Basajaun

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A shepherd on a high summer pasture below the beech line hears it near dusk: a long cry rolling down the folds of the mountain, too large for a man’s throat and too shaped for a beast’s. He knows what it means. He gets up, whistles the dog, and moves the flock down off the exposed shoulder of the ridge before the cloud that is stacking over the far peak comes across — and before the wolves that follow bad weather down out of the timber come with it. In the morning the storm will have passed over an empty fold, and the sheep will be safe in the lower meadow, and the shepherd will not be able to say for certain whether the cry came from a living thing or from the woods themselves. In the country of the western Pyrenees the answer is that it came from both. It came from the Basajaun.

The name says what he is. In Euskara, the language of the Basques, baso is the forest, the wild uncleared land beyond the pasture and the farm; jaun is lord. Basajaun is the Lord of the Woods — the great hair-covered man who lives in the deep beech forests and the limestone caves of Euskal Herria, the Basque Country and Navarre that straddle the mountains between the Bay of Biscay and the Ebro. He is one power among many in a populated sacred landscape, and he faces two ways at once. He is the guardian who watches over the herds of the people who have come up into his forest; and he is the first owner of the secrets that made those people what they are — the first wheat, the first iron, the first mill — secrets that humankind did not receive from him as a gift but took from him by a trick.

The Lord of the Woods and how he reaches the record

The pre-Christian religion of the Basques left no scripture of its own. What is known of Basajaun and his world comes from the living oral tradition of the mountain valleys, gathered late but carefully by folklorists who went from farmhouse to farmhouse writing down what the old people still told. The greatest of them was José Miguel de Barandiarán, the priest and ethnographer whose vast Eusko-Folklore field archive and Mitología vasca reconstructed the shape of the old sacred world from thousands of collected tales; beside him stands the anthropologist Julio Caro Baroja. When this entry speaks of Basajaun, it speaks at their distance — the distance of a story told by a firelight and taken down in a notebook — and the tradition they recorded is genuinely variable, differing in its details from one valley to the next, so that no single version should be fixed as the only true one.

The Basajaun of that record is described with a consistent physical particularity. He is a tall humanoid, the whole of his face and body covered with long hair that falls to his knees, and he walks upright like a man. Popular retellings inflate him to the size of a giant, but the collected tales keep him nearer to a very large, very hairy man than to a monster. In some valleys one of his feet — often the left — is said to be rounded like the cut of a tree stump, leaving a circular print in the earth, a mark a herder might find at the edge of the woods. A single eye set in the forehead is sometimes attributed to him as well, but that trait belongs by rights to another inhabitant of the same landscape, the one-eyed ogre Tartalo, and has been conflated onto Basajaun in error.

He has a counterpart. The female of his kind is the Basandere, the Lady of the Woods, whose name pairs baso with andere, “lady” — a beardless forest-woman who keeps house in the caves. Scholars generally read the Basandere as a later analogical creation, a mate supplied for the wild lord by the logic of storytelling rather than a figure of equal antiquity, and the tales give her far less to do than her companion. Together they belong to the deep interior of the same world in which Mari, the earth-and-weather goddess, rides the sky and keeps her caves in the high peaks; in which her serpent-consort Sugaar crosses the heavens as an omen of storm; in which the lamiak comb their golden hair at the riverbanks; in which the black he-goat Akerbeltz guards the health of the stable; and in which the megalith-building giants, the jentilak, raised the standing stones. Basajaun is the genius of the forest edge in that company — the power that lives exactly on the line where the wild land stops and the worked land begins.

He is also, plainly, a Basque instance of a figure the whole of Europe knew: the wild man of the woods, the shaggy upright man-of-the-forest who appears in medieval art as the woodwose, in the Pyrenees as the Homme de bouc, and in a hundred local names for the hairy thing at the edge of cultivation. Linguists have connected his name to the salvan, the forest-spirit of Lombardy, and some have proposed — the comparison is debated rather than settled — a kinship with the Roman woodland god Silvanus. Modern cryptid lore has drawn him, loosely, into the family of the yeti and the sasquatch. A more provocative modern hypothesis reads the hairy wild man as a folk memory of the long coexistence of modern humans and Neanderthals in Iberia; it is a speculation without established support, and it belongs in the record as a curiosity, not a conclusion. What the older comparisons share is a recognition that the wild man is not simply a fear. He is the forest thinking about the farm.

