Welcome to Under a Fig Tree! My name is Gabriela.
I’m a Spanish-Welsh writer, artist, mythologist and scholar of ancient religion. My work moves between two ways of knowing: the intellectual study of religion, animism, and prehistory, and the lived, embodied realm of ritual, imagination, direct sense experience, and altered states of consciousness. I give equal weight to scholarship and to the somatic, symbolic, and experiential modes of understanding that shaped ancient cosmologies.
Here, I explore how these older meaning-making systems — the mythic, animistic, and imaginal — can help us navigate the complexities of our time.
My path into this work began with two initiatory experiences. When I was fourteen, I fell ill in Tanzania and was healed by the village shaman — an encounter that left me wondering how such healing was possible. Years later, as an undergraduate in London, I had a near-death experience after being hit by a car while cycling. These two events — joined with a lifelong sense of magic, attunement to the more-than-human world, and the absence of any container for these experiences in my industrial-modern culture — set me on a long search for meaning.
Much later, I learned that my great-great-grandmother was a curandera, a traditional healer, in northern Spain. Suddenly, my lifelong pull towards the healing arts and mysticism began to make sense.
My search for meaning beyond what my own modern industrial culture could offer began in my early twenties. It first led me to live with Jain renunciant nuns in their desert temple in Rajasthan, and later into an apprenticeship with a shaman in Peru. Over the years, I met elders of different paths: mystics, philosophers, healers, and ascetics. I travelled to traditional cultures and ancient sites, following what I intuited to be the remnants of a once-universal worldview that held ecological, social, and personal life in sacred coherence.
Having also encountered my share of new-age distortions and charlatanism, I learned to marry the scholarly with the spiritual to ensure rigour, depth, and groundedness in a field that can easily become more harmful than healing
Alongside this Substack publication, I teach through online courses, conferences, guest lectures, and in-person gatherings. Full list of academic qualifications.
My first non-fiction book is forthcoming with Shambhala Publications, and some of my poetry has appeared in Clarion Magazine.
To find out more about me and my work, visit my website.
What is this publication?
I share two kinds of writing here:
A free monthly essay & poetry
For the paid community, a weekly Sunday essay with an audio recording
This Substack serves as the main archive of my work — a living record of my research, field notes, mythic explorations, and imaginal inquiries, and a platform where all new writing is sent directly to your inbox.
** 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.
