When visitors sit inside the grey stone oval at Monte Pocilgais, what they encounter is rarely a single, clean experience. It is layered. Something is felt before anything is seen. A weight gathers before any image forms. An atmosphere precedes any thought. Only later, if at all, does the presence begin to acquire a face.
This layering is not accidental. It reflects a history that reaches back six thousand years, a history in which the same chthonic force, the deep living power of the stone, has progressively acquired form, personality, and finally a face beautiful enough to speak to. Understanding that history does not reduce the experience. It deepens it. It tells you what layer you are in contact with, and what the layers below it might hold.
Stage One: The Raw Chthonic Force
The first layer is the oldest and the least personal.
The megalithic cultures that raised the great stones of the Iberian peninsula from around 5,000 BCE onward were not primarily monument builders. They were perceivers. They moved through a landscape they understood as alive in its entirety, and within that living landscape they recognised certain places where the force of the deep earth concentrated itself with particular intensity. Those places were marked with stone, oriented toward the sun or the stars or the flow of underground water, and used as interfaces between human consciousness and what lay beneath the surface of the visible world.
The word for what they were working with is chthonic, from the Greek chthon, the deep earth, the underworld, the geological body of reality that precedes and underlies the world of light and sky and ordered human affairs. Chthonic force is not spiritual in the ascending sense. It does not rise. It goes down. It is heavy, dense, ancient, indifferent to human categories. It predates personality. It predates gender. It is closer to geological pressure than to anything we would recognise as a being.
The stones of this first stage were not inhabited by anyone. They were concentrations of that force, places where the chthonic body of the landscape had been made perceptible and approachable. To sit among them was not to meet a presence so much as to be met by a weight, a gathering of something vast and impersonal that the human nervous system registered as significant before the mind had any language for it.
This is the first layer of what is felt at Monte Pocilgais. Before any image, before any atmosphere that might be called magical, before anything that resembles a meeting with a being, there is simply weight. Presence without face. Force without form. That is the Neolithic layer. It has not gone anywhere. It is still in the stone.
Stage Two: The Enchanted Dead
The second layer arrived with the Celtic peoples, who entered western Iberia from around 700 BCE onward and found the great stones already standing.
They did not dismiss what they found. They read it through their own mythological imagination, which was already richly populated with the concept of the mrvos, the enchanted dead: those who had lived, who had built, who had shaped the landscape, and who had not entirely departed when their bodies ceased. The Celtic imagination across Atlantic Europe was consistent on this point. The dead did not simply vanish. They remained associated with the places they had made, and particularly with the great stones, which were understood as their homes, their bodies, and their dwelling places in the world adjacent to the living.
In Iberia this understanding produced the deep layer of what would eventually become the Moura Encantada tradition. The builders of the megalithic stones were now understood as beings who had remained in them, not quite dead, not quite alive, enchanted into a state of suspended presence that could be felt by the sensitive and encountered at liminal moments. They were still not personalised in any complete sense. They were not yet beautiful women with golden beds and baskets of diamonds. They were the enchanted builders, the mrvos, heavy with the weight of the stones they had raised and the time they had inhabited.
Ataíde d’Oliveira (1842–1915), the Algarve scholar who documented the moura tradition village by village in the eastern Algarve in the late nineteenth century, already intuited this layer. In Benafim he found moura legends clustered around sites where neolithic remains, polished stone axes and evidence of the earliest settled cultures, had been uncovered. He connected the two without hesitation. The moura tradition was not about medieval Islam. It was about something far older, a sacred memory of those who had first shaped this landscape and who had never entirely left it.
This is the second layer at Monte Pocilgais. The chthonic force of the first stage has begun to acquire the suggestion of agency, of intentionality, of something that was once a maker and is now a keeper. The stones are no longer simply concentrations of geological force. They are also addresses. There is someone, or something that was once someone, at home in them.
Stage Three: The Beautiful Moura
The third layer is the most accessible, the most human, and in some ways the most recent, though its roots go deep into the second stage.
