Mushrooms Are More Than Just Magic
The study of fungi, in religion and theology, has been colonized by one chemical
When I was growing up I always thought of mushrooms as charming little beings who lived close to the earth, in those spaces where the earth smells like earth. There was a little forested area, across the street from my house. It was a city block, so the forest was small. But it was filled with enough trees to create the kinds of nooks and crannies that kids love to hide in, and explore. So I passed hours there, creating imagined worlds in and around the logs. The mushrooms that appeared, periodically, became shelters, or soft beds, for the fairies and the gnomes who lived together in the wood, as if it were an apartment block to house dainty magic.
I didn’t like to eat mushrooms until I was almost an adult. But I realized at a young age that my affection for mushrooms was a little otherworldly somehow. It was one of the many things that made me odd. I know, now, that this mycophilia was part of my cultural heritage. My mother is Latvian, and she (along with the rest of her family) was part of a mycophilic tradition that branched through Russia, and other Eastern European territories. The American culture I was growing up in, however, was deeply mycophobic. Mushrooms were signs of decay, things to be “cleaned up”, annoyances to be eliminated.
Things have changed, at least to some extent. As the artist I recently met in Edinburgh, who was selling watercolored mushrooms to tourists in the Old Town put it, “fungi are so hot right now.” Mushrooms have become fashionable, on trend, iconic expressions of a love for our earth in all her odd and loamy complexity. In the media environments I tend to find myself in, mycologists are like new prophets and fungi are calling us to see, reimagine, and perhaps even restore the world around us.
Of course, the most popular media appearance that fungi have made over the past couple of years has been in the post-apocalyptic horror scenario brought to us by The Last of Us. So, clearly it’s not the case that Americans have—en masse—suddenly become mycophiles. Fungi still freak a lot of people out. Nevertheless, I think my argument—that fungi are hot right now—holds.
I’ve been thinking about fungi a lot, lately, as part of my research into the varied dimensions of the underworld. Scholarship is always part of these broader cultural fashions and trends (though many an academic crank would like to deny it). So it’s not lost on me that my newfound interest in underworlds is probably not unrelated to this mycophilia that’s branching and spreading around me. This has made me more curious to know how other scholars in my field—religious studies broadly, and theology more particularly—are responding to it.
It is, at this point, a rather casual interest. I haven’t scoured the archives. It’s not yet a formal research project. But one of the things that struck me, right away, when I began to browse around for work on religion and fungi, is that it’s not easy to find. Not really.
If you’re looking for commentaries on religion and mushrooms, the stuff that you’ll probably stumble upon first tends to be work on the fungi that elicit psychedelic experiences, like John Marco Allegro’s The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross. Allegro was apparently an archaeologist who was also famous for helping to popularize the Dead Sea Scrolls. He sounds pretty fascinating, and I obviously need to spend some time with this book. It appears to have sparked its own little subfield of people who perpetuate variants of what Terrance McKenna called the “stoned ape theory”. Books like The Psychedelic Gospels or John Rush’s The Mushroom in Christian Art elaborate on the theory that Christianity was, in its origins, an entheogenically induced phenomenon. And a whole other set of books has propagated the theory that religion itself (whatever it is) evolved from the ingestion of sacred mushrooms.
I’m certainly interested in research on psilocybin. And I’m especially curious to know what people in my field have to say about it. I think that part of what’s interesting about religion, if we can isolate this aspect of social life so clearly, is the way that our cultural traditions make ritual use of altered states of consciousness. But I’m suspicious of any work that would reduce religion to one specific altered state, or even to altered states alone. Religion is more than just an altered state.
