MUSHROOMSRUSSIA AND HISTORY
BY

VALENTINA PAVLOVNA WASSON AND
R.GORDON WASSONVOLUME IPANTHEON BOOKS • NEW YORKCOPYRIGHT © 1957 BY R. GORDON WASSONMANUFACTURED IN ITALY FOR THE AUTHORS AND
PANTHEON BOOKS INC. 333, SIXTH AVENUE,
NEW YORK 14, N. Y.

www.NewAlexandria.org/
archiveCONTENTS

LIST OF PLATESVIILIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXTXIIIPREFACEXVIIVOLUME II.

MUSHROOMS AND THE RUSSIANS

3

II. MUSHROOMS AND THE ENGLISH

19

III. MUSHROOMS AND HISTORY

37

IV. MUSHROOMS FOR MURDERERS

47

V. THE RIDDLE OF THE TOAD AND OTHER SECRETSMUSHROOMIC

65

1. The Venomous Toad
2. Basques and Slovaks
3. The Cripple, the Toad, and the Devil's Bread

66
77
80

4. The 'Pogge Cluster

92

5.
6.
7.
8.
9.

Puff balls, Filth, and Vermin
The Sponge Cluster
Punk, Fire, and Love
The Gourd Cluster
From 'Panggo' to 'Pupik'

97
105
112
127
138

10. Mucus, Mushrooms, and Love
11. The Secrets of the Truffle
12. 'Gripau' and 'Crib'
13. The Flies in the Amanita

145
166
185
190

v

CONTENTS

VOLUME IIV.

THE RIDDLE OF THE TOAD AND OTHER SECRETSMUSHROOMIC (CONTINUED)
14. Teo-Nandcatl: the Sacred Mushrooms of the Nahua
15. Teo-Nandcatl: the Mushroom Agape
16. The Divine Mushroom: Archeological Clues in the Valley of Mexico
17. 'Gama no Koshikake and 'Hegba Mboddo'
18. The Anatomy of Mycophobia
19. Mushrooms in Art
20. Unscientific Nomenclature
Vale

215
287
322
330
335
351
364
374

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

381

APPENDIX I:
Mushrooms in Tolstoy's 'Anna Karenina

391

APPENDIX II:
Aksakov's 'Remarks and Observations of a Mushroom Hunter'

394

APPENDIX III:
Leuba's 'Hymn to the Morel'

400

APPENDIX IV:
Hallucinogenic Mushrooms: Early Mexican Sources

404

INDEX OF FUNGAL METAPHORS AND SEMANTIC ASSOCIATIONS 411
INDEX OF MUSHROOM NAMES

414

INDEX OF PERSONS AND PLACES

421

VI

LIST OF PLATESVOLUME I
JEAN - HENRI FABRE . Coprinus nycthemerus Fr.

Title-page

I.

JEAN- HENRI FABRE . Boletus edulis Fr. ex Bull.

4ii.

JEAN - HENRI FABRE . Coprinus comatus Fr. ex Mull.

4in.

JEAN-HENRI FABRE . Clathrus cancellatus Lin. ex Tournef.

12

iv.

JEAN - HENRI FABRE . Collybia fusipes Fr. ex Bull.

16v.

THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH. The Mushroom Girl. By courtesy of the Museum ofFine Arts, Boston (Mass.).

22

vi.

JEAN - HENRI FABRE . Arrnillariella mellea (Fr. ex Vahl) Pat.

36

vn.

JEAN - HENRI FABRE . Rhodopaxillus nudus (Fr. ex Bull.) R. Maire.

40

vm.

JEAN -HENRI FABRE . Boletus duriusculus Kalchbr.

48

ix.

JEAN - HENRI FABRE . Amanita csesarea Fr. ex Scop.

56

x.

JEAN -HENRI FABRE . Amanita phalloides Fr.

60

xi.

JEAN-HENRI FABRE. Danse Macabre: Amanita verna Fr. ex Bull.

60

xn.

HIERONYMUS BOSCH . The Last Judgment. Detail: Spitting toad. By courtesyof the Bayerische Staatsgemdldesammlungen, Munich.
xni.

70

HIERONYMUS BOSCH . The Seven Deadly Sins. Detail: Superbia. By courtesyof the Prado Museum, Madrid.
78

xiv. Conversion of Clovis. Tapestry in the Musee de Reims showing King Clovisin the battle of Tolbiac, his instruction in Christian doctrine by St. Remi,and his baptism. Woven in 1531. By courtesy of the Caisse Nationale des Mo
numents Historiques, Paris.
86
xv

HIERONYMUS BOSCH. The Hay Wain. Central Panel. By courtesy of the Prado

88

Museum, Madrid.

xvi. HIERONYMUS BOSCH. The Hay Wain. Detail. By courtesy of the Prado Mu
seum, Madrid.
88
xvn.

HIERONYMUS BOSCH . The Hay Wain. Detail: Boletus. By courtesy of the

Prado Museum, Madrid.

88

xvni.

JEAN-HENRI FABRE. Boletus Satanas Lenz.

92

xix.

JEAN - HENRI FABRE . Lycoperdon furfuraceum Pers. ex Schaeff.

100

VII

LIST OF PLATES
xx.
xxi.
xxn.
xxni.

Napoleonic caricature. By courtesy of Frank Altschul, Esq., Overbrook Farm,
Stamford, Conn.

100

Etruscan Mirror. Ixion on his wheel. By courtesy of the British Museum,London.

114

Fomes ofGcinalis. Miniature from a loth century Byzantine codex (No. 652)
of Dioscorides. By courtesy of The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York.

118

JEAN -HENRI FABRE . Morchella vulgaris Pers.

124

xxiv. JAN FYT. Still life. By courtesy of the Musees Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique,
Brussels.

128

xxv.

JAN DAVIDSZ. DE HEEM. Still life. By courtesy of the Wallace Collection, London.

128

xxvi.

ADRIAEN VAN UTRECHT. Still life. By courtesy of the Musees Royaux des Beaux-128

Arts de Belgique, Brussels.
xxvii.

Frontispiece to Franciscus van Sterbeeck's Theatrum Fungorum, Antwerp,
1675.

128

xxvni. GIUSEPPE ARCIMBOLDO. Autumn. By courtesy of the Pinacoteca, Brescia.

132

xxix. GIUSEPPE ARCIMBOLDO. Autumn: Detail. By courtesy of the Pinacoteca, Brescia.

132

xxx.

JEAN -HENRI FABRE . Psalliota campestris Fr. ex L.

136

xxxi.

JEAN -HENRI FABRE . Lactarius piperatus Fr. ex Scop.

148

xxxii. TUBER . Miniature from a loth century Byzantine codex (No. 652) of Dio
scorides. By courtesy of The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York.

168

xxxin. Toads in Hell. Detail from a painting \>y the pseudo-rlem met Ae B\eS.
Venice, Ducal Palace. Photo by Fiorentini, Venice.

188

xxxrv. Toad. Detail from a mosaic in the Battistero, Florence. Photo by Fratelli Alijgg

nari, Florence.
xxxv. JEAN - HENRI FABRE . Amanita muscaria Fr. ex Pers.

192

xxxvi. HIERONYMUS BOSCH . The Hay Wain. Left Panel. By courtesy of the Prado
Museum, Madrid.
208

xxxvn. OTTO MARSEUS VAN SCHRIECK. Moth with mushrooms. By courtesy of the
Offentliche Kunstsammlung, Bale.
208

VIII

LIST OF PLATESVOLUME II
JEAN-HENRI FABRE. Coprinus tardus Karst.

Title-page

XXXVHI.JEAN-HENRI FABRE. Boletus duriusculus Kalchbr.

218

xxxix. JEAN-HENRI FABRE. Panseolus campanulatus Fr. ex L.

242

XL.

Ceremonial mushrooms. Water-color by Michelle Bory.

254

XLI.

Accessories to the mushroom rite. Water-color by VPW.

254

XLH .

Aurelio Carreras, curandero, and his son Mauro. Huautla de Jimenez,
July 5, 1955. Photo by Allan Richardson.

262

XLHI. Mushroom stone. Attributed to early classic period, Highland Maya, c. 300
A.D. to c. 600 A.D. About 30 cm. high. By courtesy of the Rietberg Museum,

Zurich.

274

XLIV.

Mushroom stone. By courtesy of Hans Namuth, Esq., New York.

274

XLV.

Cayetano's House, Huautla de Jimenez. June 1955. Photo by RGW.

278

XLVI.

Maria Sabina and her daughter Polonia, curanderas. Huautla de Jimenez,
June 29, 1955. Photo by Allan Richardson.

294

XLVH.

Maria Sabina, curandera, passing mushrooms over incense (copal); also herdaughter Polonia and Cayetano's mother. Huautla de Jimenez, June 29-30,!955- Photo by Allan Richardson.
294

XLVIII.

Adoration of the mushroom. Maria Sabina, curandera, and her daughter
Polonia. Huautla de Jimenez, June 29-30, 1955. Photo by Allan Richardson. 294

xnx.

Emilio Garcia taking Teo-nandcatl or 'God's Flesh'. Huautla de Jimenez,
June 29, 1955. Photo by Allan Richardson.
294

L.

Maria Sabina, curandera, and her son Aurelio under the influence of mushrooms. Huautla de Jimenez, June 29, 1955. Photo by Allan Richardson.

300

Aristeo Matias with bowl of divine mushrooms. San Agustin Loxicha, July22, 1955. Photo by RGW.

316

Chinese sage contemplating Ling-chih. Painted by Chen Hung-shou (15991652). Reproduced by courtesy of Wango Wing, Esq.

322

n.
in.
nn.

Teopancalco fresco. Teotihuacan, in the Valley of Mexico. From Teotihuacan III period, A.D. 300-600. After Antonio Penafiel.

LIV.

Detail of Tlaloc effigy, Tepantitla fresco. Reproduced by Marilyn Weber.

LV.

Detail of Tepantitla fresco: Soul arriving on the playing fields of Paradise.

322
326
326

Reproduced by Marilyn Weber.
IX

LIST OF PLATES
LVi. Illuminated initial from a I5th century manuscript (No. 165) of Le Livre
pour la Sante du Corps, by Aldobrandino da Siena, 1256. By courtesy of The
Pierpont Morgan Library, New York.
342
LVII .

A . Mushrooms. Miniature from a pth century Greek codex (Grec 2179) of
Dioscorides. By courtesy of the Bibliotheque Nationals., Paris.
B . Mushrooms. Miniature from an 11 th century Arabic manuscript (Arabe
4947) of Dioscorides. By courtesy of the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris.
350

LVIII .

Mushrooms. Miniature from a loth century manuscript (No. 652) of Dio
scorides. By courtesy of The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York.
350

LIX.

PIETER BRUEGHEL THE ELDER. The Misanthrope. By courtesy of the Museo Na-

358

zionale, Naples.
LX .

PIETER BRUEGHEL THE ELDER . The Misanthrope. Detail. By courtesy of the358

Museo Nazionale, Naples.
LXI.

JUAN BAUTTSTA MAYNO. The Adoration of the Magi, c. 1610. By courtesy of358

the Prado Museum, Madrid.
LXII.

JUAN BAUTISTA MAYNO. The Adoration of the Magi, c. 1610. Detail. By

358

courtesy of the Prado Museum, Madrid.
LXIII .

HERRI MET DE BLES ('CIVETTA '). Christ bearing the Cross. By courtesy of the358

Gemaldegalerie der Akademie der bildenden Kilnste, Vienna.
LXIV.

HERRI MET DE BLES ('CIVETTA'). Christ bearing the Cross. Detail. By courtesy358

of the Gemaldegalerie der Akademie der bildenden Kilnste, Vienna.
LXV .

OTTO MARSEUS VAN SCHRIECK . Poppy with mushrooms. By courtesy of the358

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
LXVI.

OTTO MARSEUS VAN SCHRIECK. Mushrooms. By courtesy of the Herzog Anton

358

Ulrich Museum, Brunswick.
LXVII.

OTTO MARSEUS VAN SCHRIECK. Mushrooms. Detail. By courtesy of the Herzog

358

Anton Ulrich Museum, Brunswick.
LXVIII. PAOLO PORPORA, d. 1673. Still life. By courtesy of the Soprintendenza alle Gal-

358

lerie, Naples.
LXIX.

ABRAHAM BEGEYN. Still life. By courtesy of the Galleria d'Arte Antica, Rome.

LXX.

FRANS HAMILTON . Still life. By courtesy of the Bayerische Staatsgemaldesamm-358

lungen, Munich.

358

LXXI.

RACHEL RUYSCH . Still life. By courtesy of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

358

LXXII.

K W. TAMM. Still life. Private collection.

358

LXXIII. MELCHIOR DE HONDECOETER.

sterdam.

Still life. By courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, Am
358

LXXIV . MELCHIOR DE HONDECOETER. Still life. By courtesy of the National Gallery,

358

London.

x

LIST OF PLATESLXXV . SCHOOL OF ZURBARAN ,lyth-iSth century. Chestnuts, cheese, grapes, al
monds, and mushrooms, sp. tricholoma personatum. By courtesy of the Art
Institute of Chicago.
358

LXXVI.

Mushrooms. From a fresco found at Herculaneum, probably executed about
A . D . 50. By courtesy of the Museo Nazionale, Naples.

LXXVII . The dream. Woodcut after J.-J. Grandville. From the Magasin

1847-

358

Pittoresque,358

LXXVin.jEAN-FlENRi FABRE. Lactarius deliciosus Fr. ex Lin.

366

LXXIX . JEAN -HENRI FABRE . Lactarius sanguifluus Fr. ex Paul.

366

LXXX. JEAN-HENRI FABRE. Cantharellus cibarius Fr.

374

LXXXI . JEAN -HENRI FABRE . Boletus scaber Fr. ex Bull. (B. leucophseus Pers.).

398

LXXXII. JEAN-HENRI FABRE . Coprinus atramentarius Fr. ex Bull.

398

JEAN - HENRI FABRE . Coprinus radiatus Fr. ex Bolt.

409

All the colored reproductions of water-colors by Jean-Henri Fabre andPlates, xx, XL , XLI , LXXVI , were made by Daniel Jacomet, Paris. The
other plates were printed by Fratelli Alinari, Florence.

XILIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXTVOLUME I
1. Earliest reference to Russian fungi in English. Page from Russian-English
word-list of Richard James, 1619, citing five kinds of mushrooms without
English equivalents: ryzhik, guba, gruzd', volonitsa, grib. Oxford, Bodleian Li
brary, ms. James 43*. By courtesy of the Curators of the Bodleian Library.

34

2. Page from Theatrum chemicum Britannicum, by Elias Ashmole, London, 1652.

72

3. Robin Goodfellow. From The Mad Pranks and Merry Jests of Robin Goodfellow,
London, 1639.

83

4. Prince visiting fairy folk. From Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus, by Olaus
Magnus, Rome, 1555.

90

5. Fairy ring. From Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus, by Olaus Magnus,
Rome, 1555.

91

6. Description of Fomes officinalis. Last reported use in English of swamp in thesense of mushroom, referring to fungal growth on larch. From Naturall Phi
losophic, by Daniel Widdowes, 2nd edition, London, 1631.

106

7. I5th century woodcut of the agaricum. From Hortus Sanitatis, Mainz, 1491.

119

8. Map showing distribution of fungal designation in Europe and Asia.

141

9. Roman Tom Fool. From an engraved onyx, reproduced by Thomas Wrightin A History of Caricature and Grotesque in Literature and Art, London, 1875.

165

10. Tuber. Woodcut from the Hortus Sanitatis, Mainz, 1491.

170

11. The Horned God. Prehistoric painting of man disguised as animal. Caverne
des Trois Freres, Montesquieu-Avantes, Ariege, France.

175

VOLUME II
12. Map of Central America.

217

13. Map of area of mushroom cult in i6th and i7th centuries.

229

14. Teo-nanacatl as represented by a i6th century Spanish artist. From Florentine
codex Med. Pal. 218-220 of Bernardino de Sahagun's Historia de las Cosas deNueva Espana. By courtesy of Biblioteca Laurenziana, Florence.

234

15. Teo-nanacatl as represented by a i6th century Mexican artist. From Magliabechiano codex B. R. 232. By courtesy of Biblioteca Nazionale, Florence.

235

16. Map of the Province of Oaxaca, with the Wasson journeys.

247

XIII

MUSHROOMS, RUSSIA AND HISTORYPREFACE

T

HIS book

is addressed to those who love mushrooms, who love thewhole rich world of wild mushrooms in the same way that many lovethe flowers of the field and the birds of the air. Our public is certainly oneof the smallest in the English-speaking world, but no matter. We invite all
to share our joys, and if few respond, we are not less happy for being few tosavor the secret.
There is no shortage of writings about wild mushrooms. But in English andall other languages save French the thousands of pamphlets, books, and journals
on this subject seem to fall naturally into one or the other of two clusters. Around
one pole are gathered the manuals that teach beginners how to tell the species
apart, and around the other are the treatises written by mycologists solely forother mycologists to read. Ours is one of the few books about mushrooms
written for connoisseurs by amateurs. It is the first treatment in any language ofthe role played by mushrooms in the daily lives of the varied European peoples.
Strange disparities mark the attitude of these peoples toward mushrooms.
There is a deep repugnance for 'toadstools' among the folk that dwell aroundthe shores of the North Sea. The persistence of this repugnance bears witness,
if witness were needed, to the extraordinary toughness of an emotional heritage
coming down from remotest times. The 'mycophobia' of the North Sea peoples remains unshaken in the face of continuous exhortations, stretching overthe past hundred years, from well-informed men of science. We suggest to theanthropologists that they will do well to include always in their cultural valuations the question whether a given people is 'mycophile' or 'mycophobe',
and if 'mycophagous', what species they eat and love. Here is a subtle criterion
for comparative observations all the more valuable because pitched on a lowly
level, where man's superior faculties and conscious preoccupations seldom warp
the ancient grain of impulses passed on to children in their early years.
Our essays began as a mere footnote on the gentle art of mushroom-knowing
as practiced by the northern Slavs - a footnote in a larger work that was to havedealt with the Russians and their food. The footnote grew, and rose in status
to a place in the body of the text, and then mushroomed into a whole chapter,and finally one chapter by fission made five. The manuscript has burst all its
seams through successive revisions. If occasionally we wander from our theme,
we hope the reader will be indulgent, bearing in mind that what we havewritten has been for our own pleasure in the spare hours of a busy life. And
XVIIPREFACE

besides, to play a variation on a familiar French saying, je reviens toujours ames mousserons; which is to say, we always hark back to our mushrooms. In atime of troubles and darkness, we wish this book to be a garland offered intribute to those warm, rich qualities of the Russian people that wicked tyrants
strive in vain to crush and extirpate.
The reader who girds his loins and stays our course to the end will perceive
a progress in the range and depth of information as he proceeds from chapter
to chapter. This is because he is following in the authors' footsteps. The chaptershave been composed over a number of years, roughly in the order in which
they appear; and because they break new ground in subject and treatment, it
has seemed best to let them stand as they were written, for the reader to sharein the sense of adventure that the authors experienced in navigating along
uncharted coasts of cultural history, never knowing what fresh discovery lay
just ahead.
Our subject takes us into history and folklore, into mythology and philology.
The interloper treads these thickly-mined areas at his peril. We accept the risk,
armed only with the caution that accompanies a full awareness of danger. We
have tried to take counsel with the best authorities, and to shade our statements
to conform to the evidence. We are more aware than our readers will be of
the many areas of our subject that we have failed to explore. We wish wemight without presumption draw an analogy between our book and thosepaintings of Watteau's where only a few patches of the canvas are illuminedagainst the broad expanse of an undefined and shadowy background.
It is altogether fitting for an author to set forth his indebtedness to others,
and we should do so fully here, were not the list so long and weighty that it
would be unseemly and misleading on our part to associate such names with
our efforts. The extent to which we have leaned on persons more knowledgeable
than we will be apparent to all who know us. The patience of the learned
fraternity with our questions has amazed us. Doctors and lawyers and engineers
ask fees for their professional advice. But it seems that men of learning, like menof God, stand above these others, bestowing their counsel and blessings freely
on all who turn unto them. In the bibliography and notes we have tried to
pay our debts in full, and also to meet the needs of the more curious reader.
Without my husband's enthusiasm and help this book would never have cometo term, and I insist on making clear that he is personally responsible for therecondite lore concerning toads, vanished words, poisons, and many othermatters in chapters IV and V. The first-person pronouns in our text shiftoccasionally, and in chapters IV and V regularly, from the singular to the
XVIII

PREFACE

plural: there is method in this, for the plural pronouns usually evidence myhusband's contributions to our joint undertaking.
We gladly make special mention also of our debt to Roman Jakobson, theSamuel H. Cross Professor of Slavic studies at Harvard University, who combines in equal degree vast erudition in things Slavic, exquisite standards ofscholarship, and the infectious enthusiasm of the inspired teacher. Desiring todetermine what the Basque language might have to contribute to our theme,
we solicited the counsel of Professor Rene Lafon, holder of the Basquechair at the University of Bordeaux. Generously he lent us his collaborationin what he considered a novel area for research, and in a series of communications, admirable for their blend of imaginative insight and scholarly discipline, he undertook to explore with us, for the first time in Basque scholarship, the rich and tantalizing Basque mushroom vocabulary. Some of the
fruits of that epistolary interchange will be revealed in the ensuing pages, but
it is to be hoped that Professor Lafon himself will find time to incorporate thefull results of our joint endeavors in a monograph that he alone is qualified
to compose. We are specially beholden also to Robert Graves, novelist, scholar,
and poet, who supplied to us, among other brilliant suggestions, the missing
link that we had been seeking in order to round out our own conjecture concerning the death of the Emperor Claudius, and to render that conjecture not merely
suggestive but (we make bold to hope) persuasive. We believe that by re-reading
the age-worn texts in the light of present-day knowledge, we can state withsome assurance exactly what lethal agents were used when, at the. behest of
the Empress Agrippina, Locusta undertook to dispose of Agrippina's august
spouse. We are under obligations to many libraries for their cooperation, but
most of all to The New York Public Library, equally rich in its treasures andin its always courteous and efficient personnel-a unique institution, which
the community on whom it depends fails to esteem at its priceless worth.
We reserve the last paragraphs of this preface for our illustrations. The wholeworld knows that Jean-Henri Fabre was a close observer of insects, a distinguished writer, and a person of rare spiritual quality. Only a few know that
he devoted many hours of his life, in the decade that followed 1885, to painting
mushrooms in water-color. His accurate observation was matched by his artistic
sensibility. Today hundreds of these pictures he on the shelf of his study at
Serignan in the Provence, as fresh in color as the day he painted them, on
excellent stock, assembled neatly in the folders where he laid them. He painted
all his mushrooms in their natural size, save one that was too big for his paper
and that he never succeeded in identifying. During his life-time he sought a
XIX

PREFACE
publisher for them, but when he failed to obtain the assurance that the colors
would be truly rendered, he chose to leave them, on the shelf. He wrote little
about mushrooms, but in The Life of the Fly he said they were his botanicaljoys from his earliest youth, and he went on to predict sadly that the pile ofhundreds of sheets of his paintings would eventually be shifted from cupboard
to cupboard and from attic to attic, to become dirtied and stained and for rats
to gnaw, until finally they would fall into the hands of some little grandnephew,
to be cut into paper caps.
The home of Fabre is now the property of the State, and comes under thejurisdiction of the Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris. To that institution we turned, and through the intercession of the Director of the Laboratoirede Cryptogamie, Professor Roger Heim, Membre de 1'Institut, the Assemblee desProfesseurs of the Museum graciously granted to us the privilege that we sought.
In May 1950 my husband undertook a pilgrimage to remote Serignan tosee the Fabre water-colors, and he picked out more than a dozen for our book.
Two years later, finding himself again in Paris, he called once more on Professor
Heim, who by now had become the Director of the Museum National, a worthy
successor in that great post to the illustrious Buffon. Indeed, he sits at Buffon'svery table, in Buffon's very room, where the elegant i8th century furnishings have remained unchanged, the walls adorned with the graceful i8th century
oils of Jean-Jacques Bachelier, depicting the birds of the several continents.
The Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle is one of the fine expressions ofFrench cultural achievement, wherein advanced research and teaching in thenatural sciences are always suffused with a deep understanding of the humanities.
In Professor Heim the Museum National has once again found a chief who
combines in the highest measure those rare qualities of mind and heart thathave long distinguished the faculty of that extraordinary institution.
Professor Heim proposed to my husband a second visit to Serignan, and thistime he himself could go too. Thus it came about that in July 1952 I joined them,and together we set out for the Midi, driving by easy stages so as to enjoy
the lovely and storied landscapes through which we passed, and the food andwines as well. (Alas, around mid-July there is a dead-spell in the procession ofmushroom growths, and we found none on the menus of the hostelries where
we stopped.) Finally we arrived in the village of Serignan.
When Fabre had acquired his harmas, as any miserable patch of arid land suchas his was called in his native Proven9al tongue, it was a waste, but with thepassing years the bushes and trees that he planted have grown to their full height,
beneath their foliage his fountain plays quietly in the basin, and what was longxx

PREFACE

ago the parched harmas has grown into one of the most enticing, shaded recessesof the warm and caressing countryside of Provence. Fittingly, the property
is in the custody of Henri Fabre's son Paul, and to this day it is called I'Harmas,
though this is become a misnomer.
In Serignan, with Professor Heim's help, we selected ten additional watercolors. Henri Fabre had not of course our needs in mind, and so it happens that in
his whole wonderful collection we found no examples of two species of mushrooms about which we speak at length, the boletus asreus and the tricholoma
georgii or gambosum. By way of compensation we reproduce a number ofwater-colors that are unrelated to our text, solely for their beauty. Professor
Heim has been our guide in the scientific designations that we apply to the species
pictured by Fabre.
At our request the Museum National handed over the water-colors that we
had chosen to the atelier of Daniel Jacomet in Paris, for reproduction in their
original size by the pochoir process. We should like to think that Henri Fabre,
could he see the results, would be well pleased.
VALENTINA P. WASSONNew York, October 1953

VOLUME I

I
MUSHROOMS AND THE RUSSIANS
Mushrooms... the poor man's food, the rich
man's dainties.
SAMUEL COLLINS, erstwhile physician
to the Tsar, in 1671.

the time when our mother first began to send us out into the
I woods andrecall
fields to gather mushrooms for the family table. In the summer
CANNOTof 1909, when I was almost eight and my sister was nearly seven, we werespending our summer holidays at a village called Majorenhof, near Riga on
the Baltic Sea. We were surrounded by pine groves, the ground carpeted withneedles and with blueberry and bilberry bushes. What a delight it was for
Tanya and me to ramble through the clean, fragrant woods, filling our baskets
with those aristocrats of the mushroom world, the noble belye griby \We were already proficient mushroom gatherers then, and we must havebegun our apprenticeship long before. Our mother, Xenia Dimitrievna, waseven more solicitous about her brood than most mothers, yet it never occurredto her to poison our young minds with warnings about 'toadstools'. All Russians know the mushrooms, not by dint of study as the mycologists do, but
as part of our ancient heritage, imbibed with our mother's milk. A Russiannursery rime, tenderly humorous, tells of the mother who sends out her toddler
to look for the borovik. Each time he returns with the wrong kind, perhaps agood kind, perhaps bad, but never the borovik. Each time she repeats her previous instructions, adding however an additional line of descriptive advice. In
the end, off goes Mother herself, impatiently, and there, almost on her doorstep,
she discovers a family of the ones she seeks.
We Russians love the whole mushroom world, and what a world it is! Almost
endless in variety, every species expressing its individuality by its size and shapeand stance, in the beauty of its evanescent colors, in the delicate perfection ofits gills or pores or skin that are a joy to touch, and usually too in its scent andtaste. The evil kinds, how they flaunt their wicked grace, like the harlots thatthey are! But we are fond even of them, in a way. Where is death more plainly
writ than in the greenish pallor of the elegant amanita phalloides, the 'destroying
angel' 2 Where is to be found a better portrait of the Scarlet Woman than inEurope's amanita muscaria, the 'fly amanita'2 (As ofttimes happens with scarlet
women, worse things by far are said of this dazzling wanton of the mushroom
3

CHAPTER ONE

family than she deserves.) Mushrooms there are, such as the clathrus cancellatus,
so strange of line and hue that he who for the first time sees them is struckincredulous: can such things really be?
This love of Russians for the earthy tribe of mushrooms is, I suggest, a distinctive trait of the Slavs and a significant one. In the face of an ever mounting
flood of printed matter and talk about Russia, that land remains for the Englishspeaking world as deep an enigma as ever. If among those who seek the key
to the enigma there be some with an understanding heart and a poet's insight,
let them lay aside for a while most of what is written and uttered, and consider
the lesson in Russian history and Russian ways that the mushroom has toteach. Here is evidence of our visceral attachment to the bounteous soil thatis our Mother Russia. In America, the hospitable land of my adoption, we
sing hymns to our rocks and rills, to our wooded hills, but many, I think, singwith their voices and not with their hearts, for our rills we pollute and in our
great paper mills we are speedily converting those wondrous forests into the
stuff of which comics are made.
In France and Italy the peasants know many of the mushrooms and possessa rich vocabulary for them. The Germanic peoples are less informed than the
French, and there is evidence that what they know is of modern acquisition.
But when the traveler reaches the lands of the northern Slavic peoples and the
Lithuanians, the folk knowledge concerning mushrooms broadens and deepens
until it reaches astonishing proportions. The Russians find it as natural to know
the mushrooms and to avoid the deadly kinds as do most Americans to distinguish poison ivy from other creepers. Take our family for instance. We wereMuscovites. My parents belonged to the Russian intelligentsia, and were citybred. We children spent most of our childhood in the immense cities of Moscow
and St. Petersburg, and only our vacations in the country. Yet to no one in
all Muscovy could it have seemed strange that Tanya and I, and all our little
playmates, made ourselves useful, when in the country, by gathering various
kinds of mushrooms and bringing them home in childish rivalry and glee tothe kitchen. When we were naughty, our mother would punish us by forbidding us to go mushrooming.
The Catskill Mountains in August are filled with mushrooms, exquisitely
beautiful. (We Russians are always finding mushrooms wherever we go, even
where our American friends tell us there are none.) In 1927 I had just married
my American husband, and we were spending our first holiday in the lodgeof Adam Dingwall, a friend, near Big Indian. With what astonishment myhusband saw me, on our first walk, dart with ecstasy to this fungus and that,4PLATE I
Jean-Henri Fabre. Boletus edulis Fr. ex Bull.
French: cepe de Bordeaux; German: Steinpilz;
Italian: porcine; Russian: belyi grib.

