Mari of Anboto

Mari of Anboto is the great lady of Basque mythology, said to live in a cave high on the east wall of Anboto, a 1,331-metre limestone ridge in the Urkiola Natural Park, on the boundary between Bizkaia and Araba. The single name under which the world knows her was fixed in the twentieth century: it was Jose Miguel de Barandiaran who gathered the Lady of Anboto, the Lady of Aralar, the Witch of Aketegi and other local figures under the single word Mari, and who wrote in 1972 that he felt inclined to consider her a symbol, perhaps a personification, of the Earth. The oldest datable text behind the story is neither Basque nor about a goddess: a Portuguese genealogy of about 1340 in which a woman with a cloven foot marries the lord of Biscay on condition that he never cross himself. Anboto itself reaches print around 1516 as a place of witches, not of a lady. This file rebuilds the chain link by link, names the shepherds, ironworkers and millers who actually told the tales between 1920 and 1985, and explains the cloud that sits on the summit.

The oldest document behind this legend is Portuguese, and it names neither Mari nor Anboto. Between about 1340 and 1344, Pedro Afonso, Count of Barcelos, compiled the Livro de Linhagens. Title IX tells how Diego López, lord of Biscay, waiting at a hunting stand for the boar, heard "cantar muita alta voz ũa molher" — a woman singing very loudly — and left his post for the crag where she stood. She was "mui fermosa" and "mui bem vistida", and one foot was cloven: "pee forcado". He offered marriage as soon as she told him she was "ũa molher de muito alto linhagem", and she accepted on one condition, "que nunca se santificasse": that he never cross himself. They lived together a long time and had two children, a son called Enheguez Guerra and a daughter. The pact broke over a dog fight: a wolfhound killed a smaller hound over a bone, Diego crossed himself and cried "Santa Maria val, quem vio nunca tal cousa!", and she "foi-se pera as montanhas, em guisa que a nom virom mais, nem a filha" — went to the mountains and was never seen again, taking the daughter, while the father held on to the son. Years later, with Diego a prisoner in Toledo, Enheguez went alone to the crag and his mother spoke before he could — "Filho, Enheguez Guerra, vem a mim ca bem sei eu ao que vẽes" — and gave him a horse that carried him to Toledo and back before nightfall. She remains, on her rock, an oracle you go up to consult; that much survives into the twentieth-century tales. (Quoted from José Mattoso's edition through Ana Maria Soares's 2011 study.) That text is a charter of dynastic legitimacy for the Haro lords of Biscay, not a piece of mountain religion. The mountain has no name in it and the word Mari does not appear: in the twenty-four pages Soares devotes to the legend, "Amboto"/"Anboto" occurs zero times and "Mari" zero times, against thirty-eight occurrences of "Biscaia". Medievalists file the lady with Melusine, and José Ramón Prieto Lasa gave the Biscayan legends and the Melusinian tradition a book of their own in 1995. Anboto enters print as a place of witches, and there is no lady in it The mountain reaches paper some 175 years later, in a different register. Around 1516-1517 a guide written so that the young Charles I might know the people he was to rule mentions in passing "una seta y eregia a que llamaron la caridad de los de Anboto". In 1518 Juan de Padilla, the Carthusian, rhymes "las Durangas de embote" among the sorcerers of his Doze triumphos de los doze Apóstoles. In 1535 Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo drops "esotros herejes de la peña de Amboto e sus secuaces de la condenada secta de fray Alonso de Mella" into his Historia general y natural de las Indias. In 1543 fray Juan de Zumárraga — born in Durango in 1468, by then bishop of Mexico — writes of "las bruxas o sorguinas que dizen que hay en nuestra tierra", and that que dizen que hay is his own scepticism showing: he thought the business delusion and wanted preachers sent, not inquisitors. All four texts are about heresy and witchcraft in the Duranguesado. Not one mentions a goddess, a cave-dweller or the weather. Iñaki Bazán Díaz gathered them in 2011 precisely in order to ask whether the famous "witches of Amboto of 1507" happened at all, and he left the question mark in his title. Meanwhile the Basque chronicler who did write down the origin of the lordship told something else. Lope García de Salazar composed his Bienandanzas e fortunas between 1471 and 1476, imprisoned by his own sons in the tower of Muñatones. Book XX opens the dynasty not with a fairy but with Jaun Zuria, the battle of Arrigorriaga and the two wolves carrying lambs that became the arms of Biscay. Sweeping the digital edition of all twenty-five books, the string a[nm]boto returns zero hits; the control run in the same pass on "Vizcaya" returns 98 in Book XX alone. The people who actually told these stories Everything quotable about Mari as a living belief was told by named country people in the twentieth century, in a handful of Biscayan and Gipuzkoan valleys. The first printed version of the best-known tale — go in facing forward, come out walking backwards — was taken down by José Miguel de Barandiarán from Pedro Sudupe, at Azkoitia, in 1920, under the title "Un rito extraño": the Lady of Amboto steals a shepherd's ram, a friar tells him how to walk in her cave, and he hauls the animal out backwards by the horns while she says he would otherwise have had to stay. In 1927 Fermín Garbayo had a countryman of Bergara write down and send Barandiarán the fullest early text: an ironmaster from Zubillaga, in Oñati, whose forge has stopped goes up to the Lady, finds her combing her hair in a fine room, and is told to have a friar bless the works. The narrator adds that many men have seen her in the air "with fire in the shape of a heap of straw", that "when she goes into the cave of Amboto she leaves cloud and makes a dull thunder", and that the cave is on the Elorrio side and as big as a house door. Later, Juan Manuel Etxebarria collected around the Gorbeia: from Juan Akesolo, 64, of Bertzuten in Zeberio, in 1979, the miller who cursed the Lady and had his mill stopped until he knelt to apologise; from Simón Goyoaga, 77, of Ipiñaburu in Zeanuri, in 1979, the tenant sent to the cave of Supelegor because his master was afraid to go, who found her spinning with a bullock lying beside her; from Petra Etxebarria, 86, of lower Orozko, in 1983, four sentences in Biscayan Basque about the Lady combing her hair and the sun rising when she had finished; from Txomin Aretxaga, 75, of Santa Cruz in Zeberio, in 1985, the seminarian ordered out of the cave with a gold cup he had blessed. Resurrección María de Azkue had printed his own harvest as Euskalerriaren Yakintza with Espasa-Calpe in 1935 and 1942, where she appears as Anbotoko Mari and as Muruko Damea, the Lady of Muru. The moment a scatter of local ladies became one goddess She had no single name. She was the Lady of Anboto, the Lady of Aralar, the Witch of Aketegi, the Lady of Murumendi. The name under which the world now knows her was chosen for her. In his Diccionario ilustrado de mitología vasca (1972) Barandiarán wrote that among the components of her present names "the oldest seems to be Mari", grouped the local figures under that word, counted more than forty caves credited to her across the Basque Country, and concluded — far more carefully than the use later made of it — that attending to her attributes "we feel inclined to consider her a symbol, perhaps a personification, of the Earth" (pp. 423 and 430). Juan Inazio Hartsuaga states the operation plainly in the Auñamendi encyclopaedia: it was Barandiarán who established the unified name Mari over the Lady of Anboto, the Lady of Aralar, the Witch of Aketegi and the rest. That is the decisive date in this file, and it is 1972.

