Impaginato 5.p65 - Universitat Rovira i Virgili

128
Roslyn M. Frank
And this one which again emphasizes that creature’s presence was sensed in
some fashion throughout the day and night.
Mahuma, enuk hire beldur, [‘Mahuma, I’m not fear you,’]
Etzaten nuk Jinkuaikin [‘with God I go to sleep’]
Jiekitzen Andredena Mariaikin [‘with the Virgin Mary I awake’]
Aingeru ona sabetsian [‘with the good Angel at my side’]
Jesus ene bihotzian [‘Jesus in my heart’]
janian, edanian, loan, ametsian. [‘when eating, drinking, sleeping and dreaming.’]
(Satrústegui 1987: 17)
Then in reference to the daytime presence of the creature, writing in 1987,
Satrústegui (1987: 20) recounts what was told to him by a woman from the
district of Gainekoleta, a zone in which rock-slides were relatively common
because of the mountain nearby. The woman said that when a rock-slide
happened her mother would comment to her: «It’s Mahuma». Similarly, when
the informants spoke to Satrústegui about their experiences with the «night
visitor» they did not doubt the reality of the creature’s existence: that it had
actually come to see them. Then there is the folk belief that any hematoma –
the blue-black mark left on the skin that is associated with a bruise – was
caused by Mahuma having pinched the person, i.e., Mahumaren zimikoa
(Satrústegui 1987: 21). Granted, today that concept is understood as nothing
more than a mere folk saying.
In sum, the replicated version mahumahu gave rise to a phonological variant
in mahuma and then over time mahuma was reanalyzed, producing inguma.
The latter expression found in Basque today refers to a «butterfly», the «night
visitor» and is used as well as to refer to the incubus-succubus phenomenon.
The latter association suggests the possibility that somewhere along the way the
Catholic Church and/or Inquisitional authorities played a role in popularizing
the variant of inguma. And as I have mentioned, quite obviously, if all one had
to work with was the final phonological shape of inguma, it would not necessarily
occur to a historical linguist that the word’s etymology should be traced back to
hamalau. Yet the path taken by the expression inguma is a relatively straight
forward one, as one variant form after another underwent phonological
transformation and was rehaped, each building on the shape of the previous
form, with resulting phonological and semantic reduction being helped along
the way by exchanges and criss-crossing of dialectal variants over a period of
hundreds if not several thousand years.