PLATE II
Jean-Henri Fabre. Coprinus comatus Fr. ex Miill.
French: pisse-chien.

MUSHROOMS AND THE RUSSIANS
and on bended knee strike what seemed to him poses of adoration! With
what horror he strove, unsuccessfully, to keep me from bringing home andeating a mess of fragrant lisichki! He behaved, as we both at once perceived,
like the hen that has hatched ducklings and sees them swim away.
An absorbing work, perhaps rich in historical significance, needs to be written
on the role of the mushrooms in the life of the peoples of Europe. There are
already many scientific treatises on mycology, as the study of the fungi is called,
but none on the cultural implications of the mushroom world in the historyof our European ancestors. For every region there should be determined whichmushrooms are familiar to the people of the locality, and what names theyuse, and how they prepare them for food, and the folklore attaching to them.
Our theme is elemental, reaching back into the folkways of pre-history, andsuch a mushroomic map of Europe might well confirm folk-ties hitherto merely suspected, and disclose others. If only one could travel today throughout
the Slavic lands in the mushroom months, traveling close to the moist Mother
Earth, gathering mushrooms with the peasants, identifying them by their local
names, eating them according to local recipes, assembling the folklore about
them, and trying to catch their delicate beauty of line and color with paintand brush! When I was a child, anyone with the inclination and leisure could
have indulged in this idyllic pursuit to his heart's content.
To what a world of wonder and delight the fungal vocabulary of Russia
transports us! Every mushroom, good or bad, comes under the general nameof grib. When the farm-boy of the American prairies returns home after a hard
day hungry for his 'grub', he is using in all likelihood a word with the same
origin as the Russian peasant child who gathers his griby in the woods. Bothwords go back to a prehistoric root of the Indo-Germanic tribes that expressed
the scratching and stirring and rooting and grubbing of the soil which gave
to primitive man his vegetable food. Our archeologists piece together meanings deduced from the rubbed and worn artifacts of peoples who died long
before the spoken word could be committed to posterity by writing. But thevery words that those peoples spoke also come down to us, Likewise rubbed
and worn, their sounds and meanings slowly changing on the tongues of numberless generations, yet still identifiable. In the linguistic cousinship of 'grub'
and the Russian grib we see one example, out of an infinite number, of thecommon cultural heritage that unites at the deepest levels the Slavs and theWest, kindred stock of one great Indo-European family.
Of the poisonous mushrooms, only one species in the Russian language bears
a common name - the mukhomor or fly-killer, the amanita muscaria of science.
5

CHAPTER ONE

In America this knave wears a yellow cap necked with warts, but throughout
Europe its color is a splendid red, and only one blind to nature's warnings could
be seduced by its meretricious allurements. All merely tasteless or insignificant
mushrooms we dismiss with affectionate contempt under the term poganki,
the 'unworthy ones' or, as some interpret the word, 'little pagans'.
On the lowest level of culinary value we lump together a miscellaneous lotof gilled mushrooms by the name syroezhki. They can be eaten raw, as the namesays, though seldom are they so eaten. To this humble group rightly belongs
the common field mushroom, a poor thing owing its undeserved renown toa weakness in its character that makes it unique - it alone in the mushroom
world of Europe and America stoops to man's will by lending itself tocommercial cultivation in a big way.1 Among Great Russians, this people preeminent in 'mycophagy' or mushroom-eating, the field mushroom enjoys little
standing, not even possessing today a commonly used native name, being called
champignon after the French. When gathered fresh in breeze-swept pastures,it still possesses traces of distinction, but through mass production on shelvesin darkened cellars under controlled and uniform conditions the market producthas long since lost such virtue as its wild ancestors once had, until today it istruly the slattern of the mushroom world, a sickly simulacrum of what mushrooms should be. (Actually, the cultivated mushroom and the field mushroom
belong to different though closely related species. The beginnings of commercial
cultivation offer a minor mystery. The French discovered the secret around
Paris, whence the name champignons de Paris, but the exact time is unknown.
There is a reference to them in Le jardinier fran^ois, a book by N. de Bonnefonspublished in 1651. It seems likely that the art had sprung up in the previous half
century. When Francis Bacon assembled his data for his Sylva Sylvarum, published in 1626, this well informed Englishman had never heard of cultivatedmushrooms, for he wrote that a strange property of mushrooms is 'that theycome up so hastily, as in a night, and yet they are unsowne'. It is clear also thatJohn Parkinson when he wrote his Theatrum Botanicnm, published in 1640, wassimilarly unaware of the procedures for inducing field mushrooms to grow.)
Of the distinguished mushrooms, the first to appear in the spring of theyear are the smorchki, or morels. They are not uncommon in America too, but
in the New World they are gathered and relished almost solely by transplantedsons of Europe. This is especially remarkable since no one could mistake so
I. We are aware that the Italians in certain localities raise the clitocybe catinus and the polyporus tuberaster,but only on a modest scale. In Japan, however, the cultivation of the excellent shiitake is as important as thechampignon industry in the West.

6

MUSHROOMS AND THE RUSSIANS

distinctive a mushroom, standing erect as it does with its honey-combed topknot exposing its windows to the breezes.
Through summer and fall the variety of succulent mushrooms that Russians
gather is considerable. In ascending order of excellence, we begin with the
opjonki, the mushrooms that nourish on dead tree stumps. These are of various
kinds, but the classical opjonok, or opjonka, is the common ink-cap, a delicate
and lovely mushroom, the perfect expression in color and texture and line oftransitory grace. For the span of a few hours these beautiful creatures, theirhighly convex bonnets supported on spindly legs, toss jauntily in the air, andthen, by the action of their own enzymes, they curl up and dissolve into inky
fluid. Large numbers often grow in a single colony, each day bringing forth a
new generation. They must be cooked the instant they are gathered. More substantial is a second kind of opjonka, the armillariella mellea of the mycologists.
Large and fleshy, they lend themselves to drying.They too grow in family clusters,
but less populous than the ink-caps; in Italy the peasants by happy inspiration
call them, with an affectionate diminutive, the Holy Family - famigliola buona.
The mushrooms with a moist and sticky surface, which the English-born
person is quick to scorn as "slimy', the Russians by a reverse semantic twist
praise as the 'buttery ones'- the 'fat-of-the-earth', as Samuel Collins, erstwhile
physician to the Tsar, put it in his book, The Present State of Russia, publishedin 1671. These are the masljonki and masljaniki of the Russian kitchen, fromthe word maslo, meaning butter. Perhaps somewhat higher in the scale of merit
are the Hsichki and the ryzhiki - the 'little foxes' and the 'rusty ones'. The former
are the chanterelles of the West. Few are the sights that nature offers more
gladdening to the eye of man than a colony of chanterelles on the shaded floorof an evergreen forest, their brilliant yellow cups spattering a carpet of dry,dun-colored needles. True, they dance not, but for Russians they laugh likedancing daffodils. With fluted stems, they look like yellow parasols, blown
inside out. Good as they are to eat, their beauty in their native setting transcends
their taste. With Russians the chanterelle holds a more humble place in thehierarchy of mushroom values than among some of the Western peoples who
know their mushrooms less well. The folk of Norway and Sweden - countries
that abound in mushroom life - think of the chanterelle as the one edible
mushroom of the forests, which goes to prove that an abundance of mushrooms
does not suffice to bring about familiarity with them. The chanterelle is common
in America. It is pungent and unpalatable until cooked.
For the table, in my opinion, the chanterelle must yield pride of place tothe ryzhik - identified by the lexicons with the lactarius deliciosus but in fact
7

CHAPTER ONE

embracing several of the edible lactarii - a fleshy mushroom whose funnelshaped cap is handsomely marked by concentric rings of red. We Russians
love our ryzhiki. This is the famous mushroom that we gather in immense
quantities and eat with affection and gusto. We prepare it in many ways, butchiefly we like it salted and pickled. By tradition the various Finnish peoples
are not mycophagous, but the peoples of Finland and Estonia have learned
from the Russians in modern times to harvest the ryzhiki of the forests and addthem to the family menu. Ryzhik, as we have said, means the 'rusty one',a name derived from the color of the cap. At the other end of Europe theCatalans in their language have hit on the identical figure of speech: thus therovello of Barcelona is our ryzhik - the word means the same thing, and themushroom is almost the same. The Catalan prizes this mushroom highest of
all: he honors it above the cepe de Bordeaux. He puts his mess of rovellons intoa frying pan of very hot oil, and on top of the mushrooms he adds tomatoes
and garlic and parsley and sausage made from pork, and after cooking the whole
for ten minutes or less over a slow fire, he sits down to a dish that he considers
fit for the gods. In Spanish the name of this classic mushroom is the mizcalo,
apparently a pre-Latin word, indigenous in Iberia, its verbal kinships lost in
antiquity. The very antiquity of this word bears witness to the hold that themushroom has on the people of Castile. The peasants in the noble Sierra de
Credos, to the west of Madrid, know the mizcalo well: they harvest it regularly
and sell the crop to gentlemen who come out from Madrid to buy it for re-saleelsewhere in Spain and abroad.
As I said before, the lexicons tell us that the ryzhik is the mushroom known
to science as the lactarius deliciosus. I shall let this identification pass for thepresent, merely remarking that a strange confusion bedevils the terminology
here, a confusion that must be laid at the door of a naturalist who blundered.
Later I shall try to untangle the error.
The gruzdi are another famous mushroom tribe in northern Russia. This is
the name properly belonging to the large, white, fleshy lactarius piperatus,
but apparently some Russians also use it for other lactarii and even some russulae. The word itself is peculiar to the Russian language (including White
Russian and Ukrainian), being unknown elsewhere in the Slavic world. It isan honored name in our mushroom vocabulary, though rather for its role infolklore and proverbs, where the gruzd' is the captain of the mushroom host,1
than as a table delicacy.
i. There is the famous proverb: Nazvahja gruzdjom, polezaj v kuzov; which is to say, "If you call yourself agruzd', into the basket you go!"; in other words, "If you give yourself airs, take the consequences."

8

MUSHROOMS AND THE RUSSIANS

With the ryzhik and the gruzd' we leave behind the whole tribe of gilledmushrooms and ascend the scale of values to the best varieties of the numerous
genera of boleti. These are the mushrooms that, instead of radial gins on theunderside of the cap, display sponge-like pores. Two of them that are esteemedby all Russians are the berjozovik (or podberjozovik) and the podosinovik, andconcerning them there is a singular fact to be disclosed.
In recent times the mycologists of the West have discovered that an intimate
tie of mutual help links certain mushrooms to certain kinds of trees, each ofsuch mushroom species being thus related to one or more kinds of trees. These
mushrooms may assume a slightly different appearance according to the kindof tree the individual specimen lives with. For this relationship to be understood,
one must keep in mind that the mushrooms we see in woods and fields are
merely the fruit thrown to the surface when all conditions are right: the lifeof these elementary organisms goes on chiefly underground; indeed, in thecase of truffles, entirely so. Just as the therapeutic potency of certain moulds
has been discovered only in this century, so the importance of mushrooms inlife's great round begins now to be discerned. We know that the rootlets ofmany trees are often locked in symbiotic embrace with the subterranean 'mycelium' of the mushroom, and for this intimacy the mycologists have invented
their special word - 'mycorrhiza', from the Greek words for fungus and root.
The painstaking observations of mycologists have proved that between thebirch tree and the boletus scaber there is such a relationship, and similarly
between the aspen and the European boletus rufus. Now it is an arresting fact,of which mycologists in the West are usually unaware, that the folk names in
Russian for these very species of mushrooms are keyed to those same trees:
the berjozovik lives with the berjoza, or birch tree; and the podosinovik grows
under the osina, or aspen. The berjozovik is the boletus scaber, and the podosinovik
is the boletus rufus. The scientists now confirm what the peasants of Eastern
Europe have sensed from time immemorial. The berjozovik, incidentally, isabundant in America, but in my opinion the true podosinovik does not occur
here, and those that are gathered and eaten as such by Russians in the UnitedStates belong to other species somewhat resembling the red-capped aspenmushroom of Europe. There is also in Russia a rare blue-capped podosinovik,
whose scientific name I do not know: it would be interesting to identify it,
to see whether the mycologists have yet confirmed its link with the aspen tree.
Ranking above all the mushrooms so far mentioned come those aristocratsof the mushroom world, the belye griby or 'white mushrooms', known to the
French as the cepes de Bordeaux and to the mycologist as the boletus edulis.
9CHAPTER ONE

These are the most famous of common mushrooms, the delight of epicures,
the 'cep' of English gourmets. The Russians call them 'white', not primarily
because their flesh is white, but because in the Russian language 'white' connotes excellence.
And right here we come upon another of the strange parallels in fungal
imagery that recur between peoples geographically and culturally remote fromone another. We have seen that both the Russians and Catalans speak of certain lactarii as the 'rusty ones'. Now we observe that the Basques of Guipuzcoa, Upper Navarre, and the Labourd refer to the dun-colored cep as the 'whitemushroom', just as the Russians do, the Basque term being ondo zuri. We havesaid that 'white' connotes excellence, but perhaps this is an understatement.
There is an abundance of evidence that the primitive peoples of the Eurasianland mass, no matter how different culturally, were prone to associate whitenessand brightness with divinity, with the 'White Goddess' (as Robert Graves
calls this creature), who possessed myriad shapes and names. Is it possible thatin the 'white mushroom' of the Russians and Basques we discover a survivalof a primitive divine kinship>
Truly senatorial in girth and mass, the splendid white mushroom or cep issupreme in fragrance and taste. It lends itself to pickling and drying, so that it
keeps indefinitely and then may be served in soups and sauces. This is the mushroom that Russians used to eat in Lent in lieu of meat: little wonder that no one
shrank from Lenten fare!1 This is the mushroom, packaged in cellophane envelopes, that is to be found on sale in the little Jewish food shops of New York.
(How lovable are those shops, in the immense variety of their stores and thewarmth of the welcome that the owners, hailing as they almost always dofrom Eastern Europe, extend to appreciative customers, and especially to
Russians!) During the recent war with Germany, the importation of thesemushrooms was interrupted, but new sources sprang up in Chile. The quality,
however, was not the same, and with the return of peace, the flow of mushrooms
from Poland and Italy was resumed. In New York there is one firm, the Reliable
Mushroom Company in Rivington Street, that confines its business to dealing
in these imported dried mushrooms. In November 1948 I priced the various
grades that Mr. Fessel was offering: the shredded Chilean mushrooms were$2.75 a pound and the Italian were $4.00; but the long and handsome stringsof dried Polish ceps were $6.00. In December 1950 the Polish product had risen
to $8.00, and for caps alone (the stems being considered inferior and removed)
I. These mushrooms were allowed by the Russian Church during all fasting periods save Holy Week - a subtle
line of demarcation in religious discipline that will delight all amateurs of ethno-mycology.
10

MUSHROOMS AND THE RUSSIANS

the price was $12, but a year later, in October 1951, the market for these caps
had fallen to $8.
In New York the cep is for sale only in its desiccated state, though it grows
throughout the wooded countryside; and those who know it only dried will
never divine the delicacy and richness of its taste when pickled in brine, or
marinated, or preserved by boiling and sealing in jars, or better far, when fried
fresh in butter, or, finally and best of all, sauteed in sour cream.
I respectfully suggest to the Wine and Food Society that some day theyarrange to serve to their members, artfully prepared, a selection of all themushrooms I have mentioned, accompanied of course by appropriate wines,
and I predict that by a vote resembling a Soviet election the choice will run
to the incomparable belye griby. I am not unmindful of the difficulties in arranging such an extraordinary culinary event. All the mushrooms must be served
fresh, to do them all equal justice. A generous mess of the most ephemeral the opjonki - would have to be rushed in at the last moment from close by,of course with motorcycle escort, sirens whining. A chef would be cooking
them in a chafing dish en route. Other kinds of mushrooms would hail from
Europe by plane. The chef in charge would thoroughly understand the personality of each of the kinds, and possess the skill to evoke its proper character.
Nobly served, what a memorable spread we should have, and what a tributeto the folk-cookery of the Slavs!
I have one more name to add to the honor roll of the Russian mushroom
world. If the belye griby are the aristocrats of that world, then the serene dignityof Prince must be bestowed on the borovik. By ancient tradition and common
consent, it leads the roster. The Czechs, who vie with us in our enthusiasm
for it, call it the Regal Mushroom, or hfib krdlovsky. Some Frenchmen know it
too. They use for it various names - tete de negre, cepe polonais, gendarme noir, andcepe bronze. The name that the mycologists use is boletus asreus. Apparently it
does not occur in the New World.1 It is rare in Russia, so rare that many
Russians apply the famous name erroneously to its close relative, the belyi grib.
Perhaps it is not a distinct species, but only a variant of the other, a variant
linked symbiotically with some kind of pine tree, for bor means pine-forest. The
borovik owes its supreme rating with us to its rarity and to its breathtaking
beauty: its 'head' (for one refrains from speaking of the 'cap' of such a majestic
creature) is a deep brown approaching black, and in size and weight and
I. A European mycologist has reported finding the borovik in Florida. See 'The Boletoideae of Florida', by Rolf
Singer, in The American Midland Naturalist, January 1947, pp. 22-24. Until others confirm his findings, I hesitate
to accept them.
IICHAPTER ONE

stature it is the equal of the belyi grib. In fragrance and taste, perhaps only themost knowing epicures can distinguish the two, but however closely related thetwo kinds may be, and however much they look alike, to the borovik belongs
the dignity of first place in the whole mushroom world.
The Russians never discuss the weather to make conversation, and our lackof interest in golf scores and sporting events generally, both amateur and professional, is complete. But mushrooms are different. They are not only raw
material for the kitchen, they are a theme for endless discussion. They are everpresent in our minds, even when we are not discussing them. They are sotaken for granted that Russian authors seldom stop to discuss them systematically. But references to them are scattered everywhere in Russian literature in poetry, fiction, essays. Three times in Anna Karenina does Leo Tolstoy bringthem into his narrative, and the episodes, for the perceptive reader, are extraordinarily revealing. In one, a nursery full of tearful little children is turned in
an instant from tears to joyous excitement with the announcement that they areto go mushrooming. The second episode, for our purpose, is even more startling. A land-owner is preparing to propose to a girl he loves, and with thisintention goes into the woods to join her where she is gathering mushrooms.
But he never gets to the point of proposing, for they begin by discussing mushrooms, and though both are longing to speak of love, once they are on mushrooms, like a cracked record they cannot get off that subject! In Appendix I
we offer to our readers a rendering of these two passages from Anna Karenina.
The third episode, though slight, is perhaps the most touching. The land-owner
Levin goes out into his fields, where his peasants are mowing the hay, to jointhem in their labor. The day is hot and long and the work is hard, but they
all press on to finish a big stint. As twilight comes they find themselves cutting
grass among the trees of a wood where birch-mushrooms abound, big fellows
that have fattened on the moist humus of the grassy places. In their rhythmic
sweep the scythes cut the mushrooms as well as the grass. Levin, exhausted
though he is by his unwonted effort, nevertheless notices that the oldest of
the peasants, a grand old man who excels all the others in grace and endurance,
never fails to lean over and pick up the mushroom that his blade has severed,then tucking it away in the fold of his blouse. "Another present for my old
woman," he says. His scythe does not miss a single blade of grass, nor does asingle mushroom escape him.
There are delightful verses about mushrooms in the poems of two of Russia's
more accomplished poets, Lev Alexandrovich Mej and Viktor Vladimirovich
12

PLATE III Jean-Henri Fabre.
Clathrus cancellatus Lin. ex Tournef.

MUSHROOMS AND THE RUSSIANS

Khlebnikov. I like particularly Khlebnikov's apostrophe to the mushrooms of
the forest. The poetic virtue of his lines is lost in this literal translation:
Here are syroezhki and the russet ryzhikWith raspberry blood,
Yellow gruzd'', round and shaggy,
And you, pecheritza,
Simple and white like snow,
And the firm white ones with the thick caps.

The 'firm white ones' are ceps of course, the thick-capped belye griby. Of special
interest is Khlebnikov's description of the ryzhik as 'raspberry-blooded'. All
the lexicons say that the ryzhik is the lactarius deliciosus, a mediocre mushroom that exudes saffron drops. It is clear that the ryzhik of Khlebnikov is avariant, a lactarius that drips raspberry blood - malinovaja krov'.
Yet another Russian author, Sergej Timofeevich Aksakov, late in his life
wrote about mushrooms in a lovely essay that is little known. It merits attention for several reasons, and hi Appendix II we present what we believe is thefirst translation of it.
The addiction to mushroom gathering is not a badge of politics or ideology.
There was Aksakov, a superb figure of Old Russia. But there was also Lenin,
whose fanaticism brought endless woe on Russia and the world, but whose
dedication to wild mushroom hunting during one brief spell shows him hi amore winning light. His wife Nadezhda Krupskaja wrote in a letter hi 1916
that he pretended to know nothing about wild mushrooms and to care less,but in fact he was seized at that time with a veritable passion for mushroom
gathering. (He was possessed of a razh', as she put it.) One day hi that fatefulsummer of 1916 they were hurrying along a mountain trail near Zurich to
catch their train. A drizzle soon turned into a downpour. Suddenly among
the trees Lenin caught sight of ceps. At once he turned aside after them, paying
no attention to the wet. "We were drenched to the very marrow of our bones
and of course missed our train." He did not quit until his sack was full and his
razh' was quenched.1
By the Russian scale of values, all the wonderful golf courses of vast America
are inviting more for the mushrooms that grow on them and in the woods
along their well-tended borders, than for the game. You can always tell a
Russian when you see her hi wooded country: she progresses slowly, stooping
i. This curious episode is told by N. Valentinov in his Meetings with Lenin (Vstrechi c Leninym), Chekhov Publishing Co., N. Y., 1953, p. 211.
13

CHAPTER ONE

and peering to right and left, with a low, circular, sweeping glance, as though
she has lost something. She is armed with a hamper and a walking stick topoke here and there; and she springs forward occasionally with a happy pounce
and kneels to gather in the prize.
When the Russian child learns his alphabet, he sees by a picture that 'g'
stands for grib; this has been habitual at least since the zyth century. In his
primer he reads of mushrooms. In his school he is like to find a playmate whosefamily name is taken from some mushroom, a boy named Gribov, for example,
or a Gribunin, or a Borovikov, or a Gruzdjov, or aRyzhikov, or an Opjonkin, ora Syroezhkovskij, or a Lisichkin. The Maslenikovs are common, but that namemight also be derived from the trade of the butter-churner. I am told that in
Russia there are even Mukhomorovs, but I myself have never run into thisequivocal name. In the time of Catherine the Great there was a famous painternamed Borovikovskij, and a generation later the leading playwright was
Griboyedov, 'Mr. Mushroomeaterson'. Was there ever such a name in English,
or a Mycophagenes in ancient Greece ? In English the only parallel that I recall
is the fine old medieval family name of Norman origin, still current I believe, ofMuschampe, named after some field or meadow famous for its mousserons ormushrooms. At the imperial University of St. Petersburg there used to be aprofessor of law named Gribovskij who would sign his articles with the pseudonym 'Muketov', thus giving a Greek twist to his Russian name.
Before long the Russian youngster learns by heart the stanzas of the childish
mushroom marching poem, 'Panic among the Mushrooms'1, wherein Colonel
Borovik, Commander-in-Chief of the mushroom host, summons his minions
to war. The red-coated mukhomory decline to serve, for they are senators. The
beljanki say no, for they are aristocratic ladies and exempt. The opjonki refuse,since they must do duty as ladies-in-waiting. The morels beg off, for they are
gray-headed oldsters. The maslyata say they are needed in the factories, theink-caps point to their spindly legs, the volnushki call themselves old dowagers,
and the lisichki profess to be nuns. The ryzliiki are just simple peasant folk
and useless as soldiers, and the volui duck their duty by reminding the Colonelthat they are nothing but the village loafers. Then up step the valiant gruzdi,
willing fellows, who will gladly go to war and smite the enemy. And so, witha loud 'Oo-rah! oo-rah! oo-rah!', off they march. These stanzas with theirshrewd comments on the diverse species are the didactic and mnemonic device
by which a people's rich mushroom lore is passed on to the next generation.
I. The Russian name is Perepolokh sredi gribov. It exists in many variants and can be found in many Russiananthologies.
14

MUSHROOMS AND THE RUSSIANS

Based I think on them, I recall a children's ballet and chorale impersonating
the mushroom population; was it not composed by Cesar Cui, or perhaps
Rebikov ? The Czech composer Leos Janacek near the end of his opera, Li ska
Bystrouska, 'The Cunning Fox', has the Forester sing a lovely aria to the mushrooms as he goes through the woods.
No people talk and write more, or more enthusiastically, about good foodthan the Russians, and soon or late their conversation turns to mushrooms.
Has the season been good ? Who has found the biggest lot of the best kinds ?
What about the best ways of preserving and cooking > In the Russian language
the common term for a warm, soft rain in summer is 'mushroom-rain' -gribnoi
dozhd' - used even when mushrooms are not under discussion. Among thecountry-folk, by immemorial right, the peasant who discovers a spot where
morels or 'white mushrooms' abound, enjoys thereafter a first claim on the cropin that area. City folk who summer in the country eye one another furtively
on their mushroom sorties, like rival spies intent on each other's secrets, andthose who hit on good colonies often guard their secret jealously. The Czechs
are also notable fanciers of mushrooms, vying in their enthusiasm with theRussians, and the Poles do not lag far behind. The outstanding Polish poet,
Adam Mickiewicz, in the third book of his masterpiece, Pan Tadeusz, devotes
some lines of unforgettable beauty to the gathering of wild mushrooms. But
as a Russian I remark that he pays obeisance only to the Hsichki, the boroviki,
and the ryzhiki. Of the others he goes on to say that the people despise them.
Not thus does a Russian speak. Another Pole, Stanislaw Trembecki, a conspicuous literary figure in the Polish classicist period in the late i8th century, penned
an astonishing diatribe against mushroom-eaters. He was a learned crank, tobe sure, but belligerency on this theme has no parallel among Russians, noteven Russian cranks.1 Of course it is wrong to generalize from the utterances ofintellectuals, and the peasants of Poland may well be free from the mycophobiathat has infected Polish men of letters, but we are constrained to point out thatas early as the iyth century that eminent Polish poet, a master of the baroqueschool, Waclaw Potocki, in 'The Unweeded Garden' discusses wild mushrooms
at some length, and the tenor of what he says is that mushrooms are an esotericbusiness, best left to the few who know the secrets!
Close to forty years have passed since I last gathered mushrooms in Russia,
I. The attack on mycophagists appeared posthumously in an article entitled Pokarmy [Food], edited from thewriter's autograph by Franciszek Grzymala and published in Astrea, Pamlftnik Narodowy Polski, Warsaw, 1822,
Vol. n, pp. 136-152. It was republished in Pisma tvszystkie, edited by Jan Kott, Warsaw, Panstwowy Instytut
Wydawniczy, 1953, Vol. n, pp. 206-7.
15

CHAPTER ONE

and reveled in the mushroom lore that we all shared. As I re-read the lines I
have written, I become aware of receding planes of memory, on the peripheryof my consciousness, strewn with visions of mushrooms that I can no longer
identify by name, and with names of mushrooms that are no longer attached
to clearly defined images. What were those beljanki that refused to go to war
because they were aristocratic ladies? The volui of the poem - vol means 'ox',and these are therefore 'bovine-mushrooms' - were, I remember, a lowly
species, unwholesome until cooked, and utilized only in the absence of anything
better. Then there were the volnushki, which might mean the 'wavy ones',
but are more likely another 'bovine' species; the sinjushki or blue-capped ones;
the svinushki or swine-mushrooms; the bolotovik or swamp-mushroom; thedubovik or oak-mushroom; and the elovik or balsam-mushroom. There was themokhovnik or moss-mushroom. There was a big, ugly mushroom that grewin isolation and was never gathered: the kozjol or goat. The puff ball was theDevil's pepper-pot - chortova perechnitza. There was thegolubetz or pigeon mushroom, and the obabka, of which only the name floats uncertainly to me. Fromearliest childhood I recall another curious name - the skripitza, or screechingmushroom: what could it have been? Gogol's immortal character in Old World
Squires, Pul'kheria Ivanovna, once started to tell how to preserve in vinegar amushroom that she called the travjanka. She had just reached the point where she
had lined her keg with oak leaves and saltpeter and added some blossoms of
the bird-cherry tree, the Russian cherjomukha, which the botanists call the padus
avium, when she was diverted. (What can the world do about mischievous
Persons from Porlock?) Never shall we know the rest of that enticing recipe,
but someone at least can identify for us the travjanka.
One of the loveliest mushroom stories is the legend about their origin that
we find in Bohemia, which we retell from the recension recorded by the Czech
folklorist, Mrs. Bozena Nemcova.1 It seems that Jesus and Peter were passing
through a Czech village and heard the sound of wedding music in a humble
cottage. They joined the party, but not before Jesus had warned Peter to accept
no food save only bread and salt, for the people were poor. Jesus and Peter weremade most welcome. They partook of the bread and salt that were offered tothem, declining however the cakes [koldce]. But a little later, when no one waslooking, Peter slipped some cakes into his pouch. After a while Jesus and Peter
continued on their way, Jesus immersed in his thoughts and Peter lagging
behind, that he might nibble on his cakes. But at each bite, Jesus would wheel
around and ask him what he was eating. Peter would spit out the mouthfuli. Ndrodni bdchorky a povesti, Prague, 1880, vol. n, pp. 302-4.

