{"id":2564,"date":"2011-04-17T20:08:17","date_gmt":"2011-04-18T02:08:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=2564"},"modified":"2011-04-25T14:35:43","modified_gmt":"2011-04-25T20:35:43","slug":"occultism-and-mushrooms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=2564","title":{"rendered":"Occultism and Mushrooms"},"content":{"rendered":"

Not necessarily psychotropic mushrooms. To learn more about them, read Andy Letcher’s <\/a>Shroom<\/a> <\/em>or the works of Paul Stamets<\/a>, Dale Pendell<\/a>, etc.<\/p>\n

These are metaphorical mushrooms\u2014or mushrooms as metaphor\u2014from an article by Wouter Hanegraaff <\/a>on the German scholar of esotericism Will-Erich Peuckert<\/a> (1895-1969):<\/p>\n

To me, [Peuckert’s] book [Pansophie<\/em>] breathed\u00a0 an unmistakable mycological atmosphere: the mushrooms I used to collect during my trips through the forest, and the strange ideas and personalities that Peuckert had collected during his forays through the tangled woods of early modern history, simply “smelled” the same. The effect of the book had a lot to do with Peuckert’s inimitable prose … by which he introduced his readers to a forgotten world that seemed to be suffused with the same mysterious atmosphere of magic and fairy tales which, to me, had always given mushrooms their special attraction. Whereas green plants, trees and flowers flourish in broad daylight for all to see, mushrooms were half-hidden creatures of twilight, ambiguous and potentially poisonous plants-that-are-not-really-plants (what were they, really?) associated by popular tradition with the forbidden domains of magic and witchcraft. In short, mushrooms might be defined metaphorically as the occult in biology<\/em>\u2014and conversely, one could say that Peuckert now introduced me to what seemed like the mushrooms of history<\/em>. Just as mushrooms grow in the autumn and are thus associated with decay and the decline of the life cycle, Peuckert described the magic of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as the final flowering of a grand worlview in decline, inevitably doomed to be dissolved by the rise of bourgeois culture.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Wouter J. Hanegraaff, “Will-Erich Peukert and the Light of Nature,” in Esotericism, Religion, and Nature,<\/em> ed. Arthur Versluis<\/a>, et al. (Minneapolis: Association for the Study of Esotericism<\/a>, 2010), 282-83.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Not necessarily psychotropic mushrooms. To learn more about them, read Andy Letcher’s Shroom or the works of Paul Stamets, Dale Pendell, etc. These are metaphorical mushrooms\u2014or mushrooms as metaphor\u2014from an article by Wouter Hanegraaff on the German scholar of esotericism Will-Erich Peuckert (1895-1969): To me, [Peuckert’s] book [Pansophie] breathed\u00a0 an unmistakable mycological atmosphere: the mushrooms […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[39,4],"class_list":["post-2564","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-occultism","tag-scholarship"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xQTg-Fm","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1051,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1051","url_meta":{"origin":2564,"position":0},"title":"Trout and Mushrooms","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"August 9, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"M. and I are off for a few days to pursue trout and mushrooms. Blogging will resume later next week.","rel":"","context":"In \"blogging\"","block_context":{"text":"blogging","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=blogging"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4530,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=4530","url_meta":{"origin":2564,"position":1},"title":"From a Hereditary Tradition","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"August 15, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"I come from a hereditary tradition \u2014 of mushroom hunters. I remember my father the forest ranger taking me out when I was ten or eleven to look for them. It was usually raining, and I did not understand what he was seeing, but the activity was somehow important. And\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"mushrooms\"","block_context":{"text":"mushrooms","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=mushrooms"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/08\/mushroomjar.jpg-300x261.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":490,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=490","url_meta":{"origin":2564,"position":2},"title":"Local Knowledge","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"August 17, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"Three cheers for Vera Stucky Evenson, author of The Mushrooms of Colorado. Those white mushrooms were indeed Agaricus campestris. M. and I ate them on last night's pizza, and we're still here 24 hours later. (Yes, I made spore prints too.) The cat ate some too--he must have liked the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"deep ecology\"","block_context":{"text":"deep ecology","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=deep-ecology"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":508,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=508","url_meta":{"origin":2564,"position":3},"title":"Love and fungusM. and I\u2026","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"September 11, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"Love and fungusM. and I went mushrooming today in the Wets. The local news had carried the story of yet another lost mushroom hunter, so she kept reminding me that she had no sense of direction and it was my job to get us back to the Jeep.We found a\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10758,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=10758","url_meta":{"origin":2564,"position":4},"title":"Getting Lost among the Mushrooms","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"August 7, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"There are at least five stages to mushroom-hunting. You walk in the woods but do not see the mushrooms. You begin to see mushrooms here and there. Your unconscious is seeing mushrooms. For example, every reddish-tan thing on the forest floor that approximates the cap of a bolete will jump\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"animism\"","block_context":{"text":"animism","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=animism"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/08\/bolete-fb.jpeg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/08\/bolete-fb.jpeg?resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/08\/bolete-fb.jpeg?resize=525%2C300 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/08\/bolete-fb.jpeg?resize=700%2C400 2x"},"classes":[]},{"id":13446,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=13446","url_meta":{"origin":2564,"position":5},"title":"A Knife in the Woods","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"August 11, 2023","format":false,"excerpt":"M. and I went yesterday to check our favorite mushroom grounds. The radar had shown thunderstorms up there earlier in the week , but whatever rain fell had soaked right in. Nothing was coming up yet, not even LBMs. ((The mushroom hunter's catch-all term: \"Little brown mushrooms.\" Like \"little gray\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Colorado\"","block_context":{"text":"Colorado","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=colorado"},"img":{"alt_text":"Large butcher knife on forest floor.","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/found-knife-768x441.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/found-knife-768x441.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/found-knife-768x441.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x"},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2564","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2564"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2564\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2600,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2564\/revisions\/2600"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2564"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2564"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2564"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}