The Basques

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On the eastern face of Mount Anboto, thirteen hundred and thirty meters up, there is a mouth in the limestone that the valleys below call Mari’s cave, the Lady’s cave. From it a woman comes and goes. She crosses the sky sometimes as a sickle of fire, sometimes as a burning tree or a white cloud driven fast against the wind, and where she is living that season the weather answers to her. She is not a witch on a broom. She is a goddess — the presiding figure of the sacred world of the only people in Western Europe who never stopped speaking a tongue older than the Indo-European languages that surround them.

The peak of Anboto in the Basque Country, 1,330 meters, whose eastern slope holds the cave of the Lady, Mari. Etxeorratz, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Four hundred years ago, in a tribunal at Logroño, a different set of hands took up the same figure. Church scribes renamed her serving women “witches,” renamed her meadow-gatherings a “sabbath,” renamed the black he-goat who guarded the herds “the Devil,” and on the seventh and eighth of November 1610 they burned people for the world they had thus described. This entry is the distance between those two acts of naming — a mountain goddess and an inquisitor’s ledger — and the recovery, later, of the difference between them.

The oldest tongue in the West

The Basques call themselves Euskaldunak, and the word is exact: it means not “the people of a place” but “the speakers of Euskara,” those who hold the language. Their country is Euskal Herria, “the land of Euskara,” and it is a country in the older sense — a homeland, not a state — draped across the western Pyrenees on both sides of the Spain–France border. It has seven historical territories. Four lie in Spain: Araba (Álava), Bizkaia (Biscay), Gipuzkoa, and Nafarroa (Navarre). Three lie in France, folded into the department of the Pyrénées-Atlantiques: Lapurdi (Labourd), Nafarroa Beherea (Lower Navarre), and Zuberoa (Soule). Roughly three million people live across the whole, the great majority of them on the Spanish side.

What sets the Basques apart from every neighbor is that they are named by their speech and their speech is like no other. Euskara is a language isolate — the only living one in Europe. It is not Romance, not Celtic, not Germanic, not Indo-European at all; it belongs to no family, has no demonstrated living relative anywhere on earth, and was already old and already surrounded when Latin arrived in the peninsula. Its numerals count in twenties, its verb wraps subject and object and listener into a single elaborate knot, and its oldest words for the tools of daily life — for the axe, the knife, the ceiling — are built on the word for stone, aitz, as though the vocabulary remembers a world before metal. To speak it is to speak, in altered form, something that was here before the alphabet.

Scholars can trace it backward one confident step. In the Roman province of Aquitania, on the northern skirts of the Pyrenees, votive and funerary altars survive inscribed in Latin but studded with local personal and divine names — and those names are transparently early Basque. Nescato is the modern neskato, “young girl”; Cison is gizon, “man”; Andere is “lady”; Sembe is seme, “son.” This Aquitanian is the ancestor, or a near cousin of the ancestor, of Euskara, and its stones are the earliest written trace of the language there is. Behind them the classical geographers name the peoples of these mountains and the plains below — among them the Vascones of the middle Ebro, from whose name the very word “Basque” descends, and the Aquitani whom Caesar set apart from the Gauls, together with the Autrigones and others whose speech the inscriptions half-preserve. The living Basques descend from this ancient world, but they are not to be collapsed into it: the Vascones and the Aquitani are documented antique peoples, and the Euskaldunak are a present people who carried the language through.

The body carries a record too. The western Pyrenees were one of the refuges into which the populations of Europe retreated during the last great glaciation, and the people who came back out of that refuge left an unusually direct genetic signature in the Basques, who are counted among the closest living descendants of Neolithic and Mesolithic Europe. The most famous mark is in the blood: the Basques carry the highest frequency of Rh-negative blood found in any human population, around a third, on a deletion of the RHD gene that reaches nearly half of Basque chromosomes. Their paternal lineages concentrate a branch of Y-chromosome haplogroup R1b, the sub-clade DF27, at frequencies that set the region off from its neighbors. From facts like these has grown the “Vasconization” hypothesis — the claim that the Basques are the unbroken Paleolithic autochthons of Western Europe, the last of the first Europeans. It is a powerful and popular picture, and it is contested: the genetics show deep continuity but not a sealed vessel, and how far into prehistory the language itself reaches is still argued. The safe statement is the plain one — the Basques are extraordinarily old and extraordinarily continuous, and the more absolute versions of that antiquity are proposed, not proven.

