AMAZON MYTHOLOGIES

The reader of this section will find some of the Amazonian Myths that Professor Fernando Urbina Rangel has recovered and published.

In my childhood, hearing myths and then learning to read them became one of my main pleasures. That's where my professional activities came from. The study of myths has been my main concern, with them I have kept the essence of childhood: the wonder produced by the endless display of imagination to build and manage worlds. The myth is the childhood of culture, a childhood that is decisive and that, fortunately, is maintained. If the essentials of childhood were cancelled, the ability to wonder and ask questions would be lost. The stronger the wonder, the deeper the question.

It was the myth that led me to choose my basic profession: philosophy. And in this I did not do anything different from studying what was essential in the history of thought, since it was the myths that provided the great themes that later the philosophers in an endless work have tried to solve, without achieving it definitively, hence they have to return periodically to the origin to nourish themselves again with enthusiastic questions. In that long and fruitful journey the human spirit has grown, and by expanding it has expanded the universe.

The myth in poetry, the myth in other forms of literature, in art, in religion, in history, in philosophy, the myth in the profound everyday life... is what I intend to unfold, participating in the astonishment that I have harvested in these subjects, mostly in the Amazon area, whose rivers and forests - with their prodigious immensity and complexity - and their cultures - with their unfathomable depth - seem to fit only in myths.

Fernando Urbina Rangel