José Miguel de Barandiaran, 1960

Stream Three · The Basque Library · Entry 01

There is a sentence that Barandiaran quotes near the beginning of his work on Basque mythology, drawn from the tradition itself: izena duen guztia omen da — everything that has a name, exists. It is offered as a philosophical principle embedded in the language, a claim that the act of naming is not description but creation, that the world is as thick as its vocabulary. You could spend a long time with that sentence before opening the book. It prepares you for what follows: not a mythology in the sense of a tidy pantheon, but a dense, uneven, geographically specific world of named things — beings, caves, mountains, forces — each with its own local inflection, its own story of how it was told and where and by whom.

Mitologia Vasca was published in Madrid in 1960 by Minotauro, in the Biblioteca Vasca series, as a 162-page paperback. It is a slim volume for the weight it carries. Barandiaran was seventy when it appeared; he had been collecting the materials it draws on for more than forty years, across both sides of the Pyrenees, through a civil war and seventeen years of exile. The book is not an exhaustive catalogue — his Diccionario de mitología vasca serves that purpose — but a synthetic account: an attempt to describe the underlying structure of a belief system that had never been written down, that existed only in what people said to each other in farmhouses and on mountain paths, and that was, by 1960, in the last stages of living transmission.

The man and the method

Barandiaran was born on the last day of 1889 in the baserri Perune-Zarre in Ataun, a village in Gipuzkoa at the foot of the Aralar range — one of the landscapes most densely populated by the beings he would spend his life documenting. He trained as a priest and as a scientist simultaneously, studying theology at the Seminary of Vitoria while teaching himself French, German and English and reading deeply in the emerging disciplines of ethnography and the comparative history of religions. In the summer of 1913 he went to Leipzig to attend lectures by Wilhelm Wundt, the psychologist and ethnologist, an experience he later described as reorienting his entire intellectual project: from bookish analysis toward direct engagement with living culture.

He returned to Ataun and began to look at what was around him differently. In 1916 a neighbour took him to a site on the rock of Jentilbaratza, where he found a medieval castle, and the man — as if the physical excavation had unlocked something — began to tell him about the jentilak, the Gentiles, the race of pre-Christian giants whose bones lay in the mountain. Barandiaran noted it down. He had found his method: go out, listen, record, return. In 1921 he founded the Sociedad de Eusko-Folklore and began publishing the Anuario de Eusko-Folklore, a journal of ethnographic materials that would, with interruptions, run for sixty years. The first volume contained his Breves instrucciones prácticas para el investigador folklorista — a short practical guide for fieldworkers, with rules for recording testimony faithfully, classifying it carefully, and never imposing interpretive frameworks on the material before it had been fully heard.

That methodological scruple defines the best of his work. He was not a romantic nationalist inventing a primordial Basque soul. He was a priest-scientist who had absorbed enough comparative ethnology to know that what he was hearing in Ataun had structural parallels with material from Ireland, from Finland, from ancient Greece — and who was careful, precisely because of that knowledge, not to let the parallels swallow the particulars. The coordinates in his notes are hyper-local: this legend told by this person in this village in this year. The effect, accumulated across decades, is of a world reconstructed from thousands of such points, like stars gradually resolving into a constellation.

In 1936 the Civil War ended that phase of his work. Barandiaran fled to France, considered suspect — as he later noted with a kind of dry precision — simply because of his dedication to Basque culture. He lived first in Biarritz, then after 1941 in Sara, in the French Basque Country, where he continued working, studying the French side of the tradition and contributing to the inventory of megalithic monuments commissioned by the French Ministry of Education. He returned to Spain in 1953, settled again in Ataun, and resumed the fieldwork and publication that had been interrupted for seventeen years. Mitologia Vasca appeared seven years after his return.

What the book contains

The cosmological frame that Barandiaran reconstructs from the collected materials is chthonic in character — rooted underground, oriented upward toward mountain peaks, with the sky functioning largely as an empty corridor through which the beings of the earth pass. This is a significant structural observation. The Basque mythological world does not have a heavenly order of gods looking down at humanity. It has a subterranean order looking up.

