(by Pablo Burgués)
Don’t ask me why but the Ibiza people are real masters in the fine art of enjoying themselves. I’m not simply referring to dancing in a super disco (that do exist, and how!), I’m talking about a whole lifestyle philosophy that sets the daily life and every minute at the island. It doesn’t matter if it’s Monday or Saturday, it doesn’t matter if you’re the richest or the less poor in the neighbourhood, it doesn’t matter if you own a whorehouse or you’re the village priest… the most important thing here is social life and all the rest is “perhaps for another day”. Do you think I’m exaggerating? Well, let me give you an illuminating piece of information: the local holidays anywhere in the whole world last from a week to ten days, but in Ibiza villages they take from a month and a half to two months!!!! So, for the Pitiusans, the Sanfermines or the Carnival in Rio de Janeiro are sissy sports.
But where does the Homo Ibicencus get this endless desire to have fun? Based on a couple of real historical facts, I’m going to make up a shitty theory to try to explain this incredible phenomenon. Here I go:
It all started when the Carthaginians conquered these lands back in 645 BC (Before Café del mar). These nice gentlemen, besides kicking the shit out of anyone, were very observant and nature-lover people, and were pleasantly surprised by the fact that in the island there was no kind of poisonous creature: neither a snake, nor a scorpion, not even a miserable tarantula… The guys freaked out so much for this that they even declared that the magic of Ibiza was such that, if any undesirable person dared to bring a poisonous animal to these lands, the creature automatically died right after touching the ground. That’s really going for broke!
I’m sure that if they had asked some scholar at that time why there were no poisonous animals in the island, he would have quickly found a couple of scientific reasons to explain it. But, who the hell wants a boring and observable empirical explanation when you can have a crazy and random reply taken from a no less crazy and random religion?
Thus, the Carthaginians were fast in assigning these facts to divine providence and they quickly organized a Gods casting to find which one of them was the responsible for the purity of these lands. Among the endless number of deities at the time there was one that stood out among the rest. It was the god Bes, an Egyptian deity with faultless curriculum vitae that included a Master’s degree of pest eradication and several Open University distance-learning courses on how to frighten evil spirits and poisonous animals away. With such service record the position quickly was for him and the island immediately came to be named Ibosim, which means “the land of Bes”.
But gods, as the rest of us mortals, have a visible face and also a “cheek”. The naughty side of Bes was that he liked partying more than a fat kid loves cake. We only need to see his iconography to understand that the guy was born for show and provocation: dwarf, fat, long beard, tangled long hair, and with his tongue always sticking out as a sign of mockery towards everything and everybody. As if this were not enough to depict his mischievous personality, the guy is completely naked, happily showing a huge phallus that reaches down to the ground. With such a weapon it’s not surprising that he was also known as the defender of fertility and sexual pleasures.
Over the centuries the name of Ibosim mutated little by little, due to the constant conquests and reconquests of the island by the Romans, the Arabs, the Catalans, the pirates, the hippies, David Guetta… However, the funny and mocking spirit of the god Bes remained forever entrenched in the hearts of Ibiza people, and this is the reason that explains the innate predisposition to having fun of all human beings born in Ibiza and, in general terms, anyone who stays in the island for more than 40 minutes.
That’s all, folks, and that’s the end of this shitty theory.
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Translation: Dora Sales
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