By the time the legends Oliveira collected had taken their current form, the chthonic presence in the stone had fully personalised. She had become the Moura Encantada: young, beautiful, sorrowful, immensely wealthy, imprisoned in the stone or beneath the spring or inside the hill, waiting for the right person to arrive with the right qualities of courage, patience, and preparation to break her enchantment and receive her treasure.
She guards the Fonte do Mouro in São Brás de Alportel, lying beside her golden bed with twelve baskets of diamonds around her. She walks the castle walls at midnight in Martim Ennes, carrying a torch that burns with blue light. She stands at midnight on the Serro da Cabeça near Moncarapacho, ready to offer all her treasure to whoever walks three circuits of the ridge, though no one has yet dared. She sits in river pools and forest clearings and cave mouths across the eastern Algarve, sometimes appearing as a graceful woman in white, sometimes as a presence that is felt rather than seen, sometimes, in her smaller and more mischievous aspect as the mourinho, as a child in a red cap who spits gold where he spits.
She is in every structural sense what Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) called the anima: the interior feminine figure that mediates between human consciousness and the deeper layers of psychic and, we would now say, phenomenal reality. Jung’s anima is not a projection in the dismissive sense. In his later work, particularly in Aion and in the Red Book, Jung moved steadily toward understanding anima figures as genuine mediating intelligences, presences encountered in the space between the ego and the collective unconscious that have their own ontological weight, their own knowledge, and their own agendas. They are not invented. They are disclosed.
The moura is the anima of the stone. She is the form in which the ancient chthonic presence, impersonal, dense, and pre-human in its deepest layer, steps forward into human perceptibility. She is young and beautiful not because she is superficial but because the anima is always the face that draws the perceiver further in. She is the invitation. The stone is what lies behind the invitation. And what lies behind the invitation is something far older, far heavier, and far less easily personified than any beautiful woman with a golden bed.
This also explains the treasure she guards. The treasure is not separate from her. It is what she is the anima of: the accumulated chthonic wealth of the stone itself, six thousand years of concentrated presence, geological force, sacred use, and the slow entanglement of human perception with a place that has always been understood as inhabited. To receive the treasure is not to collect gold. It is to make genuine contact with the deeper layers of the stone’s presence, passing through the beautiful face into the dense and ancient darkness behind it.
The Jungian Arc and the Corbinian Bridge
The developmental movement from raw chthonic force to personalised anima figure maps directly onto what Jung described as the movement of the collective unconscious toward consciousness. In Jung’s model the deepest layers of the psyche are entirely impersonal, what he called the Self in its most archetypal and undifferentiated form, pure psychic energy without shape. As that energy moves toward the surface, toward legibility for human consciousness, it progressively acquires form. The forms it acquires are the archetypes: the great mother, the wise old man, the trickster, and, as the primary mediating figure between the depths and the surface, the anima.
The stone is the Self in its geological, chthonic, Neolithic form. The moura is the anima of that Self, the shape it puts on to make itself approachable. The three-stage historical arc we have described is not merely a history of folk belief. It is a history of how an impersonal chthonic presence has progressively generated the forms most legible to the human perceivers who approach it.
Henry Corbin (1903–1978), the French philosopher and historian of Islamic mysticism, gives us the spatial concept to complement Jung’s temporal arc. For Corbin the mundus imaginalis, the imaginal world, is the realm in which the impersonal becomes personal, in which spiritual realities acquire perceptible form without becoming merely physical, in which encounters with non-human presences occur in a space that is neither wholly interior nor wholly exterior but genuinely intermediate. The moura does not live in the physical stone and she does not live only in the imagination of the perceiver. She lives in the mundus imaginalis, the imaginal space that the stone opens.
In the framework of esoteric psychology that we have been developing at Quinta Quixote Meditation Centre, that imaginal space has a precise name: the ultra-subjective hyperspace, the USH. The USH is the infinite phenomenal interior space in which presences, perceptions, and encounters with non-human intelligences take form. It is not metaphor and it is not fantasy. It is the structural locus of everything the Moura tradition was mapping, from the raw chthonic weight of the Neolithic stone to the beautiful face that steps forward when the perceiver is still enough and present enough to receive it.
