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Even today, in the Calends of May, they are peculiar reminiscences of archaic cosmovisions in which the functions of the "Great Mother" are prolonged. (pantheistic deification of the matrix capacities of the earth) and of the celestial deities (expressions of the fecundating powers of Heaven), possessed a balance which, in later times, was subverting.Basically, they derive from an ancestral ontological complex, which the well demarcated seasonality of the vegetative cycle catalyzes, all converging towards the same objective: to ensure, in one way or another, the regeneration of the World and of Nature which embodies it.They are expressed by representations, anthropomorphic or not, that symbolize fertilizing potentials of Nature or temporal periods that embody them. They express successive cycles of existence, not only forming the Life, but also the Time and the World, which endlessly regenerate themselves in them.After all, in this fertile and fertilizing complex associated with the cycles of Nature, crucial for millennia for the survival of societies that expected the desired abundance, it is not surprising that such essential design is perpetuated, while changing, in time and space, clothes and configurations.
About the author
Profesor invitado de educación superior. Doctorado en Antropología Cultural por el ISCSP de la Universidad Técnica de Lisboa. Investigador del IELT de la Universidade Nova de Lisboa y del CIJVS: el Centro de Estudos Joaquim Veríssimo Serrão es también coordinador de las colecciones de "Antropología" y "Raíces" de la Editora Cosmos y, también, del Fórum Ribatejo.
