Mari

There is a hole in the eastern face of Anboto, high in the limestone, a little below the summit and a long way above anything a sensible person would climb for. People in the valley below used to say a woman lived in it. She would come out and sit and comb her hair, and when she had finished combing it the sun came out. That was the whole of it, and an eighty-six-year-old woman from the low part of Orozko was still telling it that way in 1983, adding at the end the sentence that Basque storytellers use to close an account they are not going to argue about: that is what I heard.

She is the largest figure in Basque folk belief and she has no proper name. The texts collected in farmhouses and shepherds’ huts across the Basque Country call her the Lady, or the Lady of Anboto, or the Lady of Muru, naming her by whichever mountain she was living in at the time. Mari is the name the ethnographers settled on, generalised from local usage, and it is worth knowing that José Miguel de Barandiarán, who spent most of the twentieth century writing these stories down as they were told to him, was careful never to call her a goddess. He called her a numen, a power. The pantheon came later, and it came from scholars.

What she does is weather. The mist, the cloud, the wind and above all the hail come out of the mouths of her caves, and she goes across the sky as fire, in the shape of a burning heap of straw, and when she drops back into the cave on Anboto she leaves a cloud behind her and a dull sound like distant thunder. Barandiarán catalogued more than forty caves as her residences. She moved between them, and people watched which mountain she was in, because it mattered to the harvest.

The hail is not weather alone. In the old accounts hail has a name: the not-received, or the things given to the no. When a man denies owning something, or hides a flock or a crop or lies about a debt, the thing he denied becomes hers, because she is the one who keeps the world’s word. She takes it, and what comes back down onto his roof is hail. One man who went into a cave at Mendikote asked the Lady what she was doing and she offered him cider, and he asked what the cider was made from. From apples provided by denial, she said. Her larder is stocked entirely with other people’s lies.

You could go and see her. This is the strangest and most human thing about the whole tradition. She was not a distant power to be placated from a safe distance but a woman in a cave whom you could visit when something in your life had gone badly wrong, and the stories are full of ordinary working people doing exactly that. An ironworker at Zubillaga whose forge had stopped for no reason went up to ask her about it, was blessed by a friar first, and found her sitting in a fine chamber combing her hair. She told him to have a priest bless the forge, because there was a little snake in it. He also asked where the master of the house was, and she said he had gone to Zubillaga to hand out what had not been received. That afternoon the hail fell on Zubillaga. The forge started again the next day.

There were three rules and everyone knew them. Speak to her in the familiar form, as you would to a neighbour, not the polite form you would use to a magistrate. Do not sit down. And leave the way you entered, walking backwards, facing her the whole time. The first version of the story anyone wrote down was told to Barandiarán by Pedro Sudupe at Azkoitia in 1920, and it turns on the third rule. The Lady of Anboto had stolen a shepherd’s ram. The shepherd asked her where it was. In my kitchen, she said. Would you give it back? If you come for it, yes. A friar told him how to walk. He went into her cave and found her lying with the ram under her head for a pillow, and he took it by the horns and hauled it out backwards, facing her, dragging the animal towards him the whole way. Behind him she said: it is lucky for you that you left as you came. Otherwise you would have had to stay here.

The same courtesy saves a miller from Zeberio who had once sworn at her and found his mill dead the next morning. He confessed it to a priest, who told him to go up and beg her pardon, and to walk in forwards and out backwards, because otherwise she would take him and carry him further in than she herself was, and he would be damned. He knelt in front of her. She gave him back the mill.

Where she came from is not agreed. One strand of the tradition says she was a girl who was carried off, another that she was simply very bad, and that her mother told her in the form of a curse what she would become. There is also a much older written story that the ethnographers have always suspected is her. In the Livro de Linhagens, the book of lineages compiled around 1340 for Pedro Afonso, Count of Barcelos, Diego López de Haro, lord of Bizkaia, is out waiting for a boar when he hears a woman singing on a crag. She is beautiful and beautifully dressed, and perfectly formed in every part of her body except that one foot is a goat’s. She agrees to marry him on one condition, that he never cross himself. Years pass and they have two children. Then a bone falls from the table where the boar is being eaten, a hound and a smaller bitch fight over it, and the bitch takes the hound by the throat and kills it. Astonished, Diego López crosses himself and says God help me, who ever saw such a thing. His wife takes hold of the children. He holds on to the boy. She goes out of the window with the girl and into the mountains and is not seen again, until her son rides up alone to the crag years later to ask her how to get his father out of a Toledo prison, and she comes down to him and tells him.

Her powers all follow from the two jobs. She controls the weather, which in a mountain farming country is the whole of fortune, and she holds the truth, which makes her an oracle and also a court. Her limits follow just as neatly. She does not hunt anybody. She waits in the mountain, and it is people who climb up to her, and once they are there she is bound by her own procedure: obey the form of the visit and she cannot keep you, however much she may want to. She gives back the ram. She restarts the mill. In the medieval version she cannot even stay in a room where the sign of the cross is made.

The Great Goddess came much later. In 1980 the philosopher Andrés Ortiz-Osés built a whole theory of Basque matriarchalism on her, following a thesis opened by Julio Caro Baroja, and gave her the name Amalur, Mother Earth, which does not occur anywhere in the collected tradition and which owes its fame to a documentary film released in 1968. Anuntxi Arana pointed out the obvious objection: this is not an earth mother at all. She sleeps underground and works in the sky, and her business is hail, wind and the fate of the barley. If she resembles anyone in another pantheon it is Zeus. The woman in the hole on Anboto was doing weather and justice. Everything else is ours.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Mari in Basque mythology?

Mari is the principal supernatural power of Basque folk tradition, a lady who lives in caves inside the mountains, above all Anboto in Bizkaia. She controls the weather and enforces truth-telling, and the ethnographic collections record more than forty caves as her dwellings. The name Mari is a scholarly generalisation of local by-names such as Anbotoko Mari, the Lady of Anboto.

What does Mari do to people who lie?

Mari takes what people deny. In Basque tradition anything hidden, lied about or falsely denied becomes hers, and hail is called the not-received, the goods coming back down on the liar’s roof. One collected story has her offering a visitor cider pressed from apples provided by denial.

What are the rules for entering Mari’s cave?

Three rules appear across the collected stories: address her in the familiar form rather than the polite one, do not sit down inside the cave, and leave walking backwards, facing her, exactly the way you came in. Break the last rule and she keeps you underground. Priests and friars in the stories are the ones who teach visitors the correct procedure.

Is Mari a goddess?

The tradition never calls her one. Barandiarán, who recorded most of the material, deliberately described her as a numen or genius rather than a goddess, and the modern picture of Mari as a Great Mother named Amalur dates from the twentieth century, chiefly from Andrés Ortiz-Osés in 1980. The word Amalur does not appear in the collected folk material.

Who is Mari’s husband?

The folk texts are vague about him. One story recorded in 1927 mentions only the master of her cave, unnamed, off dropping hail on a village. Later tradition and scholarship name him Sugaar, also called Sugoi or Maju, a serpent associated with storms.

Related Entries

Sugaar, Basajaun, Lamiak, Aatxe, Gaueko, Odei, Jentil, Mairu, Tartalo, Galtzagorriak, Iratxoak, Ojáncanu, Cailleach, Perchta, Persephone