Washer Mouras

WASHING HISTORY - Part II

Jul 14, 2023

The Ancestry of Tales

Washer Mouras, by washing and wringing the target fabric of the tales' various cultural and historical layers, allows us to reach the conclusion that Portuguese researcher Sara Graça da Silva of the New University of Lisbon reached in 2016, where, together with Jamie Tehrani, an anthropologist at Durham University in England, they studied 275 stories from a database of over two thousand categories of folktales. This team of researchers treated stories as genetic information, passed on from generation to generation. “We don’t invent culture anew with each generation”, Tehrani says. “We inherit a great part of our culture.” Through their study they came to the conclusion that instead of the stories dating back to the 15th century, the researchers say some of these classic stories are between four and six thousand years old. As they excavated and retrieved threads from this ancient weaving, they found evidence that some tales were based on other stories.

More than a quarter of the stories were revealed to have very ancient roots —“Jack and the Beanstalk” was traced back to the split between Western and Eastern Indo-European languages more than five thousand years ago, and a tale called 'The Blacksmith and the Devil' appears to be more than six thousand years old. The team also found that the first versions of “Rumpelstiltskin” (then called “The Name of the Supernatural Helper”) and "Beauty and the Beast" first appeared with the emergence of the modern subfamilies of the Indo-European language, suggesting that these tales originated between three and four thousand years ago respectively. Tehrani says: "We find it quite remarkable that these stories have survived without being written down.” They have been told since before English, French or Portuguese even existed. They were probably told in an extinct Indo-European language. Sara Graça da Silva believes that the stories endure thanks to the “power of storytelling and magic since time immemorial.”

As researcher Claude Lecouteux also states, the central core of legends and traditional tales comes from a deeper spirit and essence than all the superficial fantasies attributed to them today. The ancient rituals and initiation ceremonies, including metamorphosis into animals, so present in traditional tales, are the expression of the deep human need to experience dangerous situations by facing exceptional experiences and opening the way to other dimensions and sacred realities.

It's possible to experience all this at the imagination level by listening to "fairy tales" or by dreaming and becoming the story's protagonist. These magical and mysterious experiences are similar to those of shamanic rituals traceable back to prehistoric times and preserved in ancient orality. Fairy tales as myths respond to archetypal truths, and the study of mythical geography, legends, myths and beliefs linked to places, reveals the importance of the local landscape in shaping tales and rituals.

I venture to underline the powerful web that contextualises us to places, serving as an anchor of old memories, that whispers to us in dreams and wakes up the memory of bones, from which all these living tales are recreated at every moment.

Wild Places and Guardian Spirits

Entering mythical geography, interweaving cosmic-chthonic cartography, whether in legends, myths or beliefs associated with places and landscapes, reveals the importance of the local landscape in the origin of tales, cosmologies and rituals. Here gods, goddesses and the various entities have been linked to particular and specific places since time immemorial.

Primitive animism, which (not only) anthropomorphises natural forces, is a form of perception that allows engagement and dialogue with extremely archaic creatures, animals, and even the "inanimate" forms of stones and rivers, for the sacred continually escapes from forms that define it. Despite this natural fluidity of form, these spirits are often imagined as humans (there are several kinds of humans, so this is not an anthropomorphic-centered consciousness) so that not only feelings but also personalities are attributed to them.

In these mythical landscapes, we open space for imagination, which allows us to weave new bridges of connection to the places where mystery resides, freeing us from the rational judgment that they are only “superstitions.” The mythical and ancestral landscapes leave the domesticated and civilised space, crossing over completely into another dimension, touching the world of earthly spirits, which medieval Christians subjugated as “demons,” archaic entities that guard and hide everywhere. To know and attest to their existence, we can take a look at the popular traditions that persisted until the middle of the 20th century in rural areas in Portugal and throughout Europe. Pliny the Elder wrote in his Natural History: “trees were the temples of divinities, and in accordance with primitive ritual, simple places in the countryside dedicated a tree of exceptional height to a god.”

