Evil Ferment of the Earth: Mushrooms

Fungi ben mussheroms; there be two manners of them, one maner is deedly and slayeth them that eateth them and be called tode stoles, and the other doeth not.
—–The Grete Herbal (1526)

Mushrooms are probably one of the oldest wild foodstuffs consumed by man, but also probably the one foodstuff with the greatest potential for disaster. While there are many edible mushrooms, there are just as many which are not only inedible, but downr ight toxic. The Garden of Deadly Delights listed several of the most toxic mushroom species, including Death Cap, Destroying Angel, and Fly Agaric. However, there are many other mushrooms which can be deadly, and these often bear a close resemblance to those that are inedible. Proper identification is crucial, because mistakes can, and often are, deadly.

So why bother with fungi at all? Simply, because they’re tasty.
The Origin of Mushroom

We now know that mushrooms are merely the fruiting body of an underground fungus, analogous to the apple on the apple tree. The vast majority of these fungi live by breaking down decaying matt er, often in warm, moist, dark environments. But to the ancients, mushrooms were a mystery. They saw mushrooms appear-apparently out of nowhere-after a heavy rain. They called them ‘a callosity of the earth’, ‘earthly excrescences’, and ‘the evil ferment of the earth’. Pliny said of them: ‘The origin of mushrooms is the slime and souring juices of moist earth….’ And Plutarch thought truffles, one of the great culinary delicacies of the world, came from thunder: ‘During thunderstorms, flame comes from s oft vapors. Deafening noises come from soft clouds. Why then, if two such violent forces could issue from softness, should not violent lightning, striking the ground, cause soft truffles?’ Pliny had a few more deprecating words about the mushroom:Now whether this imperfection of the earth, for it cannot be said to be anything else, grows, or whether it has at once assumed its full globular size, whether it lives or not, are matters which I think cannot be easily understood.

There is an interesting Polish myth concerning the origin of mushrooms. When Christ and Peter were passing through a forest, Peter, who was walking behind Christ, began to try and sneak pieces of bread into his mouth. The two had been traveling for qui te a long time without a good meal, and Peter was trying not to offend Christ with his need for food. As soon as Peter would put a piece of bread in his mouth, though, Christ would speak to him, and Peter would end up spitting the bread out so he could an swer. This happened every time Peter put a piece of bread in his mouth, until there was no more. And everywhere that Peter has spat out bread, edible mushrooms appeared. The devil, who was following them, saw these mushrooms and decided he could do better . He made brighter and more highly colored mushrooms by spitting bread all over the countryside, but all of his were poisonous.

Fly Agaric has a Germanic myth about its origin. Woten and his attendants were riding across the sky on their horses when they were besieged by demons. In order to get away from the demons, they rode their horses very hard. The horses began to foam at the mouth, and eventually bleed. This blood and foam mixed, and where it hit the ground, the Fly Agaric, which is red with white spots, sprung up.

There is an entire mythology concerning fairy rings, those circles of mushrooms found in fields, or more often today, in a suburban lawn. The fairy ring usually has a dark green ring of thriving grass enclosing a ring of dead grass, which then enclose s another ring of dark green grass. Elves supposedly joined hands and danced in a circle all night; the mushrooms would spring up at the outer edge of the dancing circle so that the elves had places to sit and play musical instruments. As Shakespeare wrote:

The nimble elves
That do by moonshine green sour ringlets make,
Whereof the ewe bites not; whose pastime tis,
To make these midnight mushrooms.

In Germany, it was thought that the rings were made by witches who were dancing during Walpurgis night celebrations; the Dutch thought the rings were the resting places of the devil’s churns; the French thought they were the resting places of giant toads; and the rings were also ascribed to dragons, who made them either by resting or by scorching the earth. Even as late as 1718, one scientist thought the rings were formed by snails, which traveled in circles and left slime trails which produced the mushrooms. Most other scientists thought they were m ade by lightning.
The Mushroom as God

Soma was a god of vegetation and celestial objects who was worshipped by the Aryan tribes which conquered northern India and Iran thousands of years ago. Not much is known about the status of this god or exactly what his duties were. What is known is t hat Soma, the god, was also a plant, and a juice brewed from this plant. In ancient times, there were secret holy ceremonies centered around the drinking of Soma. R.G. Wasson, in his book Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality, identifies Soma as t he Fly Agaric mushroom. Indeed, in modern times, the natives of Kamschatka in northeast Siberia were known to use Fly Agaric to make a hallucinogenic brew. This brew ‘creates grand illusions, a feeling of transcendence, and a sense of communion with the supernatural.’ The ritual often consists of the first man drinking the brew, then urinating into a jug and passing it to the second man, who consumes the urine. He then urinates into the jug, and passes his urine to the third man, and so on. The hallucin ogenic compound in fly agaric, ibotenic acid, is almost completely excreted in the urine, rather than being retained by the body. These people so closely associate their ceremonies with this mushroom that their words for trance, daze and drunkenness are a ll derived from their word for the Fly Agaric. Wasson has also hypothesized that fly agaric may be the ‘real’ forbidden fruit of the Bible, since it commonly grows in association with trees, and may have been mistaken as a ‘fruit’.

