The Spoon Bearers of Cantabria

Story | Listen Now (20 min)

Loom, pot and other archaeological remains of the Cantabrians, Archaeological Museum of Santander, Cantabria.

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Good morning friends. This Sunday I would like to tell you a story. Like many of my stories, this one was sparked by a dream. Only this time, it wasn’t my dream. During one of the many winter nights of the 2020 lockdown, I sat by the fire with my father. That night, he told me about a historical fiction he was reading on the Cantabrian peoples of Northern Spain called El Ultimo Soldurio, the Last Soldurius - Soldurius is Latin for a warrior, soldier or chieftain. Over a bottle of wine, he told me about the Cantabrians, the peoples of pre-Roman Spain who we are descended from. Most of all, he was excited to tell me what he had discovered about the women. In the book, he learned that the spiritual leaders of the Cantabrians were women. They were what we would now call shamans. And their lineage passed down within the family from grandmother to daughter. They were an animistic peoples, and their gods were of the natural world. We don’t know much about their pantheon. But we do know that they particularly venerated the yew tree, known in Spanish as the tejo. This tree had a poisonous sap that was used by warriors and by the female shamans. For the warriors, it assured their freedom. The Cantabrians valued freedom above all else. The warriors would go into battle wearing a necklace that held a glass bottle of this sap. If they were captured by the Romans, they would drink the sap and give themselves to death. In a similar fashion, the female shamans would too, give themselves to death at the end of their lives. When it was time, they would undertake a ceremony to bestow their power on their descendant. And then they would go to the woods, to sit under the yew tree, and drink its sap.

The symbol of power of the Cantabrian women was the wooden spoon. It was a type of wand. A power tool. And it was handed down in the initiatory ceremony, from woman to woman.

My father and I talked well into the night. I couldn’t believe that there was concrete evidence for female shamans in Spain, and I barely slept with excitement.

The next morning, I woke up to an email from a shaman in Australia who I consider to be a dear friend and elder. She will sometimes write to me with a dream. This one was a particularly big one. In her dream, she saw a great chasm. There was a fire blazing through the fissure. I was standing on one side, and I was joined by an old woman. The woman held up a spoon and handed it to me, and then I stepped across the fissure into the flames.

After reading her dream, I was bedridden. For two days, I was vomiting and in and out of consciousness, spinning in the image of the chasm, the fire, the old woman, the spoon. And then, this story arrived.

Celtic-Iberian megalithic standing stones, Archaeological Museum of Santander, Cantabria

The Cantabrian stelae are monolithic stone disks of different sizes, whose early precedents were carved in the last centuries before the romanisation of Cantabria. The symbols on them include swastikas, triskeles, crosses, spirals, helixes, flowers of life and glyphs that represent the sun and moon.

The stelae are carved in sandstone and are almost 2 m in diameter and 0.32 m thick. Here you can get a sense of their dimensions.

Set in 19 BC, this story takes place during the Roman invasion of Spain. Back then, it was known as Ancient Hispania, and each region was inhabited by various clans. In the mountainous region the furthest North, up near the Pyrenees, there lived a peoples called the Cantabrians. They were a pre-Roman Celtic-Iberian people who lived in what is now Northern Spain in the second half of the first millennium BC.

Cantabria was the last region of Spain to be Romanised. And the Cantabrians were able to fiercely resist the Romans for 200 years, a period that became known as the Cantabrian Wars.

In this story, I have imagined a world that the native Cantabrians may have inhabited before they were defeated by the Romans. The story is based on research by the Spanish writer Javier Lorenzo - who wrote the book my father was reading - and on my findings at the archaeological museum of Santander, in Cantabria.

The tale is told from the perspective of a young woman who is the last ‘Knowledge Bearer,’ the lineage of Cantabrian women whose symbol of power was the wooden spoon.  

This is my heritage on my father’s side, and this story pays tribute to these ancestors whose roots can be traced to the pre-historic caves of Northern Spain, whose spiritual leaders were women, and whose warriors’ values of freedom lead them to drink poison rather than be enslaved.

You can listen to the story in the audio link above.