Warrior Mouras

GUARDING AND PROTECTING THE SACRED - PART II

Sep 14, 2023

Initiation Rituals

Traditional tales retain and share ancestral structures of archetypal registers of initiatory practices, pilgrimages and sacrifices, that is, sacred rituals and ceremonies. Be it Little Red Riding Hood on her pilgrimage to bring food to her grandmother through the forest, Sleeping Beauty pricking herself on the spindle and her ecstatic sleep, or Cinderella and her metamorphosis and transformation to go to the ball. These tales hold ancient memories of initiation, transition and regeneration rituals.

In Greek, "coming home" is called nostos, and it speaks of the return to the conscious mind just by waking up, re-emerging from parallel worlds, which alludes to the ancient pattern of initiatory shamanic journeys. Mircea Eliade says that in archaic and traditional religions, ecstasy means that Souls wander through the sky, that they walk the earth, or that they descend into the underground world of the dead, ritual or symbolically equivalent to a descending ad infernus, always for initiation into the secret mysteries — transcendent and immanent journeys. Pythagoras himself was initiated in Crete into the mysteries of Zeus, spending twenty-seven days wrapped in an animal skin.

In fact, even the metamorphoses into animals, so present in traditional tales, belong to the oldest strata of oral tradition, going back to initiatory shamanic rituals and contact with non-ordinary reality, accessing magical landscapes and mythical geographies.

There are magical times in living and cyclical time that open cracks between kingdoms, being powerful portals for performing rituals, such as the solstices or equinoxes, and the full or black moons. There are the great solstice bonfires, still practised a little all over Europe, which refer to sacred ceremonies of ritual illumination by fire, where, in ancient times, pagans scattered ashes of burnt bones on the fields to ensure regeneration. It also recalls the legacy of the tooth fairies, who collect bones, being ancient bone fairies, who take children's teeth as talismans of transmutation and re-integration of life.

The various and diverse initiation rituals, individual or communal, usually speak of renewal, crossing the abysses of mystery and ensuring the continuity of cycles, of life and abundance. They are ceremonies in threshold landscapes, borders of intersection between time and space, between worlds, internal and external, comprising an awareness and perception of systemic and sacred integration with living places, referring to a deep direct, primal and experiential connection with place.

Ancient chthonic-cosmic wisdom knows the etiquette of such rituals, often secret and unmentionable. To retrieve the seeds and keys of transition, whether wisdom or life itself, we must enter the womb's darkness and silence the mind. Entering the sacred underworld implies sacrifices and leaving offerings, for this is the tomb dimension of death, regeneration and the memory of bones.

We Are Hybrid

It is crucial to remember that in this context the place or territory is not equivalent to the borders of present-day nations. The territory is sovereign and governed by its tectonic, geological, topographic and meteorological laws, as well as its biological, cyclical and eco-systemic complexity, which includes all the cultural identities that inhabit or have inhabited it, in bi-directional fertilisation and conquest. I always speak on the basis of the diversity and hybridisation of life itself. The rescue and recreation of this local ancestral wisdom is not about "reestablishing the purity of a homogeneous cultural lineage or race", because this would be a violent reduction of the necessary diversity and hybridisation of life, making ancient cultures and their representation only uniform or "universal", and ignoring the deep, creative and valuable complexity of the processes of each place.

The activism and commitment of this rescue include voices in diversity, especially those mutilated, ignored, silenced, neglected or banned. The shadow of history and culture are essential to face in humility. For all that, these fable tales of the Serpent and the Moon do not serve to recall or integrate pure races, or cultures, or knowledge that is absolute or superior to others. We navigate here in the valuable diversity of each ecosystem, decolonising cultural identity, always working in a non-binary or even linear paradox. The Tales of the Serpent and the Moon rescue places beyond Western post-industrial, patriarchal, anthropocentrism. Nor does the ideation of modern hyper-individualism fit into this rescue, for in individualistic culture identity is closed to deep intimacy in the constant sacred experiences of dialogue and connections with all aspects of life 'out there'.