I’ve been interested in fungi because I’m interested in underworlds, and ancient mythologies of the underworld that cast it as a space for the dead. In these views, it’s not a space for us, the living. It’s a space we can only enter when we are transformed. But thinking about the fungal actors in underground networks is a reminder of the fact that there are plenty of lively elements in the underworld. It’s also a reminder to me that, in these ancient myths, the dead had their own kind of life in the underworld. I’ve been benefitting from fungal research from mycologists like Merlin Sheldrake that’s not exclusively oriented around the fungi that bring us mind-altering chemicals. Instead, Sheldrake illuminates a number of other ways in which fungi are entangled with human and more than human worlds. Work like this has made me feel like conversations about religion and fungi have been a bit colonized by the fungi that bring us psychedelic experiences.
I think that work in religion and theology could benefit from fungal conversations that are a bit more diverse and wide-ranging. I thought I would mention just a few possible trajectories that have occurred to me. And I want to recognize that my own research, in our field, has not yet been exhaustive. I’m talking about some of my most immediate impressions. This is not a scholarly article! It’s a brief musing, a discussion of impressions. It’s one of the ways that I’m building and developing my ideas. And I would love to do this in conversation with others. So please don’t attack me if I neglected to mention your new article, or your good friend’s article. Let me know about what I’m missing, in the comments or via email. More than that; if you’re interested in collaborating in some way, please reach out and let me know. I’d love to discuss how we might generate more conversations. And of course, please share this with anyone you think might be interested!
The invisibility of fungi. While we can see mushrooms (even if we don’t often notice them), mychorrizal affiliations and the branching of hyphae are more invisible to our naked and untrained eyes. In this very literally sense, fungi might be classified among those “things unseen” that scholars of religion often preoccupy themselves with. But it’s also the case that fungi have been made invisible in religious contexts (such as texts). I recently wrote about the Roman god of mildew. This inspired my friend and colleague Adam Kotsko to mention a passage in Leviticus—about mildew, and how to respond to it (check out Leviticus 14:33-53). When I went looking for it, I learned that it’s only referenced as mildew or mold in some translations. In others it’s referred to as a “plague” or an “infection.” I haven’t done enough research to understand why these particular translation decisions were made. But given that the passage refers to forms of discoloration on the walls that are easily traceable to mildew, it does seem odd that it would instead be described as “plague.” At any rate, this prompted me to wonder where are the other spaces (in sacred text, art, or discourse) where fungal apparitions have been made invisible, or erased? If someone has answers to this question, I’d love to know.
A new way into the soils. Fungi can take us into the underworld in new ways. They are living elements that can help us to think, in new ways, about spaces where—historically—we’ve been told only the dead can exist or travel. They can illuminate dimensions of the literal underworlds below our feet (such as the soils) that otherwise go unseen. This is the trajectory that I’m currently pursuing (and the reason that I’m researching fungi, in the first place). My last book concluded with a reflection on soils, and that’s what I really wanted to think more about. I wanted to think about how the underworld has always been more alive than western culture has given it explicit credit for. And I wanted to explore how this aliveness (that fungi often support and facilitate) can help us navigate back into what it might mean to be made of dirt (as we were told, in texts like Genesis).
Exploring the spiritual dimensions of decay. This is related, but it’s also a distinct phenomenon. I say, over and over again in Sister Death that Christianity has treated death as an enemy, and this obscures the many ways in which we are dependent upon decay. Fungi can illuminate this dependence. But—for those people who are still interested in thinking about the ritual use of psilocybin—this can also tie back into the use of hallucinogenic fungi for end of life care. There are ways in which fungi are literally illuminating other dimensions of existence for us, and helping to shepherd us into new states of being (that include, but may not be limited to, decay). How have religious and spiritual traditions connected fungi with portals to other dimensions? How might these portals help to reshape the way many of us have come to think about the relationships between the living and the dead, today?
