Ophiussa
{from the book Tales of the Serpent and the Moon}
… And finally, we arrive at the ancient, sinuous presence of the Serpent, Ophiussa. Not merely a name uttered by Greek geographers to designate this land, but the land herself in dreaming form, the sacred tremor of earth’s underbelly, a zoomorphic, chthonic goddess whose body pulses through stone, stream, and story. Ophiussa is the coiled breath of time, the one who does not just live in the land but is the land’s living subconscious, dreaming us, coiling through us, unmaking and remaking us in every twist of her mythic spine.
Her presence is echoed in the Red Serpent who winds through Oki-usa’s tale, guardian of the liminal edge where sun dives into sea and life kisses death. But Ophiussa’s dreaming stretches further still. She is sister to Python, the primordial oracle-serpent of Delphi, whose coiled body once guarded the omphalos, the navel of the world, and whose slain flesh gave rise to the priestess-voice of the Pythia. She whispers across time with the Minoan serpent priestesses, and flickers in the dark eyes of Melusina, part woman, part serpent, all secret. In every culture where the serpent is not demonized but revered, she carries the wisdom of the below, the wet, dark, fertile unknown.
Ophiussa is not a goddess to be worshiped in the sky but a force to be metabolized through presence and participation. Her body is not separate from ours, it is entangled with our breath, our gut instincts, our shedding skins. She calls us to remember that regeneration comes not from transcendence, but from descent, digestion, decay. Her wisdom is slow and spiraled, non-linear and unsanitized.
To listen to Ophiussa is to let one’s certainties soften, to let the tail of the past bite the neck of the present and spiral into something ancient and yet-to-come. To walk her territory is to enter the dreamscape of serpentine becoming, where every footstep is a prayer, every pause a portal, every story a shedding.
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⚠️ Important Note
The call to eco-mythology is not a romantic return to “pure” origins, nor a nostalgic revival of lost essences. Ophiussa is not a symbol to be domesticated by identity ideologies, nor by personal development practices shaped by neoliberal individualism. Snakes, like mermaids, are not at the service of success, empowerment, or personal advancement. They are archaic, sovereign, and unpredictable ecological forces and will not be silenced, superficialized, sanitized, or reduced to self-help allegories. They are powerful entities that remind us of who we are and our place in the great web, both embracing and strangling us. Reverence. We weave relationships with them through ecological emotions.
The eco-mythical activism evoked here is radically anti-fascist and anti-extractivist. It rejects any fixation on meaning, purity, progress, moral superiority, or spiritual meritocracy. Living mythology is a complex, mixed, contradictory, and porous field, where memory and imagination bend and unfold like snakes in the humus of our shared ruins.
The mythical land of Ophiussa is not conquered or climbed. It is inhabited with respect, trembling, and listening. It is an invitation to radical maturity, not personal improvement. Here we resist collapse not with techniques or solutions, but with a radical, fragmented, and relational presence. Here, the sacred is not a trophy, it is a web.
A mythopoetic invitation into the wild, sensual, and eco-mythological realms of the Iberian landscape. Through ancestral stories and relational practices, Tales of the Serpent and the Moon helps us compost cultural forgetting into soulful remembering, where serpents speak, grandmothers return, and the Moon listens. This is not a manual, but a shawl of meaning woven for our troubled times.
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Honor hystera. Re-member. Response-ability. (Un)learn together.