The soul's transitional stages

The soul's transitional stages are the secret group’s explanation for why children, especially those under two, were considered effective offerings to spiritual forces. In the group’s account, early childhood occupies a threshold between worlds; this belief supplies a rationale for its ritual rules and helps transform the killing of a child into a prescribed act of exchange. The novel presents the doctrine through a former member’s testimony, not as an independently verified account of supernatural reality.

The age threshold

The doctrine locates a first transition between birth and the second year of life. Jonan Etxaide explains that some cultures regard children of this age as moving between two worlds, able to see and hear what happens in both. The group therefore treats them as suitable vehicles for communicating with spirits or seeking answers to requests. Within this belief system, the child’s incompletely formed place in the human world becomes the very quality that makes the child useful to the ritual.

The account also gives the threshold a developmental explanation. Before two, children learn instinctively to stand, walk, grasp objects, and imitate; the development of language marks a further boundary in their relation to their surroundings. The doctrine does not say that children cease to be valuable after that point. Rather, it presents them as less effective vehicles once they have crossed the first threshold, while describing childhood more broadly as a period of ritual interest until another transition toward adulthood. Adolescents are also considered desirable, but a death before age two is easier for the group to explain as natural.

Rules for an offering

A former member describes the group’s requirements as more specific than age alone. The offering had to be a girl under two who had not been baptized. Baptism was understood as an offering and commitment to another god, and was therefore incompatible with the group’s own ritual claim. The group also required victims to be selected in same-sex, same-age groups and under identical circumstances, until a cycle was complete. The witness could not explain the origin of the sex rule; he said the leader had taught that this was how the practice had always been carried out.

The former member’s testimony connects the doctrine to a prescribed death and the transfer of the body. He says the child was to be sacrificed to Inguma by being deprived of air, and that the body then had to be surrendered as an offering. He also recounts that a child offered by her own parents was killed and her body taken away. When asked whether the same had happened to the girl from Lesaka, however, he says he does not know: the parents’ participation was part of the ritual conditions, but he cannot confirm what occurred in that particular case. The distinction matters; his account sets out the group’s rules without establishing every detail of the Lesaka child’s death.

From belief to obligation

The doctrine was part of a larger system taught by the group’s charismatic leader. A former member recalls arriving in Lesaka at twenty-five, after university, during San Fermín. What first appeared to be a commune devoted to tradition, nature, spirituality, and witchcraft became more coercive after the summer, when he was invited to stay. The leader taught that ancient forces could be awakened through offerings, and that sacrifices would bring the group power and favors. According to the witness, the favors were followed by demands for greater offerings.

In this system, the language of transition does more than describe a child’s supposed spiritual status: it assigns a role to the child and makes violence appear necessary to a promised exchange. The former member says that once the group had made its offering, its members dispersed, but dispersal did not amount to release. He insists that nobody could truly leave and that every member remained subject to a debt that Inguma would eventually collect. The doctrine thus extends the ritual beyond the moment of sacrifice, binding members to an obligation that can persist for years.

Echoes in the crimes

The idea of childhood as a state of purity and transition also informs Amaia Salazar’s reassessment of the Basajaun murders. The victims’ bodies had been exposed beside the Baztán River after being killed by asphyxiation with a fine cord. Their clothes were torn, their pubic hair shaved, and their hair arranged in two sections; their open hands, palms upward, were positioned as if in surrender or offering. A sweet was substituted for the sign of maturity removed from the body, an image Amaia connects with regression to childhood and the valley’s traditions.

The formal resemblance between these crimes and the group’s sacrificial doctrine sharpens the novel’s treatment of ritual imagery, but it does not make the cases identical. Amaia recalls the former member’s account of the under-two threshold while considering crimes against older girls, whose bodies were staged to suggest a return to childhood. The contrast shows how the language of transition can be invoked not only to select a victim, but also to reshape the meaning assigned to a body after death. In both contexts, the ritual claim is made visible through bodily treatment; the supernatural explanation remains a belief attributed to the group and its adherents.