The stone is the key. The USH is the door. The moura is what the door opens onto, first as a face, then as a presence, then, if the practitioner goes deep enough, as the ancient chthonic force that the face was always the surface of.
What This Means at Monte Pocilgais
The grey stone oval on the south-facing slope above the valley river at Monte Pocilgais stands in a landscape that Oliveira’s informants would have read immediately. Materially foreign stones, oriented on an east-west axis, enclosed and bounded, with old carob trees and stone oaks rooted deep into the structure, close to water, between the parishes of São Brás de Alportel to the north and Moncarapacho to the south, both of them documented in Oliveira’s field notebooks as places where the moura tradition was still alive and specific in the late nineteenth century.
What makes the oval unusual is that the three stages seem to remain simultaneously active. The raw chthonic force of the first stage has not been entirely mediated away by the personalisation process. Visitors do not primarily report meeting a beautiful woman. They report something older and less easily named: a gathering of weight, a shift in the quality of attention, a sense of organised presence that precedes any image and resists any easy interpretation. That is the Neolithic layer speaking first.
But the second and third layers are also present. The sense that the stones were placed, or at least chosen and used, by someone who understood what they were doing. The suggestion of an organising intelligence behind the form of the oval. And occasionally, for those who sit long enough and quietly enough, the beginning of something that might become a face, a presence that is moving toward the human-legible from whatever depth it inhabits.
The moura of this stone is not yet fully disclosed. She is still mostly in the deeper layers, still more chthonic weight than beautiful face. That may be because the site has been neglected for a long time, its creeper plants obscuring the passage, its tradition unremembered in the surrounding land. Or it may be that she is simply more ancient here than in the valley springs and castle walls where Oliveira’s informants found her, closer to the first stage, less willing to personalise, more likely to remain as presence than to step forward as form.
Either way, she is there. The tradition says so. The visitors say so. And six thousand years of unbroken landscape memory, preserved in the folk beliefs of two parishes that sit on either side of this hill, says so too.
A Note on Methodological Honesty
We want to be clear about what is documented, what is probable, and what is interpretive framework.
It is documented that the Moura tradition in the eastern Algarve is specifically associated with megalithic stones, that the philological evidence traces moura to pre-Roman Celtic roots rather than to Arabic Moorish origin, and that Oliveira’s field records place active moura traditions in both São Brás de Alportel and Moncarapacho, the parishes on either side of Monte Pocilgais.
It is probable, though not archaeologically confirmed, that the grey oval stones of Monte Pocilgais are ancient and possibly megalithic, given their material foreignness to the local geology and their formal characteristics. It is also probable that this site was perceived as sacred or significant in pre-modern times, given the consistent experiential reports of those who sit within it.
The three-stage developmental arc, the Jungian anima reading, and the USH framework are interpretive propositions, esoteric psychology applied to ethnographic and archaeological evidence. They are not folklore. They are our theoretical language for what the folk tradition was already describing in its own way. We offer them not as proofs but as tools, ways of approaching the stone with sufficient precision to hear what it has to say.
This piece is part of the ongoing series New Landscape Holistic Project: The Magick Megalithic Circle Phenomenology, documenting the esoteric landscape practice developing around the stone oval at Monte Pocilgais, Quinta Quixote Meditation Centre, eastern Algarve.
Primary source: Oliveira, A. d’ (1905). As Mouras Encantadas e os Encantamentos no Algarve. Loulé. Digitised by Internet Archive, 2009.
Theoretical references: Jung, C.G. (1951). Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self. Collected Works Vol. 9ii. Princeton University Press. Corbin, H. (1972). Mundus Imaginalis, or the Imaginary and the Imaginal. Spring: An Annual of Archetypal Psychology and Jungian Thought.
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