16

PLATE IV Jean-Henri
Fabre. Collybia fusipes Fr. ex Bull.

MUSHROOMS AND THE RUSSIANS

and reply, "Nothing." This happened again and again, until there was no cakeleft. Then Jesus said to Peter, "Go back, and pick up all that you have spat out,
and I will wait for you." When Peter returned he said to Jesus, "I found nothing
except this that I show you. I thought it was food, but lo! it was a growth,rooted in the soil." Jesus said, "It is a growth, and it grew from the food you
threw away." Then Peter asked for forgiveness, and it was granted to him.
Then they went to the cottage of a poor woman and asked her to cook what
Peter had found, and it turned out to be mushrooms, and they were good. Because the mushrooms had sprung from the food of poor people, Jesus bestowed
them on the poor, and he taught the poor woman where to seek them. And because poor people need help, mushrooms multiply and abound. And becausePeter, eating them, nevertheless remained hungry, mushrooms are not filling.
When we consider how gingerly even mycologists in America ofttimes handle
the run of miscellaneous mushrooms gathered in fields and woods, the selfassurance of Russians as they by-pass the poisonous and foul-tasting ones, andgrade the others according to their edible merits, and consume these wildmushrooms with impunity as an important ingredient in their daily diet, seems
astonishing to other peoples. Here is a notable instance where folk-wisdom
anticipates and overreaches the savants. I have surely strained the patience of
my readers with the Russian vocabulary that I have recalled for the mushroom
tribe, but there must be an endless glossary of other names that I have forgottenor never known. The wealth of the Russian nomenclature for the mushrooms
is a measure of the role they have played in the social history of the Russian
people. The names evoke for Russians the edible qualities of the various kinds,
but semantically they refer primarily to the habitat and essential characterof the species. Several of the folk-names for mushrooms in the Russian language
could have come into acceptance only after age-long intimacy. The scientificnomenclature of the Western mycologists, devised over the past century, issuperficial by comparison with some of the Russian common names, thepseudo-classical terms of the scientists being keyed often to accidental attributes,
the aspects that the untutored eye of the early mycologist first remarked.
In the English language the very word 'fungi' is an ugly, half-assimilatedalien, detached and cold in its emotional personality; and apart from it there
are in the common speech only 'mushroom' for the species that lends itself
to cultivation and 'toadstool' of evil aura. 'Toadstool' has no precise meaning,but in ordinary usage it embraces all the wild mushrooms that the person bornin the English-speaking world does not know and therefore fears and loathes.
17

CHAPTER ONE

It is a word that most of those who love mushrooms refrain from using. Evenif viewed as a fanciful term, it is inept, surviving only through the inadvertenceof a great people whose attention has been elsewhere. With this single word
'toadstool', soaked in condescension and repugnance, the English-speaking world
lumps together and dismisses without a second glance some of the richest andmost varied embroidery doing honor to wild nature's glorious vesture.

18

II
MUSHROOMS AND THE ENGLISH
Beware of musherons, moch purslane, gourdes, andal other thinges, whiche wyll sone putrifie.
SIR THOMAS ELYOT in 'The Castd of Helth',1541, folio 93.

HERE is no doubt about it: from, earliest times the English have had littleT

use for mushrooms. The Crete Herball of 1526, a translation from the
French, voiced the hostility of both peoples:

Fungi ben mussherons. . . There be two maners of them; one maner is deedly andsleeth them that eateth of them and be called tode stooles, and the other dooth not. They
that be not deedly haue a grosse gleymy [slimy] moysture that is dysobedyent to natureand dygestyon, and be peryllous and dredfull to eate & therefore it is good to eschew
them.

In the 16th century scientific thought had hardly begun to shake itself loose
from folk-beliefs of unfathomed antiquity, and compilations such as The Crete
Herball are a treasury of such beliefs. The printing press, fresh on the scene,
captured and preserved for us the common content of men's minds at thatmoment in history when the Western World was beginning its slide into themodern era of big changes. And in the case of mushrooms, let us here salutea singular example of the tenacity with which even a great people sometimes
clings to its primitive notions. For that naive division of the mushrooms between
the 'two maners of them', the one deadly and the other not, and even theselatter to be avoided - that elemental antipathy, captured for us in the textof the first comprehensive English herbal, has carried on with undiminishedvigor through four centuries more, down to the present day. Learned mycologists write treatises and preach an enlightened gospel, but what do all theirknowledge and all their cautious advice weigh? Small cliques of amateurs
exist, but the public is not stirred. In a recent elaborate American work on
mushrooms the author1 brings himself to write a chapter on 'mycophagy',
but confesses that he himself almost never lets mushrooms enter his mouth!
Not thus does one inspire appetite in others. The repugnance for 'toadstools'
I. Alexander H. Smith in his Mushrooms in their Natural Habitats (Sawyer's Inc., Portland, Oregon, 1949) says
as he engages in a lengthy discussion of mycophagy, pp. 121-2: "It is impossible for me to discuss the edibilityof even the highly recommended species authoritatively from my own experience since I seldom eat themmyself".
19

CHAPTER TWO

is sometimes an aggressive thing. I have seen the English governess, her charges
in tow, advance on the enemy (a lovely and innocent russula, as it happened),kick it over, and with shudder and grimace crush it with the heel of her big,
low-heeled shoe; turning then to the children, she shepherded them awayfrom the unclean thing. Thus by an unspoken lesson this creature unwittingly
seared their young minds with the branding iron of an ancient curse. Whereshe and her tribe see, in the words of the herbalist, a slimy toadstool, a Russianbeholds 'the fat of the earth'.
As the 16th century drew to a close, in 1597, John Gerarde brought out his
famous Herball or General! Historie of Plantes, an immense and delightful book.
What he says of mushrooms may differ little in substance from The Crete
Herball, but his opulent manner of expressing the same thing deserves the accolade of the reader's attention. The Englishman is venturesome in most things
save food, and never before Gerarde nor since has that peculiar dietary conservatism of the race received more elegant and curious endorsement:
Many wantons that dwell neere the sea, and haue fish at will, are for change of diet tofeede vpon the birds of the mountaines; and such as dwell vpon the hils or champion
grounds, do long after sea-fish; many that haue plenty of both, doe hunger after theearthie excrescences, called mushrums; whereof some are very venemous and full of
poison; others not so noisome; and neither of them very wholesome meate . . .

Master Gerarde then proceeds to describe one kind that is not bad and straightway a dozen that he condemns, saying about a certain species that grows in"mossie and shadowie woods" that he does "the more briefly passe them ouer,
not purposing to vse many words about such fruitlesse matters". Finally hecomes to his sweeping and memorable conclusions:
Galen amrmeth that they are all very colde and moist, and therefore do approoch vnto avenemous and murthering facultie; and ingender a clammie, pituitous, and colde nutriment
if they be eaten.
To conclude, fewe of them are good to be eaten; and most of them do suffocate andstrangle the eater. Therefore I giue my simple aduice vnto those that loue such a strange
and newefangled meates, to beware of licking honie among thornes, least the sweetenesof the one do not countervaile the sharpnes and pricking of the other.
[pp. 1384-6 of first edition]

A few years after Gerarde, in 1609, Sir Michael Scott said his say about
mushrooms in The Philosophers banquet, and here and now we give to his words
new wings:
20

MUSHROOMS AND THE ENGLISH. . . Sow-beard1 or Mushrome, according to Rasis [the Arabian physician] is cold andgrosse, and being taken raw ingenders flegme, and the chollike, and windinesse in theguts; neither is it to be eaten but with hot sauce or meate, but the red are not to be eaten
at all. The Todestoole is much worse then the Mushrome: for it hath choaked and killed
many that haue taken it, and the best that it doth, is to breed flegme in the body inaboundance . . . [Verso of folio 36, wrongly numbered 33]

These famous herbalists whom I have quoted were leaning on the authorityof Dioscorides, Galen, and Rhazes, but they elaborated richly on their sources,
going far beyond the Greek and Arabic writers in maligning the mushroom
tribe, and invoking the oracles only to clothe with their authority the loathing of
the English, which they undertook to express in their full-bodied prose.
Half a century after Gerarde it was still possible for a well-born and educatedEnglishman to reach man's estate without having heard of truffles. John Evelyn
at the age of 24 made their acquaintance in France. On September 28, 1644,
he found himself in Vienne, a day's journey by river from Lyons, and there,
as he says in his diary, he "supped and lay, having amongst other dainties, adish of truffles, which is a certain earth-nut, found out by a hog trained to it,
and for which those animals are sold at a great price. It is in truth an incomparable meat." (The emphasis is mine.)
The Englishman in Evelyn was being diluted by travel. His hospitality tostrange and newfangled meats found no echo in his countryman Jeremy Taylor,
who in 1650-1, in his Holy Living and Dying, strikes the less liberal note:
Fly from all occasions, temptations, loosenesses of company, balls and revellings,
indecent mixtures of wanton dancings, idle talk, private society with strange women,
starings upon a beauteous face, the company of women that are singers, amorous gestures,
garish and wanton dresses, feasts and liberty, banquets and perfumes, wine and strong
drinks, which are made to persecute chastity; some of these being the very prologues tolust, and the most innocent of them being like condited [seasoned] and pickled mushrooms,
which, if carefully corrected and seldom tasted, may be harmless, but can never do good.
[Chap. 2, 'On Christian Sobriety', Sec. in, 'Remedies against Uncleanness']

It was Jeremy Taylor's privilege to believe in the mortification of the flesh,
but why did he vent his spleen on the humble mushroom? I hope to show
on a later page that he and the herbalists were voicing, unbeknownst to themselves, a pre-Christian tabu shared by all the peoples who dwell on the shores
I. Sow-beard = sow-bread; unreported in the Oxford Dictionary in this sense of mushrooms, but familiar as aname for the cyclamen. In Latin tuber meant both 'truffle' and 'cyclamen', and in Giuseppe Baretti's ItalianEnglish dictionary, 1832, tartufo is translated by 'sow-bread, a kind of mushroom growing underground'. The
addiction of pigs, especially sows, to underground fungi justified the use of this name for truffles.

21

CHAPTER TWO

of the North Sea. The passage about the condited and pickled mushrooms
follows hard on another that perhaps my readers will thank me for recalling.
The stern author is listing his remedies against 'uncleanness', and here is what
he recommends about food in general:
A spare diet, and a thin coarse table, seldom refreshment, frequent fasts, not violent,and interrupted with returns to ordinary feeding, but constantly little, unpleasant, ofwholesome but sparing nourishment: for by such cutting off the provisions of victual,
we shall weaken the strengths of our enemy.

Is it uncharitable to venture the opinion that this exhortation to consume
unpleasant food, from Jeremy Taylor's day even unto now, has been morehonour'd by his countrymen in the observance than the breach?
Apparently the Stuarts on recovering the throne of England brought backwith them from across the Channel an appetite for the mushroom world.
How else shall we explain that before the end of the century the Englishman
was commonly referring to the good earthy 'trubs' ? A little later both truffles
and morels began to figure in the cookbooks. For example, Patrick Lamb,
who was for "near fifty years" master-cook to Charles II, James II, William andMary, and Queen Anne, in his Royal Cookery or the Compleat Court-Cook(London, 1726) includes in his menus mushrooms (which he fails to identify),
morels, and truffles. In the extracts filling five volumes that have been publishedof Parson James Woodforde's prodigious diary, he refers repeatedly to pickledmushrooms, to truffles, to morels. Toward the end of the i8th century they
had become a regular feature of this country clergyman's fare, brought to
his door by the folk who had gathered them. Gilbert White in his Observations
on Vegetables reports that a truffle-hunter had called on him "having in his
pocket several large truffles" found in the neighborhood of Selborne; the man
was offering them to him at half a crown a pound. White speaks casuallyof the dogs that the truffle-hunter was using to smell out the truffles. It is clearthat truffle hunting was no novelty for him. One might have expected tofind the gentlemen of England in that urbane century relishing the table delicacies familiar to the French and Italians; and since they were also steeped in
the classics, they must have known of the addiction of the epicures of ancient
Rome to mushrooms. But it is startling now to discover from the casual
observations of two rural clergymen that the English rustics in their time
were gathering morels and truffles for the market. In the whole of the
English-speaking world today, does there survive a single truffle-hunter e(Truffles grow in America also, but few pay attention to them, rarely even22

PLATE v. Thomas Gainsborough. The Mushroom Girl. Boston (Mass.), Museum of Fine Arts.

MUSHROOMS AND THE ENGLISH

the mycologists. They are one of the New World's still untapped resources.)That strange false dawn of mycophagy which marked England's i8th century
even attained expression in art when Thomas Gainsborough painted his Mushroom Girl, a sample of bucolic sentimentality typical of its time and milieu.
Is not this the only occasion in the history of English art when a painter of thefirst rank has acknowledged the existence of the fungal world ? And in this casethe basket filled with field mushrooms is only a detail in the composition,
an excuse for a title. There exists in a private collection a second work by
Gainsborough with the same title, a wholly different composition, showing achild, close up, as she reaches out for mushrooms growing in a field.
Having once taken hold, why did this Arcadian pursuit, so noble in its simplicity, die out? Morels and truffles added variety to the Englishman's fare, butthey were destined to vanish from his table in the course of the strange decaythat overcame the English cuisine in the glorious Victorian era. In 1847 themycologist Badham was saying of mushrooms that "England is the only countryin Europe where this important and savoury food is, from ignorance or prejudice, left to perish ungathered."1 Half a century later,in 1891, another mycologist
who bore the arresting name of Mordecai Cubitt Cooke, in a delightful treatiseon the edible fungi pointed out that "in the time of our grandfathers it wasalmost universally believed that our islands produced but one kind of fungus
which was edible."2 His words implied a growth in enlightenment in his own
lifetime that few other observers have detected either then or since his day.
Apart from occasional remarks in the writings of mycologists, the English
have paid little attention to their blindspot concerning mushrooms. So far as
I know, even among the mycologists only one has done justice to the subject,inveighing against his countrymen's prejudice -William Delisle Hay, who published An Elementary Text-book of British Fungi in London in 1887. His voice
crying in the solitudes deserves to be recalled. Speaking of the fungi near the
beginning of his book, he says:
Among this vast family of plants. . . there is but one kind that Englishmen condescend to regard with favour. All the rest are lumped together in one sweeping condemnation. They are looked upon as vegetable vermin, only made to be destroyed. No
eye can see their beauties; their office is unknown; their varieties are not regarded; they are
hardly allowed a place among nature's lawful children, but are considered somethingabnormal, worthless, and inexplicable. By precept and example children are taught fromearliest infancy to despise, loathe, and avoid all kinds of 'toadstools'. The individual who
1. A Treatise on the Esculent Funguses of England, p. vii.

2. British Edible Fungi, p. 17.
23

CHAPTER TWO
desires to engage in the study of them must boldly face a good deal of scorn. He is
laughed at for his strange taste among the better classes, and is actually regarded as a sortof idiot among the lower orders. No fad or hobby is esteemed so contemptible as that of'fungus-hunter' or 'toadstool-eater'.
This popular sentiment, which we may coin the word 'fungophobia' to express, is very
curious. If it were human - that is, universal - one would be inclined to set it down as an
instinct, and to reverence it accordingly. But it is not human - it is merely British. It is so
deep and intense a prejudice that it amounts to a national superstition. Fungophobia ismerely a form of ignorance, of course; but its power over the British mind is so immense,that the mycologist, anxious to impart the knowledge he has gleaned to others, often meetswith scarcely credence or respect. The superstition strikes deep. He who would write or
lecture about Fungi can scarce find readers or hearers. The English scientist investigatesevery domain of nature, but leaves this one coldly alone. The English medical man
disdains to inquire into the chemical constitution of Fungi, and is indifferent to andunknowing of their relations in regard to medicine, toxicology, diet, or hygiene. It issurely high time that English intelligence should rise superior to this peculiar phase ofignorance. . . .
It is a striking instance of the confused popular notions of Fungi in England, that hardly
any species have or ever had colloquial English names. They are all 'toadstools', andtherefore are thought unworthy of individual baptism. Can anything more fully demonstrate the existence of that deep-rooted prejudice called here 'fungophobia'; . . . In
the countries of the Continent the greater number of species have each their particular
local names. Even the Redskin of America and the Maori of New Zealand have specificnames for their common Fungi. Only we prejudiced Britons have none.

More than six decades have passed since the above lines were penned, andthough the English-speaking world has produced numbers of good mycologists
since then, the substance of the indictment is as true today as when William
Delisle Hay raised his voice in protest.
Hay could have cited Charles Darwin to illustrate his point. This observant
and knowledgeable scientist, in that supreme book of travel, his diary of thevoyage of H. M. S. BEAGLE, remarked in the entry for June i, 1834, that thenatives of Tierra del Fuego relied on a certain arboreal fungus (a species of thegenus cyttaria) for an important part of their diet; and then, almost as though
to supply me with a singularly happy illustration for my argument, our learned
young man showed the limitations of his learning. "At the present time," said
Charles Darwin in 1834, "I think Tierra del Fuego is the only country in theworld where a cryptogamic plant [i.e., a fungus] affords a staple article offood." The young Charles Darwin knew more about the Fuegians than about
the northern Slavs and Catalans.
As to mycophagy, Darwin revealed a strange lapse in knowledge that amount24

MUSHROOMS AND THE ENGLISH

ed to a failure of perception. In him the mycophobia of the English was a mild
affliction, a recessive trait. Sometimes this racial infirmity erupts with terrifying
ferocity. Let the reader consider the following quotation from Mrs. Gwen
Raverat's Period Piece, a book of Victorian reminiscences published in 1953.
Here we learn what mushroom gathering a 1'anglaise can sometimes mean, towhat mad purpose the gentle art of mushroom knowing may be perverted:
In our native woods there grows a kind of toadstool, called in the vernacular THE
STINKHORN, though in Latin it bears a grosser name [the phallus impudicus, of course].
The name is justified, for the fungus can be hunted by the scent alone; and this was Aunt
Etty's great invention: armed with a basket, and a pointed stick, and wearing a special
hunting cloak and gloves, she would sniff her way round the wood, pausing here andthere, her nostrils twitching, when she caught a whiff of her prey; then at last, with adeadly pounce, she would fall upon her victim, and poke his putrid carcass into her basket. At the end of the day's sport, the catch was brought back and burnt in the deepest
secrecy on the drawing-room fire, with the door locked; because of the morals of the maids.
[pp.135-6]

Who was Aunt Etty ? She was Charles Darwin's daughter!
In all the enchanted pages about England's rural life that W. H. Hudson
gave to the world around the turn of the present century, there are scarcely
a half dozen references to mushrooms. Once he conveys in a sentence or two
the magic spell cast on the perceptive beholder when he first discovers a 'fairyring' - those meadow mushrooms that ofttimes grow in perfect circles, thecircles expanding by tiny stages each year through decades and even perhaps
centuries. Elsewhere Hudson speaks of his having gathered mushrooms, butfrom the colorless reference it seems clear that he was speaking only of theordinary field mushroom. Thus even Hudson, with ah1 his sensibility to nature,never opened his eyes to the mushroom world.1
Thoreau did somewhat better. His allusions in Walden are trifling, but in his
superb Journals he speaks of the fungi time and again. In passages of luminous
beauty he vibrates to their visual appeal: suddenly he is off with a theme like
this: "The most interesting domes I behold are not those of Oriental temples andpalaces, but of the toadstools." He ponders over and over again on the strangenessof these lowly organisms. He philosophizes, and with his teetotaler's bias notalways happily: "The life of a wine-bibber is like that of a fungus..." In all that
Thoreau says of the mushrooms, for a Russian something is lacking. He views
the mushrooms as he contemplates the stars, without touching or smelling or
tasting them. Not once does he convey to the reader a carnal sensation. Somehow
i. The Hind in Richmond Park, Chap, ix; The Book of a Naturalist, Chap. xv.
25

CHAPTER TWO

we cannot picture Thoreau greedily stirring a stew of savory mushrooms over
his stove in his hermitage at Walden; that man's saliva never runs. There issomething of the eunuchoid aesthete about him. He is too pure to be fun.
But a similar insensibility afflicts even those whose business it is to discussculinary matters. As recently as 1943 an eminent American gourmet in a bookabout food declared that there were two schools when it came to preparing
fresh mushrooms for the table - those who peeled them and those who didn't.1
For the Russians, how irrelevant is this 'either-or' dichotomy as a key to theculinary possibilities of the multitudinous world of the mushrooms! It is as
though a critic of music should say that when it comes to making music, there
are two schools of performers - those who stand and those who sit. Whenever
there is discussion of Russian cooking, it is easy, by a few discreet inquiries about
mushrooms, to discover those who know whereof they speak.
Ihe herbals of old served as botany books, medical books, and cookbooks;
they were not composed as contributions to the belles lettres. It might be thoughtthat in the flood-tide of English literature, the poets with their heightened
insight would have shown themselves aware of the sensuous beauty of themushroom world. Not at all. On this subject the English poets missed theirchance to be emancipators. Chaucer and Milton ignore the mushrooms, andso I think does Wordsworth, the poet of nature and humble things. Thomas
Gray seems to have overlooked those that adorned his country churchyards.
Robert Burns brings them in, but only once, in his verses to William Creech,
and they serve merely to turn a rime:
Now gawkies, tawpies, gowks, and fools. . .
May sprout like simmer puddock stools;'puddock' meaning toads.
Shakespere refers perfunctorily to mushrooms once, in The Tempest, and in
Troilus and Cressida a character dismisses another with 'Toadstool!' as an epithet.
Indeed, for Shakespere the two words serve little use beyond swelling his
already immense vocabulary count. Apparently 'toadstool' was an accepted
term of abuse in the lyth century: William Penn in the hot flush of his thenrecent religious conversion denounced the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford as 'Thoupoor mushroom!' - a form of address that a Russian would surely misconstrue
as a term of endearment.
i. Richardson Wright, The Bed-Book of Eating and Drinking, Lippincott, Philadelphia, 1943, p. 26.
26

MUSHROOMS AND THE ENGLISH

In the 18th century the British continued to belabor the poor fungal tribe witha cold, unrelenting hate marvelous to see. Tobias Smollett in 1757 produced inDrury Lane an extravaganza called The Reprisal; or, the Tars of Old England, afeeble satire on patriotism and the conventional ideas about the French. The
villain is the commanding officer of a French frigate, on whose ship the action
is laid. He is a "musty, vain, French martinet", a ridiculous cad, and he carries
the name of Monsieur le Marquis de Champignon!
For this aspersion on mushrooms Smollett was to be repaid in kind, andwith interest. He published his famous Travels through France and Italy in
1766, a narrative memorable for its angry comments on everything that theirascible Scottish physician saw and experienced. The critics took him to task
especially for his inability to perceive any artistic virtue in the Pantheon or the
Medicean Venus. Two years later, almost as a riposte to Smollett's book, Laurence Sterne brought out his sensationally successful Sentimental journey, andthere near the beginning he pays his compliments to Smelfungus, the pseudonymthat he bestows on Smollett and that Smollett to his dying day never lived down.
The name is a key to the Englishman's attitude toward mushrooms: knowing
Smollett as we do and Sterne's feelings about him, we discover what fungi
and their smell meant for them and for Sterne's popular following. The earthy
smell of decaying leaves and compost heap, of dank mushrooms growing inrich clusters, the smell that the French call 1'odeur du terreau, is pleasing to all
who love simple and genuine things. Moreover, the mushroom tribe in fact
offers the widest range of smells, not just one and that one foul. Indeed, as
connoisseurs know, each species breathes its individual olfactory signature.
There was of course a phonetic echo of Smollett's name in Sterne's insulting
epithet, the kind of punning suggestion that Sterne loved.
Here, then, is salacious Sterne on Smollett:
The learned Smelfungus travelled from Boulogne to Paris - from Paris to Rome - andso on-but he set out with the spleen and jaundice, and every object he pass'd by was
discoloured or distorted -. He wrote an account of them, but 'twas nothing but the accountof his miserable feelings.
I met Smelfungus in the grand portico of the Pantheon - he was just coming out of it 'Tis nothing but a huge cock-pit, said he - I wish you had said nothing worse of the Venus
of Medicis, replied I - for in passing through Florence, I had heard he had fallen foul upon
the goddess, and used her worse than a common strumpet, without the least provocationin nature.
I popp'd upon Smelfungus again at Turin, in his return home; and a sad tale ofsorrowful adventures had he to tell, "wherein he spoke of moving accidents by flood andfield, and of the cannibals which each other eat: the Anthropophagi" - he had been flea'd27

CHAPTER. TWO
alive, and bedeviled, and used worse than St. Bartholomew, at every stage he had come at -I'll tell it, cried Smelfungus, to the world. You had better tell it, said I, to yourphysician.

In his next paragraph Sterne takes another traveler to task, some Croesus
whom he dubs Mundungus, a word, now fallen into disuse, that meant 'offal','refuse', 'filth'. A few years later, in the lySo's, Sterne's Smelfungus and Mundungus turn up again, in a satirical poem, The Children of Thespis, by 'Anthony
Pasquin', the pen-name of a shady journalist named John Williams. He toovents psychopathic loathing on the inoffensive fungi:
Thus scarceness gives value to dirt and mundungus,
And dignifies that Nature meant as a fungus.
But fungus and filth have their uses and buyers,
Hence oceans of urine are purchas'd by dyers;
And lawyers, who liv'd but to generate strife,
May serve when they're dead for th'Anatomist's knife.

Let not the squeamish reader shrink from the stench of Sterne's Smelfungus:
it curls upward from the very viscera of the Englishman's mycophobia. Contrast
that smell, if you please, with the Russian's scale of values. On August 22, 1851,
Alexej Konstantinovich Tolstoy penned a letter1 from the country to the young
woman whom he later married and his subject was the odor of mushrooms:
I have just returned from the forest where I went gathering mushrooms and foundmany. Once you and I discussed how odors evoke the memory of things forgotten formany a year. For me the smells of the forest possess this faculty more than any others,
but perhaps this is only because I passed my whole childhood in the woods. Just now I
smelled a ryzhik, and as in a flash of lightning I saw my whole childhood, in all its
details, up to the age of seven. The vision came and was gone in a thousandth part ofa second. Each kind of mushroom has its own odor, but always it brings back to us
the past . ..

The common English names for the wild plants are rich in poetry, andperhaps no English poet of standing has made use of a wider variety of such
names than John Clare, the farm-laborer who passed most of his adult life
within the confines of a lunatic asylum. Yet in the two volumes of poor Clare's
published poems I have discovered only one casual reference to 'mushroom
buttons'. True, most of his verses still lie unpublished, and we must not exclude
the possibility that this observant and original rustic poet somewhere paid
I. See his collected works, Sobranie Sochinenii Izdanie, St. Petersburg, 1908, edited by A. F. Marks, vol. iv, p. 37.
28

MUSHROOMS AND THE ENGLISH

fitting obeisance to the mushroom world. Possibly his learned editors, in making their selections, rejected some eloquent paean to the fungi, considering
the mere choice of such an outlandish theme sure evidence of a weak mind
wrestling with an access of lunacy.
On those rare occasions when the great English poets deign to pay serious
attention to mushrooms, they habitually link these lovely creatures with deathand decay. Keats refers to the 'cold mushrooms' in Endymion, and how
deathly cold he makes them sound! Browning in Paracelsus strikes the same
distressing mortuary note:. . . as in the autumn woods
Where tall trees used to flourish, from their roots
Springs up a fungous brood sickly and pale, Chill
mushrooms coloured like a corpse's cheek.

Tennyson in Gareth andLynette is as unpleasant about mushrooms as so decorous
a poet knows how to be. The beautiful Lynette believes that Sir Gareth, theknight assigned to champion her cause, is a mere kitchen scullion, and shevents her contempt for him:
. .. She thereat, as one Thatsmells a foul-flesh'd agaric in the holt, And deems
it carrion of some woodland thing, Or shrew or
weasel, nipt her slender nose With petulant thumband finger, shrilling, 'Hence!''agaric' meaning a gilled mushroom. How clear in this recurring image of thefamous poets is the echo of that folk detestation which the herbalists first recorded ! Keats and Browning and Tennyson may have recalled Edmund Spenser's lines, when in The Shepheardes Calendar, to heighten the sense of winter's
gloom, he forces mushrooms to grow, contrary to nature, in cold dark December. Of course living fungi can sometimes be found in mid-winter but noobservant person would think of associating the whole rich panoply of themushroom world with the dying year. Spenser is contrasting the winter scene
with summer:
Where I was wont to seeke the honey Bee
Working her formall rowmes in Wexen frame:
The grieslie Todestool growne there mought I see
And loathed Paddocks lording on the same. And
where the chaunting birds luld me asleepe, The
ghastlie Owle her grievous ynne doth keepe.
29

CHAPTER TWO

If Spenser is fantastical, just listen to Shelley. In a strange and disturbing poem
entitled 'The Sensitive Plant', wherein he, exactly like Spenser, contrasts thebeauty of a summer garden with its desolate winter state, he also does violence
to nature by associating early winter with the growth of loathed weeds andfungi. England's poets of the romantic period have long been praised for theirclose attention to nature, but in the light of these stanzas of Shelley's, one is
tempted to ask how far their observations went. Did they merely know morethan their predecessors? However that may be, Shelley in this poem was so
successful in inspiring disgust that his widow in 1839 took it upon herself tosuppress one of the stanzas, which we print below in italics, and it was notrestored to the canon of his works for almost a century. That long-suppressedstanza exhales the triple distillate of the Englishman's loathing for toadstools:
it is the supreme literary expression of this violent Anglo-Saxon prejudice.
Ariel, who at other times had caught in flight the skylark's ecstasy and divined
the secret of the wild West Wind and breathed the magic spirit of Night,
here chooses to plumb the abysses of physical revulsion, and in the very climax
of his frenzy, the imagination of this Englishman calls forth rotting mushrooms! Yes, and rotting mushrooms make him think of rotting human flesh!
How bizarre for a Russian is this association of ideas that is forever recurringin the English poets!
Between the time of the wind and the snow,
All loathliest weeds began to grow,
Whose coarse leaves were splashed with many a speck,
Like the water-snake's belly and the toad's back.
And thistles, and nettles, and darnels rank, And
the dock, and henbane, and hemlock dank,
Stretch'd out its long and hollow shank, Andstifled the air till the dead wind stank.
And plants, at whose name the verse feels loath,
Filled the place with a monstrous undergrowth,
Prickly, and pulpous, and blistering, and blue,
Livid, and starred with a lurid dew.
And agarics and fungi, with mildew and mould,
Started like mist from the wet ground cold; Pale,
fleshy, as if the decaying dead With a spirit ofgrowth had been animated!
30

MUSHROOMS AND THE ENGLISH
Their moss rotted off them, flake by flake, Till the
thick stalk stuck like a murderer s stake, Where ragsof loose flesh yet tremble on high, Inspecting thewinds that wander by.

