Basque ethnography at a glance

Joaquín Donezar – Last waxworker in the Basque Country and Navarre. Source: Fernando Uhalde.

I would ask anyone who reads these lines to try to disconnect mentally from the 21st century and to go back two or three centuries. We have to go back to those times when there was no electric light and people lit up with candles, when most of the floors were wooden and had to be cleaned and gleamed, when the souls of the dead worried them to the point of offering them light to pass from one life to “the other”, when wax was often used as money, paying for the light of public spaces and the church with it… It was then, and it has remained so until a few decades ago, when wax had the importance and value that we find difficult to imagine today.

It has been connected with many uses and customs in our country, especially funeral rites; perhaps when most wax was consumed on the day of All Saints (1 November); for wax and the dead were an inseparable binomial.

Wax was used when the sick person was about to die by putting a candle beside him, a candle which had previously been blessed in the church on the day of the Candlemas (called Argie lagun, which means “light of accompaniment”). It was understood that this burning candle drove away the devil, who at this moment of vulnerability was trying to take over the soul of the dying.

Wax was used when death was imminent; in the street before the priest, whose bearer was carrying a viaticum for the sick, everyone knew that the candle lit on that long lantern heralded the passage of the Holy One.

It was also used in funerals, and the more the better; for which, when the housekeeper or master died, they first went to the hives to say, “The master is dead,” so that the bees might try to produce more wax. In the church, at the funeral, there would be no shortage of candles, candles, and burning torches.

Kandraxarnos. Source: Fernando Uhalde.

From this moment after his death, the woman of the house was entrusted every Sunday with the great responsibility of bringing the fire to the tomb of the church, for which she used the argizaiola (Basque funerary candles) which she kept lit during the religious celebration, in order to prevent the dead from having light on the way to the afterlife of that fuesa (tomb).

It was also customary, on the night of October 31, to place empty pumpkins on the side of the road, to which eyes and mouth were made, with a candle lit in them, with the good intention of leading the souls of the dead on the right road. It was the Arimen gaua (night of the souls), which was later called, without the essence of its purpose, Gau beltza (the black night), almost like a childish game, and which we celebrate today in an adulterated manner and imported from the other side of the well, under the Anglicism of Halloween — as if it had been invented there.

Over the past few decades, we have also seen the once very common trade disappear, chandlery; only Joaquin Donézar keeps with this craft, in Zapatari Street in Pamplona.

Regarding all this “wax  culture”, the resistance that amonas (grandmothers) still make every Sunday in the church of Amezketa (Gipuzkoa), with their argizaiola on, it is probably very difficult to consume until the fuse that has kept this culture alive for centuries is extinguished. What is at least in our power is to protect the memory of all this so that one day we can look in the identity mirror of our culture.

This is the raison d’être of the book that is about to see the light: Cera – Argizari (Xibarit Publishing House), a book that tries to make sure that our popular culture associated with wax does not lack eternal light.

Fernando Hualde – Ethnographer