As Claude Lecouteux refers, in his book “Demons and Spirits of the Land: Ancestral Lore and Practices”: “every forest has its spirits, every spring its lady, every river has malevolent beings in its depths, that dwarves dance on the moors, that the marshes are teeming with will o’ the wisps —which, we are told, are lost souls— and that the mountains are home to demons and wild folk who enjoy causing landslides, avalanches and floods”. The forest and the mountains are incredible conservation areas for paganism and its beliefs, where a myriad of entities have taken refuge here after being driven out of their territories by the advance of modern civilisation.

The term “spirit of the land” is Lecouteux's translation of the Latin Genius Locci, in other words, a Numen or Daemon, bound to a specific place which it owns and protects against any conquest. In mythical geography, the term “place” speaks of a living land, of sentient landscapes, inhabited by ancient creatures that haunt forests, glades and woods, lakes and springs, streams, mountains or swamps. These tutelary and guardian entities have many names: pans, fauns, satyrs, silvans, nymphs, fatui, fantuae, or fanae. So do mythical beasts, dwarves and giants. As well as the Portuguese janas, fairies and mouras, to name but a few. Now an earth spirit or tutelary deity attached to an individual, or place, or a supernatural being endowed with powers beyond our rational understanding, is also synonymous with demon and the boundaries are blurred between natural creatures and the spirits of popular mythology. The fundamental issue is that the clerical interpretation of pagan beliefs and their demonisation is a huge obstacle to understanding this ancient mythical geography.

In the 6th century, Bishop Martim of Braga spoke of the angels who fell from heaven with Lucifer, stating: “Many are those who remain in the sea, in the rivers, in the springs or in the forests; ignorant people worship them as gods and offer them sacrifices. In the sea they invoke Neptune; in the rivers, the Lamias; in the springs, the nymphs; and in the forests, the Dianas, who are nothing but demons and evil spirits who oppress infidel men who do not know enough to defend themselves with the sign of the cross.” Christianity has systematically banished these ancient spirits to ever more remote regions through cruzeiros (stone crosses), and the sound of church bells. However, these entities are irrevocably linked to the places.

Lecouteux refers that the Christian interpretation appropriated and modified names of indigenous spirits. Even in classical antiquity, it is important to remember that many gods or goddesses were inseparable from specific places, so they would originally be earthly spirits, guardians of concrete landscapes. There is also to consider the archaic combination between spirits and the dead, as a deceased individual becomes, among other things, a channel between the living and the divine powers, and may even become a tutelary spirit of a particular territory, reminding us that in the past spirits were inseparable from humans.

These entities inhabiting mythical geography guided our ancestors to respect and care for their ecological context, because they knew they were not alone and rather accountable to the invisible and subterranean. Lecouteux writes that the disappearance of the earth spirits caused disasters, calamities and tragedies, giving free rein to the presumption of modern man because, to a certain extent, they symbolise man's struggle against a still untamed nature. The author goes on to say that these spirits, local, earthly, tutelary and guardian, were part of the regulating elements of life and remind us to live in grace and reciprocity in a living cosmos.

Share Cosmic-Chthonic Cartographies

Rocks, Springs, Wells and Crags

Washer Mouras remind us of these watery places, of the fresh, running water that purifies and washes, of the portals of transition between worlds, evoking the sacredness of the ancient Mother Goddess, where pagan nature, such of the pre-neolithic goddess, was losing its exceptional dignity, as of the female entities that never banished the worship of the local guardian spirits. In fact, the convergence between local goddesses and earth spirits may simply be a syncretism of different forms of the same archaic belief. Here we recall the remnants of goddesses, fairies, witches and earth spirits.

