Mari of Anboto: The Great Lady of Basque Mythology Who Rides the Storms
The Basques are the oldest people of western Europe—their language kin to nothing else on earth, their mountains never fully digested by Rome, their old religion surviving under Christianity's floorboards longer than almost anywhere on the continent—and at the summit of their ancient world stands not a thunder-father but a Lady . Mari is her recorded name (the coincidence with the Virgin's smoothed her survival, and may itself be the survival's method), and the folk of the valleys called her simply Anbotoko Dama : the Lady of Anboto—the sheer gray limestone peak in Biscay in whose eastern cliff-face opens the cave that is her principal house. There she sits, said the shepherds who repeated the sightings well into the twentieth century, at the cave-mouth, combing her golden hair in the sun ; and when she travels between her mountain houses—for she keeps residences in the high caves of half the Basque summits, dwelling now seven years in Anboto, then a term in Aloña or Txin...