The Basque History of the World - Mark Kurlansky [38]
The accused was not initially informed of the charges. She was simply told to confess what was in her heart. If the accused waited until being charged, it was too late to avoid torture. The Inquisition, contrary to popular belief, saw torture as a last resort and was suspicious of confessions coerced by violence, though all confessions were made at least under the threat of violence.
Accusations of witchcraft were usually initiated by Basque peasants settling a grudge or explaining a misfortune. In Pío Baroja’s novella La Dama de Urtubi, a young man runs off to America to earn wealth and stature so he can court an aristocratic woman. But when he returns, he finds that she is interested in another man and concludes that the two have been bonded by a witch’s spell.
This is typical. A crop fails, someone falls ill, the apple tree didn’t bear fruit. Someone had clearly cast a spell. And there was often agreement on who the witch was—a woman who seemed to hold a grudge for some perceived wrong.
At the edge of St Pée, a forest begins which crosses the border at Dancharia, near Urdax, and drops down into a deep valley where villages are built in the dark quiet mountain crevices and farmers work the rugged airy slopes. In 1608, a young woman named María de Ximildegui returned to her native village of Zugarramurdi in this self-contained little world. The village, whose name means “hill of elms,” would never be the same.
An illustration of the Basque billy goat by Jean Paul Tillac (1880-1969) for a book by Arthur Campión. Born in the French southwest, Tillac, whose drawings chronicled Basque life, had one Basque grandparent. (Collection of the Musée Basque, Bayonne)
Young María de Ximildegui had spent several years across the border in Ciboure. Her family had remained there, but she returned to her hometown, where she informed the local authorities that she had been a witch in Labourd, and during that time she had attended a sabbath in Zugarramurdi. She wanted to name names.
She said that while living in Ciboure, she had been an active witch for eighteen months before trying to break away, a struggle with the devil that resulted in weeks of illness. A priest in Hendaye had saved her through confession.
Ximildegui named twenty-two-year-old María de Jureteguía as one of the participants at the Zugarramurdi ceremony. Jureteguía, along with her husband, accused Ximildegui of lying. But in a public confrontation, Ximildegui was so convincing, offering meticulous details, that the townspeople began little by little to believe her and urged María de Jureteguía to confess. Too late, Jureteguía realized that she was now in the position of being a suspected witch. Overtaken with fear and the exasperation of what had turned into a losing shouting match, she fainted.
Later, the panic-stricken Jureteguía realized that since she was believed to be a witch, she could only save herself by the mercy that comes after confession. So she confessed to having been led astray by her fifty-two-year-old aunt, María Chipía Barrenechea. So began a string of denunciations that unraveled the village.
After her confession, Jureteguía said that she was being pursued by witches, whom she would try to fend off with the sign of the cross. She would see them in the yard disguised as cats, dogs, and pigs. The townspeople reacted to this news without a hint of skepticism and began searching houses for toads. They all knew that toads were necessary companions to witches. The toad search lead to Barrenechea’s octogenarian sister Graciana, who would in time confess to being the queen witch of Zugarramurdi.
The first four witches in Zugarramurdi were accused of using an assortment of spells and powders to kill a total of eighteen children and eleven adults, and cause various harm to people, livestock, and crops. Eventually, ten witches confessed to a several-decade crime spree that included killing children and sucking their blood.
Incredibly,