The rescue and remembering of the ancient and complex systemic wisdom of the place we are and occupy has already taken us through some meanders, there being no end or beginning, for they are dendritic memories. It is, in fact, a lifelong process to be cared for and attended to with responsibility and integrity. To help us find these threads and cultural fragments, we now call the Warrior Mouras, the mythical beings who guard and protect places and their sacredness.
The Warrior Mouras may contain echoes of the Furies (and vice versa), called Erinyes, female chthonic deities of justice in ancient Greek mythology. The Furies were the three ancient Greek goddesses of vengeance and retribution who punished men for crimes against the natural order. They are three sisters considered older than any of the deities and their task is to hear the complaints lodged by mortals against insolence from young to old, from children to parents, from men to nature, and to punish such crimes by relentlessly pursuing the guilty. The Erinyes are old females and, depending on the authors, are described as having snakes in their hair, dog heads, coal-black bodies, bat wings, or bloodshot eyes. The Furies are associated with night and darkness, with varying accounts claiming them to be the daughters of Nyx, the goddess of night, or Gaia, the earth goddess. They live in the underworld and rise to the surface to pursue those causing various offenses. Being chthonic deities, they are often identified with pre-agrarian spirits, guardians of the fertility of the earth and their sentences and punishments are aimed at those who stray from their honour, respect or responsibility, as they protect the sacred truth of the regeneration of life. The Iberian Warrior Mouras reverberate in this same energy of fierce protection of what is sacred to them, helping us rediscover hidden and forgotten landscapes.
We celebrate their presence reclaiming the strength of ancient beliefs and worldviews in some of the principles that rooted the making of the Tales of the Serpent and the Moon.
Shamanism and the Sacredness of Nature
To understand the underlying structure of the tales, we have to consider the shamanic perspective.
Ancient (and current) animist and shamanic practices — terms that here refer to the integrated, systemic and sacred awareness and perception of living places — relate to a deep, primal and experiential direct connection with landscapes. The essential characteristic of shamanism speaks of the direct and personal visionary and mystical experience of the sacred or otherworldly through a journey outside the body, usually interpreted as a symbolic death and rebirth and often induced by psychoactive sacraments or through techniques of ecstasy. In the progression of Christianisation, many pagan or shamanic elements were considered heretical and were intensely and violently eliminated and forgotten over hundreds of years. The shaman, as a traveller of the sacred, is a practitioner of ancient techniques of ecstasy, something common in ancient accounts.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Cosmic-Chthonic Cartographies to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.