The earth — Lur, or Ama Lur, mother earth — is the primary reality. The sun and moon are her daughters. The interior of the earth is inhabited, rich, dangerous: rivers of milk and honey, fabulous treasures, ancestral spirits. Caves are doorways. Chasms connect specific houses to specific springs miles away. The underground is not an afterlife but a parallel life, continuous with this one, accessible if you know where the openings are.

At the centre of the mythological system is Mari, the paramount female being of Basque tradition. Barandiaran is careful about his terminology: he calls her a genio or numen rather than a goddess, avoiding the hierarchical implications of Indo-European divine taxonomy. She is female. She is chthonic. She encompasses functions that other traditions distribute across multiple figures: she commands the weather, punishes lies and theft, governs the subterranean world, manifests in animal forms. She lives in the caves of the highest mountain peaks — Anboto, Txindoki, Aketegi, Aralar, Gorbea — and is said to move between them, the climate of a region shifting according to which peak she currently inhabits. In Anboto it rains; in Aloña there is drought.

She appears in different forms depending on the locality and the narrator: a beautiful woman combing golden hair at the mouth of a cave; a red heifer; a white cloud; a bolt of fire crossing the sky; a woman whose lower half is tree, or serpent, or flame. In some accounts she is compassionate, dispensing justice and protecting the honest farmer; in others she is terrible, capable of kidnapping young women who linger on the mountain at dusk, often as the result of a mother’s curse. She is not a moral figure in the Christian sense — she does not reward the righteous and punish the wicked according to an external ethical code — but she enforces certain fundamental obligations: truth-telling, respect for the natural order, the reciprocity between humans and the world that sustains them.

Barandiaran maps the distribution of her names and characteristics across villages and valleys with the same care he brought to archaeological stratigraphy. She is Mari de Muru in Ataun, Maya in Oyarzun, Marie Labako (Mari of the oven) in Ispaster, Gaiztoa (the evil one) in Oñate, Yona-gorri (she of the red dress) in Lescun. Each name is a data point. The variation is not inconsistency: it is evidence of a belief system that was never centralised, never written, never fixed by doctrine or council, but that grew differently in different valleys while retaining something recognisably common across all of them.

Her consort is Sugaar — also known as Sugar, Sugoi, Maju — a being Barandiaran describes as the male counterpart of Mari, normally appearing as a serpent or a fireball crossing the sky. He is associated with storms and lightning, which in the mythological logic are generated by his periodic union with Mari in the mountains. He has far fewer legends attached to him than Mari: the tradition is asymmetric in her favour, as if the male principle is real but secondary, a force summoned and then dismissed. In one legend he seduces a Scottish princess at Mundaka and fathers the first Lord of Biscay; in another he punishes children who disobey their parents. He is present but oblique, defined largely by his relationship to her.

The figure of the basajaun — literally lord of the woods — is among the most vivid in the tradition. He is enormous, hairy, a basa (wild, forest) being, the master of all the forests and the protector of flocks and herds. His shout carries for miles; when a storm is approaching or wolves are near, he bellows to warn the shepherds. He is also the original possessor of agricultural knowledge — the first to cultivate wheat, the first to work iron — which was stolen from him by human trickery in stories that have structural parallels throughout European folklore. He is terrifying in appearance and benevolent in function, a figure of the pre-human world that has not entirely withdrawn from this one.

The laminak (singular lamiña) are female beings who inhabit rivers, springs, and caves, appearing characteristically at dawn or dusk to comb their long hair with golden combs. They are neither purely benevolent nor purely dangerous: they live in the ambivalent zone between the human and the supernatural, capable of great assistance and of great harm. They have bird-feet, or goat-hooves, or webbed feet — the animal appendage varying by region — which mark them as creatures of a different order even when their upper bodies appear entirely human. Julio Caro Baroja, who wrote the prologue to the Txertoa edition of Mitologia Vasca, traces the lamiña name to classical sources, linking it to Lamia of Libya and suggesting a transmission through Roman Spain; Barandiaran notes the parallel but is more cautious about origin, preferring to describe the being as it appears in the evidence rather than to claim a source.