Mari’s country

Over this world presides a goddess, and that alone makes it unusual. The supreme figure of the Basque sacred order is not a father in the sky but Mari — Mari, Maddi, Anbotoko Dama, the Lady of Anboto — an earth-and-weather deity who dwells inside the mountains. She keeps house in a series of high caves, chief among them the one on Anboto, but she moves: to the range of Aralar, to Aizkorri, to Murumendi, to the pyramid of Txindoki, and the valleys disagree, valley by valley, on the rhythm of her moving — some tell of a residence that shifts every seven years, and no single canonical version is right against the others. Where she is determines the weather; she gathers the storms and dispenses a hard justice, and her particular anger falls on lying, on theft, on pride, and on the breaking of one’s given word. Her consort is the serpent-dragon Sugaar — also Sugoi, also Maju — and when the two of them cross the sky together the hail comes down. She is served by the sorginak, a court of women who are her attendants and priestesses; the word will be important later, for the persecutors will make it mean only one thing.

The landscape around her is densely peopled. The lamiak are the water-women of the streams and springs — beautiful, long-haired, combing out their hair with combs of gold, and bearing under the water the webbed feet of a duck, or in the coastal tellings the tail of a fish. Fed a little bread at the riverbank, they will plow a field or raise a bridge overnight, leaving at cockcrow with a last stone missing. (They share their name with the child-devouring lamia of Greek and Roman story, and nothing else; the two are separate beings that a coincidence of spelling brought together, and the Basque water-nymphs are not that monster.) The jentilak are the giants of the old time, the builders of the dolmens and standing stones that stud these hills, said to have hurled the capstones into place and then, at the coming of a new faith, to have thrown themselves into a chasm. And the lord of the woods is Basajaun, the tall shaggy guardian of the high forest who shelters the flocks and cries a warning down to the shepherds when the wolf or the storm is near. He was the first farmer and the first smith — the one who knew the growing of wheat, the turning of the mill, the welding of iron and the teeth of the saw — and humankind holds those arts only because they were taken from him by cunning, in the tales by the trickster San Martin Txiki, “little Saint Martin,” who stole the secrets one by one. The black he-goat Akerbeltz guards the herd and the health of the animals from his place in the stable. This is a coherent world, and a moral one: its powers punish the liar and reward the giver, and its saints and its stones stand where its giants and its Lady put them.

The human answer to this world is the house. The fundamental unit of Basque society is not the individual and not the village but the etxe — the house taken as a whole: the building, the land that feeds it, the family name, and the dead of the line, who are understood to belong to the house still and to lie, in the old arrangement, under the threshold or in its own row in the church. The etxe passes undivided to a single heir, so that the name and the ground stay married across the generations; materially it is the baserri, the stone farmstead standing alone on its slope, and socially it is bound into the auzo, the neighborhood — the ring of houses that owe each other help at the harvest, the roofing, the burial, a mutual obligation as real as any law. A Basque was, first, of a house.

Christianity came to this country late and settled slowly. The lowlands and towns took the new faith early, in the fourth and fifth centuries, but in the uplands the old order held its ground for many centuries more, and the record shows the Church still working against the mountain religion into the tenth, the thirteenth century and beyond. What emerged was not a replacement but an overlay, a doubleness the Basques never entirely resolved and perhaps never wished to: the old figures kept their places under new names. The Virgin herself is called Andra Mari in Basque, Lady Mari, and in the mountain sanctuaries the line between the Mother of God and the Lady of the peaks was never drawn as sharply as the catechism required.

Because the pre-Christian religion left no scripture of its own, almost everything set down here reaches the page through a particular door: the living memory of the Basque country, gathered late but gathered carefully by the great folklorists of the twentieth century. Foremost is José Miguel de Barandiarán, the priest and ethnographer who spent a long life — he lived past a hundred — walking the valleys, opening the caves, and collecting the tales and rites from the people who still held them, and who reconstructed from them the figure of Mari and the shape of her world. Beside him stands Julio Caro Baroja, the anthropologist and historian who set the same material against the archive and wrote the classic critical history of the witch persecutions. Both built on Resurrección María de Azkue, the priest-scholar whose dictionary and folklore collections did the first great salvage. That this pantheon was recovered from folklore collected after Christianization is itself a matter scholars weigh: how much of the ordered system is old, and how much is Barandiarán’s honest systematizing of scattered fragments, is debated, and the honest word is that the fragments are ancient and the system that arranges them is partly modern.

The language, meanwhile, is not a relic but a project. In the late 1960s the Basque language academy, Euskaltzaindia, forged from the old dialects a common written standard, Euskara Batua, “unified Basque,” so that the tongue could carry a newspaper, a law, a school. The ikastolak — the immersion schools in which children are taught through Euskara — have driven a generational recovery so marked that among the young in the Basque Autonomous Community fluent speakers now far outnumber those among the old. Some 806,000 people spoke Euskara in 2021. A language that had been counted among the dying is being deliberately, and successfully, kept alive.

