Mari

Mari is the central figure of pre-Christian Basque mythology, a powerful female divinity who dwells in the caves and chasms of the great mountains of the Basque Country — Anboto, Aizkorri, Txindoki and others — moving between them across the sky. She is often described as a lady of striking appearance, at times ringed in fire, and she is bound up with the weather: the sky's state, storms, drought and hail were read according to which peak she was said to be residing in.

Mari embodies the earth and its forces; in the old accounts she rewards honesty, generosity and respect, and punishes lying, theft and pride. She belongs to a wider cast of Basque lore — the jentilak (giants), the lamiak (river-spirits), the malign Gaueko of the night — a whole cosmology tied to the land.

The Basques are among the oldest peoples of Europe, their language a linguistic isolate with no known relatives, and their mythology carries the flavour of a very old, pre-Indo-European world that survived at the western edge of the continent. Gathered by folklorists from oral testimony in the twentieth century, Mari's lore is a rare window onto beliefs that were never written into scripture.