Basque tradition, as collected in the twentieth century chiefly by the priest and ethnographer Jose Miguel de Barandiaran, centres on Mari, a female power who lives in caves and mountain hollows, travels between them through the air, and is associated with weather and with the punishment of lying, theft and pride. Beside her stand Sugaar, a serpent figure, and a body of beings including the lamiak at streams and the basajaun of the forest. How much of this constitutes a pre-Christian system, and how much is nineteenth and twentieth century folk material read as one, is a genuine scholarly question, and the atlas does not overstate the case.
What is documented rather than reconstructed is the persecution. Gustav Henningsen's study of the Basque witch trials of 1609 to 1614 reconstructs the largest witch panic in Spanish history, in which thousands were implicated on both sides of the Pyrenean border and the accused were said to gather at the akelarre. The Spanish Inquisition's own inspector, Alonso de Salazar Frias, reinvestigated the confessions, found that they collapsed under examination, and secured instructions in 1614 that effectively ended witch executions in Spain.
Christianity has been long established here, and Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus, was a Basque nobleman of Gipuzkoa.