The jentilak — the Gentiles — are a race of pre-Christian giants to whom the tradition attributes the construction of the megalithic monuments: the cromlechs, the dolmens, the standing stones that mark the Basque high country. They had great strength and threw enormous rocks across valleys. They disappeared at the coming of Christ: a luminous star appeared in the sky, and the eldest jentil, asked what it meant, replied that it announced Kixmi (Christ) and the end of their race. All but two went underground. The two who remained became the basajaun, guardian of the forests, and Olentzero, the Basque figure of Christmas. The myth is layered in an immediately visible way — the Christianisation of an older story is almost transparent, the Christian frame barely concealing the pre-Christian content beneath it — and it is precisely this layering that Barandiaran treats as data rather than embarrassment.

The problem of the intermediary

There is a question any serious reader must bring to this book, and Barandiaran himself circles it repeatedly without ever quite settling it: to what extent does Mitologia Vasca describe something that existed independently in Basque folk belief, and to what extent does it describe something that Barandiaran — by collecting, classifying, and synthesising — helped to create?

This is not a cynical question. It applies to every major folklore collection in European history, from the Brothers Grimm onward, and the honest answer is always: both. Collection is never neutral. The choice of what to ask, what to record, what to regard as central and what as peripheral, what to connect and what to leave separate — all of these are acts of interpretation. Barandiaran’s questionnaire method, for all its rigour, guided informants toward certain kinds of material. His decision to treat Mari as the central figure of the system, around whom the other beings are organised, reflects a scholarly judgement about structure that may or may not correspond to how the people he was talking to thought of her.

The subsequent critical literature has been attentive to this problem. Julio Caro Baroja, in his prologue, was already raising questions about premature synthesis. Later scholars — Andrés Ortiz-Osés, Juan Inazio Hartsuaga — built entire theoretical edifices on Barandiaran’s foundation, sometimes in ways that went far beyond what the evidence actually supported. Ortiz-Osés, reading the mythology through Jungian and hermeneutic frameworks, made Mari into the great Goddess-Mother, the symbol of a matrial Basque psyche at the origin of culture. It is a powerful interpretation. It is also, as more recent scholarship has argued, a significant overreach — importing a theoretical apparatus that the collected material cannot bear, and projecting onto the tradition a coherence and ideological weight it did not possess in the minds of the farmers and shepherds from whom Barandiaran gathered it.

The phrase izena duen guztia omen da — everything that has a name, exists — contains within it a warning about its own use. Omen is a Basque evidential particle meaning reportedly, allegedly, it is said. The full sentence acknowledges its own hearsay status: everything that has a name, it is said, exists. The mythology is transmitted in that conditional register. Barandiaran’s greatest fidelity to his materials is that he generally preserves that conditionality. He notes where legends contradict each other, where a name appears only in one valley, where an informant’s account diverges from all others. The book is full of these small acknowledgements of uncertainty. They are methodologically honest and they are also, read carefully, a constant reminder that what you are holding is a scholar’s reconstruction, not a scripture.

The pre-Christian question

One of the things that makes Mitologia Vasca genuinely remarkable is the window it opens onto a stratum of belief that predates Christian influence in the region — and the difficulty of knowing precisely how deep that stratum goes or how intact it is.

The structural argument for antiquity is strong. The Basque language — Euskara — is a language isolate, unrelated to any other known living language, and almost certainly predates the Indo-European expansion into western Europe. This means that Basque-speaking communities had several millennia of continuous cultural life before the Roman arrival, and several more before the Christian mission. A mythology this deeply embedded in the landscape, this indifferent to the theological categories of either classical paganism or Christianity, this oriented around chthonic rather than heavenly principles, is plausibly very old.

But plausibility is not evidence, and the honest position is agnosticism about specific claims. The jentilak disappearing at the coming of Kixmi is clearly a post-Christian accretion: the myth works precisely by incorporating the Christian event into a pre-Christian narrative structure. The figure of the sorginak (witches, attendants of Mari) has been complicated by the 1609 Inquisition trials in Zugarramurdi — the subject of the library’s next long read — which generated a large body of testimony about Basque witch-beliefs, testimony that was produced under duress and shaped by inquisitorial categories that may or may not correspond to anything in actual Basque practice. The relationship between the sorginak of the mythology and the witches of the trials is genuinely unclear, and Barandiaran is appropriately careful about it.