The double face: guardian of the flock, keeper of the first secrets

Basajaun’s first face is turned toward the shepherd, and it is benevolent. He is the guardian genius of the flocks that summer on the high pastures inside his forest. His great cry across the mountains is a warning system: it tells the herders that a storm is coming, or that wolves are moving, in time to bring the animals down to safety. His mere presence is a protection — a flock that grazes under his watch stays healthy — and the tales give the sign of that watch a wonderful concreteness. When the Basajaun is standing guard over the sheep, the bells at their necks are said to ring all together, in unison, so that the shepherd, hearing the steady chime in the dark, knows the herd is under protection and can sleep. For all of this the wild lord asks almost nothing. The herders leave him a piece of bread, and that is the whole of the wage of the Lord of the Woods.

His second face is turned toward human culture as a whole, and here he is not a guardian but a hoard. Basajaun is held to be the first possessor of the arts that made civilization. He was the world’s first farmer, the first to cultivate cereals, the first to bring wheat out of the wild; he was the world’s first blacksmith, the master of iron; and he was the first miller, the keeper of the mill that turns grain into bread. In an older, purer version of the story these are simply his, the wild forest’s original property. But the Basque tradition does not tell it that way. It tells, instead, one of the most remarkable culture-hero cycles in European folklore — the cycle in which humankind gets the secrets of civilization not as a gift from the powers but as a theft from them.

The thief is San Martin Txiki, “Little Saint Martin,” a trickster who wears the borrowed clothes of a Christian saint over the frame of an older figure. He is a Basque Prometheus, and like Prometheus he steals fire from those who keep it — except that his fire is the whole Neolithic and metallurgical revolution, and his method is not daring but cunning. The tales, collected by Barandiarán and his successors across many valleys, run as a series of clever swindles.

He steals the wheat first. San Martin Txiki comes to the basajaunak and wagers that he can jump clean over their great pile of threshed grain. He puts on a pair of enormous, loose boots and makes his leap — and, losing the bet exactly as he intended, comes down not over the pile but into it, so that when he climbs out and walks away his oversized boots are packed full of seed grain, which he carries home to sow. Having the seed, humankind still lacks the knowledge of when to use it, and this too he steals — by eavesdropping. Hidden near the basajaunak, he overhears them singing the calendar of the sowing: that corn goes into the ground when the leaf is opening, wheat when the leaf is falling, the turnip at the feast of Saint Lawrence. From that overheard song he learns that wheat must be sown in the autumn, at leaf-fall, and the mountain farms have sown it so ever since.

The remaining thefts turn on the same trick, and the collected legends give it a beautiful economy. San Martin Txiki wants the secret of the saw, which the Basajaun possesses and he does not. So he sends a servant to spread word through the town that the little saint has already succeeded in making one. The Basajaun hears the boast, and — unable to believe it — gives himself away with a single anxious question: had the little saint yet noticed the leaf of the chestnut tree? He has not, the servant answers, but he will. And there is the whole secret of the saw: its cutting edge is the serrated, tooth-lined margin of the chestnut leaf, copied into iron. By exactly the same ruse, in a legend from the Kortezubi valley, San Martin Txiki tricks out of the Basajaun the art of soldering two pieces of iron into one; and the axle of the water-mill goes the same way. In every case the Basajaun betrays his own knowledge because he cannot bear to think a rival has matched it — and in every case the wild forest’s monopoly on a craft passes, by a lie, into the hands of men.

This is the deep meaning the tradition folds into the wild lord. Basajaun stands on the frontier between the uncultivated forest and the human farm, and he is the frontier’s toll-keeper. The wheat, the sown field, the forge, the mill — the whole apparatus by which a people stops foraging and starts farming and smithing — is imagined as knowledge that already existed, complete, in the wild, and that had to be stolen across the line into culture. The Basque farmer looking out at the beech forest above his fields was looking at the place his bread and his tools had come from, and at the lord who had once owned them.

