Mari

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From a farmhouse in the Durangaldea, on a clear evening, a shepherd can read the coming year off the skyline. The only question is which peak the Lady has moved to. When she keeps her house in the cave near the crest of Anboto, the rains hold and the grass stays green; when she has crossed south to Aloña, the wells drop and the season turns to drought; when she has gone to Supelegor, the harvest will come in heavy. And now and then at dusk someone on the road sees her make the crossing — a sickle of fire in the shape of a woman, arcing through the high air from one summit to the next, trailing flame across the valley. The weather is not a symbol of her. The weather is where she is.

This is Mari, the earth-and-weather goddess of the Basques, and for the people of the western valleys she was less a distant power than a neighbor on the mountain — one whose address they knew, whose house they could name, whose moods arrived as this year’s rain or this year’s hail. She is the nearest thing the Basque world holds to a supreme being. What happened to her afterward is the story of how a neighbor was turned into a witch: how the missionaries and, at last, the Inquisition recast the goddess of the peaks and her attendant women as servants of the Devil, and staged that recasting at an auto-da-fé.

The Lady of Anboto and her names

She is called simply Andra or Andre — the Lady — and then located by her house. Anbotoko Mari, “the Lady of Anboto,” is her best-known title, after the cave near the summit of the great gray limestone massif that rises 1,331 meters over the valley of Atxondo, the highest peak of the Urkiola range. She is Murumendiko Dama, “the Lady of Murumendi,” after the chasm on that mountain; Arrobibeltzeko Andra, “the Lady of Arrobibeltz”; and in a cluster of tellings Mari Urraka, or Maddi. The proper name floats free of any one seat, because she does not stay in one seat.

The name itself is disputed, and honestly so. The likeliest readings run it back to Basque emari, “gift,” or to amari — “mother” with the agentive suffix of an office or profession — either of them worn down by the loss of the first vowel. The resemblance to Mari, the Christian name of the Virgin, and to the Basque Andra Mari by which the Virgin is called, is the accident that made the later syncretism easy; it is not the origin. The goddess is older than the coincidence. She belongs to a genuinely pre-Christian, pre-Indo-European stratum of the peninsula — the world of a people whose language, Euskara, survives as an isolate with no proven kin, and whose speakers, the Euskaldunak, still live on the same ground and are reviving that language now through the ikastola schools and the standardized Euskara Batua. Mari is their inheritance, not a museum piece.

Because the tradition left no scripture, almost everything said of her rests on one of two supports, and it is worth marking which. The earliest written notice of the Lady of Anboto comes from Esteban de Garibay, the Gipuzkoan chronicler of the emperor Charles V, in the sixteenth century — a bare, hostile, early mention. The full figure was assembled much later, and from the living memory of the valleys, by the folklorists of the twentieth century: above all by the Basque priest-ethnographer José Miguel de Barandiarán, who spent decades collecting the legends caserío by caserío, and by the historian Julio Caro Baroja. It is Barandiarán who did the most to gather the scattered local tales of “the Lady” into a coherent portrait and to restore her to scholarship as a goddess rather than a scrap of superstition — which means that the shape of the pantheon we now describe is partly the shape his collecting gave it, a point his readers keep honestly in view.

The single most important thing that portrait shows is a negative. There is no male sky-father set above her. The Basque sacred world is not organized as a divine monarchy with a thundering king at the top; its supreme figure is a mother of the earth, and the powers around her — her serpent-consort, the wild lord of the woods, the water-women of the streams — stand beside her rather than over her. That mother-centered cosmology is the defining feature of the whole system, and Mari is its center of gravity. How much of its neat architecture is genuinely old, and how much is the tidiness of a modern hand arranging tales that were only ever local, is a fair and open question; the reconstruction of a “pantheon” out of folklore collected after centuries of Christianity is a contested business, and the honest reader holds both the antiquity of the figure and the recency of the system in mind at once. What is not in serious doubt is the negative itself. Across the variants, from Bizkaia to Zuberoa, no telling installs a father-god over the Lady of the mountain. She is answerable to no higher throne.

The limestone summit ridge of Anboto, the chief seat of Mari, rising over the valley of Atxondo in Bizkaia. Pablo Perez Perez (pablofausto), via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 2.0.

The moving house and the weather

Mari lives underground and up high — in the caves and chasms that open near the tops of the mountains of Euskal Herria. Anboto is her chief house, but not her only one. The tradition places her also at the chasm of Murumendi, at the cave of Gurutzegorri above Ataun, on Aizkorri and Aralar and Txindoki, on Gorbea and Aloña, in the deep cave of Supelegor on Itxina. And she moves. In a widespread folk variant she changes her dwelling on a cycle of about seven years, quitting one massif for another across the ranges — and because the weather is the fact of where she is, the peak she occupies governs the season. The formula that survives in Bizkaia and Gipuzkoa is exact and practical: it rains when she is at Anboto, there is drought when she is at Aloña, the harvests are abundant when she is at Supelegor. The seven-year period is one variant among several; the valleys do not all agree on the count, and the honest way to report it is as folklore that varies by place rather than a fixed law.

For the farming and herding valleys this was not an abstraction but the governing fact of the year, and the relationship ran both ways. A household that depended on the grass and the grain lived at the mercy of where the Lady kept her house, and the memory of that dependence survives in the sober register of the collectors: prayers said toward the peaks, small courtesies of speech, the care taken never to give offense to a power who could answer a slight with hail. The folklorists record these usages at the public distance proper to them, as the customs of a people rather than a method to be worked, and it is in that register that they belong here.