Christianisation, during the Middle Ages, appropriates land, placing it under the patronage of a saint or of Madonnas, especially near springs and fountains. Springs, wells and crags are primeval sanctuaries and, in several cases, the spirit of the spring is believed to be a female being of dubious presence, zoomorphic, to which medieval European literature and traditional Portuguese beliefs lend the metamorphosis of the serpent. The dual nature of this being also manifests itself by being both a chthonic spirit of the waters and of the wild forest. There is an archaic, mysterious and secret relationship between the wild place, the serpent monster and the stones, representing an ancient mythical pattern, demonised in later religions, also bringing an intimate association to the metamorphosis of death.

These spirits of springs, lakes and fountains became fairies, or witches, who owned lands and castles under the ground, and, throughout Christian colonisation, many castles and abbeys were built above them too —often claiming the building power of the spirit of the place itself, as in the Builder Mouras, who in one night and carrying stones on their heads build entire castles while spinning. On the other hand, the virgines silvestres, the maidens of the forest appear in the woods, demonstrating that wild places are a kind of vestibule of the other world, which clarifies their value as a shelter for all spirits and sacred entities exiled from their original places. Depending on the location and period, these guardian spirits of water and trees can be found under a wide variety of names all over Europe and even elsewhere, and their expression has hardly changed over the centuries. They represent the continued existence of ancestral beliefs, the memory of the bones of deep time, materialising fears, challenges and desires.

Nowadays, as Claude Lecouteux says, in the modern West, people no longer go to the fairy fountains, because to get water all you have to do is turn on the tap. Fortunately primeval spirits survive and emerge from the shadows every time they are remembered, every time someone tells an old story, just like the mythology shown in the bones of this melody of words, based on wild, pre-Roman, telluric memories of Portugal, on the Iberian Peninsula, in south-western Europe. Almost forgotten, these wild energies are remembered through the body, the bones and the heart. Awakening this inner listening takes us back to the reverence of wild nature. These are ancient languages incarnate (in the flesh), neglected but essential resonances, for they speak of life itself, of its potent and sacred tenderness. Living in radical presence through the lens of these primordial earth beings is a revolutionary act, for it is when life and death embrace in an honourable ceremonial dance, pulsing along the throbbing cosmos throughout creation.

In this territory, there are many megalithic remains, some still painted or carved. In our popular tales, we have this ancient being called “Mouras,” old telluric and chthonic forces, powerful and sacred primal energies generated by the place, who guard sacred and special territories. They tend to appear at the solstices and equinoxes, or at midnight, and are also linked to the various stages of a woman's life: maiden, mother and crone —for they tend to be seen in these three forms. They are usually women who transform into snakes, but also into large black dogs or oxen. Local people always have a tale for megalithic ruins, recalling the sacred being that guards the place. Although these tales have been Christianized, and most of these beings have been demonised, they still resist, staying present in oral legends.

Some elders still remember the stories of the stones, the primordial tales of a wild time where the body of the earth was still heard, when people still understood the language of rivers, rocks and places themselves. These ancient stories speak of guardians of threshold spaces and the transitions of sacred places of life: caves, springs, rocks or trees.

According to Christianised rural beliefs, there are many sequestered places where the Mouras and Witches meet when the moon is full. They are generally located among high rocks with precipices over rivers, and when the wind is very gusty, their terrible cries and incantations can be heard by the peasants living in the neighbouring villages. On these occasions, the father sets fire to a straw, and with it makes the sign of the cross around his house, which prevents these evil spirits from coming near. Other members of the family place extra light on the image of the Virgin, and the horseshoe nailed to the door completes the security of the house. On certain nights a Moura or Witch passes through one of the windows branding the newborn baby with a crescent moon on the shoulder or arm, turning him into a wolf.

