Cosmologies
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The meeting of the forests
There is a moment in Brazilian religious history that tends to receive less attention than it deserves. A moment when different traditions, coming from distinct continents, found ways to dialogue without completely losing their identities. This encounter happened amid the violence of colonization and slavery. It was from this context that some of Brazil’s most…
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Ancestry is not about religion, but it spills over!
Whenever I write about Indigenous peoples, African cosmologies, or Celtic traditions, I imagine someone might think this is a blog about religion. Actually, it isn’t. Or rather: religion appears, but it is not the center of the conversation. What interests me is understanding how different peoples organized their relationship with nature, with memory, with community,…
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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…