The texts of numerous folk songs that were popular among the peoples of the Iberian peninsula during the Middle Ages have survived to the present and have become the object of study of scholars who, like me, are fascinated by their timeless charm and ineffable beauty.... Now, in a sense, the poetry discussed in the study is merely a fossilized remnant of a living tradition, which, like everything that lives, changes. The tradition is not dead, certainly for some of these lyrics are still sung even today, though almost always in some variant form. but the tradition as it was at the time these poems were collected no longer exists.... The symbols discussed in this study are loosely arranged in four categories, to which the names of the four elements have been assigned.

Wind and water correspond neatly to the tow major clusters of symbols. Fire and earth are used as terms to speak of more varies symbol clusters that seem to gravitate around the poles of a masculine-feminine, or transformer-transformed dichotomy. But no symbol pertains to any specific category exclusively. The symbol does not embody any one meaning, but rather a vast potential for meaning. It can be masculine in one place, feminine in another, and still make perfect sense to the psyche of the perceiver. --- excerptfrom book's Introduction