Abstract
What I propose is that, by delving into the world of mythologies, there we might find some indications, helpful for understanding what is happening with the environment today. To do so, I will revisit a particular mythology from the South of Europe, an archaic (probably, a pre-Indo-European one), namely Basque mythology. Here, earth (lurra) appears as a maternal character (Ama-lur) and becomes, in a sense, divine in the figure of the goddess Mari, who occupied a central and predominant position in this cosmovision.
Highlights
A New World or the Rise of WorldlessnessLur to the Anthropocene and Back: The Earth in Basque Mythology. Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations
A New World or the Rise of WorldlessnessCitation: Garagalza, L
The word Anthropocene, which etymologically means “a new or recent human being”, arrives at a moment of generalized crisis in most the spheres of our lives, and appears to signal nothing less than an epochal shift: we are leaving the Holocene, which started around 11,000 years ago with climate change that unfolded after the last ice age, and entering another epoch, marked by climate change, though the current one appears to have been caused by humans
Summary
Lur to the Anthropocene and Back: The Earth in Basque Mythology. Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. The vision of the tumbling towers moved us, as though it were a premonition of the fate reserved for our world, a catastrophe toward which we are marching almost mechanically, unless we manage to change our way of life, of feeling and thinking, both individually and collectively. This image of the crumbling towers has become associated with the atomic mushroom cloud growing sky-high, and has invited us to realize that, if we fail to change, our civilization will head like a sleepwalker to its own destruction. As the Work Group on the Anthropocene confirmed in 2016 at the International Congress of Geology in South Africa, we are living through a change of geological era and entering a new epoch
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