Spawn, weeds, and filth, a leprous scum,
Made the running rivulet thick and dumb,
And at its outlet, flags huge as stakes
Dammed it up with roots knotted like watersnakes
And hour by hour, when the air was still, Thevapours arose, which have strength to kill: -At mornthey were seen, at noon they were felt, At night they
were darkness no star could melt.

Emily Dickinson, though dead, has become a major poet of our times, having
emerged like a nova in our literary sky long after she herself had sunk back into
darkness. Her idiom has caught the fancy of the modern world, but did she domore than clothe old emotions in a new dress ? Among her poems is one about
mushrooms, written around 1874 and first published in 1891. It consists of fivequatrains, of which the last distils the essence of the whole. Listen to those concluding lines, and you will hear only the old, the benighted theme:
Had nature any outcast face,
Could she a son contemn, Had
nature an Iscariot, That
mushroom - it is him.

For 'Iscariot' there is a variant that reads 'Apostate'.
1 he mere thought of fungi seems enough to arouse loathing in an Englishman's
breast. This revulsion is so dependable that when a novelist seeks to invoke
horror, he need only drag in the toadstools. By this device A. Conan Doylelaunches the story of Sir Nigel, on the eve of the Black Death, in October ofthe year 1348:. . . the rain had ceased at last, and a sickly autumn sun shone upon the land which wassoaked and sodden with water. Wet and rotten leaves reeked and festered under the foulhaze which rose from the woods. The fields were spotted with monstrous fungi of asize and color never matched before - scarlet and mauve and liver and black. It was asthough the sick earth had burst into foul pustules; mildew and lichen mottled the walls,
and with that filthy crop, Death sprang also from the water-soaked earth.
31

CHAPTER TWO

How different would be the description of such a scene by a Russian, wholoves his moist Mother Earth, the autumn haze, the 'mushroom-rain', thehumus rotting in the woods, and above all a splendid crop of monstrous
mushrooms! The Russian reader would put imperious questions to Conan
Doyle. Would he please describe those mushrooms more satisfactorily. Were
there four kinds each of a single color, or were all the specimens exhibiting
all four colors? Precisely what species are we dealing with? Were not mostof them edible or even delectable ? Why did not the English countryfolk turnto and gather and preserve them, by drying or pickling, to fortify their larderfor the winter, the better to stand off any perils that the season might bring? . . .
'Foul pustules', forsooth!
In the whole rich world of English literature, I have happened on only two
references to mushrooms that express an affection for the 'earthie excrescences'of the unfriendly herbalist, the 'corpse's cheek' of the poet. The writers ofthese lines were never famous and are now almost forgotten. The first was
William Parkes, the author of one little book, The Curtaine-Draiver of theWorld, published in 1612 in London. His reference to mushrooms is slight,
but who that loves them will ever forget this vignette, truly observed, of themushrooms clustered around the trunk of a cedar tree:. . . that Caedar . . .
Under whose girdle, nay beneath whose knee,
The little Mesrumes louingly agree, [p. 20]

The second was a cobbler named James Woodhouse who in 1787 penned
an autumnal ode, to be found in a volume entitled Norbury Park, in which
he first described the common field mushrooms which
proudly spread their bonnets blythe, With
coverings form'd of silk and snow And lin'dwith brightening pink below.

He then goes on to the 'toadstools', in whose forms and hues this Englishmanconcedes that he finds 'some solace'. Theirtapering stems, robust, or light, Like
columns catch the searching sight; Like fairumbrellas, furl'd, or spread, Display their manycolour'd head; Grey, purple, yellow, white, orbrown, Shap'd like War's shield, or Prelate's
crown —
32

MUSHROOMS AND THE ENGLISH
Like Freedom's cap, or Friar's cowl, Or
China's bright inverted bowl -And
while their broadening disks unfold Gay
silvery gills, or nets of gold, Beneath
their shady, curtain'd cove, Perform all
offices of love.

Whatever their failings as poetry, these verses reveal an independent mind,
an observant eye, and a sympathetic heart.
It is said that there are counties in England, notably in the Midlands, where
the rhodopaxillus nudus is regularly gathered and offered in the market-places
under the lovely name of blewits or blue-caps. The country-folk concernedwith this humble harvest must possess some knowledge of wild mushrooms
handed down from long ago. They might see the humor, invisible to mostof their compatriots, in the following episode as told to me by Eric Whittle, anunderstanding English friend: "One day one of our lady audit assistants camein with a bag of what I identified afterwards as ceps, which she had boughtfrom a hawker. She observed that they were unusual mushrooms but the
hawker had said they were edible. After a discussion amongst my colleagues
they were thrown into the dustbin. For my part I was a new member of theStaff and my opinion was not asked." (The French cepe is often called in English
the 'edible boletus', a heavy and unappetizing name, and a misleading one,
implying as it does that all other boleti are inedible. My friend in his anecdotehas wisely rendered 'cepe' as 'cep', an example that our book follows.)
Robert Graves has passed on to me another anecdote. During the recent war
against Germany a Soho restaurateur called Bozzini went gathering ceps in
Epping Forest near a secret site of the War Office. When charged with spying
he said, "I'm an innocent mushroom collector." "Show me the mushrooms!",
replied the policeman. Bozzini produced a suitcase full. "That proves you'rea spy," said the constable. "Them's toadstools!"
In 1943, when England was beset by mortal enemies, John Ramsbottom, theEnglish mycologist, tried to augment and diversify the spare menu of his
countrymen by a series of sensible lectures on the edibility of many wild fungi.
EDIBLE TOADSTOOLS was the caption used by the great Times on September 29,
1943, in reporting one of these talks. Could a more uninviting headline bedevised; Things that are merely edible may be scarcely palatable, and toadstools
by the innermost meaning of the word are unfit for the table. Had a Russian
been charged with editing that news item, he would have enticed his readerswith some such headline as WILD MUSHROOMS IN FINE COOKERY .
33

CHAPTER TWO

For almost four centuries the Russians and the English-speaking world havebeen eyeing each other, and at one point or another, on one level or another,intermingling. Yet among all the many commentaries on Russia publishedin the course of that long association, I know of only four that draw attention
to the Russian passion for mushrooms. The earliest was by an English traveler,

Fig. iEARLIEST REFERENCE TO
RUSSIAN FUNGI IN ENGLISH

Page from Russian-English
word-list of Richard James,
1619, citing five kinds ofmushrooms without English
equivalents:ryzhik, guba, gruzd',
volonitsa, grib

Bodleian, ms. James 43*

Richard James, who in 1619, while visiting Muscovy, composed an extensive
glossary of the Russian language, representing the Russian sounds by a systemof transliteration of his own devising. He translated all of the Russian words
into English, but when he came to the various kinds of mushrooms, he had
to admit defeat: he lists five words and gives no translation! His glossary has
34

MUSHROOMS AND THE ENGLISH

never been published in full: the manuscript lies in the Bodleian Library.
From 1660 to 1669 the Tsar Alexei maintained at his court an English physician, Samuel Collins, whose valuable little book, The Present State of Russia, appeared in London anonymously in 1671. The author, unfortunately, died before
the manuscript was completed, and the concluding chapter, entirely devoted
to Russian mushrooms, appears to have suffered peculiarly from the ministrations of an unhappy literary executor. The text of this chapter is a mixture ofscientific pretensions and fancy, and the illustrations are quaint aberrations.
Of a different order are the observations of an English clergyman, William
Coxe, who embarked on a tour of Eastern Europe in 1773 and who in 1784
brought out in three volumes his Travels into Poland, Russia, Sweden and Denmark.
He was an honest, laborious, and careful observer, whose pedestrian mentality
saved him from tincturing his observations with fancy. In the opening chapterof Book IV he describes the condition of the Russian peasants as he saw them.
He brings in the mushrooms, and both for this reason and because the wholetenor of his favorable comments about the muzhiks runs counter to the preconceptions of the West on this subject,! shall quote the passage with its context:
The peasants are well clothed, comfortably lodged, and seem to enjoy plenty of wholesome food. Their rye-bread, whose blackness at first disgusts the eye, and whose sourness
the taste of a delicate traveller, agrees very well with the appetite; as I became reconciled
to it from use, I found it at all times no unpleasant morsel, and, when seasoned with hunger,
it was quite delicious: they render this bread more palatable by stuffing it with onions
and groats, carrots or green corn, and seasoning it with sweet oil. The other articles of
their food I have enumerated on a former occasion; in this place I shall only observe thatmushrooms are so exceedingly common in these regions, as to form a very essential partof their provisions. I seldom enter a cottage without seeing great abundance of them, andin passing through the markets, I was often astonished at the prodigious quantity exposed
for sale: thek variety was no less remarkable than their number; they were of many
colours, amongst which I particularly noticed white, black, brown, yellow, green, andpink. The common drink of the peasants is quass, a fermented liquor, somewhat like sweetwort, made by pouring warm water on rye or barley-meal; and deemed an excellent antiscorbutic. They are extremely fond of whiskey, a spiritous liquor distilled from malt,
which the poorest can occasionally command, and which their inclination often leads themto use to great excess.

The worthy Archdeacon Coxe seems not to have asked himself the reason
for the abundance of mushrooms in the peasants' fare, whether it was owing
to a greater abundance of fungi in the woods and fields of Russia, or simply
to the habitual gathering of a normal crop. There is no reason to suppose that
Russia produces more mushrooms than the United States or England.
35

CHAPTER TWO

Almost forty years after Mr. Coxe published his Travels, another English
physician, Dr. Robert Lyall, brought out in 1823 a volume entitled The Character of the Russians, in which he dwelt at length on the Russians' addiction
to mushrooms. He even undertook to record the common names used by
the Russians and to identify them.
The knowledge of edible mushrooms [said Dr. Lyall], like a tradition, has been handed
down, in Russia, from parent to child, through a series of ages; and the discrimination ofthese, from the hurtful or poisonous mushrooms, is learned by practice, in the years ofinfancy and youth... Indeed [he goes on], mushroom-gathering or hunting forms a greatpart of the occupation of the Russian peasants, boys and girls, as well as of the women attimes, and is an amusement, in the country, of the nobility, males and females, old andyoung, who make short excursions to the woods in tbe neighborhood of their estates,and spend a few hours in selecting one of the greatest delicacies of the epicures.

With a rare perception of the realities of Muscovite life, Dr. Lyall continued:
Besides tbe enormous quantities of mushrooms which are brought fresh to market
during the summer months, and which are immediately bought up, the better sorts by
the nobility, the inferior kinds by the lower classes and the peasantry, a great abundanceis preserved by the peasants in the country, who, after retaining a quantity sufficient for
their own consumption, bring the surplus to town. They are brought throughout thewhole year, in a dried state on strings, in cart-loads, and sold in all the provision markets,...
and in all the small grocery-shops in the city. Sometimes even salted and pickled mushrooms
may be bought.

After a courageous effort to identify the various kinds of mushrooms, Dr.
Lyall discusses mushroom cookery:
Mushrooms are eaten fried, boiled or pickled, while their season endures, by allclasses. . . . They are fried on hot ashes, or in a frying-pan; they are boiled alone; they
are boiled with shchi or cabbage soup; they are roasted with butter alone, or oftener withbutter and smetana or sour cream. They also enter into the composition of some puddings
and pies. The latter are generally eaten with soup or with shchi. Mushrooms are often
served up with beef-steak, or roast beef sliced, either alone or mixed with potatoes, carrots,
turnips, cabbage, asparagus, &c., and sauce. They are excellent when prepared with cutlets
and rich sauce, duly seasoned.

Transfixed with apprehension, the Western world seems today in a horrid
trance, stop-watch in hand, as it gazes on Russia. It is wholesome to read themany fine books about Russia that were written in less anxious times, whenauthors and readers were relaxed, and when there were opportunities for deliberate observation.
36

PLATE VI
Jean-Henri Fabre. Armillariella mellea (Fr. ex Vahl) Pat.
French: pivoulade.

Ill
MUSHROOMS AND HISTORY
When mushrooms abound, there'll be war around.
An old Russian belief.

... And to be briefe, only the Moscouites may seemethat nation which hath not felte the commoditiesof peace.
RICHARDS EDEN in J555.

a1

L this talk of mushrooms would be idle, were the contrast between Russianand Anglo-Saxon attitudes a random thing. But these mushrooms hint at theanswer to bigger questions, far beyond food and cookery. A people whohave always had an abundance of other foods are little tempted to brave theinitial perils of the mushroom world. However, in the desperate exigencies of
all-out war, of chronic war through decades and generations and centuries, ofdefensive warfare with homes ravaged and farms left untended, where theunslaughtered remnants of the population hide from the pitiless invader inwoods and swamps and fields - under these conditions, I suggest, men andwomen will discover the humble mushroom, and will prove the various
kinds by trial and error, and make friends among them in time of need. For
mushrooms, springing up almost overnight, will be God's manna to a people
driven from their homes into the wilderness. And the knowledge thus gained,joined with emotions of gratitude born of the circumstances, will not besoon lost. During the blessed intervals of peace when the fields yield theirnormal increase, the various mushrooms, along with the wild berries and fruits
and the cultivated crops, will be assigned in men's minds their appointed
stations in the annual procession of the seasons, and will be clothed with fondassociations, and in every kitchen, on every stove, sundry ways will bedevised to bring out the virtue peculiar to each friendly kind. There is an
old belief in Russia that when mushrooms abound, war is in the offing. The
thoughtless intellectuals of the world despise such homely sayings, which on
the surface are nonsense. But ofttimes those sayings are the cryptic expression ofexperience graven deep in the recesses of a people's past. Mushrooms are notharbingers of war: it is the other way round. When the dogs of war are
running loose across the fair countryside of Russia, the people, hard-pressed,
i. Notes upon Russia, Hakluyt Society, ist Series, vol. 12, p. 197.

37

CHAPTER THREE

know that mushrooms may soon be their mainstay.1 Our theory finds disturbing support in a book published in Prague just as the Communist curtain was
about to descend on that city. The book dealt with Czech folk food. A peasantspeaking of a mushroom called horyl (from hofeti, 'to burn'), said that it burnt
the mouth even when thrice boiled, yet in the 'great hungers' it was always
eaten, and when hunger and the pest would return, again it would be eaten.2
This link between war and mushrooms can be detected, albeit faintly, in the
Anglo-Saxon world. It is said that during the final phases of the American
Civil War the people in the devastated stretches of the South turned to mushrooms for sustenance. Certain it is that a famous botanist living at that timein the Carolinas, the Rev. M. A. Curtis, wrote how "during the late war I
paid no attention to Botany, except to the edible mushrooms, from which
I have gotten many a substantial and luxurious meal."3 He gladly shared his
esoteric lore with the neighbors, who, food being scarce, were apt pupils,
and such was his success that he embarked on a book to spread the useful tidings. It was to be called Mycophagia Americana, but by the time it was ready,the war was over and publishers were not interested.
In England during the recent war there were public and private efforts toincrease the consumption of wild fungi. We know one elderly Russian lady
who for a time made good money gathering belyegriby onWimbledon Common,in full sight of the wondering English. She pickled or precooked them andsold them to a fashionable restaurant. But, although England's peril was acute,there was, as things turned out, little actual hunger; and furthermore, whenmeasured against the long history of a people, the crisis was brief. The times
were not bad enough for mushrooms to take hold. Today there are those
who fear that England's bitterest trials lie ahead, in her peace-time efforts tofeed herself. If chronic want, real want, should for the first time in history
beset the English people, there will be the mushrooms to turn to, and a precious
reserve they will prove to be.
More than a century ago a famous French chef, Louis Eustache Ude, propounded an ingenious and amusing theory to explain the lackadaisical attitudeof the English toward food and cookery - an ingenious theory it was, but,as I shall show, completely unsound. He began by denouncing physicians as'enemies of the art' of cooking, and then he went on:
1. But the Russian saying seems to be widely current in Europe. Consult the entry 'Pilze' inHandworterbuch desDeutschen Aberglaubens, by E. Hoffmann-Krayer, 1935-6, where we find the German dialectical Viel Schwamma- vieljamma, the Italian anno fungato - anno tribolato, and the French an de cepere - an de misere, reported in theBasses Pyrenees.
2. See Mrs. M. Ulehlova-Tilschova's Ceskd strava lidovd, Prague, 1945, p. 57.
3. Neil E. Stevens quotes Curtis in The Scientific Monthly, August 1919, p. 162.
38

MUSHROOMS AND HISTORY
I am greatly concerned at being obliged to combat a still more powerful, thoughamiable, enemy to Cookery. The Ladies of England are unfavorably disposed toward ourart; yet I find no difficulty in assigning the cause of it. It is particularly the case with them(and indeed it is so in some measure with our own sex) that they are not introduced to theirparents' table till their palates have been completely benumbed by the strict diet observedin the nursery and the Boarding Schools.1

The baneful influence of the nursery and the boarding school is doubtless allthat the author said, but one would have liked to remind the great Maitre thatthe rudiments of any distinguished cuisine grow out of the people, the whole
people, and nothing but the people; that the leisure class merely spin refinements for the most democratic of the arts; and that the people by and large
have never known either nursery or boarding school. If the English in general
seem to the rest of us indifferent to good food, and some of them even disapproving of the fine art of pleasing the palate - if the English bill of fare lacks
variety and the good ingredients are spoiled in preparation - these shortcomings of a noble people must go back to deeper, broader causes than the childlife of the well-to-do. For a thousand years England never knew war - war
as others and especially the Russians suffered it - and England has never known
prolonged, desperate want. Hardship is the school in which people forget foodtabus, and acquire that deep reverence for food and its preparation that inspires
a great cuisine. Everyone who knows anything about Russia will recall that
simple and moving ceremony of hospitality in which bread and salt, symbols
of food, are offered on a tray to the honored guest. That ceremony is an ancient,almost sacramental expression of reverence for food, and Russia's history gives
meaning to that reverence. In the Anglo-Saxon world only prolonged want will,some day perhaps, bring about a comparable respect for food. If England, thatland unique in moral resources and spiritual unity, be destined to endure privation
over the coming generations, the hardships will most certainly give birth to newand lustrous chapters in her history, chapters of stirring and triumphant drama and incidentally, I predict, they will bring about at last a worthy English cuisine.
Perhaps the reader by now is protesting that I have overlooked England's
famous warrior past. Oh, yes, I know that her history is studded with decisive
battles. Crecy and Blenheim and Trafalgar and Waterloo, glorious victories
and sometimes glorious defeats. But they were all fought abroad, by a handfulof men at sea or in other people's homes. They were fought way down yonder
among the heathen, somewhere off Flores in the A9ores. Those wars were like
I. The French Cook, by Louis Eustache Ude, one-time cook to Louis XVI and the Earl of Sefton. This work
went through many editions in both England and the United States. The early editions carried an essay entitled,' On Cookery and its imputed ill effects on health', whence I take my quotation.

39

CHAPTER THREE

big-game hunting, stepped up another dimension. Of course there were civil
wars also, back in the lyth century, and the I5th, and under King Stephen,
and there were border frays along the way. But civil wars, however cruelly
fought, lack the ultimate sting, for, whoever wins, members of the family
retain possession of the homestead. No intruder takes over the patrimony.
These comments about wars go for the United States too; broadly speaking,the tally until our own generation adds up to two civil wars (including the
War of Independence) and a few brief expeditionary ventures.
Yes, whoever seeks seriously to understand Russia must make the needed
effort of intellect and imagination to comprehend the full and awful meaningof war in the history of the Slavs. This is the first and great imperative. (In thewinter of 1939-40, when the Finnish army seemed for a time to hold its own
with heroic courage against the Russian forces, how often did my American
friends remark to me that, after all, the Finnish successes were not surprising,since Russia had had no warrior past!) As compared with the West, and especiallythe English-speaking world, war for the Russians has been a calamity of a wholly
different and greater order of magnitude. Pause for a moment and consider
this. In the wide range of the English vocabulary are there words of more awful
potency than 'Huns' and 'Tartars'? It was in the fourth century that the Huns burst
like a rocket out of Asia into Europe, and the Mongol hordes followed themseven centuries later. This was all long ago and far away. The Huns in the end
were stopped on the fields of France, and the Tartars never got into the West.
Yet the mere names of these far-off peoples of ages past still trail clouds ofterror in the minds of nations then unborn, in continents then unknown. The
earliest description of the Tartars by an unidentified Englishman who sojournedamong them will explain in some measure the fearful impact of that strange
and pitiless people on the European mind:
They be hardie and strong in the breast, leane and palefaced, rough and hufshouldred,having flatte and short noses, long and sharpe chinnes, their upper jawes are low anddeclining, their teeth long and thinne, their eye-browes extending from their foreheads
down to their noses, their eies inconstant and blacke, their countenances writhen and terrible, their extreame joynts strong with bones and sinewes, having thicke and great thighes,
and short legs, and yet being equall unto us in stature: for that length which is wanting
in their legs is supplied in the upper parts of their bodies.1

The Slavs, let us remember, met the Huns face to face, and the Russians
bowed to the yoke of the Tartars for three full centuries. Nowadays we heari. Richard Hakluyt's Principal Navigations, Hakluyt Society, extra series, Glasgow 1903-4, vol. I, pp. 50, 53.
40

PLATE VII
Jean-Henri Fabre. Rhodopaxillus nudus (Fr. ex Bull.) R. Maire.
English: blewit; French: pied bleu.

MUSHROOMS AND HISTORY

glib talk of 'genocide', a new word meaning the murder of a people; but theSlavs dwelt for centuries on the highways of the Great Migrations, and, had
their powers of survival been less, they would have been absorbed or exterminated many times over. Other nations and tribes did disappear in the ethnicmaelstrom of the Steppes.
'Huns' and 'Tartars' are not the only linguistic contribution to the Westof the Asiatic invaders. No one knows for sure the origin of the word 'ogre';it probably comes to us from the people called Ugri, known to us as the Hungarians, who drove or were pushed into the Danubian plain in the pth century.
Our word 'horde' comes from the language of the Tartars. For them (as for
the Russians to this day) ordd is simply the headquarters of a marching host,and the Golden Horde was the supreme headquarters on the Volga of the
Tartars who subjugated the Slavs of the steppes and of Moscow. In a lexiconthat comes down to us from the library of the poet Petrarch (the Codex Cumanicus) we learn the curious fact that the Asiatic invaders referred to the Holy Seeof Rome as the Horde (ordd) of Christendom. The West in taking over theword changed its meaning to cover the swarms of ferocious invaders. In India
the same word, now Urdu, came to mean the language of the nomad camps.
The Steppes - those moist, fertile plains that fan out to the north of theBlack Sea - are the monumental stage on which from the beginnings of history
East and West have clashed, in an historical drama of epic grandeur. Like thewhirling waters of a rising tide that contend from divers directions for the
mastery of a level beach, through thousands of years a succession of migrating tribes from East and South and West have flowed into the Steppes, andoverrun them, and battled with each other for possession; and then with thepassing of time have vanished into the earth. In recent centuries the Turks
made their vain bid for title; before them, the Tartars, speaking a kindred
dialect. Before the Tartars came the Polovtsi, and before them the Pechenegs.
These last-named warrior peoples are scarcely known to Westerners, but theyleft dreadful, indelible scars on Russian memories. Before them came out of
Asia the hard-riding Avars, and before the Avars the Huns. The Avars andthe Huns made general use of bridles, stirrups, and saddles. With their horses
these mounted warriors revolutionized warfare, and rendered the famed Roman
legion obsolete. Before the Huns, from the Baltic, there swept down into the
Steppes and Crimea the Visigoths, the Ostrogoths, and the Goths. Those Goths
were securely settled in the Crimea by 250 A . D ., and there they lingered on
for a thousand years. In the middle of the idth century a famous traveler,de Busbecq, encountered in the Turkish dominions a few individuals who still41CHAPTER THREE

could recall some words of their ancestral Teutonic tongue. And down evento our own days, in the Caucasus, there is a fair-haired people whose neighbors
call them, erroneously, the Goths. Before the Goths, the Sarmatians, of Persian
origin, ruled the Steppes for centuries, and before them the Scythians, whowere dwelling in the land when the Greek historian Herodotus went sightseeing up the Dniepr River. And before the Scythians legend tells us of the shadowy
Cimmerians.
In thus spanning the millenniums we have omitted many famous peoples:
the Scandinavians, who swept down from the North through the waterwaysof Russia to the very gates of Byzantium; the Greek and later the Italian colonial empires in the Black Sea; the Ugri or Magyars who crossed the Steppes
to settle in what we call Hungary; the Bulgars who once dwelt in the Volga
valley and now till their cherished Balkan soil; the strange and mighty Khazar
Empire on the northern slopes of the Caucasus, whose sovereign had to be
Jewish by religion; the Alani, and the Assi who gave their name to the Sea of
Azov; and many another tribe of uncouth name - the Utiguri, the Kutriguri,
the Onoguri - who lived out their day and vanished.
Compared with those Homeric dramas of the past, how fleeting and insignificant was Hitler's stab across the Steppes to Stalingrad. In the presence of thoseGreat Migrations, the history of Western Europe, at least up to the Age of
Exploration, seems to be acted out in miniature, and to give off a slightly
foetid odor as of a hot-house. Viewed in the light of all human history, howunusual must be the introspective, intensively developed culture of the communities clustered along the Western fringes of the Eurasian Continent. The
world is destined to devote ever more attention to the peoples of Eastern Europe
and the Black Sea Basin, and if the West will unflex its intellectual muscles,
and exercise its capacity for wonder, and lengthen the focus of its mental vision,
what a panorama filled with color and drama will unroll itself!
In the folds of the Caucasus mountains there dwell to this day a score ofisolated peoples, with strange languages many of them as curious as the Basqueof the Pyrenees. Like the Ark on neighboring Mount Ararat, these peoples
have survived the floods of Indo-European and Turkish migrations. They
are the ethnographic moraines of the world that was old before the Old Worldwas born. Sarmatians, Scythians, and Cimmerians - those ancient peoples areperhaps mere infants alongside these secluded tribes, whose secrets, if we but
succeed in deciphering them, will make the millenniums seem like centuries.
Little by little our scholars, in our own times, are piecing together the bitsof evidence, and with their aid revising the perspectives in which we view
42

MUSHROOMS AND HISTORY

both ancient Greece and Rome (and that means us their progeny also), against
the background of earlier, Eastern cultures of unfathomed antiquity.
The Black Sea is a deep basin. Its deeper waters are so infused with chemicals
that they sustain no life, and are a graveyard for the detritus of human culturesthat have passed away. Its stormy surface waters forever rotate in a counterclockwise flow, suggestive of the human tides that have wheeled around its
shores as around a hub from time immemorial. Behind Greece and Rome loom
more and more, as our study of the past progresses, the cultures of the BlackSea basin; and the Black Sea becomes the enigmatic eye of history.
The peoples of the Great Migrations erupted into the Steppes explosively,
and then in course of time faded away. The Slavs followed different tactics.
Their entrance on the stage of history was inconspicuous - an odd thing forthe Dramatist to have devised, when you consider the role they were destined
to play. Emerging from the neighborhood of the Vistula, they stole imperceptibly into the consciousness of men. Perhaps they figure among the numerous
tribes that Herodotus mentions, but he did not make the identification sure.
Tacitus in 98 A.D. described the Slavs in his book on Germany, and that was
their formal debut in history. A few centuries later, they had spilled out into
the Balkans, and by the pth century the Russians emerge securely establishedin Kiev. They were a prolific tribe of farmers, spreading like wire-grass along
the water-courses. Geographically they were of course European, as European
as the Anglo-Saxons. They were European settlers reaching out to the Eastern
frontier, and bearing the brunt of Asiatic attacks. (How ironic it must soundin Asiatic ears when uninformed Westerners decry the Slavs as 'Asiatics'!
In the course of ten centuries these European Slavs have pushed the Asiatics
out of Europe, and then overrun their own vast Continent to the very shoresof the Pacific.) Unlike the looting nomadic warriors from the East, they werea sedentary folk. They belonged to the land and the land belonged to them.
There is evidence that in their pagan religion they deified the processes ofnature, and above all their Moist Mother Earth. Their attachment to the fertile
earth is a thing that Westerners, and especially the English-speaking world,
can hardly grasp. The old religion perhaps still runs through their blood. It
is the Russian in me that makes me love to plunge my bare hands in the moist
warm fertile earth, mother earth, the earth that yields us our daily bread, thefood that we reverence as a divine gift, that we worship in the Host. Perhaps
we love our mushrooms the way we do because they seem the earthiest ofnature's growths. From those pagan times a thousand years ago down to now,
the Russians feel themselves attached to the earth viscerally, as by an umbilical43

CHAPTER THREE

cord. In the early Slavonic chronicles the Russians are depicted always as farmers,
not traders or warriors, and their enemies habitually took advantage of thisdependence on the soil to attack their homesteads and villages at harvest time.
The Slavs were already then old hands at taking refuge in the woods, just as
in the recent war, and those were the circumstances under which, ages earlier,they must have first come into intimate communion with their friends themushrooms. As the successive waves of nomads spent their initial force, theSlavs resumed their steady pressure and retook the beloved land and pushed on.
They were the resistant, tenacious, pushing tortoise, and the invaders were theshowy, easy-come-easy-go hares. The Slavs made some progress in the Westalso, and as late as a few centuries ago, the peasants in Holstein and on theBaltic island of Bornholm were still speaking a Slavic tongue. To this day the
Slav-speaking Wends survive in villages south of Berlin. Many of the placenames of Germany are Slavic; Stettin means bristles, and it was the port throughwhich this commodity was exported; and Pomerania is merely Pomorjane 'inhabitants of the sea-shore'.
The Russians today are a singularly uniform people, as compared with theextreme mixtures in Western Europe. The traits of the Russians are the traitsof an Indo-European peasant people indigenous to Europe, first Christianized
and civilized under Byzantine influences, and politically shaped by the sternnecessity of waging incessant warfare on all sides for the sheer privilege ofsurvival. It fell to them to occupy and defend a desirable land devoid of natural
defenses, a rich, land-locked inheritance surrounded by covetous and arrogant
enemies. One reason ofttimes given for the relative uniformity of the Russian
people has been the absence of mountain barriers in their homeland: the geographical circumstances have encouraged a cultural and ethnic fluidity. But
this explanation proves too much: for precisely the same reason they could
have lost their identity in the vast steppes, exposed forever as they were toalien peoples on every side, tugging them in every dkection. They survived
as a homogeneous ethnic group and a cultural entity because, for reasons deeply
hidden in the racial strain, they chose to resist foreign encroachments. This
struggle has been the theme of Russia's history - the continual temptation
to assimilate foreign influences, leading to violent rejection in the interestsof self-preservation, and ending in every instance with a deepened sense of
their folk identity, but an identity molded by the ordeal of the never-ending
struggle, molded positively by acceptance in some measure of foreign influences,and negatively by the self-inflicted effects of violent resistance.
In one of the earliest accounts of Muscovy written by an Englishman, in
44

MUSHROOMS AND HISTORY

Queen Elizabeth's time, there is an observation concerning the Tsar's wars
that could have been repeated with other names at almost any other period:
His enemies with whom he hath warres for the most part are these: - Litto, Poland,
Sweden, Denmarke, Lifland, the Crimmes, Nagaians, and the whole nation of the Tartarians, which are a stoute and a hardie people as any under the Sunne.1

A Continental traveler, Sigismund von Herberstein, writing in Latin a half
century earlier, had remarked of the Russians and their horses that "rest is
seldom given them, for either they are waging war against the Lithuanians,or the Livonians, or the Swedes, or the Tartars of Cazan; or, if no war is goingon, the prince generally appoints 20,000 men every year in places about the
Don and the Occa, as guards to repress the eruptions and depredations of the
Tartars of Precop."
We saw in the recent war the tough soldier that the Russian makes. His
qualities were not born overnight, nor were they the fruit of a single generation. He was the heir to an old fighting tradition. Read, if you will, thisaccount of the same soldier four centuries ago:
They are a kinde of people most sparing in diet, and most patient in extremitie of cold,
above all others. For when the ground is covered with snowe, and is growen terrible
and hard with the frost, this Russe hangs up his mantle, or souldiers coate, against that partfrom whence the winde and Snowe drives, and so making a little fire, lieth downe withhis backe towards the weather: this mantle of his serves him for his bed, wall, house andall: his drinke is colde water of the river, mingled with oatemeale, and this is all his good
cheere, and he thinketh himselfe well, and daintily fedde therewith, and so sitteth down
by his fire, and upon the hard ground, rosteth as it were his wearie sides thus daintily
stuffed: the hard ground is his feather bed, & some blocke or stone his pillow: and as forhis horse, he is as it were a chamberfellow with his master, faring both alike. How justly
may this barbarous, and rude Russe condemne the daintinesse and nicenesse of our Captaines, who living in a soile & aire much more temperate, yet commonly use furredboots and clokes >It is safe to assume, I think, that this hardy Russ knew his mushrooms.