The inquisitor’s ledger

The other thing done to this world was to rename it as a crime. As the mountain religion was Christianized and then hunted, its goddess and her serving women were recast as witches: sorgin, the word for Mari’s priestess-attendant, collapsed until it meant simply “witch,” and the whole vocabulary of the old sacred was fitted, term by term, to the demonology of the persecutors. Akerbeltz, the protective black he-goat of the stable, was mapped onto the Devil. And the akelarre — plainly the Basque aker + larre, “he-goat meadow,” a name on the land — was made to mean the witches’ sabbath, and passed in that sense out of Basque and into Spanish and the wider languages of Europe, so that a Basque field-name became a word for a gathering of devil-worshippers. The naming did the violence before the fire did.

The fire came at Zugarramurdi, a village in the Navarrese hills near the French border with a great cave at its edge. In 1609 accusations of witchcraft, carried in part across the border from a parallel panic in French Labourd, took hold there, and the suspects were sent down to the tribunal of the Spanish Inquisition at Logroño. It ended in the auto-da-fé of the seventh and eighth of November 1610. Of the roughly fifty-three accused brought before the tribunal, some eighteen were reconciled after confessing; six who would not confess were handed to the secular arm and burned alive — Domingo de Subildegui, María de Echachute, Graciana Xarra, María Baztán de Borda, María de Arburu, and Petri de Joangorena; and five more, who had died in prison before the sentence, were burned in effigy. (English-language reference works often give the date as 1 November 1610; Spanish scholarship places the auto-da-fé on the seventh and eighth, the dating followed here.)

The caves of Zugarramurdi in Navarre, the great cavern that the trials of 1610 fixed in European memory as the witches’ meeting-place. Conxita clara, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0 ES.

Eleven deaths were not the measure of it. The auto-da-fé lit a panic that ran through the mountains and swept up, by the end, something like seven thousand people — the largest witch scare in Spanish history — and its most terrible feature was the children. Roughly 1,384 of the accused were children, some as young as six or seven, made to tell that they had been carried to the akelarre and to denounce their parents and neighbors; the denunciations fed on themselves.

It was broken from the inside. The junior of the three Logroño inquisitors, Alonso de Salazar Frías, was sent back into the mountains in 1611 on a visitation of nearly eight months, carrying an Edict of Grace that promised pardon to any who confessed and named their fellows. Thousands came forward. But Salazar, a lawyer by training, did the thing his colleagues had not: he tested the confessions. He examined some eighteen hundred people, found the great majority retracting and blaming torture or fear, found the children’s stories dissolving under questions, found witnesses who swore to sabbaths on nights they could be shown to have been elsewhere, and found not one hard fact anywhere beneath the mass of testimony. His report to the Supreme Council of the Inquisition stated the conclusion without hedging: he had “not found one single proof nor even the slightest indication from which to infer that one act of witchcraft has actually taken place.” The confessions, he argued, had made the crime; where no one had spoken of witches, there were no witches. The Council largely took his side. Its Instructions of 1614 wrote his skepticism into procedure — barring the use of confession alone, demanding external corroboration, forbidding the tortures that had generated the panic — and with them large-scale witch-hunting in Spain effectively ended, generations before the fires died down elsewhere in Europe. Gustav Henningsen, the historian who recovered Salazar’s archive in the twentieth century, called him, justly, the witches’ advocate.

The frame those trials built has proven durable, and it has to be named for what it is rather than repeated. Mari is a goddess, not a witch. The sorginak were her priestesses before they were anyone’s devils. The akelarre is a meadow. To describe the Basque sacred world in the vocabulary of witchcraft, sabbath, and devil-worship is to describe it in the language of the people who burned it, and the language was a slander before it was a fire.

Modern Zugarramurdi has made a business of the memory. The village keeps a Witch Museum in a former hospital, stages a great gathering at the summer solstice with roast lamb in the meadow it still calls the akelarre, and lent its name to the 2013 Álex de la Iglesia film Las Brujas de Zugarramurdi. The tourism is lively and the goddess sells; both belong to the story’s afterlife, not to the thing itself. Alongside the witch-trade runs a graver current — a Basque national feeling that reads the whole inheritance as one living continuity, the oldest in Europe. In the 1890s the nationalist Sabino Arana coined a name for the homeland-as-nation, Euzkadi, and though the politics that followed have been long and often bitter, the underlying claim is the plain one this entry began with: that here is a people who kept their own language, their own house, and the memory of their own goddess through everything sent against them.

Between the two acts of naming there is finally no contest. One was a woman with the weather in her hands, told of on the mountain for as long as anyone could remember; the other was a column of names in a Logroño register, most of them later crossed out by the one inquisitor who bothered to check. The mountain held the goddess and the register held the shame, and the Basques, still speaking, carry both — knowing which of the two is Mari.

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