Welcome to Under a Fig Tree
An archive of essays, poetry, stories and reflections rooted in imagination, mythopoetics and ancient religion
A manifesto for a re-sacralised life
I believe the modern western world is suffering from a type of spiritual amnesia and an illiteracy of imagination.
We have forgotten our myths that precede the Abrahamic religions and our creation story is trapped in original sin.
The Roman persecution of paganism followed by the Inquisition of the Middle Ages did a really good job at near wiping out the earth-centric, life-affirming wisdoms of Europe and Western Asia.
But they did not succeed.
There is a deep wellspring of myth, custom, tradition and sacred knowledge in every culture.
This is the offshoot of a once universal worldview that believed in a “sacralised cosmos” - as religious historian Mircea Eliade put it - meaning an animistic belief in a cosmic sacrality manifested equally in the animal and vegetable worlds.
This worldview can be traced all the way back to our earliest beginnings in the ochre cave temples of prehistory some 60,000 years ago.
It is the oldest and longest continuously practiced religion, surviving in diluted forms in the hunter-gatherer societies of aboriginal Australia and the San of southern Africa, in the great temple traditions of the Neolithic and Bronze Age, and in the folklore and religious customs of traditional cultures.
My work re-braids this old cosmology back into the modern western psyche.
Who am I?
My name is Gabriela. I am a Spanish/Welsh writer, poet, beekeeper, ritualist and independent scholar of myth and the history of religion. I have an academic background in mythology, anthropology, theology, and Sufi poetry. I hold an undergraduate degree in Middle Eastern Studies and Arabic (SOAS), an MA in The Poetics of Imagination (Dartington Arts School) and various qualifications from Pacifica and Oxford University.
Since 2011, I have travelled to traditional cultures around the world to learn about their customs, myths and belief systems. I have studied ancient sites in the Balkans, Crete and Palestine, and prehistoric cave art in Northern Spain, Southern France, aboriginal Australia and Sulawesi, Indonesia. And I have apprenticed with shamans, renunciants and traditional healers.
To find out more about me and my work, you can visit my website.
What is this publication?
The main archive of my work and a platform for all my new writings sent directly to your inbox
Published once a month for all subscribers and every Sunday (sometimes fortnightly) for paid subscribers
A special thanks to subscribers who pay for my publication!
Each piece has an audio recording that you can listen to like a podcast
The monthly newsletter is a type of care package with a poetry offering, reflections and musings
The weekly entries are essays based on my in-depth research or pieces I write from “the Road” - on a research trip or travel. These can be spontaneous and unedited, mainly raw impressions and transmissions of images and secrets from the old places
I hope you will consider joining me here, in the imaginal landscape known by Sufi mystics as the place where the two seas meet, the Nâ-Kojâ-Abâd ("the country of non-where”) of the ancient Persians, and the land east of the sun and west of the moon in the Russian fairytales.
Or, put more simply, see you under a fig tree.
** The title of this publication is in memoriam to my great-grandmother’s fig tree in Spain under which, as C. S. Lewis would put it, my imagination was first baptised.
To get started, here are some of my most popular pieces