I. Richard Hakluyt's Principal Navigations, op. tit., vol. n, p. 438; also, Notes upon Russia, Hakluyt Society,first series, vol. 10, p. 95. The concluding quotation in this chapter is also from Principal Navigations, vol. n,
pp. 258-9.

45

IV MUSHROOMS FOR
MURDERERS
Exquisitum aliquid placebat, quod turbaret mentem etmortem differret.
TACITUS on the death of Claudius,
Annals, Book XII, Chap. 66.

murderers there is only one kind of mushroom worth considering: theFamanita
phalloides. Almost everyone who dies from mushrooms dies from it;ORand most of those who have eaten it have died from it. Even a small piece ofthe cap may kill a grown man. Specimens are easy to identify and easy to findin season - from August into October. Their poisonous virtue survives cooking,freezing, and drying. To speak more accurately, the deadly species are three in
number, for we must add the amanita verna and the amanita virosa, but all threeresemble each other so closely both in appearance and toxic properties that themurderer, whose ends after all are empirical, will disregard the distinctions as
academic. He looks for white gills, veil (or ring), and volva, taking care not to be
misled by any of the innocent amanitas, such as the citrina. On the autopsy
table the victim shows pathological lesions of the viscera, but unlike arsenic,
the pathologist cannot isolate the lethal agent, whose identity he must infer fromthe case history supplied by the attending physician, plus such evidence as canbe assembled to show that the victim had eaten the lethal fungi. From themurderer's point of view, the deadly amanita suffers from one shortcoming :some victims, after days or weeks or even months of shattering illness, slowly
recover and return to circulation. True, they are only frail replicas of theirformer selves, but they are alive and have foiled the murderer's coup. On theother hand, if the murderer also hates his victim, and if success attends his
undertaking, his worst instincts and hopes will have been more than quenchedby the slow progress and horrible suffering that attend the victim's downward
course into the grave. The symptoms of poisoning by the deadly amanita are
distinctive, dramatic, and terrifying.
To begin with, the lethal amanitas taste good - on this the abundant testimonyof victims shows no dissenting voice. Nothing arouses suspicion as the greedy
diner consumes his fateful dish; nor does he suspect anything for many hours
thereafter. Indeed, the distinctive mark of this poison, its 'veritable signature' as
Dr. Dujarric de la Riviere has aptly called it, is the period of absolute quiescencethat follows the ingestion of the mushrooms, a period that never lasts less than47

CHAPTER FOUR

six hours, and usually ten or twelve, sometimes twenty or even forty or more.
The victim goes about his affairs blissfully unaware that the fingers of death
already entwine him. Perhaps he speaks with relish of the mushrooms he has
eaten, even returning to another dish of the same kind at the next meal. If they
have been served to him intentionally, his murderer, standing by, eyes him withwicked and dissembled solicitude, alert for the inevitable moment. Of a sudden
the victim is gripped by appalling abdominal distress, followed by vomiting
and diarrhoea fcetida. Neither emetics nor purgatives can help him now, for his
system has absorbed the venom, during the long period of silent invasion.
The initial seizure is followed by utter prostration, which in turn is succeededby another paroxysm like the first, and this alternation continues, perhaps formany days, until the victim, his pulse fast and weak, succumbs, usually after
a delirious phase. The appearance of the patient meanwhile is marked by what
the physicians describe as the Hippocratic facies - eyes sunken and staring as
though with anxiety or even terror, skin over the cheekbones taut and parched,nose pinched, temples hollow, ears leaden and cold, their lobes turned out,
lips relaxed, the whole face livid - an appearance that is clear harbinger ofimminent dissolution.
Our lugubrious, even sinister, approach to the toxic fungi presents the elementary facts that should be known to any detective story craftsman who resorts to mushroom poison as a device in the construction of a plot. The art ofthe detective story is a minor literary genre proliferated by the English-speaking peoples. Its leading exponents are often conscientious in their scientificresearch. But when they invoke mushroom poisoning, they seem incapable ofartistic performance, as though the mycophobia peculiar to the Celtic andAnglo-Saxon races inhibited all inquiry into the dark recesses of the repellent
subject. Mushrooms remain a mystery even to mystery writers.
Before examining the texts, we must mention two other kinds of toxic mushrooms. First and foremost there is the amanita muscaria, erroneously regarded
by many laymen as the poisonous mushroom. Its evil reputation far outruns its
deserts. It gives its name to 'muscarine', the agent that most physicians and evenmedical examiners in the English-speaking world regard as synonymous withmushroom poisoning. But the facts are that muscarine is seldom if ever fatal,that it is destroyed by cooking, and that it exists in the amanita muscaria onlyin traces, being much stronger in the amanita pantherina. The hallucinations andmuscular exertions inspired by the amanita muscaria, followed by a period of
stupor, are attributable to the presence of a wholly different compound, which
resembles atropin. The victim (or beneficiary) of this intoxicating mushroom48

PLATE VIII Jean-Henri
Fabre. Boletus duriusculus Kalchbr.

MUSHROOMS FOR MURDERERS

is imbued with a new sense of dimensions, of physical powers, of miraculous
mobility.
Of the remaining toxic mushrooms, there is a peculiar mystery about the
gyromitra esculenta, a common species much eaten (as its name suggests) inEurope. Certain it is that at intervals cases occur where an individual dies fromit. The explanation may not yet be surely known, but if the best opinion available today proves right, the gyromitra esculenta offers us a notable fungal
peculiarity. It seems that everyone may eat this tasty mushroom with impunity
for the first time. But there are rare individuals who, if they return to a mess ofthe same species shortly thereafter, and if the mushrooms are fresh rather thandried, suffer a dangerous and even fatal anaphylactic shock.
Dorothy L. Sayers with Robert Eustace in The Documents in the Case produced
the supreme example in English of a mystery story based on fungal poisoning.
An eccentric Englishman, George Harrison, made wild mushrooms his hobby(he was obviously eccentric), and in the end was found dead (as normal Englishmen would expect) in a lonely shack. The evidence indicated that he had
recently eaten a mess of stewed mushrooms prepared by himself. The coroner
after chemical analysis of the uneaten remains of the stew put the death down
to accidental muscarine poisoning. The victim's son, Paul, was not satisfied, because he was certain his father, a careful man and excellent amateur mycologist,
could never have confused the amanita muscaria with an edible species, and in
the end he ran down the real culprit, a lover of Paul's step-mother, a villain
named Robert Lathom, who in due course was proved to have introduced
synthetic muscarine into the stock that had served for the mushroom stew. He
was tried, convicted, and hanged. The story is well told, with delightful touches
revealing the mycophobic habits of mind of the run of Englishmen. But it suffers from one defect: muscarine is destroyed by cooking and could not havecaused the victim's death. True, the muscarine here involved is synthetic, but
no evidence is produced to show that, in resistance to heat, the synthetic productdiffers from the natural. Furthermore, the toxicity of fresh muscarine is exaggerated: the chances were excellent that Harrison would survive an uncooked
dose. Lathom should have used amanitine, not muscarine - the amanita phalloides, not the amanita muscaria - and for informed readers, his execution wasa painful miscarriage of justice, a tragic sequel to an incompetent performanceby Defense Counsel.
Miss Sayers and Mr. Eustace used, or misused, a genuine mushroom. Moreoften English authors create fictional species, tailored to fit their plots. Ernest
Bramah in The Eyes of Max Carrados tells a story entitled 'The Mystery of the49CHAPTER FOUR

Poisoned Dish of Mushrooms'. It hinges on the peculiar properties of a nonexistent fungus on which he bestows a name unknown to mycology, the amanita
bhuroides. (This name sounds like a misspelled derivative of Burrhus, a personage in attendance at the imperial court of Claudius and Nero.) It is so deadlythat the victim expires within a half-hour of his seizure.
More remarkable than the amanita bhuroides is the panseolus sherriffoides, as weshall call the mushroom that the playwright R. C. Sherriff devises for his dramaMiss Mabel. His plot is unhappy, for we are expected to sympathize with akindly, somewhat demented heroine who poisons her wealthy and hatefulsister, the widow Fletcher. The mycophile watches with astonishment as theauthor, by a very act of creation, invents his mushroom and clothes it with
precisely those attributes that the plot requires. It appears in the spring: thedaffodils are in bloom and Easter is yet to come. (In nature there are almost nomushrooms then.) It grows fast, progressing noticeably in the course of a night's
rain. A cluster of nine serves as the lethal dose, but the playwright suggests thatfewer would have sufficed. When cooked, these mushrooms smell like hotrubber, but the smell is successfully overlaid with onions and tomatoes. Most
remarkable are the toxic properties. These fungi are a powerful narcotic andput the victim to sleep at once. The widow Fletcher departs this life without
pain, her ugly, resentful face assuming in death 'a look of such peace and gentleness' that the audience is presumably reconciled to her hurried departure at thehands of her sister.
Yet another inventor of mushrooms is H. G. Wells, in his short story, The
Purple Pileus. Here a mild-mannered, milktoast of a man named Coombes,
lower middle-class, finds himself browbeaten by his wife and her odious friend,
Clarence, to the point of desperation and suicide. He rushes from the house into
the woods. He thinks of drowning himself, but suddenly notices all the variedmushrooms around his feet. A purple pileus catches his eye, "a peculiarly poisonous looking purple", slimy, shining, emitting a sour odor but not disgusting.
Coombes breaks off a piece, and the creamy white of the inside changes in ten
seconds to a yellowish-green color. He remembers that his father had described
this very species to him, and they were the deadliest poison. He tastes the thing.
It is pungent and he almost spits it out, but then it seems merely hot to the taste
and full-flavored, a kind of German mustard with horse-radish. He swallows it.
There ensues a curious tingling sensation in his finger-tips and toes. His pulse
quickens. The blood in his ears sounds like a mill-race. He loses his balance andfalls, and forgets everything. While he lies there unconscious, a peculiar transformation takes place in his personality, for after a while he wakes up feeling bright50

MUSHROOMS FOR MURDERERS

and cheerful, his complexion a livid white, his eyes large and bright, his pale
lips drawn in a cheerless grin. The mild little man is now a lion, fit to be themaster of his house. He goes home, and in a scene of violent retribution he imposes his will on his wife and that noisome friend of hers. He is so successfulthat the reformation in his household proves lasting, and the whole course of
Coombes's life is changed for the better.
Coombes's violence might suggest that he ate the amanita muscaria, but
Wells expressly distinguishes his purple pileus from that other species, "the red
ones with white spots". Furthermore, the fly agaric produces a sleepy stupor
after the spell of exhilaration, not before it. Wells, like Bramah and Sherriff,fills out the necessities of a given plot by inventing the needed mushroom, on
which we here bestow the name of boletus wellsoides.
Have English authors ever invented flowers or bushes or trees with which toadorn the English countryside? It seems unlikely. Surrounded by mushrooms
that they never truly see, they usually ignore them, and on the rare occasions
when 'toadstools' are needed, they blithely misrepresent them, to make themserve an odious or exotic purpose.
With Wells and Sherriff and Bramah, we observe a peculiar aspect of the mycophobia of the English in its unconscious and spontaneous workings. Doubtless many other examples could be assembled, and we shall mention a few. But
first let us note and celebrate one exception. Anne Parrish in her novel The
Perennial Bachelor dispatches one of her characters by means of a dish of mushrooms. Unlike ah1 the other writers about whom we speak, she shows herself
thoroughly versed in the properties of the deadly amanita. The episode is only
incidental to her plot, and this makes the accuracy of her details even moreastounding. It is not as though she had worked hard on mushrooms in orderto hang her story on them.
In December 1949 Ellery Queen s Mystery Magazine published a yarn by
August Derleth in which the murderer killed his victim by substituting formorels some specimens of the gyromitra esculenta - a species that no villain
bent on murder would ever rely on. In Murder with Mushrooms, Gordon Ashe
has his victim die the same night that he dines on poisonous mushrooms a tragic sequel that could not occur. In R. T. M. Scott's Ann's Crime, the victims
inhale spores of the amanita phalloides that have been concealed in a cheese cloth
inside a pillow, and forthwith they die, for no doctor, we are told, could save aperson whose head had once touched that pillow! . . . Has there been a single
writer of detective or mystery stories who has done justice to the genuine
drama hidden in the properties peculiar to the amanita phalloides; The German
51

CHAPTER FOUR

author Gustav Meyrink in his Bal Macabre deals with mushroom intoxication.
The story is drenched with a pathological atmosphere artfully contrived. Thereis much about mushrooms in the narrative, but the hallucinations that hang over
the whole story seem to us to be best explained by the effects of alcohol, an
alcoholic's nightmare about toxic mushrooms. Meyrink reveals no knowledgeof fungal toxicology. The prolific American writer Percival Wilde in his
Tinsley's Bones, published in 1942, introduces as a witness a knowledgeable
female mycologist who seems to be addicted to mushrooms of the genus panaeolus as a substitute for cocktails, the author and his character displaying thereby
an astonishing command of mushroomic esoterica; but mushrooms in this yarn
were not the agent used for the murder.
The facts about lethal mushrooms are to be found, not in standard medical
reference works, but in mycological publications. They are well summarized inJohn Ramsbottom's A Handbook of the Larger British Fungi, an indispensablereference book, which however still characterizes the amanita mappa (i. e., citrina) as poisonous, ignoring the work done by the French with this species.
Good case histories in English of poisoning by the deadly amanitas appear in a
Canadian Government publication, Mushrooms and Toadstools, by H. T. Gtissow
and W. S. Odell. Certainly the best worked up case history in any language
is the account of the tragic end of a Madame Boyer and her daughter Elodie,
more than a century ago, retold with dramatic suspense and pathos by Camille
Fauvel in his delightful little book, Le Champignon aui tue, published in Paris in
1926. The best single source of information about all the toxic mushrooms is,
we believe, Les Champignons Toxiques (Paris, 1938), compiled jointly by Dr. R.
Dujarric de la Riviere of the Pasteur Institute, and the mycologist Professor
Roger Heim. Dr. Dujarric de la Riviere's promising efforts to produce an antitoxin for the deadly amanita were interrupted by the second World War, andintravenous injections of glucose are the only readily accessible palliative available to physicians today.
Mycologists are prone to exaggerate the importance of mushroom poisonings
in history. In their writings we repeatedly find a list of eminent persons who havedied allegedly from eating poisonous mushrooms, a list that they copy from eachother without verification. Sometimes we read that Euripides lost his wife andtwo daughters thus, an assertion unsupported by any ancient text, apparently
based on a misreading of Athenaeus. We read that Pope Clement VII - he who
is remembered chiefly for his troubles with Henry VIII of England - was a
victim of poisonous mushrooms. This Pontiff died on September 25, 1534. The
52

MUSHROOMS FOR MURDERERS

date falls in the season of the deadly amanita, but the records show that Clement's symptoms first manifested themselves many months earlier, on May 30,
and the course of his fluctuating illness from that moment is well documented.
We discover in the record no trace of the telltale stigmata. As his biographer
Emmanuel Rodocanachi wisely observes, "In accordance with the custom of
those times, people attributed his death to poison."1
More remarkable still is the persistence in mycological writings of the assertion that Tsar Alexis of Russia or his widow died from mushrooms. Sometimes
the texts name him, but more often her. As to the Tsar himself, the circumstancesof his death are well known and are unrelated to fungi. His widow was an outstanding woman, the mother of Peter the Great, Natalija Naryshkina by name.
She died on January 25,1694 (Russian style), after an illness of five days. Neither
contemporary records nor the historians of the period tell us the nature of her
ailment. If mushrooms were the cause, they must have been dried or pickled specimens from the previous autumn. What has given rise to the tradition among
mycologists that mushrooms brought about her end ? We believe the source is tobe found in a footnote that appears on page in of Jean-Jacques Paulet's classic
Traits, des Champignons, published in Paris in 1793, reading as follows:
L'accident arrive a la veuve du czar Alexis, qui s'empoisonna avec des champignons
qu'on avait gardes pour le careme, et rapporte par Miiller, est de notre siecle.
The accident that befell the widow of the Tsar Alexis, who was poisoned by mushrooms that had been set aside for Lent, as reported by Miiller, belongs to our century.

The Miiller to whom reference is made can only be Gerhard Friedrich Miiller,
a prolific i8th century writer about Russia who died in 1783. But his numerous
works available to us make no mention of the death of Natahja Naryshkina,
and Paulet's footnote remains uncorroborated.
Finally there was the case of the German Emperor Charles VI, father ofMaria Theresa of Austria. He had been worried and run down. "On the loth[of October] at night his complaint was increased by an indigestion, occasioned
by a dish of mushrooms stewed in oil, of which he eat voraciously". So wrotethat admirable man Archdeacon William Coxe, the same whom we quoted
earlier, in his History of the House of Austria. Ten days later, on October 20, while
the doctors were still arguing about the diagnosis, he surprised them by dying.
The clinical details that Coxe supplies to us, including the patient's sudden death,
I. Histoire de Rome: Les Pontificals d'Adrien VI et de Clement VII, Librairie Hachette, Paris, 1933. See also Ludwig
Pastor, The History of the Popes, London, 1910, vol. 10.

53

CHAPTER FOUR

are compatible with poisoning by the deadly amanita. There were no allegations
that the poisoning, if such it was, was deliberate. If fungi were the agent, heis the one modern personage thus killed. His end precipitated war and Voltairedeclared that "a pot of mushrooms changed the history of Europe".
So much for the famous men and women whose deaths have been attributed
rightly or wrongly to mushrooms. This mortuary procession of alleged mushroomie victims would be incomplete if we did not here add the murders revealed
by 1'afFaire Girard. In this case, the victims were persons of no consequence:
their very names are forgotten. But the circumstances that brought them totheir deaths are, for mycophiles and epicures of crime, both instructive andfascinating.
The standard mushroom manuals of France, like those of England, havealways been saturated with mycophobic caution. By overstating the toxic
dangers of various species, they have aimed at assuring the safety of their readers.
But, through a strange conjuncture of events, that very bias once contributed
to the disastrous end of a man who trusted his mushroom manual too much.
This is the lesson to be learned from Faffaire Girard.
Girard's murders would doubtless have drawn wide attention if the press
stories had not broken at the precise moment of the great spring offensive of1918, the final year of the first World War. Girard was a Parisian, and his
accomplices were his wife and his mistress. He murdered only his friends, after
insuring their lives in his own favor. Poisons were his instrument, and among
other poisons he used toadstools gathered for him in the forest of Rambouillet
by an old hobo known as le pere Theo, whose testimony later was damning to theaccused. From time to time Girard would order from Theo a mess of amanitas:
they had to have white gills, veil, and volva - the stigmata of the deadly amanita, but also of the amanita mappa or citrina. Girard and his wife would serve
these fungi to their victims at sumptuous dinners in their own apartment.
Sometimes the guest went home and died, but on other occasions, doubtless
to the surprise and discomfiture of the Girards, the intended victim suffered noill effects whatever! Indeed, a number of them lived to give their evidence tothe police.
In 1918 the standard mushroom manual of France was Paul Dumee's. Like
all of the over-cautious manuals of that time, it condemned the amanita citrina
as deadly. Girard had not thought it necessary, therefore, to distinguish the two
amanitas when instructing old Theo about the mushrooms to gather. Thus itcame about that when Theo brought in a mess of the amanita phalloides, thevictim would enjoy a dish of tasty mushrooms and later die. But when Theo54

MUSHROOMS FOR MURDERERS

produced specimens of the innocent amanita citrina, the intended victim musthave found them a little unpleasant to the taste, and that was the end of the matter.
For the deadly amanita makes a delectable dish, whereas its relative the innocent
citrina scarcely rises palate-wise to the mediocre level.
Thus it may be said that Girard was deceived and misled by Dumee's overcautious manual, with the result that some of his friends and intended victims
unwittingly survived his honest efforts to do them in, and he in turn was fatallyentangled in the law's toils. Now that the French manuals have improved,
Girard's mistake is unlikely to be repeated. Had Girard hailed from Serignan,
Henri Fabre's village in the Provence, he would have known from childhood
not to rely on Dumee, for these peasants need no manuals.
Girard's crimes would have been forgotten, had it not happened that Camille
Fauvel, that prodigious mycophile, was a Commissaire de Police in Paris at thetime, and though he was not handling the Girard case, having lately been charged
with the more famous and important but less interesting Mata Hari dossier,he followed it with expert attention, even interviewing Girard in Fresnes prison
after the conviction, in the interests of mycological lore. Fauvel published anadmirable narrative of the affair many years later, in the Supplement to the issuesof June and August, 1936, of the Revue de Mycologie, and we have drawn ourfacts from his account. It should be added that Girard died in his prison bed oftuberculosis a few days after he was interviewed, never having admitted his
guilt nor that he had relied on the unsound advice of Dumee. But Fauvel's
inference is based upon evidence that leaves little room for doubt.
All that we have set forth in this chapter up to now - the description of
the singular properties of lethal mushrooms, the inadequacy of mystery writers
when they deal with this theme, our comments on alleged poisonings of eminent
personages and the niushroomic murders of unimportant folk-has had only one
purpose: to equip the reader for a reconsideration of the death of the Emperor
Claudius in A.D. 54. On that occasion, for once in the course of recorded history,
the whole of a great Empire and the known world swung on a dish of mushrooms. The accounts in the ancient writings of that famous event are an old,
old story, familiar to all students of antiquity. Those texts have been parsed by
students, dissected by historians, pondered by moralists for close on to twenty
centuries. It would seem that by now every conceivable interpretation musthave been hit upon, and the resources of scholarly inquiry exhausted. Indeed,
the signs of exhaustion are not lacking: in our own generation Guglielmo
Ferrero in his The Women of the Ccesars has not only struggled to exonerate55

CHAPTER FOUR

Agrippina of the dreadful charge laid at her door, but to portray her as a noble
Roman matron!
It would be surprising if at this late date fresh evidence shedding light on Claudius's death were discovered, and yet this is what we think we have done. We
rely solely on the same worn texts, and we entrust our fate to the verdict ofscholars far more learned than we. Perhaps those old texts have a message todeliver to us that can be discerned only by one who is a lover of mushrooms,
a physician, and above all an amateur of venomy - amateur in the sense of a
critical but passive observer of those who have practiced that subtile art.
Let us recall the background of the crime. Claudius succeeded Caligula asemperor in the year 41, at the age of 51. By his third wife, Messalina, he had hada son, Britannicus, born the year before his accession. After executing Messalina for adultery, he married his niece Agrippina, who by a previous marriage
had a son of her own, three years senior to Britannicus; and her son was destined
to worldly immortality as the Emperor Nero. Indeed, Agrippina's motive inmurdering her husband was to assure the succession to Nero, in which endeavor
success crowned her efforts. Claudius at the time of his death was said to befavoring Britannicus, and it was even rumored that he had bequeathed the Empire
to Britannicus in a will that Agrippina destroyed.
The young man who was to be known as Nero had as his tutor from A.D. 50
on the famous Seneca, and at the time of the crime Seneca was an intimate of
the imperial circle, privy to all that went on. He could have left us an eye-witness
account of what happened, but instead he veils his remarks in satire - a prudent
evasion of one who undoubtedly knew too much. Three of the ancient historians
have given us accounts of the event. Tacitus, who was probably born in the year
after Claudius's death, wrote his narrative about sixty years later; Suetonius's
version came a few years after that; and Dio Cassius told the story again almost
two centuries after the event. These three secondary sources differ among themselves in details, which gives to their agreement on essentials a stamp of verisimilitude. In the main they were not copying each other, and they probably
had the important facts right.
Claudius was exceedingly fond of mushrooms (boleti), and a plausible tradition
has it that his favorite kind was what we know today as the amanita caesarea.
The dish of mushrooms that he ate on the fateful day consisted of poisoned, notpoisonous, mushrooms. On this all three of the ancient historians agree, in different words. None identifies the poison that was used, but they are abundantly
clear that poison was added to the Emperor's favorite dish. Here is Tacitus, Book
XII, Chap. Ixvii of the Annals in the Loeb edition:
56

PLATE IX
Jean-Henri Fabre. Arnanita csesarea Fr. ex Scop.
French: orange; Italian: ovolo.

MUSHROOMS FOR MURDERERS
Adeoque cuncta mox pernotuere, ut temporum illorum scriptores prodiderint infusum
delectabili cibo boleto venenum.
So notorius, later, were the whole proceedings that authors of the period have recordedthat the poison was sprinkled on an exceptionally fine mushroom.

Suetonius gives alternative versions, in Book V, Chap, xliv, in the Loeb edition:
Et veneno quidem occisum convenit; ubi autem et per quern dato, discrepat. Quidam
tradunt epulanti in arce cum sacerdotibus per Halotum spadonem prsegustatorem; alii
domestico convivio per ipsam Agrippinam, quae boletum medicatum avidissimo ciborum
talium optulerat.
That Claudius was poisoned is the general belief, but when it was done and by whom
is disputed. Some say that it was his taster, the eunuch Halotus, as he was banqueting on
the Citadel with the priests; others that at a family dinner Agrippina served the drug to
him with her own hand in mushrooms, a dish of which he was extravagantly fond.

Suetonius places the poisoned mushrooms only in his second version, but mushrooms could have been the vehicle that Halotus used too, and this may be implied. Dio Cassius comes down to us in a Greek summary. In Book LXI he
accuses Agrippina of having put the poison into "one of the vegetables calledmushrooms", using for mushroom the Greek word μύκης. A few pages later
Dio Cassius refers again to the same poison when he says:
Agrippina was ever ready to attempt the most daring undertakings; for example, shecaused the death of Marcus Junius Silanus, sending him some of the poison with which
she had treacherously murdered her husband.

