The Magick of the Mycelial World
Readers, please enjoy this guest blog post by Nathan M. Hall, author of the new Path of the Moonlit Hedge.
The lowly mushroom is experiencing a celebrity moment lately.
Maybe it’s because of shows like Star Trek: Discovery, which featured a unique mushroom-based method of space travel, or the relentless efforts of famed mycologist Paul Stamets, who has opened up a generation to the healing and other miraculous powers of fungi. Still, the rootedness of mycophobia—literally, the fear of mushrooms—in much of Western culture has proven hard to undo as evidenced in other popular shows like HBO’s The Last of Us, which imagines what would happen if a variety of fungus called cordyceps did to humans what it does to insects (spoiler—it ain’t pretty). In other cultures outside of the US and Western Europe, mushrooms are regarded much more warmly, however, as important sources of food and medicine.
But if you’re in the mushroom-skeptical camp, fret not; there are some magickal partnerships that you can make that may change your mind. Animism is kind of my cuppa; it’s the worldview that sees all things, whether or not they have the spark of life, as beings who you can get to know and with which you can develop relationships and partnerships. With an animistic lens, you can make friends with what were simply a list of spell components. This is summarized neatly by the idea that the things that we use are not objects but subjects, who might have some opinions and input of their own.
Something that I’ve taken to calling the decompositional magickal model, featured in my book Path of the Moonlit Hedge: Discovering the Magick of Animistic Witchcraft, is based on work that I developed while developing a relationship with some mushrooms that were growing near my house. Thanks to fairy tales and folklore about fairy rings (some types of mushrooms grow in a circular pattern that was said to be a gateway to the land of the fae), and also likely thanks to a video game featuring a certain mustachioed plumber, I have loved fungi since I was a child. When I discovered that the actual organism that was responsible for sprouting mushrooms was a massive network of root-like threads called mycelia—which were in some cases responsible for connecting trees to one another and creating what is essentially a world wild web, fostering nutrient and information transfer across distances and species—I was amazed.
The magick of this species seems inherent; they hardly seem real the more you discover about them, and so I knew that befriending and partnering with the various species was going to have to be part of my work as a witch and an occultist. Of the many jobs they perform, information transfer is one of the most mind blowing. They are able to alert whole forests to the encroachment of predators, such as beetles, across species. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a magickal equivalent, something that smooths and enables clearer communication with the realm of spirit? Try this out and see if it helps the next time you’re making first contact with a spirit, be they tree, stone, lake, or ancestor.
Normally I’d recommend cultivating a close relationship with a wild species of forest mushroom, but to ease you into the first steps, try this out with a variety that’s already more familiar to humans. Shiitake are wilderness natives and widely available; buy some dried from your local grocer. Get a small box, like a matchbox, or an envelope, and place them inside. Place them on your altar and meditate with them. Reach out either in meditation or more deeply in trance, and begin communicating that you’d like to ask for their assistance to help communicate with other spirits. A promise to make regular offerings of spring water (just a sprinkle) are appropriate. Sometimes, if a species I’m working with is native, I offer to spread its spores around (in this case, shiitake are native to Southeast Asia, so unless you’re there, please refrain). Once you’ve finished communicating, place the mushrooms into your container and ask for a blessing from any spirits with which you may regularly work that the charm work well and perform the function you’ve created it for. Take it out on your witchy wanderings and see how it works!
Our thanks to Nathan for his guest post! For more from Nathan M. Hall, read his article “How and Why to Awaken the Animist Spirit in Your Magick.”
