Thread on the role mushrooms play in our cultural system with extracts from "On the semiotics of mythological conceptions about mushrooms" by Toporov.

Knowing the ingredients also means knowing their position in the cultural space.

Mushrooms, in mythology, transcend the coincidentia oppositurum (life/death; dark/light; animal/plant; etc.)

This can happen only when the limits of a given system are transgressed.

Culturally speaking, what are mushrooms? How are they seen and located?

Mushrooms were always seen almost with suspicious, mystery surrounded them together with taboos.

Stories of old women around Moscow in the pre-war period viewed an interested in mushrooms as a sign of depravity.

The far right branch of the scheme below coincides with the most "mycophobic" cultures. Their ban as food was a result of their identification as natural (not cultural), raw (not cooked), and rotten (not fermented).

The opposite could also happen (again transcending dualism)

Mushrooms as breaking the opposition masculine/feminine.

In many languages (such as Russian), the name of a given mushroom can be feminine or masculine depending on their shape (convex-concav)

Lightning, thunder-bolt and mushrooms.

Ancient Greeks said that it was thunder, not rain, that made mushrooms grow. This connection between mushrooms and thunders is cross-cultural.

Many mushrooms name are connected to rain and thunders.

A Zapotec ritual connecting mushrooms gathering with a thunders.

In the most diverse cultures we find utterances linking mushrooms with celestial phenomena

Mushrooms circles.

German tradition: place where witches gather to dance/fly out from.

Welsh tales: fairies lure mortals inside to dance with them, once in it’s impossible to leave.

Mostly associated with doom, those are sacred places not to be violated.

The Haywain Tryptic by Hieronimous Bosch (1516) depicts the history of evil in three stages: origin (Eden), flowering (human life), death (hell).

In the central panel, the hay way moves towards what seems to be a mushroom as if it were moving towards the last panel, hell.

The last panel, Hell, is populated with chthonic creatures.

Those are strictly connected with mushrooms in many cultures and pictorial codes.

Popular beliefs say that insects, frogs, lizards and other chthonic creatures can transform into mushrooms or were once mushrooms.