My current line of work keeps me looking for stories of place, and myths, constantly searching for different versions of local folktales. One of my motivations to keep unearthing and recovering the submerged layers of my culture is to rescue other ways of relating, different forms of telling stories, that, without appropriating other cultures’ myths and wisdom, might bring us close to an animist sacred perspective —the complex relational presence in a living conscious world. This is a daunting task, at the brink of multiple wars and ecological crises along with conspiracist, fascist, and systemic racial gloom. Doing so means digging deep into the Portuguese cultural fabric, patiently opening the thick iron doors of fifteen hundred years of hierarchical Christian annihilation —which, paradoxically, also became the best keeper of the local ancient cultures it repudiated— and stubbornly walking the systematically demonized and aseptic landscapes. Recently, while speaking with two friends and colleagues in the same line of work, Élia Gonçalves and Patrícia Rosa-Mendes, I shared the difficulty in finding local narratives with integrity, and how sparse and frail this ancient mythic and ecological knowledge is in Portuguese folk stories. Élia and Patrícia readily echoed my feeling, sharing the same challenges caused by this deep severance —indeed, all of us face the profound alienation and collective amnesia of the roots of our culture. They mentioned that when archaic shamanic and animist hints do show up, they arise in bizarre and absurd ways, always without context and in a violent, random, and demonized way. For example, the tale “The Crow’s Bride,” tells a story of a woman with a raven in her company. The raven wanted to marry, so she sent for the eldest of three beautiful sisters living nearby; she answered no, and the raven angrily gouged out her eyes. Eventually, the third one submitted to marry the crow, and after many adventures —from scorching feathers, walking the earth in iron shoes, a mother-of-pearl fountain with a washerwoman in a feathered dress, along with the disenchantment of birds that were princes —the girl was able to marry the crow, who was really a bewitched king. In another example, we have a piece of raw meat vomited up by the desecrated mermaid D. Marinha, out of fear of her son being burnt by his father. There is also the tale of “The Wolf-Child,” the demonized wolf boy, hexed by an evil witch with blood streaming down her face. Only the Christian Lord can save the boy, although through the hand of a curandeira, a local woman healer. There’s also a different type of story, like the “Tale of the Moon and the Water”: when God made Hell, he left Luz-Vela in his chair; when he returned, Luz-Vela would not give him back his chair, claiming that the Lord had given it to him. The Lord said, “The chair is mine; I lent it to you, I did not give it to you.” Luz-Vela burned very hot and made a quarrel with the Lord. The Lord presented the Moon, the Water, and the Sun as witnesses that he had lent and not given the chair. The Moon and the Water swore falsely; the Sun swore the truth, saying to the Lord “What is given is given; what is sold is sold; what is lent is lent. Therefore, the chair is yours.” Of course, God punished the Moon, by taking away her rays to give them to the Sun; he also punished the Water by forcing it to run always, never falling. Here is the clear demonization, by false testimony in favor of the devil himself, of the Moon and Waters, both ancient sacred elements of Earth’s immanent and seasonal spirituality, while aiming for a mono-faith in the Sun. In my previous book, “Tales from the Serpent and the Moon,” I opened the possibility that these stories are scraps of very ancient shamanic and animist myths, wisdom, observations and rituals, part of a lost and forgotten oral web of eco-systemic knowledge, now appearing in a grotesque and nonsensical way. Possibly, these stories were part of bigger mythic narratives, now vanished, and what remained are loose knots adrift with no ground, primal whispers now barren, with no roots or real meaning.

Through their brave work, Élia and Patrícia described this forgetfulness as a consequence and symptom of buried intergenerational trauma from the shattering violence this territory and its inhabitant bodies have endured since time immemorial. Indeed, the thousand years of successive colonizations triumphantly violated, silenced, and exiled animist ways of being in this area, extirpating any possible relation with the ground —the rooted bones where these painful and bloody memories still reside. And, together with the forgetfulness of communal rituals to alchemize such ache, the only safe place is in transcendence, yielding to a single sky god —shattering any possibility of local, visceral,  kinship, and reciprocal connection. In this work of recovering other ways of being in this land, we want to remember who we were before exporting these aggressive and predatory lenses throughout the world. This is no romantic endeavor, for it implies responsibility and rigorously dealing with the exiled living shadows of our history and present, with its metabolic monsters and paradoxes. These abyssal wounds cut deep into our collective psyches, breaking all possibilities of safety or integrity, for when every place, ground, soil, river, or stone is disturbingly demonized, all that is left is fear, which is what we mostly find in Portuguese folktales and oral rural communities. 

So, the amulet-book “The Sanctuary” gathers these frail threads, re-weaving fabulated ancient stories and picking up on four popular Portuguese narratives, from sonnets to folktales, demonstrating that this dissociated cultural mindset has been brewing for millennia in this place —and the fifteenth-century invasions were already a symptom of a desecrated and violent culture, while not intending to remove any accountability from the perpetrated omnicide. At the same time, throughout these pages, prayers and stories from an animist paradigm (versus the current anthropocentric lenses) are woven to rekindle a somatic more-than-human dialogue, opening a different ritual space for a culture that bypassed that the Forest is a sovereign place, creating meaning and stories, harboring food, medicine, revelations, and memories; a culture that forgot the communal ceremonies and rituals to ask permission, tell and listen to stories, sing songs, or leave offerings.

Can we still hear the brittle echoes of the ancient dances and the many voices that sang them, the rhythmic drumming, feet pounding on the ground, cries from the heart, bird melodies, howls, and roars? Togetherness, whispered conversations, shared secrets, communal accounts, revealed stories, sensed ceremonies, joys and mourning, collective rituals, and living pain? Can we still delight in dreaming of the memories of these nutritious and vibrant conversations of multi-species kinship?