Program & Contents
This is a pioneer meeting in Portugal about the need to intertwine Ecology and Mythology; about the importance of how we tell stories, be they personal, cultural, social, scientific or even political.
Twenty-one 45 min recorded presentations, in English and Portuguese (English subtitles available), for you to watch at your own pace.
This event does not intend to define or crystallize the concept or territory of eco-mythology. Rather, it intends to take on its many voices and diverse contexts of time and space, just like a vibrant ecosystem where multiplicity is the key to resilience.
Here we speak the languages of the earth, its ferocity, and subtlety. We challenge anthropocentric perception. We make ourselves available to listen and feel through the lens of radical and eco-systemic relationships. Furthermore, we allow other nuances to nourish us, like the voice of the wind, the stories of the mountains, or the whispers of the deep sea.
Here you will find all the recorded contents.
Day 1
Weaving the Territory
Opening. We lay the ground for eco-mythological perception and its current importance and necessity.
Sofia Batalha (org) – Cosmic-Chthonic Cartography, Primeval underground mysteries of Iberian myth, ecomythology, ecopsychology, art and 8 books. DB @the_emergence_network
Welcome presentation by Sofia Batalha
Rituals of Beginning, Middle, and End.
Introduction to Eco-Mythology fundamental concepts.
Eco-Mythology as the ground of radical kinship. We remember that myths were never just by, for, or about humans; myths have always been contextually ecological, weaved by the landscape in communion with the human and the more-than-human. When we challenge epigenetics itself as an animist legacy, in a much broader heritage, it awakens visceral responsibility and relational symbiosis.
Story of the Three Ladies.
Ana Alpande
OLD WOMAN’S SPIT AND THE AWAKENING OF SIGHT
The story goes that when the old woman who is older than old things – the requevelha – spits into our eyes amidst the slimy, gooey liquid, our retinas begin to see beyond the smokescreen of civilization. The inanimate comes to life, and all the things that were known as names become verbs.
It takes courage to sustain presence in a world in constant motion where everything that had definite and secure form is now constant motion, a coming to be that never becomes anything we can pin down to a single definition.
Ana Alpande – Textile Artist, Astrologer, and Storyteller.
Patrícia Rosa-Mendes – Transpersonal Therapist, Storyteller, Mythology – Art – Ecopsychology
Patrícia Rosa-Mendes
GODDESSES, FAIRIES AND FOXES:
ANCESTRAL WISDOM FOR NAVIGATING THE INITIATIONS OF LIFE IN THE FEMININE.
All human beings, all over the world, throughout their lives go through initiatory stages that prepare them to play new roles, integrate experiences, and transition to new phases of life. In the case of women, these stages are perhaps most marked by the physical processes of transition. Threshold times, they often bring pain and insecurity, due to the losses they imply and the assumption of new realities.
Day 2
The Place of the Body
Following the body, ancestry, and death.
EUA – Inabel Bee Uytiepo – pilipinx-chinese, deep collective care, somatic forgiveness & ancestral wayfinding
Inabel Bee Uytiepo
CURIOSITIES ARE NOT COINCIDENCES
Ancestral communication arises regardless of our ability to discern or define it. Ancestral communication can be surfaced through healing arts modalities like somatic mindfulness, ancestral wayfinding, auric and energetic presencing and neuro-visceral bodywork. It is possible to uplift our individual and communal capacities by connecting and communicating with our vast ever-present knowing.
Since our varied interdimensional selves are interdependent with all beings, both seen and unseen, the communication is already occurring. Focusing on our curiosities creates portals to discovering and increasing capacities and abilities to understand. Suppressing curiosities close portals to ancestral communication and healing.
Íris Garcia
THE LADIES OF THE PATHS: ANIMISM, ANCESTRY AND SYNCRETISM
The cult of the Iberian Ladies is one of the most Ancestral, primitive and diversified in the world.
It unites Neolithic inspiration with the multiple ethnic-geographic crossings of the peninsula, between mountains, land and the abyssal sea.
Íris Garcia – Somatic education, Trauma therapy, Nervous system, Womens health, Doula, Herbalism
Ecology, Iberian Animism, Eco-mythology
Ana Catarina Infante – End-of-Life/Death Doula, Nurse C. Palliative, Author of the book – the passage, Founder: Community doulas end of life
Ana Catarina Infante
WHAT STORIES DO WE TELL OURSELVES?
The term myth is often used to refer to a false story, however, a myth is a sacred narrative that explains how the world and humanity came to be the way they are today. The way you currently are.
I want to bring you reflections, individual and unique, about the stories we tell ourselves when death comes our way. Now. About who we are in each instant. I will not bring you closed answers about who you are. I am looking for an inward dive. A reading of the book you were born to be. To compassionately investigate the Art of your body and all the sacred Stories and Myths, from the origin of time, that it tells you. I don’t want to hear the stories told by others. I want to see You. What do your bones tell? Your silence, your screams? How do you commune and who do you share with the Body of the World?
