Witchcraft

Witchcraft in the novel is not simply a synonym for satanism or a residue of the past: it is a varied body of practices and beliefs that characters connect to the history of Baztán Valley, the use of human remains, and a modern group’s sacrificial rites. Its decisive significance lies in the way ancient explanations are made to serve contemporary violence. The investigation examines what can be established about that violence while confronting a worldview in which sacrifice is believed to alter the balance of forces and bind its participants indefinitely.

Historical Roots and Unsettled Records

Sarasola places the valley’s witchcraft within a long history of beliefs that, in his account, were older than Christianity and became entangled with it. He invokes the inquisitor Salazar y Frías, who investigated alleged diabolical activity across the valley and into France. Sarasola portrays him as an unusually open-minded investigator who spent more than a year among local people, observing and checking claims rather than accepting them at face value. The historical account therefore gives witchcraft both cultural depth and an investigative problem: testimony produced under the threat of torture cannot be treated as transparent evidence.

Sarasola argues that fear of the Inquisition drove some people to confess practices they might not otherwise have admitted. Once the authorities had recognized the confessions as products of coercion, however, they also dismissed them wholesale. In his reading, that response left crimes unresolved, including reported deaths of children under two and adolescent girls, followed in some cases by the disappearance of their bodies. The record thus carries two opposing dangers: mistaking forced confessions for proof, and treating the violence described in them as if it must therefore have been imaginary.

The Arizkun grave desecrations bring this history into the present investigation. Sarasola interprets the use of human remains, especially those of children, as part of ritual practices, but distinguishes such use from killing a person specifically as an offering. He regards the latter as a more extreme act: not merely the handling of remains, but the sacrifice of an innocent life. Amaia Salazar asks whether this connects seventeenth-century witchcraft to the profanations at Arizkun and to the attempted sacrifice associated with a cave. Sarasola affirms the connection as his interpretation; the exchange establishes the framework through which he understands the clues, not independent proof that supernatural forces caused them.

A Broad Practice, Not a Single Creed

Sarasola rejects the assumption that witchcraft and satanism are interchangeable. He explains that satanic practice may involve a deliberate aim to honor the devil while offending God, whereas witchcraft is broader and need not share that purpose. In different traditions, he says, human remains can function as ritual objects through which practitioners seek favors or summon deities and spirits of the dead. He cites voodoo, Santería, Palo, and Candomblé as examples of practices he associates with that use of remains. In some rites, a sacred place is sought precisely so that it can be profaned; in the valley, he also points to a history of invoking Aker.

The stories of witches collected by the Grimm Brothers give Sarasola another way to describe what he sees as the core logic of sacrifice. He tells Amaia Salazar that the popular image of witches eating children need not be literal: the supposed nourishment is the life of an innocent person offered up. The image converts an act of killing into a theory of exchange, in which the victim’s life is imagined as a source of power. The distinction matters because it explains how the group can claim to pursue benefits through sacrifice without reducing its beliefs to a straightforward allegiance to Satan.

Sarasola also disputes Amaia Salazar’s insistence on assessing such beliefs by modern standards of logic, behavioral profiling, and established science. He compares confidence in accepted knowledge to the certainty once used to condemn Galileo, and asks whether what people call proven has always been tested. His challenge does not demonstrate that the group’s supernatural claims are true. It does expose a divide between the investigator’s demand for verifiable explanations and a believer’s conviction that the world contains forces outside the accepted account of it. Amaia Salazar’s silence as she looks out at the dark sky in Pamplona precedes a change in her expression from doubt to determination, but it does not amount to assent to Sarasola’s entire worldview.

Sacrifice, Age, and the Use of Remains

In Sarasola’s account, the perceived ritual value of a child changes with development. He distinguishes the period from birth to the second year, associated with instinctive learning such as standing, walking, holding objects, and imitation, from the period beginning with language, which he treats as a new boundary in the child’s relation to the surrounding world. Older children, particularly those not yet at puberty, may still be considered attractive for witchcraft practices, he says, but are no longer as effective a vehicle. This is Sarasola’s explanation of the group’s beliefs, rather than a medical finding endorsed by the investigation.

When asked where stolen remains might be taken, he resists the assumption that the destination must be a church or temple. Such places may be chosen for rites intended both to honor the devil and offend God, he says, but other practices have different purposes and may use human remains to approach spirits or obtain favors. The sacred place matters in those cases because profaning it is part of the rite. His answer connects the desecration of graves to a practical ritual logic: the location is selected not only for privacy and protection, but for what its religious status can mean within the practice.

The Modern Group and Its Debt

A former member’s account shows how this broad belief system was organized into a modern group. At twenty-five, newly graduated from university, he came to the area with friends for San Fermín and met a woman who invited them to a shared house. What first seemed like a commune devoted to tradition, humanity, and nature held discussions for possible recruits, including local people and tourists seeking spirituality, magic, or spiritualism. Members cultivated a communal atmosphere around a small cannabis plot, listening to the wind and dancing around a fire. They spoke often of Tabese, though the witness did not meet him until after the summer, when most visitors had left and he was invited to stay.

The witness identifies the leader as Xabier Markina, whom he remembers as wealthy, polished, and compelling. He describes the group’s attachment to him as intense: members believed he gave them power, and they were willing to do what he asked. Xabier Markina taught what he presented as ancient witchcraft, a return to origins and primal forces through offerings. He also explained megalithic markers and ley lines as signs of an older presence, and taught that offerings could awaken such forces and secure desired benefits. The group began with small animal sacrifices, but, according to the witness, the favors it received were followed by demands for more. The escalation culminated in a human sacrifice. The witness says the victim’s own parents offered and killed her; afterward, the body was taken away, the group dispersed within weeks, and Xabier Markina did not return.

The group’s obligations, in this account, outlasted its visible community. More than thirty years later, the former member encountered a doctor from the group during hospital visits for his eight-year-old son’s cancer. The doctor suggested that the illness could be addressed through another sacrifice. The father was desperate enough to consider the proposal, and he interpreted his son’s death as a consequence of the earlier sacrifice. Sarasola describes this as a balance disturbed by an action that must eventually be answered: time may separate an act from its consequences, but cannot cancel them. The former member insists that no one truly leaves, because every member remains liable for an offering, whenever the debt is collected.

The novel also supplies a less supernatural account of how such a group holds people. Sarasola describes destructive sects as identifying members’ vulnerabilities and reshaping them through belonging: recruits are made to feel loved, protected, respected, listened to, and important. In that account, special knowledge and promised power are inseparable from social dependence. Witchcraft consequently serves two connected functions in the story: it gives the group a sacred language for sacrifice, while the group’s methods make that language a tool of recruitment and control. The unanswered question of supernatural efficacy does not erase the human mechanisms through which its demands are enacted.