She rules the elements outright — the storms, the hail that flattens a field in minutes, the lightning, the drought, and the fertility of the land and the herds that all of these decide. She keeps a court of attendant women, the sorginak, who serve her and carry her work; the word would later be twisted to mean “witches,” but in her house it names her priestess-figures and spirit-servants, not maleficent hags. And she takes almost any shape. She is most often a beautiful woman in red, seated at the mouth of her cave, combing her long golden hair with a comb of gold. But she is also a woman of fire; a woman-tree; the sickle or bolt of flame seen crossing between the peaks at nightfall; a white cloud caught on a summit; a gust of wind; a rainbow; a she-goat; and, in the tellings of the Zuberoan valley of Kakueta, a vulture wheeling over the crags. Now and then the human form is betrayed by a single detail — one foot that is a goat’s or a bird’s — the sign that the woman in red is not a woman.

Her consort is the serpent. He is Sugaar — also called Sugoi, and in some Gipuzkoan tellings identified with Maju — the dragon-god of the storm, and when the two of them meet, the myth says, they conceive the tempests. One common version fixes the meeting to a Friday; another simply says that when Mari and her serpent come together the sky answers with hail and thunder, the union of the earth-mother and the storm-snake read directly off the weather it makes. The black he-goat Akerbeltz, guardian of the herds, belongs to her world as well, counted among the animals she favors and the shapes she can wear. So does the wild lord of the forest, Basajaun, and the golden-haired water-women, the lamiak, who comb their hair by the streams as she combs hers at the cave — a shared world of powers, none of them ruling the others.

What holds that world together, in Barandiarán’s collected legends, is an ethic, and it is a demanding one. Mari is a guardian of truth and of reciprocity. She rewards honesty, humility, generosity, and above all the keeping of one’s word; she punishes lying, theft, pride, boasting, and the broken promise. In the standard account she is even said to feed, as the folklorists’ record preserves the phrase, “on the negation and affirmation” — on falsehood itself, on the yes that is really no — so that a lie is not merely disapproved but literally consumed by her. The stories carry a matching code of conduct for anyone who comes to her cave, and it is described here at the folklorist’s distance, as the tellings preserve it, not as a rite to be performed: the visitor must show respect and address the Lady directly, must never sit down in her presence, and must never turn his back on her — leaving, as the Basque collections have it, facing the way he came, walking backward out of the mouth of the cave. Those who honored the form, and told her the truth, went home rewarded; those who lied, or boasted, or reached for what was not theirs, did not. The most famous of these tales sends a servant girl to live seven years in Mari’s cave; she comes back having learned to spin, to bake, the names and uses of the plants, and the speech of the animals — the goddess of the mountain as a teacher of the household arts, paid in knowledge for honest work.

From goddess to “witch”

The Christianization of the Basque country came relatively late and lay relatively lightly at first, and for a long time the Lady of the mountain and the God of the church shared the same sky. What changed her fortunes was not conversion but persecution — the moment the old powers stopped being tolerated as country beliefs and started being hunted as a heresy. In that turn the whole vocabulary was inverted. Mari and her sorginak were recast as witches; the attendant women of a goddess became a coven of the Devil’s servants. Akerbeltz, the black goat who guarded the herds, was mapped onto Satan himself, presiding in goat-form over a nocturnal assembly. And the ordinary Basque word for the place of that assembly entered the languages of Europe as the name of the witches’ sabbath: akelarre, from aker, “he-goat,” and larre, “meadow” — “the he-goat’s meadow.” A pasture became a crime scene by translation.

That machinery reached its climax at Zugarramurdi, the village near the French border whose cave and stream — the Olabidea, the Infernuko erreka, “the stream of hell” — were named as the meeting-ground of the sabbath. The Spanish Inquisition’s tribunal at Logroño gathered the accused, and on 7 and 8 November 1610 it staged an auto-da-fé. Of those condemned, several were burned alive, and others who had died in prison were burned in effigy; the rest were reconciled. Real people were killed on a charge built out of the demonized shadow of Mari’s world. The full weight of that history belongs to the account of Zugarramurdi and to the story of the Basques themselves; what matters here is only that the goddess of truth had become the pretext for a fabrication, and that the fabrication burned.

The correction came from inside the same institution. The junior inquisitor sent to work the region under an Edict of Grace, Alonso de Salazar Frías, came back not with proof but with its collapse, could find no objective trace of any pact, flight, or sabbath, and his reports moved the Suprema to dismiss the cases and end the burning of witches in Spain — the fuller reckoning of which belongs to Zugarramurdi and to the Basques. The skeptic’s dossier is the reason the demonizing frame can be named for what it was: not a record of what the Basques did, but a record of what was done to them.

Francisco de Goya, El aquelarre (“Witches’ Sabbath”), 1798 — the demonizing imagination rendered by an artist who painted it to indict the Inquisition, not to endorse it. Francisco de Goya, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

The recovery, when it came, was scholarly and Basque. Barandiarán and Caro Baroja did for Mari what Salazar had done for her worshipers: they returned to the sources — in their case the living memory of the caseríos — and restored the goddess to the record as a goddess, disentangling the earth-mother of the peaks from the “witch” the trials had manufactured. Their collections are why she can now be written about at all in her own terms. The reception is not only theirs, though. In the villages the old formulas about which peak brings rain never quite died, and the language that carries them is being deliberately regrown. And at Zugarramurdi itself the memory has taken a commercial turn worth naming with some care: the cave is a heritage site, there is a Museum of the Witches, and each summer a festival called an akelarre draws crowds to the meadow that gave the sabbath its name. It is easy to enjoy and easy to misread. The word on the banners is the persecutors’ word; the “witches” it celebrates were, at the root, a goddess and the women who served her — the Lady combing her golden hair at the mouth of the cave on Anboto, moving to Aloña when the wells were about to fail, crossing the dusk as a sickle of fire, and eating the lies of anyone who came to her door and did not tell the truth.

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