The rescue of the wild consciousness in reciprocity with the territory thus becomes unattainable and impossible in the box of individualistic and extractivist modernity.
The rescue and incorporation of this ancestral wisdom is not possible in an exiled mind that ignores other sources of intelligence, whether by body, instinct, intuition or imagination, as well as the hierarchy and mutilation of the intelligence of other beings and landscapes, only seen as useful resources and never validated in themselves.

Life, that mysterious event of complex and present becoming, that story that unfolds at every moment in every place. Life is a wild territory of relationships between what was and what will be. The occurrence of modernity encapsulates us in a mechanistic view and perception of things, events and reality. This mechanistic view assumes that there is a causal linearity in processes, that the ultimate purpose is to serve the human being and that to fix something it is enough to fix "the part" that is broken.

This simplistic and tragic perception isolates us from the dialogue of life.

The simplification of nature as a machine, in its mechanistic metaphor, automatically removes its sovereignty, creative capacity and highly complex becoming. Many contexts are part of a life, a place, an ecosystem. These contexts are always in deep and mysterious dialogue. Not all dialogues are made to be heard, much less to be quantified, controlled or categorised.

The richness of each moment is exactly found in this network of systemic exchanges that surrounds us, from the air we breathe, the water we drink, to each food that nourishes us. In this intrinsic tangle of life, the "parts" are never separable, because, despite their singularity and peculiar purpose, they never exist outside the web of life. In this valuable biosphere that surrounds us, everything is within, in deep Immanence. We submerge, surrendering to these sacred dynamic connections that make up everything, that respond to everything. The core of co-creation.

In the mechanistic mind we confuse complexity with complication — our dictionaries even claim them to be synonyms. The technological advent of industrial machines, which brings us so much production and comfort, comes from a position of necessity to tidy up reality to make it easier to control and bend it to human needs. Now, without taking away the value of technical prowess, it is urgent that we do not continue to confuse technology with life itself, nor surrender our survival to it. Technology will not save the world —and, yes, the world needs to be "saved", or rather, we need to be saved from ourselves.

Since the primeval times of fire management, technology undoubtedly brings new possibilities, but its current use mutilates the wild, amputating the multiple enigma that conceives us. The hierarchy of the human being as the pinnacle of evolution, as the centre of creation in which everything else exists only to serve him, has served as a basis and excuse for the sinister destructive narrative that sustains so much of the invisible violence on which our daily comfort is based.

When power is represented by progress and property, when capital and value underline that a forest is more valuable cut down than in millennial growth and regeneration, we depart from invisible and submerged beliefs of superiority that make any humble and sincere dialogue, any deep regeneration, impossible.

We set out to plunder life to store up value, because we believe we do not intrinsically possess it. We have to prove ourselves, over and over again, we have to fit in to numb fear. We exchange life's immanent value for quantifying and quoting time or skills. We silence the Soul. We forget who we are. But the territory of life is wild, unpredictable, abundant and spontaneous. It is not as tidy as we would like, but full of exuberance, intensity and plurality. It is neither ours nor controllable. The territory of life is the place of the Soul, not scientifically reproducible in a controlled environment, but a space-time of stories full of meanings. This visceral web of life conspires in our favour if we allow it to. We don't have to go to Mars to seek possibilities or greater (ever greater) "achievements" and "discoveries". We just have to be here and listen, feel, in presence bound to the life we are, to the territory that sustains us every moment of our lives.

European Self-Colonisation — The Invisible Histories

To work towards hybridity and diversity, we first need to acknowledge and unravel the many ways in which we are all colonised. European self-colonisation is a narrative of domestication and it is long past its inception. This reality of separation, destruction, absolutism and violence has been practiced for millennia. What we most desire, however, is a long, deep embrace that nourishes our souls again, signalling that we are brave enough in 'not knowing' - keeping us free, living nourished and whole.

We should note that colonisation is not something done to others long ago and elsewhere, but a mindset that we recreate daily, just by waking up in the morning in the context of modern Western society. In a deeper sense it relates to fundamental values and beliefs about reality and life itself. By not recognising these cultural tensions or constraints, we do not welcome the invitation to shake up established narratives.

