Washer Mouras
WASHING HISTORY - Part I
The Tales of the Serpent and the Moon,1 which form the first part of this book, come from my direct access to the subterranean mysteries of the root, where the freshest water runs in the darkness of the earth, surfacing after a groundwork of cleaning up the Christian makeup (in its various facets and phases) of various legends, folk tales, and traditional stories.
The figure of the Washer Mouras,2 mythical beings so present in Portuguese stories, women who wash white clothes in rivers and fountains, are evoked for various reasons. These guardian spirits of the waters are interpreted here not as a legacy of the Moorish culture that fertilized the Iberian territory over eight hundred years, but as archaic and primeval remnants of Genius Locci, or spirits of place, sacred earthly entities later demonized. Each of these entities has its own territory, landscape and history, sharing many symbolic keys, not only throughout the Iberian territory but also across Europe. The legends of serpent-fairy-maidens express the resistance of the indigenous cults, which kept alive the shamanic sovereignty of certain places in free and non-Christianised Europe. One of the resources to learn more about this alternative perspective of the Moorshish enchanted women, not as Moorish legacy, but as much older sacred entities of the territory, is the research work of authors Fernanda Frazão, Gabriela Morais and Aurélio Lopes (see bibliography).
Starting the deep rescue pilgrimage, knees on the ground and hands in the earth, we thus call upon the Washer Mouras, those potent chthonic entities, of ritual baths and washings of purification and ablution, that they may help us wash the stories and tales of their most recent cultural layers, paving the way to their original core.
In 2018, when I started the research and investigation for my book Lugar Feliz (see bibliography), which came out in 2020 by publishing house IN, I recalled and reread many Portuguese folktales and what, I felt, was common across the board: a profound disassociation with the original nature of these ancestral tales, a curation that confined them in linear, mental, religious and moral judgments. This reductive lens constantly renders female characters immature and mutilated of their own inherent power, for whenever any woman retains any power, she is either holy and innocent, or, more commonly, a demon and her actions are naturally destructive or evil, all of them being relatively immature.
In European tales, female characters are generically demonized, and grandmothers are disempowered, having lost their gifts of healing. The malevolent stepmother who replaces the mother and often acts with cruelty, can, in fact, be equated to the serpent in the garden of Eden, and her action to the initiation of ancestral transition rituals and trials of death and rebirth. In these mutilated tales with a linear and moralistic varnish, like the stepmothers, so too have the elderly women lost and forgotten the broad technical expertise of the healers, herbalists, faith healers, midwives, singers, poetesses or sowers, showing a superficial, immature and extremely limited image of the feminine.
The original version of the tales has been confined over centuries by patriarchal prejudices denying women victory, insight, or sovereignty, systematically portraying them either as helpless victims in need of rescue or as demons to be obliterated. Although the saintly and innocent Virgin has maintained an important role for the feminine in Christianity, her archetype is clearly an incomplete and one-sided representation because, as Marie Louise Von Franz writes, she "encompasses only the sublime and light aspects of the divine feminine principle." In fairy tales, however, the fuller pre-Christian expression of feminine spirituality occurs, including the deep feminine of crucial darkness in cyclical phases, and one can find its remnants in the not completely sanitized versions of the tales.
As I remembered and reread these tales in their aseptic versions, my body, unnerved, insisted on showing me some uncomfortable images, such as a pitcher once broken but never really forgotten, a frayed and abandoned wicker basket, or an old and threadbare shawl, all later fixed and patched following the patterns that justify and streamline the narratives of more recent historical mono-cultures.
These root-images correspond to the ancient shamanic and pagan religions replaced over millennia by Christianity, colonialism and, more recently, capitalism, adding layers to their myths and beliefs, which have adapted and survived in less objectionable ways in folktales.