What poison did Agrippina use? We think the answer is clear. She turned foradvice and aid to a woman named Locusta, an experienced artist in the preparation of poisons, as Tacitus tells us; a famous dealer in poisons, as Dio Cassius
puts it. According to Tacitus, the instructions of the Empress to Locusta were
narrowly defined. The poison was not to be sudden and instantaneous in its
operation, lest the desperate achievement should be discovered. On the other
hand, if the effect were slow and consuming, Claudius as his end approachedmight discover the treachery and take steps to thwart the perpetrators in theirultimate purposes. (He might, that is to say, proclaim Britannicus as his heir.)Something subtle was needed, which would take time but also deprive the victim
of his faculties. As Tacitus goes on to say, by Locusta's skill the desired poison
was prepared. This passage in the Annals of Tacitus being a crux in our argument,
we give it in full:57

CHAPTER FOUR
Turn Agrippina sceleris olim certa et oblatas occasionis propera nee ministrorum egens,de genere veneni consultavit, ne repentino et praecipiti facinus proderetur; si lentum ettabidum delegisset, ne admotus supremis Claudius et dolo intellecto ad amorem filii rediret. Exquisitum aliquid placebat, quod turbaret mentem et mortem differret.
It was then that Agrippina, long since bent upon the impious deed, and eagerly seizing
the present occasion, well furnished too as she was with wicked agents, deliberated upon
the nature of the poison she would use, whether, "if it were sudden and instantaneous inits operation, the desperate achievement would not be brought to light: if she chose materials slow and consuming in their operation, whether Claudius, when his end approached,and perhaps having discovered the treachery, would not resume his affection for his son."Something of a subtle nature was therefore resolved upon, "such as would disorder his
brain and require time to kill." [Oxford translation, Annals, Book xn, Chap. 66]

There was only one poison available to the ancients that would fulfill Agrippina's requirements - the poison of the deadly anianita. The victim would notgive away the game by any abnormal indisposition at the meal, but when the
seizure came, he would be so severely stricken that thereafter he would no longer
be in command of his own affairs. For one familiar with the properties of theamanita phalloides the text in Tacitus seems transparently clear. But for others
than mycophiles there might remain a doubt: is it legitimate for us to infer that
Locusta knew the deadly amanita and its secret virtue to which even now, after
nineteen centuries, few are privy?
This question troubled and challenged us, not because we were uncertain
but because it would be hard to carry conviction with an uninitiated public.
Once more we reviewed all the principal sources, all the stray allusions in theclassical writers. We concentrated especially on Seneca. After all, he was a witness whose testimony would have been competent in our own courts of justice;
he was articulate, and had he not carried the secret etched sharp in his memory
from that fateful October day in A.D. 54 until his death eleven years later?
Somewhere, if only by inadvertence, he must have talked, and perhaps his revealing words had survived, their esoteric meaning hitherto unperceived. We
embarked on a reading of ah1 his extant writings. We began with his later works,
composed after the death of the Emperor, and tried to orient each sentence
toward that event. Suddenly one day we came upon the tell-tale phrase: itleaped at us from the page, fairly shouting at us. Yes, whether with sly intention
or by inadvertence, Seneca had blurted out the fateful secret, imparting it to
all knowing readers. And before us not a single commentator had ever caught
the inner meaning of the plain words.
We refer the reader to Letter xcv that the old Stoic wrote to his friend Luci58

MUSHROOMS FOR MURDERERS

lius nine or ten years after the death of the Emperor and one or two years before
he took his own life on Nero's orders. In it he describes and deplores the excessesof the Roman upper class. He refers to the late Emperor's gluttony:
Di boni, quantum hominum unus venter exercet! Quid 2 Tu illos boletos, voluptarium
venenum, nihil occulti operis iudicas facere, etiam si prsesentanei non fuerunt.
Good gods! What a number of men does one belly employ! But can you think thosemushrooms (a tasty poison) do not secretly and gradually operate, though no bad effect isimmediately perceived from them ? [Loeb translation]

Here is proof that Seneca knew the amanita phalloides. The period of silent
invasion, that veritable signature of the lethal mushroom, was familiar to him,
and he even took pains to mention how tasty the wicked mushroom was! How
much guilty knowledge packed into a few words! Read in conjunction with
the Empress Agrippina's instructions to Locusta, we believe it clinches ourcase. The poison in the dish of Caesar's amanitas was the poison of the deadly
amanita. Two of our authors, Suetonius and Tacitus, give us grounds for supposing that the administration of the poison was entrusted to the eunuch Halotus,
whose office it was to taste the Emperor's food before serving it to him. Tacitus
says that Halotus poured the poison into the dish of mushrooms. It would havebeen easy for Locusta to prepare a sauce from the deadly specimens, and byenlisting the aid of Halotus, no suspicion would be aroused by the failure toserve it to others at the feast. However, this is a detail, important at the timeto the participants of course, but secondary to the primary fact that the ancient
writers are telling us exactly how Locusta handled the assignment with which
Agrippina charged her. We believe that the secret of those two fearless andwicked women is withheld from us no longer. (For Latinists and mycologists
it is interesting to note that Seneca uses the word boletus for the deadly amanita:
it was clearly the term for all amanitas, not merely the amanita cassarea.)
We rest our case on the knowledge shown by Seneca and the quoted passage
from Tacitus, taken together. But there is additional circumstantial evidencecompatible with our theory. The crime was committed on October 12 - in theseason when the deadly amanita could be easily found around Rome. On themorrow after Claudius had eaten the mushrooms and while he was yet alive,
comedians were introduced into his presence to solace and delight him, as Suetonius says. Since any such kind intention was foreign to Agrippina's nature,
and a fortiori at the dreadful moment that we are considering, we may assume
that her purpose was different: the comic actors were to bear witness in the publicmarket-place that the Emperor had not been killed but was in truth desperately
59

CHAPTER FOUR

ill, and the Hippocratic facies that we know he must have manifested gave themfull warranty for such a report. Immediately after Claudius's death, he was proclaimed a god-a posthumous honor for emperors to which Romans were accustomed. Afterwards, when Nero was in secure possession of his imperial office,he was present at a certain banquet where mushrooms were brought in, andsomeone remarked that they were the gods' food, cibus deorum. To this Nero issaid to have replied: "True enough: my father was made a god by eating amushroom." (This story is told by Suetonius, Dio Cassius, and Petrus Patricius.)
Nero's remark is more apt if he was referring to the deadly amanita, and not
merely to a dish of edible mushrooms that had been poisoned; and Nero wasin a position to know.
In spite of Locusta's artistry, we know that her bold stroke was botched, andthis leads us to the second part of the crime. The time schedule alone tells usthat something went awry. Claudius sat down to his fatal banquet at about
2.30 p.m. on October 12. At or shortly after noon the next day he was dead.
The lethal amanitas do not kill so quickly. We do not know at what stage inthe lengthy banquet he ate his mushrooms, but probably not at the beginning.
His seizure could not have taken place before 9 p.m., and probably not before
midnight or later, which would mean that his agony lasted only twelve hours!
On its face this is impossible. We pointed out earlier that, for a murderer, theamanita phalloides labors under one defect: occasionally a victim recovers.
Agrippina could not afford this risk, and even if we had no evidence to support
our theory, we might assume that she and Locusta, as their imperial patient lay
at their mercy, resorted to direct methods to dispatch him. Fortunately, ourtexts come to our help.
"The victim of the plot," says Dio Cassius, "was carried from the banquet
apparently quite overcome by strong drink, a thing that had happened manytimes before." Suetonius's version is hesitant: "Of those accidents also which
ensued hereupon [after eating the mushrooms] the report is variable. Some saythat straight upon the receipt of the poison he became speechless, and continuing
all night in dolorous torments died a little before day. Others affirm that at first
he fell asleep, and afterwards, as the meat flowed and floated aloft, vomited allup." (If it is true that in his usual drunken stupor he threw up, this was enoughto send the two women into a panic, for he might have rid himself of the fungal
poison!) Tacitus is explicit: "Agrippina therefore became dismayed; but as herlife was at stake, she thought little of the odium of her present proceedings, andcalled in the aid of Xenophon the physician, whom she had already implicatedin her guilty purposes. It is believed that he, as if he purposed to assist Claudius
60

PLATE X
Jean-Henri Fabre. Amanita phalloides Fr.
French: orange cigue verte.

PLATE XI
Jean-Henri Fabre. Danse Macabre. Amanita verna Fr. ex Bull.
French: orange cigue blanche.

MUSHROOMS FOR MURDERERS

in his efforts to vomit, put down his throat a feather besmeared with deadly
poison; not unaware that in desperate villainies the attempt without the deedis perilous, while to insure the reward they must be done effectually at once."
There was thus a second poisoning, with the Greek physician Xenophon replacing Locusta. Suetonius says that, according to one report, the second poisoning
was by clyster.
What was that poison to which Xenophon had hurried recourse? Robert
Graves in private correspondence offers us an answer that fits the circumstances
perfectly. Not long after Claudius's death, Seneca published a satire on theemperor's deification to which he gave the title of Apocolocyntosis, an artificial
word telescoping apotheosis and colocynthis. The colocynth (as we call this gourd
in English) is far from being a pumpkin, and the traditional translation of thistitle, the Pumpkinification of Claudius, is indeed as insipid as the classicalscholars have considered it. But if Mr. Graves is right, and we believe that heis, the scholars have missed the point.
The colocynth is not edible. It is exceedingly bitter, whence its name, 'thebitter gourd'. It is not native to Italy, but was imported from the arid areasof the Near East, notably Palestine. This is the famous gourd that responded
to Elisha's miraculous powers in II Kings, Chapter 4, verses 38 to 41 :And Elisha came againe to Gilgal, and there was a dearth in the land, and the sonnesof the Prophets were sitting before him: and hee said unto his seruant, Set on the greatpot, and seethe pottage for the sonnes of the Prophets,
And one went out into the field to gather herbes, and found a wild vine, and gathered
thereof wilde gourds his lap full, and came and shred them into the pot of pottage: forthey knew them not.
So they poured out for the men to eat: and it came to passe as they were eating of the
pottage, that they cried out, and said, O thou man of God, there is death in the pot. And
they could not eate thereof.
But he said, Then bring meale. And he cast it into the pot: And he said, poure out forthe people, that they may eat. And there was no harme in the pot.

In minimal doses the colocynth is a violent purgative; in larger doses it islethal. It happens that we know the history of this drug in surprising detail.
In the first century of the Christian era the upper classes of Rome were muchconcerned with their health: hypochondriasis was rampant, and miracle drugs
were being discovered one after the other.1 Early in the reign of Claudius
i. Some of the drugs used in imperial Rome have survived iii use until recent times. One such is the agaric,
and another is colocynth, this latter having been the base for 'general issue" purgative pills in the British armyin the first world war. We too, in the mid-2Oth century, are witnessing a spate of miraculous pharmaceutical
discoveries. Will a single one of them be remembered in A.D. 3850?

6l

CHAPTER FOURan apothecary named Scribonius Largus enjoyed immense vogue; possibly heattended Messalina, the mother of Britannicus and predecessor of Agrippina as
wife of the Emperor. In the middle 40'$ of that century he assembled and published a collection of prescriptions that was destined to become famous, andamong them was a formula, or hiera, that he had discovered among the papersof a deceased colleague, Paccius Antiochus. One of its ingredients was colocynth,a novel drug that thereupon quickly became the rage in the upper crust of Rome,a few years before the events that we are discussing. In the desperate extremity of that turbulent night of October 12, A.D. 54, when the Greek physician
Xenophon was called in consultation and permitted himself to become a particeps criminis, it was natural for him to come to the rescue of Locusta and Agrippina by dispatching Claudius with an overdose of colocynth, administered bymouth or clyster or both. This explains the name that Seneca gave to his satire.
Claudius's last words, as attributed to him by Seneca, were Vce me! puto, concacavi me, which would be apt for either colocynth or the deadly amanita.1
If then our reading of the texts is right, Claudius was done in with a one-two
knock-out, first a dose of the deadly amanita, and then a dose of colocynth. As
a pun on 'apotheosis', the name of Seneca's satire Apocolocyntosis at last becomesclothed with wit: the deification of an emperor is reduced to a repulsive scatological metamorphosis. When, later, Agrippina did away with Marcus Junius
Silanus (as Dio Cassius tells us), it was the deadly amanita that she used, and not
colocynth; for colocynth proclaims its presence by its bitterness, and an intended
victim would spew it out forthwith.
At noon on October 13 the gates of the imperial palace in Rome swung open,
and Nero, then a youth of 17, emerged and presented himself as the new emperor
to the army detachment that was on guard there. The Emperor Claudius wasdead, or in extremis. There could have been no reason, only danger, in prolonging
the interval between the death of the old emperor and the assumption of authority by the new.
And so we bring our review of Claudius's death to an end. The three ancienthistorians who tell us the story were not clinicians. Their accounts, differing
sharply in the unessential details, give us a surprisingly clear and consistent overallclinical picture. This is circumstantial evidence of virtually conclusive weightthat they were telling the truth. They could not severally have invented a combination of symptoms, and a sequence of events, that two thousand years later
would speak for themselves.
i. For information concerning the early use of colocynth in Rome, the best source is Wilhelm Schonack's
scholarly study Die Rezeptsammlung des Scribonius Largus, published in Jena in 1912.
62

MUSHROOMS FOR MURDERERS

Our sources say that a curtain of secrecy had shrouded the palace during theillness of Claudius. It is tempting to try to reconstruct the scenes in the imperial
palace before and during the crime. The plot had been laid earlier in whispered
conversations between Agrippina and Locusta in some safe spot to which Locusta had been furtively summoned. How stirred Locusta must have been by
her great assignment: the world offered none bigger for a person in her line ofwork. Locusta, if she possessed imagination as well as art, may well have leapedwith excitement at the thought that this deed, artfully accomplished, would bringher immortality; and indeed it has done so. But during that fateful night thetension must have been unbearable. Had their victim foiled their efforts prematurely from drunkenness, by vomiting before the poisonous amanita had done
its damage? Might he survive and resume the exercise of his imperial functions?
Was Locusta vexed, her professional pride hurt, when Xenophon was called in,or was she relieved ? With what anxious eyes Locusta and Agrippina must havesearched each other's ill-lighted faces as the hours crept on! But in any case,with his enemies in command at his bedside, Claudius stood no chance.
The triumph of Agrippina and her fellow conspirators bestowed on them all
power. They may well have gloated in their success, and were so situated thatthey could talk with a large measure of impunity. In the writings of Seneca andthe three historians, one seems to hear echoes of veiled boasting, as though Locusta and Agrippina were dying to tell just how they had contrived their ends.
Their words were veiled, in homage to virtue, but thinly, and lend themselves
to understanding by the initiated, if only across a chasm of nineteen centuries.

V
THE RIDDLE OF THE TOADSTOOLAND OTHER SECRETS MUSHROOMIC[Fungi] quod comesti frequenter oppilant vias spirituum
animalium in capite, et inducunt insaniam.
ALBERTUS MAGNUS, De vegetabilibus.

is a strange term, and doubly strange because no one in our wordTconscious times
seems to have paused to look at it. Toads do not sit on wild
OADSTOOL

fungi, nor under nor around them; neither do they eat them. Indeed toads andfrogs have no direct physical or biological link with toadstools. Our word, withroots deep in our folkways, is not, in any way obvious to us, a distillate ofman's observation of nature. The Oxford Dictionary says it is a 'fanciful' name,and thus sidesteps a riddle. Not infrequently commercial artists and fanciful
illustrators of children's books represent toads with toadstools, and occasionallyeven photographers contrive by trickery1 to juxtapose the two. In every such
instance they draw their inspiration from the word, not from nature.
Why 'toadstool'; This question sank its spurs in us some years ago andpricked us onwards, until soon we found ourselves launched on a pilgrimage
to far-off places and remote times, to the frontiers of men's knowledge andbeyond, where we sought to discern vistas behind the beginnings of recorded
history. Through the worn faces of familiar words we re-discovered things
that civilized men had forgotten. We may have found, in the end, successive
answers to our toadstool riddle, layer beneath layer, as well as answers to anumber of other fungal mysteries that reared their challenging heads along ourpath. The measure of our success will be the cogency of certain problems oflarger scope that seem to emerge from our argument, problems that we gladly
bequeath to others.
I. Thus on Nov. 8, 1930, The Times published a sequence of six photographs showing a toad as it approached aboletus, clambered up on the cap, and finally sat there. Dr. John Ramsbottom reprinted four of these in his
Mushrooms & Toadstools, Collins, London, 1953, facing p. 287. The photographer, Neville Kingston, died in the
I93o's. The Times kindly supplied us with his original series of seven photographs, and by internal evidence it
is clear that they do not record a spontaneous happening in nature. Innocent and playful in intent, and delightful
as one more example of man's undying loyalty to cherished error, these photographs must be docketed as nature
fakes. Toads when slightly chilled become lethargic and lend themselves to posing, a secret undoubtedly
known to Kingston.

65

1
THE VENOMOUS TOAD
He ordenit hir to hing, roist, and drop ane taid, andto lay the droppis of the taid in his hienes [=Highness']way, for his hienes distructioune.
Testimony in trial of Barbara Napier, May 8, 1591.

The sinister mark of the toad is not confined to the English fungal vocabulary.
You will find it in Norwegian and Danish, though not in Swedish; in Low
German, Dutch, and Frisian; in Breton, Welsh, and Irish. The romance languages know it not, except for traces in French. Nor does it survive in standard
High German, though it lingers on in High German dialects. Thus the citadelof the 'toadstool' is in the ring of peoples who dwell around the shores of theNorth Sea, a gigantic and evil Fairy Ring, as it were, embracing fringes of the
Teutonic peoples and the surviving Celts, along with the French. (The Bretons,
let it be remembered, emigrated from Britain to their present home acrossthe Channel in the fifth and sixth centuries after Christ, and are thus remoteheirs, folkwise, of old Britain.)
Not all of these peoples use the figure of the toad's stool. The Norwegians
and Danes speak of the toad's hat; the Low Germans, of the frog's stool; theDutch say toad's stool; and the Frisians refer to an old fungus as a toad's hide.
The Irish term is the frog's pouch; the Welsh, toad's cheese; the Bretons,
toad's cap, but by the addition of a single initial sibilant, their term becomestoad's stool, and this is a recognized variant in their language. Here are thewords in these tongues: in Norwegian and Danish, paddehat; in Low German,
poggenstohl; in Dutch, paddestoel; in Frisian, poddehud; in Irish, bolg losgainn, withbolg meaning pouch; in Welsh, caws llyffant, with caws meaning cheese; inBreton, kabell tousec, and also skabell tousec. The Pennsylvania Dutch speak a
dialect of High German that comes down from the language of the Palatinate in
the i8th century, and in Pennsylvania Dutch we find both toad's stool andtoad's foot: grottestuhl andgrottefuss. We know that toad's bread,pain de crapault,
was used for wild fungi in i6th century France, and this same expression has
been reported in modern times in the Calvados region of Normandy. The
amanita muscaria, with its red cap flecked by warts, is called crapaudin in someparts of France and this word in the form grapaoudin has been reported as far
south as the Herault, on the Mediterranean.1
I. Our source for the French mushroom vocabulary is Flare Populaire ou Histoire Naturelle des Plantes dans leursRapports avec la Linguistiaue et le Folklore, by Eugene Rolland, Paris, 1914; vol. XI, pp. 129 ff.

66

THE VENOMOUS TOAD

All these words, in varying degrees, exhale a bad odor. They designate wild
fungi that the speaker considers, rightly or wrongly, inedible and dangerous.
The English toadstool, freighted with evil, is typical of the class. In the dialects of England there are numerous variants, and these are interesting because
they echo the figures of speech that are current in our list of foreign words.
Thus we find toadcheese or taddecheese, toad's bread, toad's cap or toadskep,
and toad's meat. For the toad itself there is an ancient variant, pad or paddock,which gives us paddock-stool and puddock-stool. This 'pad' is the same word
for toad that the Dutch and Frisians, the Norwegians and Danes, use. Thisis the witches' word in the opening scene of Macbeth:
Padock calls anon: faire is foule, and foule is faire,
Hover through the fogge and filthie ayre.

Here in our argument we interrupt its course for a necessary diversion.
Today civilized men have a kindly feeling for the toad. Lewis Carroll and
Kenneth Grahame have planted the seeds of their benign influence in the mindsof successive generations of well brought up English-speaking children. The
Victorians were inclined to foster sympathy for the whole animal world.
(Was this because the industrial revolution released increasing numbers of men
from slavery to the soil, from intimate conflict with cantankerous nature?)
As for the toad, there has been an additional influence: men of science haveundertaken to show that it is the farmer's friend.
Far different was the repute of the toad in times past. There was no othermember of the animal kingdom that inspired such revulsion and fear. Chaucer
spoke of the 'foule tode', and Spenser of the loathly and venomous toad. 'A
pad in the straw' was what our ancestors said when they meant 'a nigger inthe woodpile'. (Now that this last phrase is banned in polite society and perhaps
vanishing, why not revive the earlier expression?) Shakespere reveled in thetoad as a potent term of abuse. In Richard III the toad is a recurring theme,
as is fitting for a play about a king described as:That bottel'd Spider, that foule bunch-back'd Toad.

Among all of Shakespere's many references to the toad, there is not one that isneutral, much less friendly. Edgar in King Lear denounces Edmund as 'a most
toad-spotted traitor'; and the witches in Macbeth, when they concoct their
hellish brew, give to the toad pride of place in the cauldron:Toad, that under cold stone Days
and nights hast thirty-one
67CHAPTER FIVE
Swelter'd venom sleeping got, Boilthou first i' the charmed pot.

Not only were toads venomous: to the medieval mind they were also a symbolof lechery, as were warts and moles, with which toads were supposed to becovered. We shall return to this matter of lechery; for the present we only
direct the reader's attention to the visual use of the toad in this sense by Hieronymus Bosch, in his Seven Deadly Sins, of which we reproduce the pertinentdetail in Plate xm.
The evil repute of the toad is not yet dead. There are English circles where'Toad!' flung in anger would be a fighting insult now. The derivative 'toady'brings to mind the sycophantic and hypocritical squat of the creature, with
its upturned watchful eyes. The bad name of the toad survives among untutored countryfolk in England and the United States, where farmers cling to
the belief that the spittle of toads is poisonous, and that warts will grow on
the skin where a toad has touched. French peasants down to recent times, andperhaps even now, put toads to death by methods shocking for their cruelty,
methods that reveal an ingenuity in torture ordinarily reserved by man for
his fellow-men.1 The venom-spitting toad in all his horrible lineaments waspainted for us by Hieronymus Bosch in a detail of his Judgment Day. Summonedfrom his grave, a nude Cardinal (his worldly office proclaimed by his hat)is floating away to everlasting damnation as a squatting toad directs a shaft ofhis deadly saliva at the passing corpse.
Toads were closely linked with witchcraft. In France all witches harboredtoads as their familiars, and this was common in England and Scotland too.
In 1591, trials held in North Berwick elicited from the members of certain
witches' covens clear testimony that they had tried to murder King James VI
of Scotland, and that one of their plans had been to drop toad's venom on
his head or body, and to smear his small clothes with it.2 Presumably the poison
was to invade the person of the king through abrasions of the skin, which inthose days of absent hygiene and parasitic insects were taken for granted. Fromthe contemporary records of this case we learn that 'to drop a toad' was theidiom used at that time for the milking of a toad's venom - a meaning of theverb 'to drop' that the Oxford Dictionary fails to record - and in one of the
1. See Le Folklore de France, by Paul Sebillot, vol. in, La Faune et la Flore, Paris, 1906; pp. 280 ff.
2. See The Witch-cult in Western Europe, by Margaret Alice Murray, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1921, p. 53; alsoLife in Shakespeare's England, an anthology compiled by John Dover Wilson, published in 1911 by the Cambridge University Press and reprinted repeatedly since then. For additional references to toad poisoning in
England, see Miss Murray's latest work, The Divine King in England, 1954, Faber & Faber, London, p. 40;
also p. 61.

68

THE VENOMOUS TOAD

accounts of the trial we even learn the details of the method used. Here is aparaphrase of the testimony of Agnis Tompson, a defendant, as published in
Newes from Scotland Declaring the Damnable Lif and death of Dr. Fian, printed in
London for William Wright in 1591:
She confessed that she took a blacke Toade, and did hang the same up by the heeles,
three dales, and collected and gathered the venome as it dropped and fell from it in an
Oister shell, and kept the same venome close couered, untill she should obtaine any parteor peece of foule [soiled] linnen cloth, that had appertained to the Kings Maiestie, as shirt,
handkercher, napkin or any other thing which she practised to obtaine by meanes of one
John Kers, who being attendant in his Maiesties Chamber, desired him for olde acquaintance betweene them, to helpe her to one or a peece of such a cloth as is aforesaide, whichthing the said John Kers denyed to helpe her too, saying he could not help her too it.
And the said Agnis Tompson by her depositions since her apprehension saith, that if she
had obtained any one peece of linnen cloth which the King had worne and fouled, she had
bewitched him to death, and put him to such extraordinary paines, as if he had beene lying
upon sharp thornes and endes of Needles.

It comes as a shock to modern man to learn that his ancestors considered thecommon toad venomous as the adder. It comes as a double shock to him when
he learns that these ancestors were probably right, and that on this subject
they were better informed than he is. The toad has no fangs and cannot bite.
But on his coarse skin are scattered numerous glands that look like warts orpustules; and when the creature is frightened or in pain, these glands exude
a milky fluid, which is powerfully toxic. Hidden inside the skin, invisible tothe naked eye, is another set of glands, which lubricate the skin with a slimy
mucoid secretion, easily perceived by the human hand but perhaps not poisonous. The witches who kept toads as their familiars knew the wicked propertiesof the toad's milky secretion, and it is a fair surmise that the singular tortures
reserved for toads by some countryfolk were originally devised to milk thetoads of their deadly drops. The venom of the toad cannot penetrate healthy
human skin, but takes hold of any mucous membrane, and if swallowed orabsorbed through an abrasion of the skin, might well be lethal. Among those
who work with toads, it is common knowledge that their secretions, if accidentally brought into contact with the eyelid, cause an acute burning irritation.
(The inflamed swelling of the sebaceous gland at the margin of the eyelid,
commonly known in English as a stye, is called in vulgar Dutch paddescheet,'toad's excrement', even when no toad is involved.)
In the 15th century Chronicle of St. Albans there is an account of the deathof King John of England that possesses extraordinary interest both for its own
sake and for the role played in it by a toad. History relates that the King in
69

CHAPTER FIVE

the year 1216 was making his way north with his retinue, dogged by his enemies
and ill. In crossing the Wash he lost much of his baggage train, to his greatsorrow, and after lying at the Cistercian monastery at Swineshead, he progressedsome distance beyond to the castle at Newark-on-Trent, where he died on
October 19, on "the morrow after St. Luke's Day". The Chronicle of St. Albans
says that his death was precipitated by a draught of poisoned ale served tohim at Swineshead. Though perhaps the scribe was only giving currency to amalicious canard, this scarcely affects the interest of his narrative for us, because
he was writing what he and his contemporary readers were ready to accept,
and the role in the affair that he assigns to a toad conformed to common beliefs
and probably to esoteric knowledge. The provocation that the scribe reports
for the alleged regicide is curious. The King swore a great oath, says the chronicler, that if he was spared another six months, the loaf of bread then worth
a ha'penny would be selling at 20 shillings! A modern reader may be excused
if this passage conjures up for him the specter of runaway inflation, but for thechronicler and his public it meant famine and panic in the market place. Why
should King John have foreseen famine and panic as the inevitable sequel to his
own survival > And why should the chronicler, as well as the monk of Swineshead, have considered this sequence so obvious that it called for no explanation? Miss Margaret Murray in The Divine King in England uncovers the strange
beliefs that seem to have underlain the King's great oath and justified the monk's
deed in his own eyes and his superior's, a vignette of medieval behavior bafflingfor us but clear and simple then.
Here, then, is the story of King John's death as put down about the year
1483, more than 250 years after the event, by the chronicler of St. Albans: 1
The Kyng came by the Abbey of Swynesheade, and there hee abode two dayes; And as
he sate at mete, he axed a Monke of the house, How moche that loof was worth that wassette before hym uppon the table > And the Monke said, That the loof was worth but anhalf-penny. O said the Kinge tho [then], Here is grete chepe of brede; Now sayd he tho,And [=if] I may lyve ony while, such a loof will be worth xx. shillinges or half a year begone. And so whan hee sayd this worde, moche hee thought, and often hee sighed, andtoke and etc of the brede, and sayd; By God, the worde that I have spoken, it shall be
soth. The Monke that stode before the Kynge was for this worde full sory in his herte,
and thought rather hee would hymselfe suffre deth, and thought yf he might ordeyne
therefore some manere remedye. And anone the Monke wente unto his Abbot and was
shriven of him, and tolde the Abbot all that the Kynge had sayd; And prayed his Abbot
for to assoyle [absolve] him, for he would yeve the Kynge such a drynke, that all Englonde
I. The extract from the Chronicle is copied from the History of King John, by William Prynne, London, 1670,
pp. 36-7.
70

PLATE xn. Hieronymus Bosch. The Last Judgment. Detail: Spitting toad.

Munich, Bayerische Staatsgemaldesammlungen.

