Cosmic-Chthonic Cartographies
Ecologies of Myth, Memory & Grief
This space is not a platform for answers. It is a living ground of questions, mythopoetic textures, and eco-mythological offerings. Here we walk alongside the primeval mysteries of Atlantic Iberian mythology, ancestral underground revelations, entangled ecological narratives, dreams, and body-listening practices that emerge from both personal and collective wounds of modern severance.
We are not here to extract meaning, but to be soiled and shapeshifted by what we do not yet know.
Why this work?
The stories shared here rise from the tangled roots of dreams, research, grief, and a long process of unlearning the colonial, modern, and disembodied patterns that have domesticated not only our lands but also our imaginations. Nothing here is of academic authority or a “mystical certification.” It is an ongoing, situated, accountable inquiry emerging from within the wounded landscapes of the Global North, as an attempt to remember what it might mean to become response-able again, to hold paradox, to grieve, to tend, and to listen.
What you’ll find here:
Eco-mythological entanglements of Atlantic Iberian underground mythos
Interweavings of body, grief, and the sacred mundane
Story as decomposing and regenerating knowledge
Dream-rooted explorations that honor not only life, but decay, liminality, and emergence
Why subscribe?
I’m working to make all posts open to everyone. Paid subscriptions help support the depth of this research, allowing these narratives to continue gestating outside institutional and market demands. You’re invited to support if you feel called, but your presence here, as a living witness, is already part of the story.
Honor hystera. Re-member. Response-ability. (Un)learn together.
This is not a hero’s journey. This is a remembering.
By Sofia Batalha
Eco-Mythic Activist and Question Tender
Sofia Batalha is a writer, eco-mythologist, and facilitator of radical presence, whose work braids ecological deep listening, embodied myth, and collective repair. Rooted in the lands of Portugal, she moves through the paradoxes of decolonial remembering and symbolic ecology. With a background in ecopsychology and applied mythology, Sofia tends to stories as a brew, inviting entanglements beyond extractivism. She is the author of several books. Her offerings stir the memory of our porous, reciprocal place in the living world.
+ INFO: serpentedalua.com or Instagram: @serpentedalua or see books
Positionality Statement
These works emerge as offerings from a body situated in specific inheritances, as a white, able-bodied, cisgender woman from the Iberian Peninsula, shaped by the layered sediments of Global North modernity and its colonial, patriarchal, and extractive logics. I do not speak from nowhere, nor do I offer these texts as universal claims or authoritative knowledge. I’m definitely not a specialist nor a prophet (lol). I’m just curious, on the spectrum of cynicism. I’m a humble listener and weaver, remembering and engaging with what pulses beneath and beyond my own cultural training.
The stories, dreams, and research that animate The Sanctuary, Siduri’s Nectar, and Tales of the Serpent and the Moon are not presented as retrievals of some untouched indigenous purity… that would only replicate the violence of romanticization. Instead, they move with the cracks and fractures of severed lineages, fragments, and shards that remain accessible through dreams, rituals, myths, ruins, and the metabolic grief of historical disconnection. They are invitations to compost what I carry in my body, both the privileges and the losses of being entangled within European modernity’s severances from land, kin, and cyclical relationality.
In this sense, the Iberian Peninsula offers not only geography but also a dense matrix of eco-mythological echoes, pre-agrarian cosmologies, animist threads, matrilineal knowledges, and seasonal wisdoms that were violently subjugated over millennia. The narratives I engage with attempt to honor these submerged voices without claiming ownership over them. They seek neither to appropriate nor to restore, but to move alongside, humbly entering conversation with what still lives in the bones of the land, in the layered griefs, and in the silent singing of stones, rivers, and old trees.
This is not a project of escapism nor a solution-making endeavor. It does not aim to heal the trauma of modernity through simplistic repair. I sit with complexity, paradox, and grief, the anguish of extinction, domestication, severance, and assimilation. I write from within modernity’s habitat, attempting to loosen its structure, making space for relational repair and remembrance. I stand on the cracked ground of Iberian histories that still whisper through enchanted tales, bone memories, and ancestral landscapes.
May these texts serve not as finished blueprints, but as offerings for others who are also navigating the intricate, painful, and necessary work of relational re-membering. A fierce and gentle work that refuses extraction, superiority, or purity, and instead roots itself in accountability, complexity, and reciprocal belonging.