Indeed, the archaic and ancient fabric of stories and tales rescued me from the chaos of abstraction while studying systems complexity theory, bringing me back again and again, providing meaning, not always rational, let alone logical or linear, to the systemic and multi-contextual complexity that surrounds us, so diverse and sometimes so difficult to navigate. I feel that these rituals, tales and ancient exiled mythical webs are a fundamental resource for dealing with the paradoxical systemic complexities of today and all the tragic challenges that possibly lie ahead. This is an interstitial (re)learning, of remembrance in the midst of living tissues, which needs intimacy and integrity with the body's somatic language. These are not superficially performative or transactional rescue movements, for they start from the core of a dynamic and eco-systemic identity, and not from an individualistic and exclusively anthropocentric or egoistic identification.
The radical, from-the-root act of imagining and recreating these tales brought me the potency of paradox and impermanence and the wisdom of non-resolution or choice, leading me to the subtleties of human life decentralized and embedded in a living, sentient cosmos. The deep work of dialogue with these tales is an ancient ritual of integrity with life, in reciprocity with impermanence and in more-than-human dialogue. The archaic myths and symbols manage to decolonize the mind, heart and deep perception, recalling the embodied tools we all have, resources for managing and solving systemic and complex challenges. So to shatter the newer versions and reweave the threads or glue together the lost shards of these old stories, I first had to find them again. The exercise of nurturing this re-encounter was not at all academic, in a laboratory investigation, linear or classical, in a tapering of a specialty.
This re-encounter was, is, a sensorial journey, of fractal, kaleidoscopic and dendritic connection, both cosmic and telluric, opening space through dogmas and cultural expectations, not claiming to bring any absolute truth, only tactile feelings.
As in the branches and roots of a tree, in the networks of mycelium hidden under the earth, in the structure of rivers, or even in the human circulatory system and in galaxies, the dendritic pattern reveals constant movement and exchange, creating fractals and possibilities in a more than human dialogue.
To find the fibers of the once-woven basket or the shards of clay from the once-broken pitcher, both the visible and the invisible fragments, and even the imagined ones, I had to stoop down and remember, recognizing the chthonic and poetic richness. For in the depths of the ground live potent ancestral entities that aid in the task of remembrance, ancient gods that decompose and transform, renewing life itself. With knees on the ground and hands on the earth, I ventured to touch and feel these various parts of many wholes. I risked opening cuts in the flesh and exposing scars, howling in pain, but also finding relics and treasures. With my knees and chest on the ground I allowed myself to be blown away by the Inspiratus winds, retrieving the Daemon, or the Wyrd. I wove anew a reciprocal relationship with the wild twin and the spirits of place of Iberian mythology, echoes of primordial chthonic gods, on a journey in Immanence and Catabasis, a descent into the sacred and subterranean memories, so often demonized and neglected. An experiential journey of descent to my own hells, made by the body, dreams, imagination and generative textures.
The stories that emerged intuitively connected me to the imaginative liminal and relational web that surrounds us. I was moved by the potency of life, rescuing different perspectives, with none being better than the other. I entered into a work both individual and collaborative, both in silence as in human and more than human dialogue. These are stories rescued through and by the body, in spontaneous, organic and living movement, discovering forgotten, exiled, mutilated or neglected landscapes. In these mythical fabulations the archaic geography of death is naturally included as an inherent part of life, as well as the landscapes of transition, uncertainty and vulnerability and also the unknown territories, the invisible and even the dangerous, as our ancestors knew so well.
I want to remind you that no single shard, thread or fiber in these tales is better or superior to another, for they are all part of the pitcher to be rebuilt, the shawl to be mended and the basket to be repaired. All threads, fibers and shards, all dimensions, are crucial and essential, all being singular and in reciprocal relationship with everything else, for the systemic narrative, which the mythic tales embody so well, re-creates life by bringing multiple layers into co-emergence. That is, the many dimensions, layers or contexts emerging together and influencing one another in a living web of potent alternatives to the logical, impoverished and aseptic discourse.
We dirty our hands but open our hearts.
