The following is a brief excerpt from the chapter “Portugal and Portuguese Identity ” part of the upcoming book by Angela de Almeida, to be puslishd by Bruma Publications, entitled: Natalia Correia: a commitment to humanity. the end notes have been adapted to this format.
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Natália understands that the country will only rise again by recovering its Portuguese identity or its essence—the place of interiority, present in the origins[1] and in the symbols and myths[2] of Portugal, because they translate the divine world that is present, though hidden: its unveiling will take place in the ascetic and necessarily spiraling journey that will allow synthesis by merging symbolic reality with essence. As he will write:
to undertake this new epic, not of the heroes of the sea, but of the heroes of the land[3] .
The path to unveiling will be memory, recalling the roots of Portuguese culture, which are thought to be lost. Precisely in the 1980s, committed to the recovery of the Portuguese soul and the soul of the world, the poet will publish in JL – Jornal de Letras, Artes e Ideias[4] a fundamental essay, which, first and foremost, presents a synthesis of the author’s poetic-philosophical thought. In it, she states:
With the last crumbs of expansion scattered, we must seek clues to understanding our roots in the culture of Portuguese sedere. The time has come to stop disguising with Europeanizing cosmetics that our deputies are the province, our ministries are Beira, our revolutions are Maria da Fonte, our popular heroes are Maria da Fonte herself and the baker of Aljubarrota, our institutional peace is the Sunday amazement in the village square, our church is the abbot (bless him!) with holy gluttony and hierogamy, our Romanesque genius is, from Camilo to Aquilino, a rustic path of ear-boxing and love blows with the logical conclusion of death by amorous congestion, and Queiroz’s own urbanity is the nausea vented in irony by the ridiculousness of a Portugal made into a city that is only rudely authentic in the mountains.
And let us also take these ridiculous things as the caricature of an urban fibrin, a poorly executed pose of rurality that invades the defenseless city (due to the insufficiency of solid bourgeois foundations) to defend itself from the rusticity that occupies it.[5]
The author refers to what she understands to be the polytheistic and matriarchal origins of Portuguese culture[6] – following the path taken by M. Espírito Santo, the feminization of popularly worshipped saints indicates the matronage of the female deity[7] . She adds:
This primacy of the feminine principle now observed by M. Espírito Santo in his “speleology of the popular soul” (…) is enriched by a collection of symbols and ritual forms that clearly place us in a matriarchal system: the cult of vaginal stones, the gynocratic serpent, the matriarchal form of the circularity of the village, lunarity, the sanctification of (uterine) waters, the female priesthood of “women of virtue,” and many other practices and beliefs of popular mythology linked to a maternal providence that acts from birth to death (…) It is thus understandable that, in opposition to the unitarian absolutism that characterizes the religion of the Father, focused on the unknowable transcendent, the magic embedded in the religion of the Mother implies the power to produce divine action, the freedom to act on the will of the forces that govern nature and even to modify it, through the efficacy of magical rites. This belief in the value of human will over divine designs, the antithesis of the passivity of faith in the absolute God of the patristic system, is complemented by the theodemocratic feature of pluralism transferred to the cult of saints. The mother-freedom relationship. [8]
Following the path she proposes to readers, Natália will recover the Platonic concept of mátria, which she will use to replace pátria – Along this path, she would have to arrive at the revelation of Mátria, the name given to the homeland in Crete and the title I gave to the book[9] from which I extract this poem[10] –and she will travel, with words laden with nostalgia, through the Azorean stronghold of Espírito Santo:
The environment in which I was raised greatly influences the dimension taking shape in my poetic journey. There, as you know, the cult of the Holy Spirit reigns supreme, about which I have heard a lot of nonsense. The fact is that the Holy Spirit, a heterodoxy persecuted by the church, is feminine. Ruah in Hebrew is feminine, a secret kept in the vault of Judeo-Christian androcracy and which modern theologians have opened, releasing the dove that glorifies the feminine principle. Add to this the advent of the Third Age, that of the Holy Spirit inscribed in the Joaquinist doctrine of the cult celebrated in the Azores.[11]