THE VENOMOUS TOAD
sholde be glad thereof and joyfull. The[n] yede [went] the Monke into a gardeyne, andfounde a grete Tode therein, and toke her up and put her in a Cuppe, and prycked theTode thorugh with a broche many tymes, tyll that the venym came out of every syde in
the Cuppe, And tho toke the Cuppe and filled it with good ale, and brought it before
the Kynge, knelynge sayenge; Sir, sayd hee, Wassayll, for never the dayes of all your lyfe
dronke ye of so good a Cuppe. Begyn Monke, sayd the Kynge: and the Monke dranke agrete draught, and toke the Kynge the Cuppe, and the Kynge dranke also a grete draught,
and set downe the Cuppe. The Monke anone ryght wente in to farmerye [infirmary] andthere dyed anone, on whoos soule God have mercy, Amen. And fyve Monkes synge forhis soul specially, and shall whyle that the Abbaye standeth. The Kynge rose up anone
full evyll at ease, and commaunded to remove the table, and axed after the Monke; andmen tolde him that hee was deed, for his wombe [belly] was broken in sundre. Whan the
Kynge herde this, he commaunded for to trusse, but it was for nought, for his belly
began to swelle for the drynke that he had dronke, and within two dayes hee deyed, on
the morowe after saynt Lukis daye.

That 'great toad' found in the garden at Swineshead could only have been thecommon toad of western Europe, bufo vulgaris. This is the same toad that
George Ripley, a writer on alchemy, saw in a vision late in the I5th century,
and commemorated in curious verse. His short poem, which we reproduce as
it first appeared in print, eloquently expresses medieval man's repugnance forthe toad, and reveals how intimate Ripley and his circle must have been withthe toad's milky exudate and its fearsome virtue.
Our quotations concerning the toad go back to the Middle Ages and theRenaissance, but the ideas therein expressed lived on until recent times. One
William Northcote, for many years a surgeon in His Majesty's Navy, publishedin London in 1770 a serious medical work, The Marine Practice of Physic andSurgery, a reference book for use on ships. In it there is a chapter on poisons,and coming to the toad, Mr. Northcote has surprising things to say:
The toad is full of venom, and the very centre and repository of terrestrial poisons...
they discharge their venom on herbs (particularly strawberries) by pissing, spitting, andvomiting; this is not only pernicious by getting into the body, but by being sprinkled on
the skin, unless washed off immediately with urine and salt.
When a person is infected, his skin turns yellow, his body swells universally, his lips
and tongue grow black, and a stammering supervenes; he is seized with an asthmatic
shortness of breath, vomiting, cold sweats, convulsions, fainting, and at length withdeath, if not timely remedied, [p. 421]

Mr. Northcote is guilty of patent absurdities, but the fact remains that we cannot deny for sure his clinical description of the victims of toad poisoning, formodern medical records offer us no histories of such cases. This seasoned practitioner of the 18th century was closer than we, chronologically, to the era when71

CHAPTER FIVE

Fig. 2.

From Theatrum chemicum Britannicum, by Elias Ashmole, London, 1652.

THE VENOMOUS TOAD

men knew the properties of the toad's venom, and his account of the symptoms
is the only one emanating from a medical pen known to us. It stands thus
uncorroborated and unchallenged, a wisp of dubious expert testimony in what
would otherwise be a scientific vacuum.1
1 here exists an additional body of evidence of a different order testifying
to the toad's sinister grip on the popular imagination in times gone by. Mentake refuge in euphemisms when they talk about things that move them profoundly. People 'pass away' rather than 'die', and Satan becomes the 'EvilOne'. Abhorred creatures are called out of their names, or else their names
are subjected to irregular distortions in sound.
In the languages of Europe few creatures can compete with the toad forevasive nomenclature. The measure of this tabu lies in the number of etymologically unrelated words for it, not to speak of the variety of dialectical variants
for each word. Here are a few of the important ones: in Latin bufo, and in Italian,rospo and botta; in Spanish, sapo and escuerzo; in French, crapaud and hot; inGerman, Krote; in Russian, zhaba; around the North Sea, padde; and in English,'toad'. An abundance of diverse names like this makes difficulties for the philologist, who has more to show for his efforts when he goes coursing through the
Indo-European languages after words like 'wolf and 'fox', words that turn up in
more or less regular mutations in various languages. Some of the words for'toad' defeat the philologists completely. Take 'toad' itself. It exists in several
variations in English, of which 'tad', as in 'tadpole', is the most important.
It is genetically related to the three-syllabled variants in Anglo-Saxon, tadie
and tadije. There the trail is lost: no remoter ancestry is known for the word,
and it has no kin in other tongues.
We believe that all, or almost all, of the words for 'toad' in Europe can be
explained, if we look for the figures of speech that are latent in them by focusing our attention on the creature itself. Instead of attacking the 'toad' problem
by frontal assault, let us approach by a postern gate, viz., through the Celtic
languages. We know the words for 'toad' in five Celtic languages, and, as
befits a creature veiled by tabu, the five words appear to be unrelated to eachother. From ancient Gaul craxantus2 survives in a single citation. In Cornish the
1. In the second century before Christ an Ionian Greek, Nikander of Colophon, composed a metrical essay
entitled Alexiphartnaca on poisons and their antidotes, and in lines 567-594 he discusses toad poisoning. His
observations are obscure, perhaps deliberately so, but in tone they are not far removed from Mr. Northcote's.
As we go to press we learn that Howard F. Fabing, M. D., of Cincinnati, has been giving intravenous injections of bufotenine, the toxic agent secreted by the epidermal glands of the toad, to volunteers in the Ohio
State Penitentiary.
2. See Franzosisches Etymologisches Worterbuch, by Walther von Wartburg.

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CHAPTER FIVE

toad was croinoc or cronec, and this meant 'the skin' or 'the hide', from croin,meaning skin. The Cornishman referred to the toad by its skin, covered as it
is with pustules, and notorious for the way the creature blows itself up withair like a sac when making its eerie call. In Welsh the toad is the llyffant; thisappears to mean 'the slimy one,' with obvious reference to the slippery secretionsof the skin. The common toad does not exist in Ireland, and the only toadreported there is the bufo calamita, known in English as the natterjack. Its
range in Ireland is so limited that almost no natives have ever seen a toad:the natterjack has been found in historic times only over an area of some twenty
square miles, around Castlemaine Harbor at the head of Dingle Bay in Kerry.
The expression for 'toad' in Irish is 'the poisonous frog' - losgann nimhe; andsince the word for frog - losgann - means 'the burning one', we arrive ultimately
at 'the poisonous burning one' - a doubled reference to the toxic, stinging
secretion of the pustules.
Now we turn to the Breton language, and here perhaps we discover aloose end to Ariadne's thread, a possible clue to our problem. The word fortoad in Breton is tousec. It comes from the Latin toxicum, and therefore means'the poisonous one'. On an earlier page we said that the standard word for'toadstool' in Breton is kabell tousec, wherein kabell (from the Low Latin cappa
and capello] means 'cap'. When the early Bretons spoke of the toadstool as
the kabell tousec, the term meant to them 'the poison cap', as well as the toad's
cap; and the variant skabell tousec could have meant 'the poison stool' as wellas the toad's stool.1
In Britain, the island that the Bretons had left behind, are we surprised to
discover that the Anglo-Saxon word tosca meant toad ? It is, we submit, identicalto the Breton word, offspring of toxicum, and another example of'the poisonous
one'. We have mentioned the English name for the bufo calami ta - the natterjack. We believe that the root of this word is to be found in the AngloSaxon word for poison -ator; a word that as 'etter' survived in English for
centuries, and still circulates in dialect, to designate the venom of a reptile, andthe corrupt matter that oozes from a suppurating ulcer or abscess. An 'attercop'
is an old word for a (supposedly poisonous) spider. In modern Dutch etter
still means pus. If we are right, what we now call 'a natterjack' was once 'an atterjack', the shuttling V being a well known linguistic quirk. The jack' issimply the same element that we find in the jumping-jack'. The 'atterjack'is then a 'poison jack', and an Anglo-Saxon rendering of the Latinism tosca.
Let us pause on tosca, that long forgotten word for the toad. It had a doublet
I. See Lexique Etymologique du Breton Modcrne, by Victor Henry, Rermes, 1900; p. 268.

74

THE VENOMOUS TOAD

in Anglo-Saxon, taxe, which survives in a single citation. The alternation in thevowels reminds us of 'toad' and 'tad', and also of a parallel in Latin: toxicum
meaning 'poison' and taxus, 'yew'. In antiquity the yew was notorious as apoisonous tree, and the adjective taxicus was popularly associated with toxicum.
In Greek TO ^ OV meant 'bow' and 'arrow' and 'bow-and-arrows'. Philologists
are inclined to deny a link between the Greek and the Latin words, and evenbetween the Latin words themselves, but concede that the problem is unclear.
Until we know more about the role of bows and poisoned arrows in earlymagic and myth, it is well to suspend judgment. Bows were made of yew,
and arrow-heads were smeared with poison, perhaps from yew. Robert Graves
has pointed out1 that arrow-heads were sometimes knapped with double tangs
to resemble the yew. The making of such arrow-heads demanded far morepatience and skill than the simple willow-leaf and elder-leaf points, and would
be less effective in hunting or fighting. They must have been ceremonial infunction and were undoubtedly bathed in mana. As we look back in recorded
history, our 'toad' or 'tad' emerges from the Anglo-Saxon world as the venomous helpmeet of sorcerers. The very name of the creature, tousec or tosca
or taxe, is redolent with poison, potent with mana. Down through the Middle
Ages and into modern times the toad was still freighted with this primitive
cargo of evil. Tosca and taxe may have contributed to the shaping of our words'toad' and 'tad'. As we said before, the etymology of 'toad' is unknown. We
must consider the possibility that, by steps that may forever remain obscure,
the Anglo-Saxon words come down to us in 'toad' and 'tad' by lineal descent.
The irregular mutation of -sc- and -x- into 'd' could have been a euphemistic
substitution.2
If 'toad' descends etymologically to us from toxicum, then in English as in the
Breton tongue a 'toadstool' in its ultimate meaning is a 'poison stool', and theidea of poison, rather than the toad, may have been dominant in the minds ofthose who first applied this term to the wild fungi in the Anglo-Saxon world.
In any case, whatever the etymology, the cultural soil in which 'toad' had its
beginnings explains that aura of abhorrence which bathes the word to this
1. See his White Goddess, a Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth, Creative Age Press, New York, 1948, footnote
on p. 320; also p. 38.
2. If Latin -x- became -s- in tosca, then the Anglo-Saxon word results from the omission of the middle syllable,
toxicum becoming tos'ca. But if -x- by phonetic transposition became -sc- we arrive directly at tosca by the erosion of the last syllable. If taxe or a hypothetical toxe became by euphemistic mutation tadse or todse, the evolu
tion into 'toad' or 'tad' is easy, the sibilant being lost by a popular back-formation of an erroneous singular; cf.
'toad's stool' which becomes 'toad-stool'; also 'pea', 'asset', 'shay', 'sherry', 'cherry', etc., all of which have lostthe sibilant with which they originally ended. The mutation of 'c' into 't' is not altogether conjectural. In the
Anglo-Saxon dictionary of Joseph Bosworth and T. Northcote Toller, under tosca, we find a quotation in which
the plural of tosca appears with 't', - tostan.

75

CHAPTER FIVE

day in the English language. We discover why the Oxford Dictionary fails tosatisfy us when it dismisses the problem of the toadstool by calling it a 'fanciful'term. We realize why the headline in The Times, EDIBLE TOADSTOOLS, shocks us
as a contradiction in terms.
We have already observed that the Irish word for 'frog' is the 'burning one'.
Here again the reference is to the secretion of the epidermal glands of theamphibian, the secretion that stings when it comes into touch with a mucous
membrane. This Irish word has its parallels in certain of the Germanic languages.
In Old High German the verb 'to burn' was zusken, and by regular mutationof sounds this explains the Danish word for the toad, tudse, in which today
the letter d is silent. In Swedish the corresponding word is tossa, with dialectical variants tosk and tusk; and there also survives a citation from 1652 in theform tadza, pronounced perhaps as 'totsa' would be in English. In all thesewords the toad is called the 'burning one', as the frog is in Irish. These words
find their semantic parallel in the vulgar Dutch term paddescheet, the stye withits burning sting, to which we called attention earlier. In Greek the word
for toad, eppOvo?, is usually explained as meaning 'the brown one', but brownis the burnt color, and Professor Andre Martinet has suggested that cpptivoc;
may refer to burning rather than to the color.
We know that the secretion of toads was used by the practitioners of witchcraft.
We know that in ancient Rome the lethal properties of the wild fungus known
as the deadly amanita or destroying angel or death cup were familiar to thepractitioners of venomy, as we choose to call the art of murder by poison. But
no positive evidence survives, so far as we know, to show that in the practiceof witchcraft the secrets of the fungi were utilized; no evidence, that is, beyond'toadstool' itself, this humble folkword with its secret message. Does the absenceof positive evidence mean that the toadstool was not used in the practices of the
Old Religion, or that the secret was successfully kept? For the present we leave
the answer to the reader.

76

2

BASQUES AND SLOVAKSIn research it is often the small remainder of unexplained evidence that points
the road to further discoveries, and even perhaps to an abrupt step-up in thescope and thrust of the inquirer's purpose. We believe that we may have discovered for the first time the explanation for the 'toadstool', the secret lying in theoriginal but now forgotten sense of'poison-stool'. But our answer to this question
leaves certain tantalizing facts unreconciled. Why do the Danes for 'toadstool'
say paddehat, rather than tudsehatt 1 Of their two words for 'toad', why dothey link with the wild fungi the one that does not refer to the poisonous
secretion? In English too we find paddock-stool. In Dutch there exists noname for the toad, so far as we know, that means 'the poisonous one'; yet
the Dutch also say paddestoel.
In short, while we have perhaps explained the word 'toadstool', we have notanswered the whole of our question, for we find toads linked with fungi where
poison is not involved. We must ask ourselves whether there was not a deeper
and broader association between toads and mushrooms, whether the two ordersof living things did not possess in common some other attribute that originallystruck the primitive fancy and led to verbal kinship. If this be so, then thewords based on the common attribute of poison may have been a late development, restricted in area, superimposed on an older and broader verbal
stratum, a verbal variation on an exceedingly ancient theme. The use oftoxicum
in the context of toads and fungi may have been merely a Latinism devisedby practitioners of an esoteric witchcraft cult around the North Sea basinin the early centuries of the Christian era.
It turns out, indeed, when we look further afield, that the toad-fungus link
is not confined to the North Sea countries. In two areas of the Continent,
far removed from each other in every sense, the same semantic tie occurs.
First, there is the Basque country of Spain (not France), where in the Basquelanguage several names for wild mushrooms involve the Basque word for
toad, which is zapo or apo or (in certain combinations) amo.2 The amanita
muscaria, which in parts of France is sometimes called crapaudin, carries a Basquename in parts of the Biscay and Guipuzcoa country that is an exact semantic
equivalent of the French word: viz., amoroto. In a contiguous area apontto
1. Tudsehat, reported in the Danish lexicons, appears to be obsolete and to have been always rare. But a reliable
informant tells us that in the Low German dialect of Holstein tutzenstol is in current usage.
2. The mutation of p into m is well recognized in Basque; e. g., Pentecost becomes Mendekoste.

77CHAPTER FIVE
is the name bestowed on a certain distrusted wild fungus, and this word also
serves thereabouts as a term of personal abuse. The root is apo, 'toad', in boththese words. Two excellent species of wild mushrooms, marasmius oreades
and marasmius urens, are rejected by the Basques of the same provinces, whocall them 'viper-fungus' and 'toad-fungus' - suge-perretxiko and zapo-perretxiko.
(Note this our first encounter with the viper theme.) Except in the Basquecountry, we have found no trace of the toad figure in the fungal vocabularyof Spain, but we possess one straw of evidence indicating that formerly it wasin use. Dr. Stephan F. Borhegyi, the Hungarian archeologist working in Guatemala, on a visit to the village ofJocotan in the Department of Chiquimula,discovered that the Spanish-speaking people in that community used neither
hongo nor seta for 'mushroom': their pejorative term for species believed to bepoisonous is sombrilla de sapo, 'toad's parasol'. Remote Jocotan is known tolinguists for the Spanish archaisms that survive there, and one assumes that thesombrilla de sapo is a fossilized survival of an expression current somewhere in
16th century Spain.
Far from the Basque country, in the Ukraine, the natives speak of any wildmushroom that they reject as zhabjachyj hryb - the toad-like mushroom. A
little to the West, in Slovakia near Tatra, a native informant reports to us thatsuch despised fungi are variously called zabaci huby, the toad-fungi; had'adhuby and had'unke huby, both meaning viper-fungi; or salene huby, mad fungi.
We are unable to circumscribe the area in the Slav world where the toad theme
survives in the mushroom vocabulary. It is unknown in Great Russia.
The semantic analogies between the Basque terms and those used in the Ukraine
and Slovakia, combined with the evidence around the North Sea, suggest a
profound substratum of folk associations between fungi and toads in the IndoEuropean world, a substratum that is today everywhere silted over except for
the three outcroppings on the map of Europe1. This inference finds support in afurther surprising fact. Throughout the Slav world the most beloved generalword for the edible mushroom of forest and field is, in its Russian form, grib.
In the Slavic mind there is no association between this happy word and thecreature we call zhaba, the toad. But now turn to the Catalan language.
There we find that the word for toad is gripau. No Catalan connects itwith wild fungi. Yet it seems clear that the etymological root of Catalan
gripau and of Russian grib is identical! That root, surviving virtually unchanged
I. In the Romansch language pawn de pdder, meaning 'monk's bread', is the general term for fungi. Could pdder
be a folk corruption of Dutch padde? If so, the term is identical semantically to the French pain de crapaud.
Padde, coming from Dutch, spread far beyond the confines of Low German, being recorded for Frankfurt andLeipzig as far back as the i6th century.
78

PLATE xiii. Hieronymus Bosch. The Seven Deadly Sins. Detail: Superbia. Madrid, Prado Museum.

BASQUES AND SLOVAKS

from remote times in two widely separated languages in words with wholly
different meanings, carries the sense of gripping, grabbing, seizing, scraping,grubbing, digging. Here is no allusion to poison, no kinship with toxicum.
If 'toad' evolved from toxicum, it is a late and geographically circumscribed
intruder in verbal history, by comparison with the perspectives that we now
contemplate. Only by a kind of linguistic triangulation into the past can wearrive at a reconciliation of Russian grib and Catalan gripau. And we mustdefer this until we have explored certain other matters.
It would be easy to spin an argument that in the early European mind toads
and fungi shared a chthonian existence - toads hibernating in soft earth andthen thrusting themselves to the surface; fungi living out the better part oftheir existence hidden in the soil, but, when circumstances are propitious,
shouldering their way through the soil's crust to the light of day. One could
even postulate a primitive earth-cult with its focus of worship in the earthy
toad and the toadstool. But perhaps we can find a more solid basis for inquiries
than such facile and unsubstantial speculations.

79

3

THE CRIPPLE, THE TOAD, AND THE DEVIL'S
BREAD

In the Middle Ages the French viewed the toad somewhat differently fromthe English, and in this section we shall digress briefly to clarify the distinction.
With the French the emphasis was not directly on the venom but on the creature as an incarnation of Satan.
In Old French there was a curious word, le lot, which according to the dictionaries meant 'toad', and they add that it fell into disuse in the 15th century.
For a time it lingered on in a single phrase: enfle comme une bote, 'blown up like afemale toad', a phrase that beyond the Loire had already become enfle comme un
crapault. (The female is much bigger than the male, and the older simile thus
carried a double superlative.) Bot in the sense of toad survives to this day inmany regional dialects of France and also in the Italian botta. The word in a different meaning still circulates in standard French, in the fossilized term, piedbot, 'club foot'. What links toads to club feet?
The origin of this word is not in doubt. Bot comes down from a Germanicroot meaning 'blunted', 'malformed', 'clumsy'. It exists in an English form:
the pudgy, clumsy hands of babies are 'puds', as are the forefeet of certain
animals. 'Puddifoot' is a family name, originally a nickname for a cripple.
But why should a toad, with its delicately articulated extremities, be called acripple ?
We believe that the history of this little word is a chronicle of successive metaphors, and that its primary role was as a euphemism for Satan. The Foul Fiend in
the Middle Ages possessed certain sharply defined attributes. He wore horns.
He had a tail. For hands he showed claws. He was enveloped in the hairy hide ofan animal. He was sometimes represented as glorying in shameless priapism.
Finally, he was a cripple, one leg ending either in a club foot, or a splayfoot,or a bird's talons, or a paw, or a hoof- a cloven hoof. To this day horns andcloven hoof are familiar metaphors for wickedness in English. There are low
circles in which 'cripple' serves as an epithet of singular viciousness, beyond
anything that mere lameness justifies. Eric Partridge in his Dictionary of Slangcites what he calls a senseless phrase used by English schoolboys to spur theirteammates to greater efforts: " Go it, you cripple!" Sometimes the language ofchildren preserves words and phrases that have disappeared among adults,
and we believe these schoolboys are in hopes that the very Devil will possess
the players on their side. Perhaps our suggestion explains another folk belief
80THE CRIPPLE, THE TOAD, AND THE DEVIL

that is still current, the notion that cripples are capable of more than normal
sexual prowess.
In the first instance, then, le hot meant 'the Cripple', a euphemism for Satan.1
In this sense it survived into the i6th century in the oath, Vrai lot! - 'by thevery Devil'. Elizabethan England borrowed this French oath intact. The Oxford
Dictionary gives as its earliest citation the following, dated 1584: "A bots on
thy motley beard!", and the final citation is from 1719:
Bots on them all Bothgreat and small!

Unaccountably, the Oxford Dictionary says the origin of 'bots' is unknown.
Satan's sinister limp seems to have vanished today from men's memories. It
was vanishing already in Napoleon's time. His coadjutor Talleyrand, notorious
for his loose life and lack of scruples, limped from his earliest years; and thisphysical deformity did not escape his enemies, who dubbed him le (liable boiteux,'the limping devil'. (Boiteux, by the way, is unrelated etymologically to le hot.)In ear her times either the noun or the adjective would have been redundant. An
English caricaturist devised a satirical coat of arms for Bonaparte, supported
on either side by a Devil, on the right by the Corsican Devil with a cloven hoof,
and on the left by Talleyrand, the French Devil, with a reptilian extremity.
Was it not Talleyrand's distinction to be the last major figure with a limp
whose infirmity was held against him as a demonic stigma? We reproduce
this savage print in our Plate No. XX.
In the next stage, le lot underwent a shift from Satan himself to the creatures
into which he was supposed to transform himself- the toad, a certain kind of
nocturnal bird, and bats.2 The nightjar, kin to the American whippoorwill, was
known in parts of France up to recent times as le hot volant, and also as le crapaud
volant, names so layered with metaphors that they could be fairly translated
in any of three ways, the flying Devil, the flying Cripple, and the flying Toad.
Even more interesting is the widespread use of le hot volant for the bat, acreature that was formerly steeped in sinister associations. Its nakedness, its
blackness, its miraculous agility in night flight, its facial features stretched taut
1. A parallel for hot is to be found perhaps in bratze, a colloquial name for the toad reported in Bavaria, which
can mean 'paw', 'claw', 'clumsy foot'. But bratze must be considered in conjunction with certain other words
for the toad: Bavarian braste, suggestive of the lamenting cry of the toad; the Bavarian broz and the Austrianbrotze and braitling, these relating to the swelling of the toad.
2. It is permissible to conjecture that the Germanic etymon of hot, in the sense of a rough lump, attached itself
directly to the toad, rather than through the mediation of Satan. There might even be a kinship with the Dutch
padde, the English 'pad' and 'paddock'. But the application of the word to the nightjar and to bats is proof thatin France in the Middle Ages the idea of Satan was uppermost.

81

CHAPTER FIVE

in a subhuman grimace, the strange profile of its wings with their articulated
struts, its vampirish repute - all these attributes caused it to be feared and loathed
as the very Devil himself, and justified medieval man, in his own eyes, in puttingbats to death, whenever caught, by methods of hideous cruelty, similar to thetreatment accorded to toads.
The English word 'bat' for the flying rodent is first recorded in the year 1523.
Formerly the creature had been a bakke, and philologists have been at a loss to
explain the irregular mutation in its ending. Have they not been looking in
the wrong direction? Surely Tudor England borrowed the new word 'bat'from France, altering the vowel under the attraction of the native Middle English
word. (The same vowel change was to take place shortly afterwards in God's
name: in the profanity of the iyth century 'God' by a euphemistic mincing of
the vowel became 'Gad'.)'Old Boots' is one of the names by which the Devil has been known in English.
Is it not a popular adaptation of 'bots'? When Bella, in Our Mutual Friend,calls her husband a 'Clumsy-Boots',1 is not Dickens, all unawares, recapturing
for us a faint echo of the stumping Cripple's awkward limp, now sugared down
into a loving pet-name? Then there is Puss-in-Boots, le Chat Botte, the fairy
tale that Charles Perrault first put on paper late in the iyth century, in whicha cat displays superhuman acumen when shod in boots. Do we not detect herea punning echo, come down from much earlier, of the demonic Cripple's
prowess ?
Demonic possession connotes mental disturbance, and we think this is why'bat' in English, especially in slang, is linked with lunacy. 'Bats' is a vulgar wordfor delirium tremens, and those who go 'on a bat' indulge in wild behavior,
while the man with 'bats in the belfry' is quite 'batty'. If we are right, all thesewords, full of vigor in the spoken language, stem back to le bat, the limping
Arch Cripple.
Satan today has degenerated into a pallid personification of evil. In the Middle
Ages he was no abstraction, no mere Idea. He was hot flesh and blood. Miss
Margaret A. Murray in her studies of witchcraft has shown that his bestial
attributes - the horns and hoof, the claws, hide, and tail - were those of thecelebrant in the nocturnal rites of the witches' coven, the rites belonging to thereligion of the Horned God, as she calls this divinity, the autochthonous religionof Europe and the Near East which slowly gave ground before Christianityand on which in its expiring throes the triumphant enemy bestowed the condei. Part iv, Chap. xi. For a study of names used for the Devil in English, see Charles P. G. Scott, 'The Devil andhis Imps', Transactions of the American Philological Association, Vol. xxvi (1895), pp. 77-146.
82

THE CRIPPLE, THE TOAD, AND THE DEVIL

scending name of witchcraft. The master of the ceremonies was known to his
followers by many names, such as Robin Goodfellow in England. On the
tongues of his enemies in the Christian Church Militant he was Satan and theFig. 3

ROBIN GOODFELLOW

Devil, the Foul Fiend, the Seducer, he of the Horns and Cloven Hoof, le Bot.
If Miss Murray is right, we are discussing a religion practiced by our ancestors
for thousands of years, which expired just yesterday, and which we can now
study only through the eyes of the Church that was its deadly foe, and throughclues such as we are here discussing. It is not surprising that when Hieronymus
Bosch painted his famous Seven Deadly Sins, the successive scenes swarm withtoads, the incarnation of Satan, as well as other reptiles. We reproduce one ofthese vignettes, representing the sin of Pride or Superbia, with a peacock fittingly
present. Satan in the shape of a great man-like toad holds up a mirror to theworldlings.
In Queen Elizabeth's reign, probably before 1588, there was published inEngland a poem entitled The Mad Pranks and Merry jests of Robin Goodfelloiv,lI. The pamphlet was republished privately by the Percy Society, London, in 1840, using the text of the 1628
edition, with commentary by J. Payne Collier, Esq., F.S.A., on whose information we have relied.
83

CHAPTER FIVE

It seems to have appeared in a long succession of editions, of which the earliest
known to survive bears, we believe, the date 1628. The verses are of little worth,but they and the illustration that accompanies them are valuable as one of the few
spontaneous expressions of the witchcraft cult emanating from within the circle
of sympathizers. Here is the Horned God in proud panoply, le Bot in action.
Here is Robin Goodfellow, Hob-goblin, Will the Wisp, Mad Crisp. No
mushrooms appear in the woodcut that illustrates the 1639 edition, which we
reproduce, but their presence offstage may be inferred, for we are told that
Robin was sired by Oberon, whose fungal attachments we shall shortly pointout. The witches of the coven are dancing in a 'fairy ring', but there is noevidence that these rings, where the grass grows differently, were linked withmushrooms before the iSth century. In the poem we learn that Oberon had
been looking for his offspring high and low:
At last upon a summer's night
King Oberon found him out, Andwith his elves in dancing wise
straight circled him about, The Fairies
danc't and little Tom Thumbon his bag-pipe did play And thus theydanced their fairy roundtill almost break of day.

The artist who carved the woodcut, though crude in his technique, conveyed
his message effectively. In the heavens fly two black birds, and he took sufficient
pains for their silhouettes to be unmistakable. They are none other than nightjars,
sometimes called goatsuckers or night ravens. These are the lots volants of evil
augury, the sinister birds that held our ancestors in dread fascination:. . . the night raven Whichdoth use for to call Men to
Death's haven.