Deep History
To begin to understand where these tales, so patiently guarded by the Serpents and the Moon over millennia, come from, we begin by reformulating the idea we have of "prehistory,” opening ourselves up to different perspectives. First, we must remember that the concept of "prehistory," or "before-history," only began to take shape during the 19th century, when the antiquity of ruins and cultures was "discovered," as well as the recognition that there were unrecorded events that occurred before writing. Originally, the term prehistory was somewhat pejorative, as it implies that official history worthy of being told, history perpetuated by self-conscious and civilized human beings, only begins recently with the advent of written language. When we think of proto-history, in a vague way, we imagine distant events and wild men, lost and brutish, always and only looking for what to eat, in a violent and harsh environment. However, we must not forget that our recorded history, that is, the one we can name, is actually too recent, representing only a thin layer of the totality of the profound presence of the human being in the wide earthly cycles.
It is necessary to claim and find multiple perspectives of ecological and human history, bringing different textures, fluctuations and paradoxes, confronting the defined boundaries and accepted absolute truths of what "was so and not otherwise" - such as the "discovery" of agriculture being considered a precise civilizational turning point, but which, in truth, was a process that took millennia, back and forth, free, wild and recollecting, since recollection itself is already a process of tending seeds and caring for what will be nurtured and generated in the following cycle. The reductionist narrative of the history of the "world," also known as Eurocentric limitation, of monotonality and linearization, has never fitted in with or recognized a richly diverse world.
The reductive and dangerous idea of hierarchical and linear progress is quite limiting to the complexity and diversity of rich human history. According to this narrative, during the first three hundred thousand years after the appearance of Homo Sapiens, practically nothing happened. According to this simplistic, unimaginative and dogmatic narrative, people lived in small, egalitarian hunter-gatherer groups, until the sudden invention of agriculture around nine thousand years BCE, which gave rise to sedentary societies and states based on inequality, hierarchy, and bureaucracy. As Graeber and Wengrow reflect, all this might be wrong. These authors, over ten years of archaeological and anthropological research and investigation, write in their book "The Dawn of Everything" that early humans, far from being automatons moving blindly and linearly in an evolutionary hierarchy in response to material pressures, consciously experienced "a carnival-like parade of political forms."
It’s a more detailed history, the authors argue, but also “more hopeful and more interesting,” because “We are projects of collective self-creation,” they write. “What if, instead of telling a story about how our species fell from some idyllic state of equality, we ask how we came to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves?” That is the key question of this research, and this study finds widespread evidence that large and complex societies thrived without the existence of a centralized state, or fixed structures of civilization. For most of the last five thousand years, the authors write, kingdoms and empires were “exceptional islands of political hierarchy, surrounded by much larger territories whose inhabitants systematically avoided fixed and overarching systems of authority.”
The idea I would like to put across about this profound history is that it was certainly much more diverse than just composed of lost or aggressive humans in innocent communities systematically violated by the elements or by other humans. It is an ancient history of complex cultural, ritual and social systems involved in ecosystems different from today's, be it in the abundance of natural resources or in biodiversity and even in human multiplicity - since different species of humans existed and cohabited throughout this "pre" history.
Thousands of years of integrated experiences of diverse minds and bodies, neurodiversity, languages and beliefs, in deep, regenerating and reciprocal dialogue with places, contextualized in a living cosmos and earth. It is from these long immemorial pre-agrarian times that deep knowledge of cosmic cycles, earth seasons, plants and animal seasonality begins to be nuanced, giving rise to numerous local metaphysics and cosmologies. The prevailing idea that ancient human agglomerations were simple, sparsely populated settlements is simply unimaginative given the thousands and thousands of years diluted in this deep history.
There will have been many gods, a few battles, countless discoveries, much curiosity, and destruction, but also love and affection, research and creations, because our ancestors were not immature or devoid of conscience. Yes, they lived in a reality that was different from ours at various levels, but over millennia, they compiled observations, knowledge, symbols, metaphors, myths, wisdom and stories that gave structure to their ancestral cultures, their dialogue with the rivers, the trees, the stones and the clouds, solving challenges and complex problems. There are, within our bones and stories, echoes of some of these experiences.