The apology for the feminine origin of life corresponds to Mother Earth, the archetype of the mother-island. Thus, for the poet, Spirit is feminine[12] , because Spirit, being Origin, is synonymous with Mother-stronghold of Supreme Love. Naturally, by hyperbolizing this idea, the author intends to denounce the (…) Judeo-Christian patriarchy (…)[13] and call for a society where women and men experience the divine[14] and live with equal rights and duties. As she writes:
The institutionalization of the Women’s Commission is presented from a perspective that is not exactly mine. This is in terms of principles. As for establishing legal mechanisms to bring about gender equality, I recognize that this is a requirement of the Second Constitutional Government’s program regarding the status of women. But—and here I am speaking in terms of principles—it is impossible, not because of reservations about the segregation of these mechanisms in a special department, which to me represents the underlying predominance of old discrimination. The status of women should not be assumed to be a specific socio-human construct, as with childhood or old age. If we want to break down barriers between the sexes, we must include women in a legislative and administrative framework common to both sexes, without special bodies to administer women’s rights.[15]
This relentless search for the Mother-Spirit-place of divine Love will rekindle her connection to the Azores, which keeps the Pentecostal brotherhood alive through a simple, communal lifestyle:
Euro-Pentecostal Portugal is transposed intact to the Azores, where two lines of force converge in the spiritual goal of maritime expansion. The social instance that, through the alliance of the crown with the popular classes, achieved national unification, is completed in the collective work of the Discoveries. The upper scaffolding of this construction is the totality of Pentecostal influences that reach us from European spiritual centers through various channels: Cister, the Templars and the Order of Christ that continues it, the Franciscans and Queen Saint Isabel, founder, with D. Dinis, of the cult of the Divine Holy Spirit. (…) Another condition favorable to the transfer of the Pentecostal cult to the Archipelago and its rooting in the islands is the geo-anthropological uniqueness of the Azoreans. There we witness the wide-open seismic birth exposed in the slopes furrowed by lava torrents. (…) The cult of the Holy Spirit found its ideal territory in a people who, through the symbolism of the Emperor-Priest’s self-investiture—the spiritual and temporal royalty of the collective Self—configured in the rite of coronation, satisfied both their community idiosyncrasy and their vitalistic relationship with the transcendent. Considering this Pentecostal nature of the Azorean soul, we can reveal the island worldview embodied in the islanders’ culture. (…) The synthesis enshrined in the mystery of the Holy Spirit.[16]
And it will strengthen the Azorean roots by revisiting the legendary Atlantis and Antilia on their native island:
Antilia, or Sete Cidades, the mysterious island, so designated on 15th- and 16th-century maps, located in the Western Atlantic Ocean west of Portugal, where seven bishops who fled the Muslim invasion of Tariq and Musa are said to have taken refuge. And beyond the myth that preserves, in its imagination, successes history has forgotten, Sete Cidades was the name given to the lake wonder that, at the heart of the crater of an extinct volcano in São Miguel, deserved the fabulous honor of being identified as the stunning location of the legendary Antília. Since mystery is the emotion that produces beauty, and the right to beauty is the very request of literature, what better title to bring together works of the spirit linked to the Azores than this Antília immersed in the seduction of indecipherable island recesses?[17]
It is in the context of interiority, derived from a unique identity, that Natália praises the Iberian Peninsula, considering Iberism to be the communion of interests and identifying values of the peninsular peoples,[18] , which includes not only Portugal and Spain, but also
the many millions who speak Portuguese and Spanish in Africa and the Americas, improperly called Latin, since, due to their cultural matrix and linguistic expression, they should be called Iberian.[19]
The poet believes that Iberian cultures[20] would be the salvation of the Western world, now that Europe had surrendered to the commodification of man[21] , which is nothing more than
the logical outcome of the hegemony of the Anglo-Franco-Germanic cultural area, whose rationalist categories have translated into industrialism and engineering. [22]
In other words,
while European communitarianism turns against the identity of European man, why not combine a defensive cultural strategy in the Iberian area, where the energies of the identical have not yet dried up?[23]
And poetry would be the ideal link, given the common roots and matrix of their identity.