The Aztecs had a sacred mushroom, or rather, family of mushrooms, known as the Psilocybes. The Aztecs called them teonancatl, which means ‘the flesh of god’. One description of the ceremonies was provided by Spanish priest Bernardino de Sahagun (in around 1500):

The first thing which they ate at the gathering was small, black mushrooms which they called nancatl. These are intoxicating and cause visions to be seen and even provoke sensuousness. They ate these before dawn, and they also drank chocolate before daylight. They ate these little mushrooms with honey, and when they began to be excited by them, they began to dance, some singing, others weeping, for they were already intoxicated by the mushrooms. Some did not want to sing but sat down in their quarters and remained there as if in a meditative mood. Some saw themselves dying in a vision and wept; others saw themselves being eaten by a wild beast; others imagined that they were capturing prisoners in battle, that they were rich, that they possessed many slaves, that they had committed adultery and were to have their heads crushed for the offense, that they were guilty of a theft for which they were to be killed, and many other visions which they saw. When the intoxication had passed, they talked over among themselves the visions they had seen.

In fact, most of the peoples who inhabited Central America considered these mushrooms holy. The Mixtecs left behind a record (Codex Vienna Mixtec manuscript, 13th-15th century) which depicts the ritual use of the teonancatl by the Mixtec gods. They also had a god of hallucinatory plants, especially the sacred mushrooms, who was known as 7 Flower and is depicted with a pair of mushrooms. The Mayans were also known to utilize the sacred mushrooms, including the use of ritual enemas to deliver the hallucinogens. There are Mayan vases which depict various forms of this activity. And there are stone mushrooms statues present in Guatemala which may be as much as 3,500 years old. Their purpose is not known, but it has been speculated that they were religious objects.

The Romans also had an interesting association between fungus and a god. Stem rust of wheat is a fungal disease that produces masses of bright orange spores on the plant and will severely damage the crop. It has been known since ancient times, and Pliny called it ‘the greatest pest of the crops’. On the 25th of April, the Romans had a festival known as Robigalia. The festival offered prayers and sacrifices to the god Robigus, who had the power to control this fungal disease.
Fanciful and Real Properties of Mushrooms

Fairy rings had all sorts of superstitions connected to them. Treasure was thought to be buried within them and guarded by witches and fairies. In England, if a maiden washed her face with the dew from inside a fairy ring, the fairies would ruin her complexion. A fairy ring in your neighbor’s field was good luck, but one in your own was bad. And ruin awaited any Scot who stepped inside one:

he who tills the fairies green,
Nae luck again shall hae;
And he who spills the fairies ring,
Betide him want and woe;
for wierdless days and weary night,
Are his to his deein day.

Cattle weren’t exempt from these woes, either. The Danish believed that if cattle grazed where ‘the Elle-people have spit, or done what is worse’, then they were liable to fall prey to disease, and could only be cured by St. John’s Wort which had been harvested at midnight on St. John’s night.

Medicinally, mushrooms were used for all manner of remedies. They were used for cauterization, and were supposedly good for ripening boils and abscesses. Suilli removed freckles and blemishes, and were used as a salve on ‘foul ulcers and eruptions of the head and…bites inflicted by dogs’. Puffball spores were used by the Tewa Indians to cure ear infections by blowing the spores into the ear; in contrast, the Scots thought that puffball spores caused blindness (and called puffballs ‘the devil’s snuffbox’).

An interesting property that many mushrooms share is bioluminosity. The ‘Jack-O-Lantern’ mushroom is well known for glowing in the dark. Various mushrooms glow white, bluish-white, bluish green, greenish white, or green. Many of these mushrooms are nearly invisible during the day and only become visible as they glow at night. These phosphorescent mushrooms are particularly abundant in the tropics and are used for decorations or even to assist vision at night.

Of course, mushrooms have toxic properties. Some of those toxins just kill you. The toxin in Coprinus atramentarius only affects you if you’ve consumed alcohol after eating the mushroom. The toxin blocks the metabolism of alcohol, even four or five days later, and can cause alcohol poisoning. The gyrometra mushroom’s poison resembles an ingredient in rocket fuel. This toxin is volatile, and people have been poisoned just by breathing the fumes from a pot where the mushrooms are cooking. Of cou rse, there are also the ‘toxins’ which are hallucinogenic, such as those found in the psilocybes, conocybes, amanitas and panaeoli. And although Amanita caesarea, or bolete, is not poisonous and was in fact a highly prized delicacy of the Romans, it was nonetheless involved in a famous poisoning. The Emperor Tiberius Claudius was poisoned by a dish of boleti prepared for him by his wife Agrippina, and her son Nero ascended the throne.