The threshold of when we were landscape
by Sofia Batalha and Carolina Mandrágora
In the entangled spirit of mythopoetic inquiry, Sofia Batalha invites us into a landscape where stories emerge as sentient companions, and images become thresholds to ecological reciprocity, ancestral memory, and soul-rooted listening.
“Tales of the Serpent and the Moon” is a woven shawl of mythic threads, eco-mythological whispers, and tentative mendings of the broken stories that still hum in the bones of the land. These are not tales to consume or decode, but to live with, to compost and be composted by.
In the entangled spirit of mythopoetic inquiry, Sofia Batalha invites us into a landscape where stories emerge as sentient companions, and images become thresholds to ecological reciprocity, ancestral memory, and soul-rooted listening. Each tale acts as a shimmering riverstone, arising from dreams, places, and relationships, that can be held, turned, and reflected upon in one’s own inner cauldron.
This book is not about recovering a pure past, nor is it a bypass from modern complexity. It is a remembering of the sacred ways life speaks through serpents, grandmothers, swamps, lamias, crows, daemons, and rivers. It invites readers into embodied relational practices with myth, image, and land, away from extractivist knowing and toward felt, situated, ethical entanglement.
Sofia writes from a rooted European perspective, tracing stories beneath domesticated culture, colonizing narratives, and identity myths. These tales invite us not into clarity, but into complexity. Not into escape, but into repair. Not into certainty, but into reverent unknowing. This is a book to be stirred like a potion, lived like a question, and remembered like an old song.
“This book Remembers us, like a weaving from the Feminine Soul. With astonishment and acceptance, silences and pauses to integrate wisdom that belong to us, but which have never crossed our minds, so old they are. Imagination has never resided only inside our heads, but throughout the body, in a deep dialog and relationship with the entire cosmos.”
Portuguese reader
“I've come to share the extraordinary work of recovering stories as a matrix of personal, collective and systemic construction presented by Sofia Batalha in her book, which is as much about research at a top academic level as it is about the enchanting beauty typical of fairy tales. Well worth a read.”
Portuguese reader
“One of the last books I read. It's in Portuguese. I haven't read anything in this language for almost 5 years. It's like the beat of the drum coming from the depths, and we walk towards the sound, into the forest, drink from the sacred spring and are transported to the depths of the earth, to the womb of the Great Serpent Mother-Goddess. A source of inspiration to increase our efforts to create symbiotic relationships with the ancient spirits of the earth; those who guard ancestral knowledge. The guardians of the timeless whispers that echo the voices of generations.”
Portuguese reader
“I highly recommend reading this book, which is deeply rooted in Portuguese tradition, giving flesh to fictionalized myths so vital that they seem to have existed for a long time (and indeed they have). Here, myths, ancestry, memory, mystery and magic are the roots of identity, power and sovereignty, true Ariadne's threads for the core of Portuguese culture, but also for the territory and the spirit, from a perspective stripped of patriarchal logic, with female protagonists...”
Portuguese reader
Cosmic-Chthonic Cartography Eco-Mythic-Activism, eco-mythology, ecopsychology, art and books. No fear of paradox.
🌿 Between Earth pedagogies and mythical imaginaries, Sofia cultivates an undisciplined ethic of belonging and listening, where there are no formulas for healing, but a loving stubbornness in sustaining the unfinished, the paradoxical, the sacred, and the entangled. Serpentedalua.com Insta: @serpentedalua Substack: sofiabatalha.substack.com
Ecologia da Loucura e do Luto, Corpo Contaminado, Mitologia e o Feminino do Fim dos Mundos
by Sofia Batalha
Mistura de ensaio crítico, lamento ritual e invocação mítica, numa descida poética e crua de uma deusa mutante pelas sete camadas da contaminação, onde o corpo feminino de meia-idade se torna altar e denúncia. Aqui, a carne e ossos são territórios feridos, a loucura é linguagem da Terra e os venenos não são metáforas.