Builder Mouras

MYTHICAL TERRITORY

Aug 09, 2023

Throughout most of Europe, the construction of megalithic monuments was attributed to giants, since only a colossal force could have erected them, or so it was believed. In more archaic European traditions, primordial giants are hermaphroditic beings - at least not governed by the confines of today's gender binary - and are not only the first inhabitants of the world, but also the fathers of the gods. The term 'giant' functioned as a generic term that applied to various creatures, relating to large entities, spirits and local gods.

The rich legacy of the Mouras, the faerie-serpents, who live in mysterious springs and quench thirst with medicinal and enchanted water, also brings us to the presence of the Moor Stone, or their magical ability to build megaliths, castles, fortresses and temples near springs and place them on their sacred sites. According to local legends, it was the Building Mouras who carried the gigantic stones on their heads while spinning, building dolmens or castles overnight.

The Building Mouras mark sacred places of transition between worlds in the cosmic-tonic cartography. They are both gatekeepers and markers of these magical places, guarding the passage to other dimensions. These are places where we can feel the touch of enchantment, inviting us to enter the stories with our bodies and hearts, not just our heads.

Here we breathe poetry and free ourselves from the tyranny of perfection, meaning, or harmony. We embrace what is with curiosity, allowing revelation and nourishment of the Soul, immersing ourselves in inner and outer, local and seasonal landscapes, and gathering ancestral clues of metamorphosis.

Dendritic Stories

In this journey of fractal and dendritic connection, both cosmic and telluric, finding the fibres of the once woven basket, the shards of clay of the distantly broken pitcher, both the visible and invisible fragments, and even the imagined ones. We have invoked some mythical and ancestral entities of the Iberian cosmic-tonic territory, to help us open space in our hearts to feel the tales in their ritual and millennia-old potency.

As I mentioned previously, all threads, fibres and shards, all dimensions, are crucial and essential, all being singular and in reciprocal relationship with everything else, because the systemic narrative, which mythical tales so well recreate, remakes the many layers that emerge and submerge together influencing each other, in a living web, always as potent alternatives to logical and impoverished modern discourses.

Originally transmitted by the organic threads of orality, tales are culturally significant stories of local spirits or gods, echoing and expressing each place's and culture's way of seeing and being world, literally being the invisible cornerstones and foundations of each people's beliefs and perspectives.

With hands covered in dirt, but with open hearts, we recognise that each community has a bag of stories, where myths, tales, legends, legacies and memories fit. This is a living bag that can only be deciphered by dreams, imagination or intuition —a bag of stories that is a map of relationships, giving and receiving.

The stories contained in this bag change through the ages, having different qualities, tones, purposes and origins. Like us, the tales are hybrids, being the result of crossbreeding, fertilisation and natural intermingling of life's diversity and complexity, containing multiple perspectives and paradoxical truths. In fact, through this perspective of living stories, we move away from the moral linearity with which the Grimm brothers recorded, edited and reduced, reinterpreting oral tales from 18th century Germany.

Living tales do not squeeze themselves into a single moral or truth, for in this way they lose their Soul and their link to what regenerates them at every moment. These are not factual, measurable or deterministic stories, because they were not created in laboratories, but in environments contaminated by life, spontaneous, chaotic and active, where cold and distant objectivity isn't possible.

Living stories are not governed by their usefulness but by their living complexity.

Indeed, they carry the profound wisdom of paradoxes, helping us appreciate the wise natural impermanence of the cosmos. In this mythical and onyric geography we inevitably encounter multiple truths in intimate and visceral dialogue with the sacred depths of the earth, in an immanent pilgrimage of descent into the sacred subterranean worlds that comprise the geography of death and regeneration. The echo of the Builder Moura now helps us to anchor another perception of the bedrock and foundations of the rich legacy of these stories in us.

Interweaving the Tales

Intertwining and interconnectedness are key perspectives to bring into stories, because if they are made of life, they are always interdependent and reciprocal.

Whether in the whole body or in an ecosystem, there is a symbiosis of multiple parts and with stories it is no different. As Doug Crouch points out, interconnectedness reminds us to break with the rational thinking imposed on us by Cartesian dualism and to remember that complex systems like nature cannot simply be broken down into mechanical and utilitarian parts. Is a tree composed of the roots, branches, trunks, twigs and leaves that we singularise it as? Or do the microbes that live with it, the birds that spread its seeds, the mammals that find refuge inside its hollow trunk, also make up the tree?

The living system of tales includes each of us, even when we are exhausted and disconnected, co-operating with and activating the abundant and exuberant language of the Soul.

The regeneration of earth and Soul relies on the stories we tell again and again, for tales keep us porous and in relationship; they vibrate and resonate with each of us uniquely and guard all our impermanence and complexity. A story is different every time it touches us.

Stories are an involuntary way of connecting with the unconscious, the body or deep parts of ourselves and the world we are and belong to. They are important because they give us access to dimensions beyond everyday consciousness. If we allow it, the Tales of the Serpent and the Moon are generative, opening access to inner landscapes that have been silenced, neglected, or even mutilated.

Why are these tales important now?

INTRO, tale list and chapter references.