D. Marinha

Water-centric forgotten Wisdom

art by me

D. Marinha: Water-centric Forgotten Wisdom is an interdisciplinary essay that brings together ecopsychology, eco-mythology, cultural studies, medieval history, and decolonial critique to investigate the historical marginalization of water-centered cosmologies within the Eurocentric imaginary. Drawing on the analysis of a fourteenth-century Portuguese genealogical tale—the legend of Dona Marinha—Sofia Batalha examines the symbolic, political, and epistemological processes through which aquatic beings and hydric ecologies were domesticated, silenced, and dispossessed under Christianization, colonial expansion, and Western modernity.

Combining textual analysis, historical research, and speculative eco-mythological fabulation, the essay offers a critical reading of the mermaid as an ecosystemic entity and guardian of animist, trance-based, and relational forms of knowledge, later reduced to moral allegory or decorative motif. The work challenges linear narratives of progress, questions land-centric and anthropocentric epistemologies, and re-centers water as a symbolic, psychic, and ecological matrix essential to understanding contemporary ecological and cultural crises.

This essay contributes to ongoing debates in ecopsychology, environmental humanities, feminist and decolonial studies, comparative mythology, and critical ecology, proposing eco-mythology as both a critical methodology and a relational practice of remembrance.

---

This essay is but a humble offering, a word libation to the waters.

So, firstly, I will tell an old story, a tale of a silenced Ocean, offering the original myth like it was written in the XIV century. After, I'll frame the cultural and historical premises of where it springs from; my main interest is finding the psychic and cultural threads that enable such a story to be woven and registered in the first place, uncovering the undercurrents of the Eurocentric psyche.

The following sections are about reweaving forgotten fragments, beings, and lost entanglements, in an eco-mythological arrational, speculative fabulation, using creative re-search-imagination and body (watery) wisdom to tap into the depths of the violent modern (Eurocentric) collective amnesia.

Appendix I contains other Portuguese stories of the Mermaid lore, Appendix II lists some of the most important Mermaid and triton accounts in Portuguese historical documents; Appendix III includes an eco-mythological tale recreated by the aquatic currents of this essay in my heart-psyche.

Keywords: Eco-mythology, Ecopsychology, Sirens, Mermaids, Water-centric, Decolonization, Trance

2-hour reading time.

🧜🏻‍♀️ framing the Mermaid's character through conquest and extraction-based culture, the abyssal monster to be conquered, extracting all its mysteries, and even changing embodied time perception. They became solely desacralized, greedy, and fear-inducing demons, like the imperial and conquest culture that framed them.

The only possible solution to keep humankind safe from these mythical monsters was to control, tame, rape, and silence them instead of reclaiming the place of ocean-centric symbiotic wisdom, of flowing embodied consciousness. Rather than being water, singing water, the sacred and ecstatic water.

Of course, they were always hybrid, paradoxical wild creatures, not to be conquered, but to be listened. So, in this modern western culture, we've lost the coherence, wholeness, subjectivity, and flow of these primal water dialogs, inevitably killing its ecosystems. Our minds and bodies became antropocentrically rigid, in stiff dogmatic binary consciousness, unable to imagine otherwise. We readily mistake the colonial maps for the wild, complex, and living territory.

---