These snake-women are seen combing hair or weaving, singing or wailing, and giving riddles, secrets, or incantations to those who encounter them. Sometimes they seek the help of human midwives, guiding them to their domains under the ground and bringing them back. In most stories, they present themselves as a maiden who wishes to be freed of her enchantment, a lonely princess who will share her underground treasure if only we kiss her snake head without looking back. They are angered if our part of the bargain is not kept and their wrath is absolutely fearsome, bringing the ambiguity of not knowing whether we will be freed or be lost forever. They induce panic, madness and even death, embodying the paradox of the innocent young beauty hiding an old wild creature, the ambiguity of being in the presence of an archaic tutelary spirit of the place.

In ancient Celtic traditions, in England, Ireland or Wales, it is customary for these incantations or spells, which may originate from ancient initiation rituals, to be prescribed by druids at birth. Observance of the ban is believed to bring power. On the other hand, violating the taboo brings dishonour or even instant death. Many of these prophecies and sacrifices, incantations or curses, are imposed by women on men, these female figures being revealed to be goddesses or another figure of sovereignty. In several sovereignty stories, usually a witch defeats the hero in a game or asks him a riddle he cannot answer, rewarding him with an incantation deemed impossible to perform. The ambiguity and paradox of these encounters are precisely because they can be likened to either a curse or a gift.

An encounter with one of these mythical beings brings us face to face with the wonder and terror of uncertainty, for they guard the passage of the impermanence of life and death, access to other realms and dimensions —they are the guardians of lost rites and ancient wisdom.

Their wisdom is steeped in old medial knowledge since they guard the deep transformations of life, both the seasonal and the tragic —these ladies are gatekeepers to the mysterious, later demonised, subterranean realms. They oversee the hiatus and the cracks, the subterranean openings that allow new or different ideas —an end or a possible change of direction. A hiatus is an interruption of what is, making room for what might be. A pondering, a willingness to listen. These ancient creatures watch these transitions, gaps and passages, observing the thresholds. They build destinies with wisdom from grief.

Their body is the earth, their laws and fluid patterns; they transform with the cosmos. Their primordial wisdom is renewal and transformation, the not knowing, for they represent the good and the bad: tender embrace and the separation of death. They are creators and destroyers, guardians of death and birth. The Mouras as archaic goddesses and earth entities hold the key to the deep underground dimension of the ancestors, their stories and memories, continuing to whisper to those who hear them.

Christian Veils

On the far fringes of successive empires, in the hardest to reach places, beyond the borders of urban centres, the old religions continued to live on despite being pejoratively designated as paganism, a term that encompasses a myriad of distinct beliefs and rituals. Nevertheless, the conversion of pagans to Christianity was rather deficient and did not serve to eradicate several practices that were diabolical, sacrilegious, and highly condemnable by the church.

Cities and urban centres suffered a more rapid and profound Christianisation, as conversion often served as commercial integration. Let us also remember that early Christianity had its own rites of shamanism and other similar ones in the Gnostic sects, such as the Cathars in southeastern France, but the Roman church, as a political hierarchy jealous of power, opposed both heresies and individual visionary mystical experiences, for both diminished the role of the institution as the sole and indispensable intermediary with the one and only omnipotent divinity. The sacred becomes accessible only through the institution.

As pre-Christian rituals and ceremonies took place on ancient altars and in sacred groves, the church first recommended not to pray at wells and springs, and later added the borders, crossroads and crossroads where candles were lit and offerings made. “These irrational men who worship springs and trees,” which the Council of Agde forbade in 506, demanding a three-year penance on bread and water for anyone who worshipped such places. Cesaire of Arles (470-542) was confronted with people who refused to abandon ancestral practices and would not cut down or burn sacred trees, nor stop talking at springs and fountains, or attending shrines that would be rebuilt as quickly as they were demolished. “No one should worship trees”, an order he repeated tirelessly. “If you still see people worshipping trees or springs,” he said, “condemn them severely, for whoever commits this sin loses the sacrament of baptism.” A little later it was Pope Gregory I, 590-604, who first satanised the manifestations of the Celtic sacred animal-man metamorphosis.