[1] See CORREIA, Natália (1988). Somos Todos Hispanos, Op. Cit., p. 47: (…) Portugal and Galicia, from which it took a part to separate itself from the Leonese monarchy, fundamentally constituted a single geographical, cultural, and economic nation (…). See Idem, p. 57: (…) But I will have to raise my ingenuity even higher to tell you about the passion from which springs the dazzling gold of the myth that, in the ill-fated love of the Portuguese prince and the Galician woman, projects the silhouette of the prostrate Galician-Portuguese affection. Because when I say Pedro, I say Inês, and when I name her, I name the heart that still bleeds for her on the horizon of the most painful of myths, so eternal did these lovers become in each other (…).
[2] See CORREIA, Natália (1968), Op. Cit., p. 97: (…) What I want to say is that there are no valid civilizations and cultures without accepting the idea of a myth that continues to enliven organisms, allowing them a constant magnetic confrontation with universal symbols (…).
[3] CORREIA, Natália (undated). The cause of peace. Unpublished document: D9/2987, 10 pages (fragments), doc. Natália Correia Archive, Restricted Section of the Ponta Delgada Public Library and Regional Archive.
[4] CORREIA, Natália (1984). “Ethnology / Rurality / A speleology of the Portuguese soul.” In JL – Journal of Letters, Arts, and Ideas, May 22, 1984, p. 28.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Natália draws on the book by Moisés Espírito Santo, Origens orientais da religião popular portuguesa: seguido de Ensaio sobre toponímia antiga (Eastern origins of Portuguese popular religion: followed by an essay on ancient toponymy), the preface to which was written by the poet. See Espírito Santo, Moisés (1988). Eastern Origins of Portuguese Popular Religion: followed by Essay on Ancient Toponymy (Afterword, Natália Correia). Lisbon: Assírio e Alvim, 395 p.
[7] CORREIA, Natália (1984). “Ethnology / Rurality / A speleology of the Portuguese soul,” Op. Cit.
[8] Ibid.
[9] See CORREIA, Natália (1968). Mátria, Op. Cit.
[10] CORREIA, Natália (undated). A Minha Biografia. Unpublished manuscript. Edited by Ângela de Almeida in 2005. See appendix to ALMEIDA, Ângela (2005). A simbólica do panteísmo pentecostal em Natália Correia, complementary doctoral thesis, unpublished document.
[11] Idem, p. 4.
[12] For Natália Correia, spirituality is feminine, while sexuality is masculine. See CORREIA, Natália (n.d.), “Vária VI,” catalog title. Unpublished document: ct.D9/3121. Natália Correia Archive, Reserved Section, Ponta Delgada Public Library and Archive.
[13] Ibid.
[14] In an unpublished note dated December 19, 1974, the poet writes: The Spirit presupposes polytheism. And vice versa. That is why only through paganism can one reach the Holy Spirit. See CORREIA, Natália, Notebook, unpublished, D9/3122: notebook no. 1039/1-B, December 19, 1974, pp. 13. Natália Correia Archive, Reserved Section, Ponta Delgada Public Library and Regional Archive. See also CORREIA, Natália (1959). Communication, Op. Cit., p.12.: (…) It doesn’t matter whether it’s Christ or Apollo/(…) It doesn’t matter whether it’s Mary or Venus(…)/It doesn’t matter whether it’s Jesus or Mars(…)/It doesn’t matter whether it’s Buddha or Allah.
[15] CORREIA, Natália (1978). “International Women’s Week: The prostitution of the female body is deplorable.” In Jornal Novo, March 3, 1978, p. 12.
[16] Natália Correia (1981). “Azores: The Place of the Spirit.” In Cultura Portuguesa, Bimonthly magazine of the Secretary of State for Culture, Lisbon, ed. Secretary of State for Culture, 1981 pp. 91-93.
[17] CORREIA, Natália, (1982). The Island of Sam Nunca: Atlanticism and Insularity in the Poetry of António de Sousa, Op. Cit., p.7.
[18] CORREIA, Natália (1983). Iberism. Unpublished document: NC 6283-6285, manuscript with 11 pages, author, page 2. Natália Correia Archive, Reserved Section, Ponta Delgada Public Library and Archive.
[19] Idem, p. 6.
[20] Idem, p. 5.
[21] Ibid., p. 3.
[22] Ibid.
[23] Idem, pp. 4 and 5.
Translation by Diniz Borges