IT'S FUNGI!: Ancient Greek Cults, Scandinavian Pop, and LOTR

feeding my fungi obsession

Fungi—not a plant, not an animal—is retaking artists’ imaginations. Since Western society’s rediscovery of fungi’s beneficial properties (such as Lion’s Mane mushroom, which regenerates neurons disconnected by Alzheimer’s and dementia or mycoremediation which is the process of fungi decontaminating it’s environment such as crude oil from oil spills), the world has become obsessed with our fungal friends. From mushroom-themed clothes to discoveries of toadstool-loving religions, it begs the question: why fungi?

In 2022, Icelandic singer Björk released her tenth album, Fossora, translating from Latin as “she who digs” in response to the recent death of her mother and the COVID-19 pandemic. Her muse for Fossora was what many artists describe as an inseparable link between fungi and death, or as Björk claims, what is “underground, in the body, like lying in the soil… letting [everything] vibrate through you”. The album navigates sorrowful topics with a bubbly undertone and embodies the constant desire to connect all life as one, breathing organism— a comparison made in many mythologies worldwide. 

Since 2020, there has been a boom in archeologists discovering archaic networks between mushrooms and faith. The Mayan culture, for instance, has left behind hundreds of stone depictions of mushroom-shaped death deities associated with the realm of the Hidden and Unknown. 

After much debate over the centuries, scholars have found evidence that the Eleusinian mysteries, the ancient Greek cult dedicated to the vegetation goddess, Demeter, and her daughter Persephone who resurrects once a year, featured what seems to have been a sacred relationship between mushrooms and women (highly recommend The Immortality Key by Brian Muraresku to get a full analysis on the topic). This spiritual relationship between fungi and humanity can even go back to some appearances in prehistoric cave art of shamans using entheogens (a word literally coming from the Greek entheos— “possessed by god” and genesthai—“to come into being”) such as the Tassili Mushroom Figure, a depiction of a supposed shaman utilizing mushrooms, in Algeria that dates to roughly 8000 BCE.

Some of the earliest Iranian religions, such as Zoroastrianism and the cult of Mithras, revered the mushroom because of how it pulls the consciousness of its environment together, symbolic of human accessibility with the Divine inside of themselves. Similarly, Ancient Egyptians considered fungi the gift of the underworld god, Osiris. 

Contact with more indigenous communities has unlocked knowledge of the medicinal properties of fungi which have been lost to Western civilization since the witch trials of Europe and the American colonies. Modern historians tell us these “witches” were female shamans utilizing their knowledge of fungus to help their communities. 

Much of this information has been preserved through the mediums of art and storytelling, granting modern artists a newfound desire to explore their roots with fungi. Norwegian writer Jenny Hval employs the fungal ecosystem and its role in decomposition as a metaphor for ego annihilation in her novel, Paradise Rot. 

Recently, literary scholars have reanalyzed authors such as Lewis Carroll (Alice in Wonderland), J.R.R. Tolkien (Lord of the Rings), and Frank Herbert (Dune) and found that they used the field of mushroom study as an inspiration for the “otherworldliness” of their fantasy novels— a genre that, in and of itself, is a resistance against the boundaries of our reality and a turning towards the Hidden and Unknown. 

Fungi live around us. They are beneath our feet as roots of mycelia that carry the language of the trees we cut down, their spores are the air we breathe, they lived in the pockets of our ancestors, they heal us, they kill us and in the end, no matter who we are, they accept us into their love beneath the soil— down where the world is singing of life in death. 

Keep telling and collecting stories,

Ava