Anboto (1,331 m) is the highest summit of the Urkiola range, on the boundary between Bizkaia and Araba, inside the Urkiola Natural Park. The gentlest approach starts at the Urkiola pass on the BI-623 between Durango and Vitoria-Gasteiz, where the sanctuary of San Antonio stands at about 700 m and there are marked car parks; from there the south side is a long but ordinary mountain walk of roughly two to three hours. The northern approach from Arrazola and Axpe, in the Atxondo valley, starts near 250 m and involves about a thousand metres of ascent over exposed ground; a third start is Aramaio, on the Álava side, near 312 m. Mari's cave is not a visit, it is a climb. Mariurrika kobea, or Mariren koba, opens in the vertical east wall above 1,000 m — Bazán Díaz places it at 1,200 m — a short way below the summit, and is reached by a narrow, steep ledge traversed from the Gerriko Koba tunnel. This is mountaineering terrain with real exposure and people have died on it. Do not attempt it because you read about it here: go with someone who knows the traverse, in settled weather, or look up at it from the Arrazola valley, which is where the 1927 narrator said the cave could be seen from. The Toki Alai visitor centre of the Urkiola Natural Park sits about 200 metres above the pass, up a concrete track from the Bizkarra restaurant car park, facing the whole crest from Alluitz to Anboto; it opens 10:30-14:30 and 15:30-17:30 in autumn, winter and spring, and 10:30-14:30 and 16:00-18:00 in summer, closing only on 25 December and 1 and 6 January (telephone 946 814 155). Confirm the hours before travelling. From the north face, the karst windows called the Ojo del Ezkilar and the Bentanetan line up twice a year with the hermitage of San Roque down in Arrazola. One correction worth carrying with you: Supelegor, the other cave in these stories, is not on Anboto. It lies in the Itxina massif of the Gorbeia Natural Park, above Orozko and Zeanuri — another mountain and another day out. The tradition has the Lady moving between the two, which is exactly why they get confused.