Decolonisation is indeed a continuous and intentional effort in both personal and collective life. Colonisation has made us unhappy and devoid of tools to deal with the wound of brokenness, because one of its ways is to shut off wise and mature responses to deep-seated fears of death or pain. By being colonised, we choose a numbing identity, a kind of anaesthesia that avoids the tragic path before our eyes. We don't want to recognise it or see it. But we feel it in our flesh and bones, in a tingling despair of the uncertainty of broken cycles.

One of the ways I discerned it in myself, is the forgetting of stories and the pressure to follow a pure narrative blindly, usually the modern Western scientific tale — but not only that, as many of the alternative narratives are built on the exact same absolutist paradigm. This "pure narrative", the ONE truth, relates to insidious absolutism, a monolithic and impoverished point of view, which nullifies the richness of diversity and subjectivity —superficialising the modern gaze.

Colonialism is the genocide and ecocide of histories disguised as the unification of and for truth, but violently rendering mute anything that gets in the way of its relentless path of technological progress and moral transcendence.

Consequently, we live on the remnants of lost and dead stories, the ancient, inferior perspectives and neglected wisdom. We have lost the myths that bind us to the immanent pattern that emerges and submerges from the surrounding creation. We have exiled the narratives that keep us humble in a more-than-human world. We forget the stories that speak not only of production or objective solutions, but also those that give meaning to place, death or decay. The tales that declare pain and death as part of creation, regeneration and life itself.

But only modernity could consider this graveyard of stories a dead place, for it has forgotten how to listen for subtleties.

Each story is a seed in a fertile ground of possibilities, where ancient voices that still reverberate and call weave in the bones through generative imagination. When we dwell in facts, isolated in collective trauma, proudly independent, neglecting the sadness and suffering of living in a dying world, we live imprisoned —severed from the creative core of ourselves, the damaged and neglected cosmic-telluric self. But we insist on fitting into an unsustainable system, mutilating the whispers of the Soul, pushing forward with all life energy to quantify happiness. We may even get angry when other narratives whisper back in a dialogue, because it challenges us. “That's absurd!”, we say. “That's not real!”, we think, reclaiming our own imprisonment over and over again.

How it hurts to remember the invisible stories, for they have been silenced in total violence and shame —lost stories about the land, other cultures and women. Rescuing these stories and memories means relinquishing our supposed moral superiority, and surrendering centrality, only to reclaim our humble place for and in the name of life.

The Sacred is Life

As we have been reclaiming throughout these articles, places are a communion of beings and not objects, for all matter and energy is alive and conscious, and sacred life always speaks of cycles of continuous transition. Primeval knowledge, though generated in particular biomes and landscapes, is flexible and open to seasonal exchanges of deep time and cultural fertilisations and influences, for we have always been nomadic, establishing bridges, parallels and reciprocal dialogues. It is a living, mutable experience in permanent transformation and evolution. As I mentioned earlier, shamanic cultures generally adopt an animistic worldview, attributing life or divinity to all natural phenomena, a form of primordial relationship, where gods are everywhere and the landscape is full of entities and spirits. In this integrated view, we have no greater privileges than other animals, not taking centre stage just because we're human, and our needs are no more important. Most contemporary indigenous cultures do not have words in their lexicon that distinguish people, animals, landscapes or plants into separate categories, which speaks to us of horizontality, networking and reciprocity rather than hierarchy and control. According to these views of the cosmos, humans have specialised in thinking and stones in being.

This way of seeing the world is the foundation of a sober but ecstatic humility in deep, intimate relationship.

The sacred spontaneity of bodily processes celebrates the sacredness of life, and even of thoughts if we allow it, and from this comes the living orality of all stories told, for over ninety percent of our communication is non-verbal! In the controlling paradigm of the Western mind, spontaneity seems intuitively impossible to achieve, or is even considered negative, because the underlying message is one of control. Through spontaneity, we can identify ourselves as the collective co-creation, being the sum of all our experience, all the local situation, including physiological and genetic resources, by the co-creation with the rest of the cosmos that mirrors and expresses all that is.

Why are these tales important now?

INTRO, tale list and chapter references.