Cantabrian mythology

It seems that the native mythology of Cantabria connected, from the beginning and with the passing of the years, with Celtic and Roman mythology becoming partly related with legends and traditions from the rest of the Cantabrian Mountains. In most cases its deeper meaning, passed from parents to children through oral tradition, has been diluted, either because this meaning has been lost or because the classic writers did not gather all the popular wealth and mentality of the time, paying attention only to cults and divinities that were similar to theirs. On the other hand, the Romanization and later ascendancy of Christendom transformed the sense and representation of these pagan rites, reaching in many cases religious syncretism.

Even so, Cantabrian people still conserve more apologues and legends with a great ritual or behavioral component than significant tales.

Among the remains of myths that still persist as substrate in the Cantabrian tradition is the cult to great protective divinities, like the adoration to the Sun, as is evident in Cantabrian Steles, and in relation to the cult of the fire. Also, the Cantabrians worshiped a supreme divinity-father which in Roman time was associated with Jupiter and the cult to the Sun, and later with the Christian God.

Combined with the marked warlike disposition of the Cantabrians, appears a god of war, subsequently identified as the Roman Mars, to whom they offered sacrifices of male goats, horses, or large numbers of prisoners, as Strabo, Horace and Silius Italicus point out. These hecatombs were accompanied by the drinking of the still warm blood of the horses, as Horace mentions in regard to the concanos, and it will be, then, a true communion.

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