Day 3
Day 3 – Earth’s Narratives
We listen to the gods that whisper to us all the time.
Spain/England – Karmit Evenzur – Story-tailor, Cosmology & textiles, living landscape, mythic memory.
Karmit Evenzur
Thresholds and Pathways in the Strait of Gibraltar
Where Europe meets Africa, where the Mediterranean Sea meets the Atlantic, where the ‘old world’ once met the ‘new world’, we come to explore the connection between myth and earth energies.
The story of the Greek Heracles can be found in the ancient name for the Strait of Gibraltar: Fretum Herculeum. The myth still lives on today in the widely used symbolism of the pillars of Hercules which are the portals of the Strait, one being the Rock of Gibraltar and the other, Jebel Musa in Morocco. Jebel Musa, the mountain of Moses, is curiously named after the great biblical prophet who is said to have gone on a pilgrimage to look for the one who was more knowledgeable in God’s ways than himself. It is there, we are told in sacred Sufi stories, where the mountain meets the sea at the confluence of two waters, that Moses found the one he was looking for; El Khadr, the Green man.
Élia Gonçalves
The Moors, the Selkies and the Stories We Live
Encounters with the Spirit of Place
Millennia of anthropocentrism have restricted the perception of our existence to the human context, and the importance of territories and the more-than-human world is, in our day and age, only concerned with their usefulness or utility in the human vision.
However, many of the emptinesses we carry inside take the form of longing, be it for that sacred connection with something we can barely explain, or for a feeling of belonging that never seems to arrive.
Élia Gonçalves – Psychologist, Transpersonal Therapist, Sub-Director EDT – Transpersonal School, Storyteller, Personal Creative Mythology, Author of Ophidia’s Myth.
Samuel F. Pimenta – Poet, Writer, Artist, LGBTQIA+ Rights, Human Rights, Earth Rights
Samuel F. Pimenta
Ophiussa – Joining the ends of broken strands
The myths we know are the oldest memory on Earth. But myths are not the same among themselves: some are true survivors, resisting through the ages all the forces that wanted to silence and destroy them; others are fragments, scattered echoes; still others are mutilated or subverted versions; and still others are nothing but lies.
Yet all of them are true gems, for through their multiple voices they allow us to get a glimpse of the memory they carry, our memory. All of them are the ends of broken threads, threads that, by telling and retelling the myths, we can retrace and put back together again.
Day 4
Alchemy of Stories
We cook stories and alchemize landscapes. We remember Mythology in Ecology.
India – Gayathri Ramachandran – Scientist and weaver of ecosystem metaphors.
Gayathri Ramachandran
Kolam on the threshold of Tamil homes: weaving metaphor, myth and matrilineal transmissions
Kolam are intricate, geometric, ritual-art designs made fresh every morning using rice flour powder by Tamil women. They are considered to be offerings to Bhoo-devi, the Earth goddess, and are anchored in the Hindu belief that householders have a karmic obligation to feed a thousand souls, for having displaced innumerable creatures, seen and unseen, by the act of creating permanent shelter in the form of a house.
A kolam is also an impermanent, transient, immanent, evanescent and cyclical art-form, decreed to disappear every day, as the rice flour is nibbled by insects, rodents, slugs and birds, blown-apart by wind and erased by human footsteps.
Ana Sevinate
The landscape, psyche, and the place of history
In everything there is consciousness and reciprocity. The psyche turns inside out and integrates the net that nature sews. Like an attentive rabbit, we listen to the sweetness of flowers, are touched by the sound of sparrows, smell the sensuality of colors, taste the twilight, and smell the wind. We feel ears, whiskers, pads of paws, active muscles. We feel the connection between the human body and the earth. What if the psyche ran free and curious behind a sparrow? What if the psyche traveled to the body of the Earth with the seed? We belong to the landscape, and that is where the psyche lives. And we are also places, where the stones rest and the sun sets. We do not exist apart from it, we exist embedded in it, and it is when we become sensitive to everything, everyone, and everyone that we repair the wound of helplessness. We repair the primordial relationship in which nothing and no one is an object, nor alien to our gestures.
Ana Sevinate – Clinical Psychologist and Psychotherapist
Sofia Batalha (org) – Cosmic-Chthonic Cartography – Primeval underground mysteries of Iberian myth, eco-mythology, ecopsychology, art, and 8 books. DB @the_emergence_network
Q&A with Sofia Batalha
Rituals of Beginning, Middle, and End
About the Land-Body and multiple ecological identities.
The richness of being poli-vocal in a nourishing kinship reality.
We discussed the valuable relational identity and the animistic psyche that knows it’s not just humans who tell stories or create meaning.
Day 5
The Ancestor’s Pulse
Do we remember who we are?
Canadá – Pegi Eyers – Author of Ancient Spirit Rising: Reclaiming Your Roots & Restoring Earth Community