What can be said with confidence is that the mythology Barandiaran documented represents something that had not been fully absorbed into either classical or Christian frameworks, that it preserves cosmological orientations — the priority of the chthonic, the landscape as inhabited and animate, the moral weight of natural reciprocity — that diverge in interesting ways from both the Indo-European sky-god traditions and the Christian tradition of transcendent deity. Whether this constitutes evidence of an extremely ancient continuity or simply of a regional culture that developed particular characteristics in partial isolation is a question the evidence cannot resolve. The mythology stands as a thing in its own right, whatever its age.

How to read it

Mitologia Vasca is a short book and a demanding one. It rewards slow reading and a certain willingness to suspend the organising habits that European mythology — Greek, Norse, Celtic — has installed in most readers’ minds. There is no Olympus here, no genealogy of gods, no heroic cycle in the classical sense. What there is instead is a world that is densely populated at the level of the landscape: every mountain a potential dwelling, every cave a doorway, every spring a point of contact between the human and the supernatural. The mythology is local in the most literal sense — it belongs to specific places, named with the precision of people who have walked them for generations.

The practical recommendations are as follows.

Read with a map. The place-names in Barandiaran’s notes — Ataun, Anboto, Aralar, Cegama, Cortézubi, Oyarzun — are real places, most of them accessible. The mythology is not separable from the topography. A great deal becomes clearer when you can see that Anboto and Txindoki are both visible from the same valley, that the caves Barandiaran identifies as the dwellings of Mari are genuine caves in actual rock-faces at specific altitudes. The landscape is not the backdrop to the mythology; it is the mythology’s primary text.

Read Caro Baroja alongside it. His prologue to the Txertoa edition is essential, and his larger work Los vascos (1949, available in Spanish) provides the anthropological and historical context within which Mitologia Vasca makes full sense. Caro Baroja was skeptical of premature synthesis and attentive to the processes by which folk material gets transmitted and distorted; reading him next to Barandiaran keeps the critical intelligence engaged.

Read the Eusko-Folklore materials where possible. The Anuario de Eusko-Folklore volumes, published between 1921 and 1935 and then resumed from 1955, contain the raw fieldwork from which Mitologia Vasca draws its conclusions. They are in Spanish and Basque, without English translation, but several have been translated informally — some of the third series material is now appearing in English on Bill Corcoran’s Buber’s Basque Page, a volunteer translation project of real value for readers without Spanish.

Finally, read the mythology alongside the landscape — not as metaphor but as instruction. Barandiaran believed, with an intensity that deepened over his long life, that the landscape of the Basque Country was itself a primary source, that the mountains and caves and stone circles were not merely the setting of the tradition but its substrate, the material condition of its specific character. The best preparation for reading Mitologia Vasca is to stand on a Basque mendi at dusk, when the light is leaving the peaks and the valleys are full of shadow, and to notice that the world does not feel empty.

Availability

Mitologia Vasca is in print in Spain, published by Txertoa in San Sebastián, with a prologue by Julio Caro Baroja, an analytical index, and a bibliography. ISBN 8471481170. It is available through Elkar, the Basque bookshop network, and through Spanish booksellers. No English translation exists.

The Barandiaran Foundation (barandiaranfundazioa.eus) maintains a digital archive of his publications, with some materials accessible online. The Anuario de Eusko-Folklore volumes are held in major Basque collections and in some university libraries with Iberian studies holdings.

The Barandiaran Museum in Ataun, housed in the restored seventeenth-century mill of Larruntza, is dedicated to his life and work, and is worth a visit as part of any engagement with this material. Ataun is in the Goierri region of Gipuzkoa, in the valley between the Aralar and Aizkorri ranges — the exact landscape of the mythology. The museum’s address: Barrio San Gregorio, Ataun.

Next in Stream Three: Obabakoak — Bernardo Atxaga, 1988