In 658, the Synod of Nantes also spoke of sacred trees and indicated that no one dared cut off a branch or even a shoot, and that the people, deceived by the devil, “worshipped stones in ruinous places and in forests,” recording an ancestral cult of stones, trees and springs, “places designated by the pagans.” The people “believe in the spirits of the earth, whether they are found in woods or hills, or waterfalls,” paying cult to the “devil-worshipped trees,” especially oak trees of great age.

Here I make room for the inflection that the movement to build monasteries, abbeys, convents, basilicas, cathedrals or churches does not emerge only as a reclusion or access to the divine, but mainly as a conquest of wild space, domesticating the landscape to the one god and subjugating all local gods to silence. Chapels, monasteries and hermitages are irradiating centres of civilised and Christianised space, more or less isolated enclaves, small islands in hostile territory. Claude Lecouteux recalls that the symbolism of Christianity's victory over paganism brought with it the conquest of man over the spirit of the earth, under the excuse that a wild place is dangerous because it belongs to its first inhabitants, the tutelary spirits of the places.

Christianity expelled the mythical and sacred beings that inhabited these landscapes, ridding the natural elements of their sacredness, previously celebrated by rituals, offerings or worship in reverence of those who populated the region. The archaic and primeval beings, once demonised, become, among other things, the dragons and demons that the saints vanquish or expel. Archaic megaliths have also fallen under the ban of the church, and come to be called devil stones, also demonised and desecrated in many other ways. However, as Max Dashu points out, popular memory will continue to link archaic stone temples to earth spirits, fairies and witches.

Wild spaces of difficult access, where church bells are not heard or where there are no crosses consecrated to the one god yet, are truly the last refuge of primaeval spirits and talking animals. The combinations and fertilisations of archaic elements, popular beliefs and Christianity generate hagiographies where the saint becomes a tutelary spirit taking the form of the sacred as protection against the savage powers that haunt the place, the local patron saints. In these stories of saints, we consider the accounts of how they choose the place to build their temple, and how they often follow a magical animal to find the place destined, which is a very shamanic and pagan way of finding the sacred. Before construction, the chosen place must be consecrated, and the ritual is an exorcism whose aim is not to destroy the magic of the site, but to defeat its earthly spirit, neutralise it and thus reintegrate the space into the Christian and civilised map, as Lecouteux reminds us. The assimilation of saints' names and characters is not surprising given the long crusade to Christianise pagan culture, and the peasants' refusal to give it up. Under these circumstances, a synthesis was inevitable, giving rise to strange associations of biblical saints blended with the old shamanic traditions of earth spirits, witches and fairies.

Through alchemy, and during the mediaeval and Renaissance neoclassical pagan revival among the European intellectual elite, archaic and esoteric religious elements were preserved and codified, thus escaping the full censorship of the triumphant church. Until the 17th century, fairy tales reserved their deeper esoteric meaning for an adult audience and so some of their most ancient strains were retained. Marie Louise Von Franz, analytical psychotherapist, researcher, writer and important continuation of Carl Jung's work, attributes the belated relegation of these esoteric tales as “mere” children's stories to the rejection of their complex and ancestral nature during the Enlightenment, the European intellectual and philosophical revolution that enshrined European reason and morality as hierarchically superior to everything else.

Despite the threads, fibres and shards that remained of the archaic beliefs, of their syncretism, we cannot forget the almost three hundred years of Inquisition in Portugal (unofficially it was much longer), that silenced many voices and wisdom from the ground and the land. The persecutions of heretics lasted two hundred and eighty-five years. The Inquisition only officially ended in 1861, one year after the Portuguese liberal revolution. From the records that do exist, we know that between 1543 and 1684, the Inquisition condemned in Portugal 19,247 people, of whom 1,379 were burned, and hundreds died in prison while awaiting trial (“Breve história da Inquisição em Portugal,” or “Brief History of the Inquisition in Portugal,” see bibliography).

Why are these tales important now?

INTRO, tale list and chapter references.