These days Ibiza is a part of the autonomous Balearic Islands community of Spain, and is officially called by its Catalan name, Eivissa. The Catalans (actually Catalan-Aragonese) first arrived in 1235 and ended the Moorish age of Yebisah, launching a beautiful period in the island’s history which saw a new ‘freedom charter’ exempting its citizens from military service, granting free legal aid and a provision for islanders to retain all profits from the sales of salt. Agricultural workers from mainland Spain were encouraged over to help with farming, and in return they were offered a house and some land of their own. Now the official language was Catalan, and the official church Catholic.
Bubonic plague has swept the island twice. The first outbreak is thought to have occurred in 1348, and the second in 1652. This latter extended assault on the island’s health saw the port declared a contamination zone and marked as highly unsafe, which basically closed down maritime activity. The pall cast by this grimly dark and dispiriting epoch provoked a destructive famine which is alleged to have taken the lives of one in six of the islanders.
But the one gung-ho archetype to have been a consistent presence throughout the island’s history (and even unto this day) is that of the pirate, or corsair. The Catalans even sportingly authorised local corsair activity, as they could see it was a great way to make money and, to a certain extent, this ‘if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em’ approach was even a reasonable response to the permanent inevitability of piracy in the Western Mediterranean.
‘Privateer’ was the preferred nomenclature in this era of pro-active island defence. Even in 1356, one Pere Bernat, a notorious Ibicenco corsair had been issued the state’s full authority to defend the island from marauding Moorish ships. State-sanctioned Ibicenco privateers were furthermore eventually entitled to an excellent 80% of all booty captured, while the crown was only asking for their 20% commission. By the 17th century, the Ibicenco corsairs had become widely notorious and feared in the western Mediterranean, not just claiming vast quantities of stolen goods, but also gaining a heroic reputation for recapturing slaves that had been taken by the Moors. In 1806 Ibicenco privateer Antoni Riquer Arabí captured the Felicity, an English sailboat which was helmed by the infamous, bloodthirsty privateer Michele Novelli, alias ‘The Pope’. Arabí’s boat El Vives, and his fearless retinue are still celebrated in local lore.
The capital, Ibiza Town had at one point in the 16th century been wasted by Turkish marauders, and conical watchtowers were later built along the coast and inland. Many of these still survive today. The Castilians came to claim the island in 1715, and quickly renamed it from Eivissa to Ibiza, imposing Castilian Spanish as the official language, and renaming the various island districts to Castilian versions of their names. They also started to set up local town halls, flogged off the salt pans, built more churches and installed the island’s first Catholic bishop. On the whole, historians tend to agree that the island would now enter a long and maudlin period of cultural depression.
Ibiza only began to recover its colour towards the end of the 19th century, when the first settling travellers were to arrive by way of the new ferry services to and from the mainland. The initial bohemian travellers of the early 1930s, including characters such as the artist and Dadaist photographer Raoul Hausmann, were joined by other artists and writers escaping the spread of dark political clouds such as the nascent fascism movement that were spreading across Europe. These escapees represented in many ways Ibiza’s first proto-hippies.
Not that this would lead to mass tourism just yet, since by 1936 the bloody Spanish Civil War had broken out and the lives of Ibicenco families would be affected in ways which are still too painful for most locals to talk about today. A nightmare bloodbath ensued as the island saw itself align with forces on two opposing sides – Nationalist and Republican. Island cafés were marked as designated hotspots and news centres for one group or the other. Massive bloody barbarities were executed by both sides. The most brutal single act of horror was carried out by the Catalan Anarchists, who had briefly gained island control after hoisting the Francoist Nationalist forces. The Anarchists murdered more than 100 Nationalist inmates who were locked inside a holding enclosure in the castle in Dalt Vila. When the Nationalists hit back, they scoured the countryside for Republicans and tortured, executed or imprisoned them (many subsequently died from starvation) in a specially constructed concentration camp at La Savina in Formentera. The smoke from the Civil War fires still leaves a subliminal trail around the island, and for several families many hatchets remain unburied to this day.
Christian holy days eventually replaced the traditional pagan festivals that had long been in place. The annual summer solstice Nit de Sant Joan in the north of the island is a great example of an old pagan festival that is now being held in the name of a Christian saint, while keeping the old customs and rites