Cosmologies
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The sunflower of three worlds
The sunflower appears in very different places. In Van Gogh’s painting. In the Queen of Wands of the Rider-Waite Tarot. In the legend of Cabocla Jurema. Three stories that were born in different times, cultures, and contexts, but that seem stitched together by the same thread. I begin with the tarot. The Queen of Wands…
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Oxóssi and Ossaim
I have already spoken of the forest as a monument a landscape built over thousands of years by the hands of Indigenous peoples. Today I want to look at it in another way, as mystery. Because the forest also holds knowledge; it shelters remedies, food, stories, and paths that are not always written in books.…
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The forest is not virgin (and never was)
When we think of the Amazon, what comes to mind? Dense forest. Giant trees. Untouched nature, far from human presence. For a long time, that is how we learned to imagine the largest tropical forest on the planet. But archaeology, ecology, and anthropology have been showing that this image is incomplete. The Amazon remains one…
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Moths and orixás
For a long time, science believed that several moths belonged to the same species. They were found in different regions of Brazil and received a single name: Eois russearia. It seemed simple. But nature is rarely as simple as it seems. Researchers from Unicamp and USP gathered different types of evidence: morphological characteristics, genetic analyses,…