A brook in the beech forest of Irati, Navarre — the kind of deep Pyrenean woodland the tradition gives to Basajaun. LBM1948, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The demonized landscape, the trials, and the recovery

There is one more thing the wild lord is said to have built. Basajaun and Basandere, together with the giant jentilak, are credited in the tradition with raising the megaliths — the dolmens and the standing stones that stud the Basque uplands — and the land keeps the memory in its names. A place called Basajaundegi, “the residence of the Basajaun,” marks a spot where the Lord of the Woods was held to dwell, and dolmens carry names of the same order. One of the most striking megaliths of the Basque Country, the dolmen of Sorginetxe in Álava, bears a name that means “the witch’s house” — and that name opens directly onto what happened to this sacred world when a new religion came over the mountains.

The dolmen of Sorginetxe (“the witch’s house”), near Arrizala in Álava. Basotxerri, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The Christianization of the Basque country came relatively late and settled over the old world without wholly erasing it. But where the two systems met, the incoming one renamed the powers of the older one as its own demons. Mari, the goddess of the earth and the weather, was recast as a “witch.” The sorginak — in the tradition the servants and priestess-healers of Mari — were turned into her coven. Akerbeltz, the black he-goat who guarded the stable, was mapped onto the Devil, imagined now as a great goat presiding over a nocturnal assembly; and the Basque word for that assembly, akelarre, from aker, “he-goat,” and larre, “meadow” — the plain “he-goat pasture” of a herding country — entered the languages of Europe as one of the names for the witches’ sabbath. This was not a description of the old religion. It was a slander laid over it, and it should be named as such: Mari is a goddess, not a witch; the sorginak were her demonized priestesses; the akelarre was a pasture before it was ever a sabbath.

Basajaun himself, it is worth saying plainly, largely escaped this recasting. The wild lord was not turned into a devil. If anything the tradition did the opposite with his cycle: the thief who robbed him of the wheat and the iron was Christianized into a saint, “Little Saint Martin,” so that the culture-hero theft could be told in a Christian mouth. But Basajaun shared the landscape that was criminalized, and the criminalizing of it was not a matter of names only. It reached its climax in an atrocity.

The Spanish Inquisition’s tribunal at Logroño, which held jurisdiction over Navarre and the Basque provinces, opened an investigation in 1609 into an alleged coven around the village of Zugarramurdi in Navarre, where a great cave and the stream that runs through it — called Infernuko erreka, “Hell’s stream” — were said to be the site of the akelarres. Under imprisonment and torture in the cells at Logroño, dozens confessed to flying to the cave to worship a he-goat-shaped Devil. On 7 and 8 November 1610 the tribunal staged a great auto-da-fé at Logroño. Real people, falsely accused, were burned there for a sabbath that never happened, in a pasture that was only a pasture.

What broke the panic was a skeptic inside the machine. The junior inquisitor Alonso de Salazar Frías, who had signed the 1610 sentences under protest, toured the region under an Edict of Grace, watched most of the confessions retract under his questioning, and reported that he had found no proof that a single act of witchcraft had actually occurred. The fuller account of that trial and its cave belongs with Zugarramurdi and with the story of the Basque people as a whole; here it is enough to mark that the sacred world Basajaun inhabited was, for a moment, a capital crime.

That world was not lost. In the twentieth century Barandiarán and Caro Baroja recovered the mythology as heritage, writing down the wild lord and the sowing-song and the stolen saw before the last farmhouse tellers were gone. The recovery ran alongside the vigorous modern revival of the language that names him: Euskara, a pre-Indo-European isolate with no proven relative on earth, taught now in the ikastola schools and standardized as Euskara Batua — a living tongue of a living people, not a relic. Basajaun has had a second afterlife as well, more commercial than scholarly: Zugarramurdi has become a destination for witch-tourism, with its cave, its museum, and a summer akelarre festival that sells the persecutors’ fantasy back as folklore; and the Lord of the Woods himself has walked into modern fantasy, cryptid lore, and best-selling fiction — most prominently as the shadow at the edge of Dolores Redondo’s Baztán crime trilogy, where the old forest-guardian returns to a valley that half-remembers him.

He is still, at bottom, the cry on the mountain at dusk. A shepherd who has never opened a book of mythology can hear it, or say he has, and know to bring the flock down before the weather. The wild lord who keeps the sheep and hoards the wheat is the forest’s own account of how the farm began — told, in the Basque country, not as a gift from above but as a theft across the tree line, the day human hands first reached into the woods and came back holding the seed.

→ Related: Mari Goddess · Sugaar · Lamiak · Akerbeltz · Anboto · Aralar · Zugarramurdi · Txindoki · The Basques · The Vascones · The Aquitani