AN EARTHLY GOD
tessa
I. why i can’t eat mushrooms even though i like the taste
When I truly love a written work, I often have this strange inclination to isolate some borderline indefensible interpretation of it, and prove it true.
Sometimes I feel villainous in my de(con)struction, as if iIm wringing out the work’s intestines and twisting them into balloon animals, all for an argument I wasn’t sure of to begin with. Inevitably, though, using only my own contrived rhetoric, I somehow convince myself. This begs the question: how many unwritten, borderline indefensible arguments have I unknowingly convinced myself were true? Also: at which point does an intellectual exercise become a conviction? At which point am I no longer a contrarian, but simply a believer?
I haven’t eaten a mushroom in a long while. Fungi seem to me to hold a mysterious kind of intelligence. But this isn’t, as I once described it, akin to my discomfort around horses, whom I also regard as unnervingly intelligent; of them I am afraid, because they are smart and kick you on purpose. I am not afraid of fungus, exactly, and so eating mushrooms isn’t the same as eating the meat of a horse (which I have done, by the way. It was raw, and thus took several minutes to chew. Overall unpleasant).
It isn’t about aliveness, then, or intelligence, or fear. After all, I am not a vegetarian.
Some ideas: as silly as it makes me feel, maybe I consider myself somehow outranked by fungus. or maybe I have simply been disillusioned by the philosophies offered to me by theists, and, unsatisfied by nihilistic atheism, something inside me is reaching toward a different force beyond my comprehension.
Somewhere along the line, you see, I went from feeling a little discomfited by the mysteriousness of mycelium to swearing off mushrooms all together.
Somewhere along the line, I unwittingly convinced myself of something spiritual, something mystical, something which pokes holes in my identity as a rational skeptic, and, therefore, something for which I must contrive explanatory rhetoric. In any case, I cannot abide an arbitrary conviction; I must set out on a quest to legitimise my beliefs, no matter their origins.
Resultingly, somewhere along the line, I started explaining
II. how fungus is a god on earth
While arguably less spectacular than the Book of Genesis, the story of fungal evolution provides a fundamentally similar framework through which to understand our creation, and our mortality.
Let us consider decomposition.
This process is facilitated by fungi, who therein dissolve the boundaries between life and death, making of them a cycle. As fungi decompose a corpse, it releases the phosphorous and nitrogen that ensure the survival of surrounding flora and fauna. As such, death becomes not an ending, but the primary point of connection between an individual and their environment.
This is not the only way in which fungus giveth life. 470 million years ago, plantlife was confined to the aquatic and, yet to evolve its own root systems, it required the assistance of fungal roots to migrate onto land. Mycelium thus enabled plants to intercommunicate, and provided them with the nutrients they needed to survive. (1)
Fungus is therefore owed the credit for both the endurance of life, and its origin.
Furthermore, mycologists, like theologists, are plagued by unknowns. Of the 5 million estimated species of fungus, only 5 percent have been formally documented. (2) As such, fungus shares with other theistic figures a certain incomprehensibility.
In fact, renowned mycologist Merlin Sheldrake repeatedly emphasises the importance of one’s “imagination” in the process of scientific discovery, or a least in “allow[ing his findings] to build and contribute to a general understanding.” Being as he was continually vexed by his studies, and following this line of thinking, he once embarked on a medically supervised LSD trip (LSD was actually synethsised from a type of fungus) (3) wherein he “closed [his] eyes and [...] followed a fungus hypha into a cavernous root,” whereupon he found his perceptions of said roots to be “changed.” Sheldrake never claimed this process to be scientific, but nevertheless found his experience to “loosen [his] certainties” and “press against the limits of [his] understanding.” Not his understanding of fungus, mind you — his understanding of his world. (4)
Sheldrake and others of his ilk are not repelled by the yawning gaps in scientific knowledge; they are endeared. Fungus becomes an object of reverence, and the deepening study of mycology finds itself stretching ever-futher into the study of biology, ecology, and even sociology. Fungi “form intimate and intelligent partnerships with all forms of life,” (5) and is thus the stitching in all the world’s seams. (What is god, if not the stuff which fills the space where questions remain unanswered? What other thing could, in this same way, allow uncertainty to give way to faith?)
Essentially, if the world can be understood through the nebulous lens of theology, not in spite of, but because of all its unknowns, it can be similarly understood through mycology.
Admittedly, there is something missing here. For one thing, institutional religion is composed, in part, of encoded morality; a series of guidelines, if not a literal instruction manual. It is simple and palatable to exist this way, believing that Something is tallying the score — Something whose criteria we have written down, and can feel righteous about imbuing into society.
Does this lack of moral guidance, this insistence on individualistically determined ethos, make fungus a bad god? An insufficient one?
Or, perhaps, a more benevolent one?
These are unanswerable questions, of course. Although, a movement away from institutionally defined ethics might strike some people as a positive one. Maybe the god that should exist is one that creates, facilitates, but does not dictate. Maybe faith must be something owed to us by our deities, as much as we owe it to them — faith that we will honour the life we have been given. Faith that we will honour each other. A somehow symbiotic relationship; one of mutual self-determination.
Whatever the case may be, it is safe to conclude that fungus is — by definition — a force beyond our comprehension.
III. mushroom risotto as a kind of eucharist
I’ve come to realise that the premise of this intellectual exercise is not, in fact, indefensible.
This is because there is something other than reasoning that is integral to belief: feeling. It is not necessarily uncritical to privilege one’s instinct over one’s thoughts. For instance, my nonbelief in the simulation theory (6) does not spawn from its implausibility, but from the fact that the extent of its trueness changes nothing about my reality. Also, and this is even more important: I do not want to live in a simulation.
Likewise, I do not want to live in a godless world.
The arguments in the above may legitimise a spiritual approach to mycology, but only for those with an existing inclination toward this approach. Moreover, this inclination is enough; mysticising the ecological world, and thus challenging the inner rationalist, is not invalidated by a lack of indulgence in lengthy thought experiments.
I do feel, however, that the process of intellectualisation is endlessly valuable. To understand one’s world is to meet it, over and over, with curiosity. Thus it is only in allowing my thoughts and feelings to meaningfully interact that I can conclude that I do, truly, believe in the godliness of fungus.
The question I must ask now is, what meaningful change does accepting my own spirituality bring about? More pressingly than that, can I eat mushrooms again?
The fact is that I don’t know. I don’t know how I’ll feel about consuming the flesh of god until I have done it. Maybe I’ll make a ritual of it; make my mushroom risotto from scratch and eat it barefoot in the backyard. Or maybe next time a friend eats some I’ll steal a forkful from their plate.
There is no wrong way to worship.
sources
(1) Learn, Joshua Rapp. Fungi Helped Kickstart the First Plant Life on Land. Discover Magazine. (2021)
(2) Paterson, R.R.M., Solaiman, Z. & Santamaria, O. Guest edited collection: fungal evolution and diversity. Sci Rep 13, 21438 (2023)
(3) Ergot: The Psychoactive Fungus that Changed History. US Department of Agriculture.
(4) Sheldrake, Merlin. Entangled Life. Penguin Books. (2021). pg. 15-16
(5) Lim, Michael & Shu, Yun. The future is fungi. Openbook. State Library New South Wales. (2022)
(6) Thomas, Mike. What Is Simulation Theory? Are We Living in a Computer Simulation? Builtin. (2024)
cover image: Marshall, Nina L. The mushroom book. Doubleday. (1904). Courtesy of the Biodiversity Heritage Library.