Another way of materializing spirits, and spiritualizing the material. I see people cite Robin Wall Kimmerer’s definition of “puhpowee” all the time, both in religious studies and in conversations about mushrooms and fungi. It’s a word that Kimmerer stumbled upon in a book by the Anishinaabe ethnobotanist Keewaydinoquay. The term describes the force that mushrooms use to push up through the earth, while the rest of us sleep. It’s a phenomenon within nature that western science lacks a word for, as Kimmerer writes, In other words, puhpoweee highlights one of the many ways in which indigenous knowledge of nature extends beyond the categories of understanding that modern science uses today. Indigenous practices and traditions are no doubt full of various ways of thinking about the spiritual impact and importance of fungal dimensions. I’d love to see more of this research, in religion and theology. But thinking about the unseen powers of puhpowee also made me think back to the god of mildew. When it comes to mold and mildew, I’ve been taught to regard it as disgusting, as blight. And there are easy ways (sprays) for me to get rid of it. But to see it as a force that can’t be contained, one that we might witness in our domestic spaces as much as in our fields, was interesting to me. What is it about a fungus like mildew, or rot, that makes it like a spirit? What does this tell us about spirits, themselves (how they have functioned within culture, how they have been understood and negotiated with)? I think that fungi can offer us a series of interesting avenues back into conversations about spirits, the spiritual, and the unseen.
Another way to think about horror. Fungi can be horrifying (as The Last of Us helps us remember). And religious studies is one of the most interesting disciplines for thinking about horror. It’s a field that can highlight the complex functions of horror. And it can also illuminate the way that horror is often connected, in complex ways, with affects like wonder and awe. What can religion and theology tell us about the horrific dimensions of our fungal encounters? To what extent do fungi open for us what Eugene Thacker has called the (unthinkable, horrific) world without us? Fungi are more than human in the biggest sense. They aren’t gods (unless they’re deified!) But fungi are powerful forces that were on this planet in deep time, long before us. They paved the way for our existence. We could even say that they created the world that created us. And fungi will inevitably outlast us. This is both a little terrifying and a little awe inspiring to think about. What resources do scholars in religious studies and theology have, for unpacking this?
Another way to think about manipulation. The fungi that harbor psilocybin may have colonized the study of religion and mushrooms. But one of the things that these studies may not be able to explore in-depth is the way that religion is so often also often violent and manipulative. I always think about these manipulative dimensions of religion, when I come across work on zombie fungi: the parasitic forms of fungi that can alter the behavior of their hosts before they kill them. Why not think about zombie fungi as metaphors for the development of religion and spirituality? There are a lot of cynical takes that this sort of reading could generate, obviously. But I still think that any scholar of religion who is worth their salt will maintain an undying sense of curiosity about how easily people can be manipulated if you tap into a dimension of their being that they understand as “spiritual”. We always need new metaphors and analogies through which to explore this…
Fungi and the powers of healing. The fungal world is large, and (like religion) it’s far more than merely manipulative. There have always been medicinal uses of fungi. I’m curious about how this has been discussed in the history of religion. I’m sure that there’s been work done on this in other fields, if not religious studies. But I would be interested to see how scholars who think explicitly about religion, spirituality, and health would make sense of our relationships with fungal worlds.
A form of salvation: There are many reasons that fungi are hot right now. But one of the reasons, certainly, is that fungal dimensions of the more than human world meet us in spaces that feel familiar to many of us right now: spaces of death and destruction. Especially since the spread of COVID-19, and as our anxieties about climate change intensify, the future can look like a devastated wasteland, if we dare to look at it too closely. But fungi thrive in what we tend to think of as wastelands. And they transform those dead zones into more life. Mycoremediation projects, promoted by people like Paul Stamets, are showing us the many ways in which mushrooms might be able to help us with bioremediation. How they might help us to do something about this terrible mess that’s been made of the planet, in other words. This is contributing, broadly, to a sense of expectation that many people have in relation to fungal worlds. There is a sense in which mushrooms have begun to appear in the guise of earthly saviors. I have an essay about this that I hope to publish soon (beyond the confines of this newsletter), so that I can share it with you. For now, I would just say that this I’ve found this hope and expectation to be an interesting one to analyze, from a political theological standpoint.
What else? Please post in the comments and share other thoughts!
Also, if you happen to be in or near Philly today (Saturday September 9th), I will be taking part in this book event at 4 p.m.. Please feel free to join us!
