Aatxe

Above Orozko, on the eastern lip of the Atxulo gap in the Itxina massif, there is a hole in the limestone that swallows daylight about a metre in. Strangers went up to it once, because a thief had died without saying where he kept his gold and the whole valley knew he had kept it in there. What came out to meet them was a young bull the colour of rust, with fire running from its nostrils and its open mouth, and they did not stay to argue the point.

That bull has a name in Basque, and the name is the plainest thing about it. Aatxe, also written ahatxe, is a contraction of aratxe, the ordinary word for a calf. It is the word a farmer uses at market, and it is the word Basque Bibles reach for when the Israelites bow down to the golden calf in the desert. Its red variant, aatxegorri, means nothing grander than “red calf”. The word is not a name. It just means calf.

What the word points at is harder to pin down. In the material Jose Miguel de Barandiaran spent sixty years gathering out of farmhouses in Gipuzkoa, Bizkaia and Navarre, the aatxe is not a person with a biography. It is a shape. The spirits that live under the ground put it on when they come up, and they put on others alongside it: a red cow, a red heifer, a bull made of fire on the slopes of Otsabio above Lizarza. Every district has its own word for the same red animal standing in the same gap in the rock. Zezengorri across much of Bizkaia, txahalgorri at Ataun, txekorgorri and behigorri elsewhere. Barandiaran filed the whole set together as one thing, and the tellings bear him out.

Most often the shape belongs to Mari, the woman who lives inside the mountains and is the nearest thing this tradition has to a sovereign. She has a great many forms: a lady in a long dress combing her hair at a cave mouth, a sudden wind, a white cloud, a sickle of fire crossing the sky from one peak to the next. The red bull is one more of them. Sometimes it belongs to something smaller and meaner than she is. Once, in Orozko, it belonged to a man.

The animal is described almost entirely by its colour and its light. Red coat, fire at the mouth and the nose, and in some tellings the horns and the tail burning too, so that the thing glows as it comes out of the dark and you see it before you have worked out what you are looking at. Nobody ever gives its size. That silence is worth noticing, because the word underneath it is calf rather than bull, and a good many of the stories therefore put something young and not very large in the doorway, which is somehow worse rather than better.

Above Bedaio one evening the shepherd from the Jazku Goiko farmstead was caught out on the hill called Sahats by the dark arriving early. Coming down, he met red bulls in among the trees, and they went to work: trunks splitting, branches coming off, the whole slope in uproar. He reached his own kitchen with his hair standing off his scalp, and his family told him flatly that bulls cannot break trees. They walked up in the morning to settle it. Every tree stood exactly where it had stood.

That is the ordinary shape of the encounter. Nothing is left behind.

The Orozko story ends differently, because there is something to be settled. The strangers went back to Atxulaur a second time carrying the dead thief’s bones, and set them down inside the cave. The bull did not appear again. They took the gold out of the deep hole at the back of the cavern and nobody stopped them. The bull, it turned out, had been the thief himself, unburied and unquiet, standing at the door of the one place he could not bring himself to leave. Once his bones were where bones belong, the guard went off duty.

Its powers follow from that job. It burns, it charges, and it holds a threshold absolutely: anyone who goes into a cave to break the peace and the silence is dealt with without much in the way of mercy. It keeps treasure, which in these mountains usually means gold that was taken from someone. It can put down the animal shape and walk into a village as a man to settle accounts with people who have insulted it. And it takes what it is owed. In Amezketa they told of a girl from the Irabi farmstead who went up Aralar after a cow that had strayed, saw a red heifer, decided it was hers, took hold of its tail and walked along behind it, all the way into Marizulo. Marizulo is Mari’s house. Her family searched and searched. Afterwards people said they had seen the girl standing inside the cave mouth with a red dog beside her, keeping watch on it.

Its limits are just as consistent. It belongs to the mouth of the cave and the road immediately outside; it does not follow anybody home. It comes at night, and it prefers dirty weather. And it can be held off by a dog, which is the most domestic detail in the whole business. Javier de Arratine had spent an evening at the spinning gathering in Urretxu playing at being a priest and handing out boiled chestnuts as communion, and the girls begged him not to walk home, because he had done something that would be paid for. On the road through the Laioa wood the red bulls came for him. He ran to the Tellerietxe farmhouse, borrowed a dog, and went on with a maize cake in his fist to keep the dog interested. While the dog was at his heel he was not frightened. The cake ran out at the Lauztiazpikoa turning, the dog went home, the bulls came back, and he got through his own door by a hair. The byre at Arratine gave nobody any rest that night: bellowing, and the noise of horns, and the noise of yokes.

The caves that the red bull is assigned to are a particular list, and it is a suggestive one. Isturitz, Sara, Aitzbitarte at Errenteria, Santimamine at Kortezubi, Balzola at Dima, the Akelarre cave at Zugarramurdi. Several of those hold Palaeolithic paintings and engravings of aurochs and bulls on their walls, and it is very tempting to run a line from the animals on the rock to the animal in the doorway. Nobody has ever managed to prove the line. What can be said is narrower and still worth saying: for as long as anyone has been writing down what Basque farmers told them, the farmers have been putting a red bull in the mouth of the same holes in the ground.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Aatxe in Basque mythology?

The Aatxe is a spirit that appears as a red calf or young bull, usually at the mouth of a cave, often with fire coming from its mouth and nostrils. In the Basque record it is not a single named individual but a shape that underground spirits take when they come to the surface. The same figure is called Zezengorri, Txahalgorri, Txekorgorri or Behigorri depending on the district.

Does the name Aatxe mean anything?

Yes, and it is not mysterious. Aatxe is a contraction of the everyday Basque word aratxe, meaning “calf”, recorded across the dialects in forms including aretxe, atxe and aitxe. The longer name Aatxegorri simply adds gorri, “red”, so it means “red calf”.

What is the connection between the Aatxe and Mari?

Mari is the great female power who lives inside the Basque mountains, and the red bull is frequently one of the forms she takes. Barandiaran’s collections describe the cave-dwelling bull spirit as most often a form of Mari, alongside her other shapes such as a well-dressed woman, a gust of wind and a sickle of fire crossing the sky. In the Amezketa story a girl follows a red heifer straight into Marizulo, which is Mari’s own cave.

How do you escape the Aatxe?

The stories are consistent that it keeps to the cave and the road immediately outside it, so getting home ends the encounter. A dog at your side is also protection: in the Ataun story of Javier de Arratine, the red bulls stayed away while he had a borrowed dog with him and returned the moment the dog turned back. In the Orozko legend the bull stopped appearing altogether once the thief’s bones were laid to rest in the cave.

Why does the Aatxe guard caves?

Caves in Basque tradition are the doorways into the world where the powers actually live, so their entrances are defended. The bull attacks people who enter to break the peace and silence of the place, and it also keeps hidden treasure, which in these stories is usually gold that somebody stole. In the Orozko legend the guardian was the thief’s own restless soul standing watch over his hoard.

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