Why Manichaeans had fondness with red mushrooms

R. Gordon Wasson writes on his “Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality” pages 71-73 about the fondness Manichaeans had to mushrooms, red ones, and hence, Amanita Muscaria aka Soma, he suggests. Wasson credits St. Augustine, citing his “On the Morals of the Manichaeans”, when he condemns those who eat mushrooms. The original word in Augustine’s is “boletus”, Wasson argues that “In imperial Rome boletus was the name applied to what we call the genus Amanita, including both the edible and the toxic amanitas”. He also credits 11th century Chinese official Lu Yu as writing the Manichaeans “What they eat is always the red mushrooms” and “consider urine as a ritual water”.

The identity between the two mushrooms is questionable, he refers his own book “Mushrooms, Russia and history”. His logical conclusion is through the mention of urine and red mushrooms, that the Manichaeans used A. muscaria. Note that porcini mushrooms aka King Bolete (which were very popular in Roman cuisine) are growing next to the A. Muscaria and has similar habitats and seasons. Confusion between those two, or exchange, is plausible, plus the fact that the color of the Boletus is brown, and the colors in ancient cultures were not one-to-one unequivocal, so it may be a description for a brown mushroom as red.

Wasson argues that the mycophobic attitude toward mushroom eating is due to this St. Augustine’s writing, or at least it influences St. François de Sales and Jeremy Taylor condemning it.

Mushrooms as a fertility symbol

Throughout history mushrooms have symbolized fertility in various cultures due to their rapid growth and reproductive abilities. And they became sacred symbols for various fertility gods. The fact that mushrooms would grow out of nothing made the ancients wonder. They thought that the mushroom, which is a plant, has no seeds and considered the formation of the mushrooms as a virgin birth. However, the appearance of the mushrooms after the rain made them think that the rain is the fertilization of the sky god mother earth, and therefore the moment when the insemination was missing in their equation.

Some saw in the lightning from the sky the divine seed, the fact that immediately after the lightning comes the thunder, marked in their eyes the moans of the divine orgasm. The fact that some of the mushrooms are phallic in shape added to this myth. Since a mushroom was considered a symbol of fertility, they likened the world to a mushroom. The fact that a mushroom hatches from a type of egg, made them imagine the creation of the world as hatching from a cosmic egg.

Another amazing aspect of fungi was that sometimes mushrooms would grow on substrates of decaying organic matter, and it was amazing how from the places of death life could grow. In their eyes, this symbolized the circle of life. Of course, since these mushrooms were sometimes psychedelic, it generally symbolized rebirth for them.

The link between mushrooms and fertility also exists in Judaism (and of course in Christianity. And I’m not talking about John Marco Allegro’s theory or the fact that Peter was supposedly named after the mushroom i.e Pitriyah). Rebirth binds us to the Messiah. A person who is born again is a person who “wears the Messiah”, and is “one in Christ”. From the moment one lives in a messianic reality, revelation is considered the moment of birth.

In Tractate Shabbat 30b, they claim that the hebrew sages thought to shelve out the book of Proverbs because its words contradict each other, but they did not shelve it because this contradiction teaches us something great. In the book of Proverbs it is written, on the one hand, “Do not answer a fool as he is, lest you also become equal to him” (26:4), and on the other hand: “Answer a fool as he is, lest he be wise in his own eyes” (25:6). What we learn from this is that even though fools mock the words of the Torah, and it is better not to make them mock the words of the Torah, sometimes it is actually allowed and necessary, as demonstrated by the story of Rabban Gamliel who said several things, and each time some douchebag came and said that it could not be because the Bible says something completely different.

The story told by Rabban Gamaliel is that in the days of the Messiah, nature will change and all kinds of unnatural things such as miraculous fertility will occur as a matter of everyday life. The douche man asks: After all, it is written in the Bible that there is “nothing new under the sun”, and this means that nature cannot change. Rabban Gamliel answers: Even today it happens, come and I will give you an example. The three examples in Rabbi Gamliel speak of miraculous fertility, the first time a woman who gives birth every day, the second a plant that produces fruit every day, and the third the soil that produces cakes and candies. Rabban Gamliel’s proof that the third example still exists today is the mushrooms and truffles that come out as they are in one night, and wide and round as candies. Another example of mushrooms and fertility in the context of rain that “creates” mushrooms can be found in tractate Ta’anit 23a, where it is told about the “Honi the circle-drawer” who prayed for rain during a drought and immediately after it rained, “the wind blew and the clouds were scattered, and the sun shone, and the people came out to the field and brought them truffles and mushrooms”.