The Serpent and the Moon
As I mentioned previously, the Moon Serpent project was born in 2009 after symbolic, ritual and cyclical maturation and, like any personal path, it is an organic journey that evolves and transmutes, in a metamorphosis that recreates life itself. The Serpent and the Moon have been guardians of the oniric and imaginary threads with which these tales have been woven.
The Serpent holds wisdom, mystery, and sensuality according to various cross-cultural myths. With its seasonal skin change, it represents metamorphosis and feminine cycles. Serpents sleep in holes in the ground, calling to themselves all the comfort and connection to the womb of mother earth. Dalila Pereira da Costa understands the Serpent as telluric energy, in other words, sacred energy, which emanates from the Earth, original to the territory of Portugal. The Serpent and the Moon, with associations with the oceans and cyclical tides, are the symbols of the original landscape of this corner of Europe. The Genius Locci and essence that springs from this ancestral place.
In Portugal, we were colonized four thousand years ago by the Romans and along the way we forgot about the Earth culture that emanates from this place, despite receiving some fragments of oral traditions and rural folk tales. This territory has been populated since Paleolithic times, and there are cave paintings and engravings all over the region. From ancient Greek, this land was known to be the land of the dead, part of the sacred geography that connects different dimensions of reality. The people who lived here were, among many others, the Ophides or the people of the Serpents. It is a land that ends in the ocean at the westernmost point of the continent, Finisterre - a place of ancient cave memories, death ceremonies and hissing snakes.
Historically speaking, millennia ago there was an attempt to cut the great Serpent's throat, to forget her essential wisdom. The story goes that the Greek god Apollo cut off her head and that she was, like Lilith, expelled from the garden of Eden. But from the hidden wilderness, Ophiussa is reborn at every moment and demands to be heard again. Her original pulse calls for presence and attention. She reminds us of the abyssal wisdom of the wild ground, of the untamed earth, of the primitive soil, of the uninterrupted alchemy of transformation between life and death, of the threads that weave and unite us. The sacred Serpent is the beginning and the end of the mystery of Life; its timeless power is in us with every heartbeat, in the blood that courses through our veins. The Tales of the Serpent and the Moon come from this root place, and to better understand it, we will continue to remove layers and reclaim the threads that weave us together again and again, restoring to the ancient shawl its original pattern, with room for future fertilization.
Why are these tales important now?
INTRO, tale list and chapter references.
THE TALES
The Goat Girl - Belinda & Benilde & What breathes through the Tale
The Shepherdess - Hystera and the thread of life & What breathes through the Tale
The Red Cloak - Ananta the She-Wolf Woman & What breathes through the Tale
Lucífera and the Cauldron - The Cinder Girl & What breathes through the Tale
Carisa - The First Wailer & What breathes through the Tale
Monster Sanctuary - Brufe and the Bears & What breathes through the Tale
Queen of the West Sea - Oki-usa and the Black Rock & What breathes through the Tale
FOLLOWING CHAPTERS
Remembering the Tales / Disappointed Moors - The Disenchantment of Growing up Storyless, Part I
Disappointed Moors - The Disenchantment of Growing up Storyless, part II
Washing Moors - Washing History, part I
Washing Moors - Washing History, part II
Builder Mouras - Mythical Territory
Warrior Mouras - Guarding and Protecting the Sacred - Part I
Warrior Mouras - Guarding and Protecting the Sacred - Part 2
Enchanted Mouras - The Power of Imagination
Spinning Mouras - Telling and Weaving the Stories
From the Book - Contos da Serpente e da Lua, Sofia Batalha(in portuguese)
T.N.: In Iberia, the name “mora encantada” (Spanish) or “moura encantada” (Portuguese) is a hybrid denomination for nature spirits, dryads, or goblins, or spirits of the dead, as well as actual Moors who lived in the territory and professed the Islamic religion. Theories as to the etymological origin of the words range from Gaelic to Greek to Latin.