The toad appears as a visual symbol of Satan and the pagan god in French
iconography in the late Middle Ages. One of the most famous episodes in earlyFrench history was the conversion of King Clovis to the Christian faith. His
wife Clotilde was a Christian, but he resisted the attractions of the new creed
until he fought the battle of Tolbiac in the year 496. When the battle was goingagainst him he swore that he would abandon the old religion if the Christian
God would give him victory. The tide turned, and shortly thereafter he wasbaptized by St. Remi at Reims.
In that city there survive a number of tapestries woven in the I5th and early84THE CRIPPLE, THE TOAD, AND THE DEVIL

16th centuries that depict the life of King Clovis. They show him fighting at
Tolbiac as a pagan clothed in a surcoat adorned with toads, under a standard
bearing the heraldic emblem of toads. The creatures are pictured as from above,
their legs spread-eagled. In the next scene, where St. Remi is giving instruction
to the King, the heraldic toads vanish. In the third scene the king is baptized,
while high above the font an escutcheon appears bearing fleurs de lis, as though
to give a stamp of lofty approval to the happy event. Nearby a dove descends
bearing the holy ampulla with the oil for the king's anointing.
Heraldic emblems did not come into use until about A.D. noo, and the tapestries in Reims are therefore an anachronism, a didactic invention of the Middle
Ages.1 Toads never figured in the arms of any French king. But those who designed these tapestries were not guilty of mendacity. It was their purpose toconvey a simple message to the unlettered laity, and how better could the conversion of King Clovis be taught through pictures than by showing the pagan
king waging war under Satan's banner? Here the symbols have come full circle:
in the beginning the Foul Fiend was le Bot - the Cripple - and then this namejumped to the demonic toad, and now the toad, commonly known as le. hot,stands for the club-footed Fiend. Heraldic creatures are mythical at best, and here
we have myth compounding myth, a legend about a symbol that never was.
The belief in Clovis's toads circulated chiefly among lowly and unlettered folk,"par le vulgaire et par le menu peuple", and le hot flourished in the same milieu.
We believe that we are the first to direct attention to the demonic multivalence of 'the Cripple' in medieval France, but the evil emanations of toads arewell known. Dirk Bax, for example, in his recent book on Hieronymus Bosch2
points out their malign meaning for this painter. He reminds his readers of theold belief that witches could transform themselves into toads. He recalls thepapal bull published in the year 1233 by Gregory IX wherein toads were called
the symbols of the Devil and magic. He reports an episode in 1610 when aFrench sorrier discovered a cast in the left eye of a child, the cast taking theshape of a toad's leg, and the child confessed that Satan had imprinted this signum diabolicum with his horn. According to an authority that Dr. Bax has found,
St. Anthony beheld Satan in the shape of a toad with a human head, and if we
1. For a sceptical and charming discussion of these toads, see Claude Fauchet's Origines des Chevaliers, Armoiries,
et Heraux, Paris, 1600, p. 17. See also C. Leber's Collection des Meilleurs Dissertations, Notices et Traites Particuliers
relatifs a I'Histoire de la France, Paris, 1838, vol. xiii, pp. 198 ff. Leber quotes from Scevole de Sainte-Marthe(1572-1650), and the evidence indicates that the popular belief in the heraldic toads of the pagan French kings
goes back at least to the beginning of the I5th century. From the i6th century to the 18th we find in both
English and French sources frequent references to Clovis's heraldic toads. Today they are forgotten by almost
everyone, even historians.
2. Ontcijfering van Jeroen Bosch, The Hague, 1949, p. 33, where the author also gives the sources for his statements.
85

CHAPTER FIVE
accept the assertions of yet another writer, the toads in Hell torment the sinners,
and in turn are food for the damned. To this day, Dr. Bax says, the Flemings
believe that toads spit venom, just as Bosch shows us in The Last Judgment.
From Simin Palay's recent dictionary of the dialects of Gascony and Beam
we learn that in former days the Gascons spoke of a cast in the eye as a 'toad'— crapaud — and considered it a distinctive sign of the witch and sorcerer. Hereis that same signum diabolicum which Dr. Bax reported from a different source.
A cast in the eye is a painless blemish, but it reminds us of the paddescheet of
the Dutch, that stye, inflamed and stinging, which people call the toad's excrement. Suddenly there dawns on us a lively and sinister meaning behind thesefaint folkloric hints linking toads with the human eye. In the days of the Old
Religion in western and northern Europe, the toad gripped the imaginationof our ancestors with a dread fascination such as the serpent has always exercisedin the East and in India to this day. Yes, in cultural history the toad was theEuropean equivalent of the serpent in the East. On its face strange, the folkloric
link between toads and the human eye becomes clear if our surmise be rightthat the venom of the toad was deliberately used by the priests of the ancient
cult to inflame the eyeballs, and thus heighten the awesome spell of the rites.
Here may lie the reason why a genuine stye suggests the toad's secretion, why
the cast in someone's eye was for the beholders the reminder and sign of demonic
power.
By now the reader may fairly ask what our discussion of Satan and le hot
has to do with the problem of the toadstool. In brief, toads figure in both theEnglish and the French fungal vocabulary, but the figure of speech in English
emphasizes poison, whereas in French demonic possession plays the dominantrole. In the former, the 'toadstool' is a blanket malediction on all wild fungi,
all of which are erroneously suspect as 'poison-stools'. In the latter, the crapaudin(like the Basque amoroto] is the name for a particular species, and this species is
not one of the deadly mushrooms. It is the amanita muscaria, the mushroomthat intoxicates and exhilarates, that gives hallucinations. It is the mushroom ofdemonic possession. Bad as are both Satan and poison, there is a difference
between the two. The whole world rejects poison, but Satan always has a goodly
following. Unlike lethal poison, Satan is seductive. There is thus a distinctionin the inner meaning between the toxic 'toadstool' and the demonic crapaudin.
The distinction is in the emphasis: the associations of the two terms overlap
but do not coincide.
If our interpretation of le bot is correct, why do we not find this word figuringin France's fungal vocabulary? The answer is that we do. Eugene Rolland in86

PLATE xiv. Conversion of Clovis. Tapestry in the Musee de Reims showing King Clovisin the battle of Tolbiac, his instruction in Christian doctrineby St. Remi, and his baptism. Woven in 1531.

THE CRIPPLE, THE TOAD, AND THE DEVIL

his Flore Populaire reports bo as a designation for gilled mushrooms in the Haute
Saone, and botet in the Loire. He gives no explanation for these words, whose
inner meaning becomes obvious now for us. It would be well for specialists
in French provincialisms to concentrate on bo and botet, to determine whether
they still survive and where and with what precise fungal application and inwhat contexts. In the center and south of France there are regions where boutarel, boutareu, and boutairoual are general words for 'mushroom'. They also meanin the langue d'oc 'barrel' and 'basket', but we suspect that in the sense of'mushroom' they are a popular corruption of boterel, a diminutive of le botthat is not uncommon in France as a family name. A close scrutiny of theFrench dialects will certainly uncover additional links, until now unnoticed byscholars, between toads and mushrooms. On page 73 we mentioned the Gallic
word for 'toad', craxantus, obsolete these many centuries. Does it perhaps survive in the Gascon name used for the despised and rejected boleti whose flesh
turns blue on exposure to air — craaue-maudit, which would then mean 'thecursed toad'?
Vve conclude, then, that mushrooms and toads were linked together inFrance in former times as part of a cluster of folk beliefs having a demonic
nucleus. The link was strongest, it seems, north of the Loire and faded out as
one approached the Mediterranean. Apparently it stemmed from the Germanicor Celtic cultural strata that antedated Mediterranean influences, strata steepedin the blackest mycophobia. And this leads vis again to Hieronymus Bosch.
One of Bosch's powerful paintings is the Hay Wain, to be seen in the Prado.
It is a large triptych, and in the central panel, almost unremarked hitherto bycommentators, there stands forth a giant boletus. So far as our inquiries havegone, this mushroom was the first significant representation of a fungus1 after theancient fresco of Herculaneum (which we reproduce on Plate LXXVI), a lapse of
I. The Bulletin of the Societe Mycologique de France in 1911 (vol. xxvii, p. 31) announced to the mycologicalworld the discovery of a I3th century fresco representing the temptation of Eve. The mycologists who focused
their attention on this fresco persuaded themselves that the Tree of Good and Evil had been portrayed by
the artist as an amanita muscaria. The fresco, which we visited in the summer of 1952, is in a disaffected chapel
in France, in the Berry, between Ingrandes and Merigny, near the Chateau de Plaincourault. The style is Romanesque, and this fits the date that the edifice bears - 1291. Since the initial announcement there have been
numerous references to the fresco in mycological publications; e. g., The Romance of the Fungus World, by
R. T. and F. W. Rolfe, London, 1925, p. 291; also John Ramsbottom's Mushrooms & Toadstools, pp. 46-7 andillustration facing p. 34; also The Illustrated London News, Nov. 21, 1953. The mycologists would have done
well to consult art historians. The Plaincourault fresco does not represent a mushroom and has no place in a
discussion of ethno-mycology. It is a typical stylized Palestinian tree, of the type familiar to students of Byzantine and Romanesque art. The German art historians have even devised for this oft-repeated motif thetechnical designation of Pilzbaum.
87CHAPTER FIVE
more than fourteen centuries. Let us see if we can arrive at the meaning of thisextraordinary mushroom, so boldly painted, at first glance so enigmatic.
The Hay Wains left-hand panel, of which we reproduce the upper part on
Plate XXXVI, depicts with idyllic beauty the momentous events that took placein Paradise in the Beginning, up through the final scene where the Angel of theLord drives Adam and Eve forth from Eden into the wilderness. The righthand panel depicts Hell. The central panel is occupied chiefly by a huge load ofhay, which is the dominating feature of a procession that enters the scene from
Paradise on the left and disappears on the right heading for Hell. The wagon
is being hauled by a miscellany of grotesque creatures who are personificationsof the Sins. With a dead switch the Devil in the foreground drives on thesemonsters. The withered branch, as always in Bosch's symbolism, signifies cursed
sterility, recalling the withered vine of Christ's homily. Sceptred king andmitred churchmen with their trains follow the hay-wagon, which as it progresses
crushes little men like a juggernaut. Jesus looks down in anguish from Heaven,and a strange group of merry-makers disport themselves a-top the hay.
The hay wain represents pleasure, but it remained for Mr. and Mrs. Nicolas
Galas of New York, in the course of their studies of Bosch, to discover the precise
text that is illustrated, a passage in a book with which Bosch was familiar,
Gregory the Great's Morals on the Book of Job, written after A.D. 600. In Book
32, paragraph 7, Gregory is commenting on the Vulgate text of Job 40: 4(King James Version, Job 40: 9):
As he says by the Prophet, 'Behold, I will shriek over you, as a cart creaketh ladenwith hay' [Amos 2: 13], for since the life of the carnal is hay, as it is written 'All flesh ishay' [Isaiah 40: 6], in that the Lord endures the life of the carnal, he declares that he
carries hay as a cart. And to creak under the weight of the hay is for Him to bear, withmurmuring, the burdens and iniquities of sinners. [Vot. 3, Part 2, p. 514, of the English
translation by J. H. Parker et al., published in Oxford, 1844-1850]

On the right in front of the wagon the great procession is joined by a small
confluent stream of people pouring from a door-way as the hay-wagon approaches their earthly abode. They too are damned souls, as is declared by theirleader's reaching up for carnal hay on the wagon, and by another branch,withered and cursed, that holds up the trapdoor of the habitation out of which
this secondary stream emerges. In the door can be seen the peephole used by theinmates when the door is closed. In our opinion the doorway gives access, not to acave, but to a turf-covered dwelling, of which the roof rises to a clearly identifiable peak, made by the upright post that is presumably the structural support
for the primitive structure. On the left of that peak there lies a fruit, symbol of88

THE CRIPPLE, THE TOAD, AND THE DEVIL

man's First Fall. On the right stands our mushroom. Bosch has painted not amushroom, but a gigantic effigy, a mushroom sculptured in stone or wood. It
represents a boletus, perhaps the boletus satanas, a species that to this day ispopularly associated with Satan in Central Europe. The light color of thepainted mushroom effigy is not significant, for it is the color of the material
in which the mushroom is sculptured. The stem is covered with flecks likegoose-flesh. The cap is disproportionately small, and from it emerges again
the withered branch of the Biblical curse.
We have seen that in i6th century France mushrooms were called pain decrapault, 'toad's bread', a term that has been reported in modern times in Normandy. Contemporaneously, at the time of the Renaissance, the corresponding
name in Flemish and Dutch was duivelsbrood,1 'devil's bread', a term now obsolete in the standard language, but historically documented in the larger Dutch
and Flemish dictionaries. These two expressions, 'toad's bread' and 'devil's bread',superficially using different metaphors, are in essence perfect translations one ofthe other, for as we have seen 'toad' and 'devil' are synonyms. The effigy of amushroom that Bosch the Dutchman painted was the effigy of the Devil's
Bread, and the people who lived at the Sign of the Devil's Bread were breadfor the Devil.
Our mushroom effigy is then a pictographic embodiment of a popular
metaphor, and proclaims the curse that lies on the household dwelling within.
This interpretation receives surprising support from an otherwise inexplicabledetail of the painting. The base of the mushroom shows two flattened surfaces.
Bread always bears the imprint of the vessel in which it is baked, and here we
discover the beveled faces left by the Devil's bread-pan. How obvious this musthave been for Bosch's neighbors in the Low Countries!
There remains a crucial question: why did Bosch introduce into this sermon
in paint the minor tributary stream of Hell-bent sinners, emerging from theHouse of the Devil's Bread? Clearly this rather crowded detail of his exhortationon the carnal sins was not a capricious fancy. He was asserting something, butwhat; Here is our conjecture. The main stream of sinners is recruited from theChristian community, as evidenced by the trappings of the leaders. The tributary stream is fed by folk similarly damned but who have not belonged to
the Christian fold. The Devil is the hot-blooded Devil of the witches' covens.
The people crowding forth from the hovel do not lend themselves to a precise
count but they are about thirteen, the full complement of a witches' coven withi. See Hadrianus Junius' Nomendator, Paris, 1567, p. 144, where the word is spelled duyuehbroot; also the history of
duivelsbrood in Dr. J. A. N. Knuttel's Woordcnboek der Nederlandsche Taal.
89

CHAPTER FIVE
their leader the Devil, whom we may perhaps distinguish in this group. Hereare then the 'fairy folk', who were wont to dwell in the remote and desert
places and who paid no obeisance to Pope or Christ. They were described invivid detail by the Swedish writer Olaus Magnus, whose Historia de Gentibus
Septentrionalibus appeared in 1555 in Rome,1 a generation after Bosch's death.
The fairy folk dwelt in houses walled and roofed with turf, the roof being sup-Fig. 4 PRINCE VISITING FAIRY FOLK, after OLAUS MAGNUS .

ported by a central post. A woodcut in Olaus Magnus shows the Swedish King
Hotherus paying a visit on the fairy people and we reproduce it here, for wesuggest that the house painted by Bosch springs from the same folk beliefs as
the houses in the Magnus woodcut a half century later. Miss Margaret A. Murray may be right that a culturally distinct people, autochthonous, unlettered,and pagan, lived side by side with the Christian world in northern Europe
down into Renaissance times. But whether that people existed or not, thebelief in them existed and was generally accepted, and Bosch presents thosecursed outcasts to us under the Sign of the Devil's Bread, a sinister and mycophobic Sign that marks for us the initial emergence of the mushroom world
into the documentary annals of northern Europe.2
1. The English edition was published in London in 1658 as A Compendious History of the Goths, Swedes andOther Northern Nations. See Book m, Chapters 9 and 10. See also Miss Murray's The God of the Witches, Oxford
University Press, New York, 1952, Chapter n.
2. The mushroom in the Hay Wain is not the only one painted by Bosch. In his ghostly portrayal of The World,
strangely disturbing, on the back of the wings of the Garden of Delights, there are two unmistakable mushrooms,
possibly three, all in the left-hand panel. Elsewhere we find shapes that suggest mushrooms, perhaps intended
by Bosch to do so; e.g., one such shape in the left-hand panel of the Garden of Delights and two in the central
panel, the table in the Cure for Folly, and various 'puckfist' shapes elsewhere. The demonic symbolism of thetoadstool may have played an important and hitherto unsuspected role in Bosch's cosmos.
90

THE CRIPPLE, THE TOAD, AND THE DEVIL

For the medieval world the fairies were sinister beings, at least in orthodox
eyes, and down to recent times the flavor of the old belief could still be detected
in Sussex, where 'fairy rings' long continued to be called 'hag tracks'. By the endof the 16th century the fairies had become the dulcified sprites of modern usage
and this transformation has been attributed to the imposing genius of gentle
Shakespere. But the time has come to take new soundings in the social upheavalsof that troubled i6th century. The Reformation turned society upside down
and inside out, and perhaps layers of the community, formerly inarticulate,where the fairies had always been beloved rose to the top and through Shakespere and others made their voices heard.

Fig. 5FAIRY RING, after OLAUS MAGNUS.

PLATES XV, XVI, XVIIPLATE xv. Hieronynius Bosch. The Hay Wain. Central Panel. Madrid, Prado Museum.

PLATE xvi. Hieronymus Bosch. The Hay Wain. Detail. Madrid, Prado Museum.

PLATE xvn. Hieronymus Bosch. The Hay Wain. Detail: Boletus. Madrid, Prado Museum.

4 THE 'POGGE'
CLUSTERJ ust as we turned to the Breton word tousec for a clue to the inner meaning of'toadstool', so now we invite our readers to look with us at the Low German
word pogge, meaning frog or toad, and poggenstohl, 'frogstool'. Pogge exists inmany a dialectical variant: pogg, pagg, pugg, puck, pook, pauk, poch, and puch.
One of the daring labors of modern philologists has been the reconstructionof the original Indo-European roots that lie behind our modern vocabularies.
With the known vocabularies of some scores of languages, living and dead,to go by, they work back along converging lines of evolution to discover,as closely as the evidence permits, the roots that were current perhaps fourthousand years ago, before the linguistic unity of our ancestors broke up.
These reconstructed roots cannot of course be tested against actual usage, nor
is it remotely possible to document the history of their verbal progeny backto them in a way that would constitute proof by the exacting standards of the
etymological discipline. It is also true that different philologists working fromthe same evidence arrive sometimes at different reconstructions of the root,
but often there is a consensus, and even if we consider the results only tentative
and approximate, these hypothetical Indo-European roots serve, if cautiously
used, to associate together significantly large clusters of words. The philologist of
our time who has devoted his life to this work is Julius Pokorny. In his latest
revision of his IndogermanischesEtymologischesWorterbuch he presents an importantroot that he represents thus: b(e)u-, bh(e)u-. It means to swell up, to puff up,
to fill with wind, to inflate or expand or distend, and in origin it is imitative.1
Among the many words that Pokorny traces to this root is our Low German
pogge, meaning frog or toad, and the semantic link here is clear. Of the aspects
that the frog or toad presents to the human senses, two stand out, one auraland the other visual: the croak, and the astonishing distension of the creature
with air in the act of croaking. A frog or toad suggests the idea of a sac that
lends itself to gaseous distension. From Pokorny's root we derive also ourEnglish 'poke', meaning a bag, and 'pocket', and the French poche. To thesame family belongs the Anglo-Saxon buc, meaning 'belly' and also any bellied
container such as a pitcher. To these we would venture to add a curious trio of
English words, the obsolete 'pung' and 'bung' and the Scottish 'spung', all threemeaning 'purse', words that picked up somewhere along the road a nasal infix,
I. Pokorny offers two additional, somewhat similar roots conveying the same meanings: (i) baxb-, bhaxbh-,
paxp-; and (2) baxmb-, bhaxmbh-, paxmp-, phaxmph. See first two fascicles of his revision, published in Bern in
1949. The possible kinships between these three roots need not concern us.

92PLATE XVIII Jean-Henri
Fabre. Boletus Satanas Lenz.

THE 'POGGE' CLUSTER

as the philologists say. In Swedish pung, meaning 'pouch', is in current use.1
There exists, we believe, abundant evidence that latent inpogge is the metaphorof an inflatable sac. In the eastern part of the Dutch province of Gelderland,
the same word pogge means, not a frog, but a young pig, a creature notorious
for its fat rotundity.2 The same figure of speech underlies the words for 'toad' inother languages. Thus bufo in Latin suggests the blown-up cheeks of the buffoon.
In ancient Greek a kind of toad that was said to puff itself up to bursting and toexhale a poisonous breath was the cpuaaXoc, a word derived from cpDasc, meaninga bellows, a wind, a blast, a breath; and it is related to a Greek word for bladderand bubble. In the Tosk dialect of Albanian, a toad is a thithelope, or 'cow's
udder', thithe- being the udder. The inflated pouch of a toad suggests an udder.
Now we turn to the Irish language, and here our wild fungi re-enter thescene in a strange blending of metaphors already familiar to us. In Irish there
are two words for a bag or pouch, bolg, which is related to the Latin bulga,
and puca, which was probably borrowed between A.D. 800 and 1050 from
Scandinavian sources. They are two further examples of words belonging
to the family of our familiar Pokorny root. In Irish one way to refer to a wild
fungus is bolg losgainn, literally 'frog's pouch', and another wayis pucan beireach,'heifer's pouch'. If the 'heifer's pouch' refers to the udder, as we suppose, thesame figure of speech that in Albanian means 'toad' turns up in Irish meaning'toadstool'. In Irish, bolg seidte, 'blown-up bag', is a term for the puffball. It
is easy to see why the fungi figure in all these metaphors: puff balls, toadstools,
all the wild fungi of forest and field, impress the visual sense as creatures thatquickly swell up.3 Francis Bacon in his Sylva Sylvamtn described the puffballas a 'cod, or bag'; in Bacon's time 'cod' meant both 'pouch' and 'scrotum'.
In Latin bulga was a humorous metaphor for the womb, and the bagpipe down
through Renaissance times was a symbol of lust and wantonness.4 In Slavic our
Pokorny root erupts directly in to the fungal vocabulary. An
1. High German Pocke, English 'pock' and 'pox', the erupting pustule, belong to the same verbal family. It
has been suggested that Low German pogge means the 'pock-marked one", rather than the 'bag'. But this isbelied, as we shall see, by the metaphors latent in other languages and dialects. Furthermore, the principal meaning of pogge is 'frog', and the common frogs of Central Europe, unlike toads, are free of warts and pustules.
The usual words for 'toad' in Low German are padde and utze.
2. For this information we are indebted to Professor G. G. Kloeke, of Leiden, who refers us to his Taalatlas
van Noord- en Zuid-Nederland, Lief, n, 1, in the 'Ferkel' chart.
3. For hobgoblin there are words in Manx, boag, boagdne, and in Irish, bocdn, that seem to belong to the samefamily, though the kinship is obscure. They recall a cluster of Irish words for mushrooms - beac and its dimi
nutives biocdn and beacdn. Perhaps Irish scholars will tell us whether these fungal words do not also harborideas of sprites and of bellies, and thus link them with our pogge-duster. There is an Irish term, beacdn bearaigh,which on its face would seem to mean 'heifer's mushroom', but underneath the surface is it not analogous to
pucdn beireach, 'heifer's pouch', and parallel in meaning ?
4. For a discussion of the erotic associations of the bagpipe as found in art and literature, see Edward A. Block's'Chaucer's Millers and Their Bagpipes', Speculum, April 1954, pp. 239 ff.

93

CHAPTER FIVE

ancient word for 'mushroom' survives in the Czech bedla, in the Polish bedla, andin bhtza, a term reported in certain parts of Russia. From these words Roman
Jakobson reconstructs the hypothetical bii-dla for primitive Slavic, descended in
its turn from our Indo-European root, with the addition of the Slavic instrumental suffix -dl-. The philologists link these Slavic words with an Indie word
meaning 'bubble', wherein the idea of the swelling sac recurs in purest form.
Vv e have pursued our Low German pogge on the humble and earthy levelof toads and frogs, udders, bags, and fungi. But the underlying metaphor,
keyed to gaseous distension and gaseous collapse, lends itself to images on awholly different plane, and our same Indo-European root proliferated verbal
progeny in the incorporeal world, the world of imps, sprites, and goblins.
Here we find our 'spooks', and Shakespere's Puck, and Kipling's 'Puck of
Pook's Hill', malicious forces of the unseen world, unaccountable, like Hamlet's
ghost hie et ubique, the bugbears and bugaboos of cowering minds. In Irish,
puca circulates as two distinct words, meaning 'bag' and 'sprite', though inour opinion they are etymologically and metaphorically identical. The Pooka
of Mary Chase's play Harvey is a wise but mischievous spirit, an imaginary
rabbit blown up to more than human size. In English 'puck' refers only to imps,
but here, as in Irish, we find it associated with the fungal world, for 'puckfist',
now fallen into disuse, was once a common name for the puff ball. The second
element in the word, '-fist', meant a silent expulsion of hind wind, and so a
puffball was an imp's flatus. In Russian a 'flatus' is a puk, riming with juke',
and the word is another of our pogge cluster intimately linked with a familyof Russian words relating to gaseous distension, swelling, bursting, ripping open;
but the Russian word is not associated with fungi or amphibians.
Like the weaver's threads shuttling in and out in warp and woof, we have seen
how words and meanings play hide-and-seek: frogs and toads are inflatablesacs, and these are sprites, and bags and sprites are fungi. Today the meanings
are compartmented, their latent metaphors forgotten. But there was a time
when the metaphors were living, the words fluid. We have said that 'puckfist',referring to a puffball, meant an imp's flatus. Did it once, long ago, mean
'toad's flatus'? There is no evidence in surviving English documents for this.
Yet we know that the toad was the habitation of the Evil One. We knowthat in the southwest of England toadstools to this day are called 'pixie-stools',
with a puckish pixie thus doing service for the toad. 1 We know more: thei. Richard C. A. Prior pointed this out close to a century ago in his On the Popular Names of British Plants,
London. He also suggested an etymological tie between 'puck' and pogge. See entries under 'pixie-stool', 'puckfist', and 'toadstool'. We consulted the edition of 1879.

94

THE 'POGGE' CLUSTER
language closest to English is Frisian, and in the dialect of Frisian spoken on
the island of Terschelling the puff ball is called the podde-fyst, toad's flatus, andin the neighboring island of Schiermonnikoog it is the pare-puster, toad's puff.
But the association with imps is also not absent from Frisian, for in the townof Dokkum the puffball is called the spoekebal, or 'spookball'. With whatregularity the semantic themes recur! In German we face a pretty problem:the puffball is theBovist or Bofist, and in Low German we fmdpofist: the secondsyllable in these words is clear, but what idea hides behind the first syllable?
No one knows, but we think it is safe to assume that it meant either frog ortoad, or an imp, or a sac, or a puff, or a blending of these. And whichever it
was, behind it lay the primal idea of a gaseous swelling, an exhalation; andemotionally, all of these terms connoted something vile.
In the first stage of our 'toadstool' pilgrimage, we identified what we callthe poison-cluster of toad and fungal words. Now we have gone on to identify
the pogge-cluster, wherein, through the mediation of the evil spirit with which
both toads and fungi were felt to be instinct, we find these lowly creatureslinked together verbally in the untutored minds of early men inhabiting thedank forests of northern Europe from Ireland to Russia. Here we discern the
deep folk associations that caused and expressed the mycophobia of the Celtic
and Germanic peoples. In the Mediterranean world, a kindred idea of thebreath, the exhalation, gave rise to metaphors of the loftiest associations the Holy 'Spirit' and Divine Imp/ration. In Russia the word for the soul dushd - flows from dukh, the word for breath. But by an initial turning in thewrong direction, the metaphorical use of gaseous distension and exhalation in
the world north of the Alps reduced the Holy Spirit to a sprite, and the Divine
Afflatus into an imp's flatus. The northern metaphor was keyed to frogs andtoads, and they to swollen fungi, and both to the Devil.
Earlier we saw how toads and fungi and venom executed a kind of triangularmeasure in the minds and words of the peoples who dwelt on the shores of
the North Sea. Against the vaster background of a still more ancient world,
we have seen how a common idea underlay the words for things as disparate
as toads, sacs, fungi, and imps, and how meanings and metaphors criss-crossedin the figures of an antique quadrille. The poison-cluster of words was superimposed, so to speak on the pogge-cluster:. In France the toad and the Devil
coalesce, with fungi joining the company.
We have seen that an Irish expression for the mushroom is the frog's pouch,bolg losgainn. Bolg is cousin to the English words 'belly', 'bulge', and 'bilge'.1
I. The Irish chronicles refer to the aborigines of Ireland as the Fir Bolg, 'pouch men", of which the meaning is95

CHAPTER FIVE('Bilge' is the ship's belly where bilge-water collects.) Bolg also means belly
or womb, bag or pouch or pocket, bellows, bladder, pimple, blister. It is kin
to the Latin bulga, which meant a leathern pouch or reticule (in lieu of thepockets that the Romans did not have) carried over the forearm, a word thatthe second century lexicographer Festus traced to an origin in Gaul. It is thesame word as the French bouge, which has had a succession of meanings down
the centuries - a concavity, a dump, a miserable habitation, the belly of a cask,
a leathern bag, a valise. Another word of the same clan is 'budget', that most
distended of all wallets, always 'bulging'.
If, as we have seen, frogs and toads were often called 'pouches' or 'bags', thenby a reverse semantic transfer, we might discover that on occasions some word
for 'toad' that had no semantic or etymological kinship with the pogge-clustei:
might be used for a pouch or wallet. The word for pocket in High German
today is Tasche, and we can trace it back to Old High German tasca, where thetrail is lost. The Italian tasca means a pouch or wallet. Some have considered
the Italian word distinct from the German, but no satisfactory etymology
has been found for it either. We now put to the philologists the question whether
both the German and the Italian words are not simply our old friend tosca,
the Anglo-Saxon word for toad. We are not obliged to assume that tosca ortasca in the sense of toad was ever current in Old High German: it could havebeen borrowed in the Old High German period (not earlier than about
A.D. 800) from some other area where tasca, meaning toad, had already taken
on as a second meaning the sense of bulga or wallet. Nor was it borrowed
necessarily from Anglo-Saxon, of course, since the area where this word circulated in various forms was much more extensive; just how extensive we do
not know. There could have been, for a time, a style of bulga - a leathern scrip
hanging from the forearm - designed to imitate a toad, and a term that began
as a nonce-word could have struck permanent root in Germany and Italy.1
obscure. Bolg here may be related to bog, an Irish word meaning 'soft', and to the Irish words began and bogac,'bog', 'quagmire'. Cf. the undoubted etymological kinship between German Schwamm, 'mushroom', and English 'swamp'.
I. The presence of a in both the Italian and Old High German words reminds us of the Anglo-Saxon variant
taxe (see p. 75, footnote), and lends weight to Victor Henry's suggestion that confusion arose in Latin between
toxicum on the one hand and taxus, taxicus on the other. Our suggested etymology might be valid for Italian tasca
even if invalid for the Old High German word. This brings us to an obstacle in the way of our theory thatphilologists will quickly bring up. The authorities cite an Old Saxon word dasga meaning 'pocket'. This would
correspond by normal transition to Old High German tasca, and the pair of words would point to a purely
Teutonic root. But the Old Saxon word appears, not in a text, but in a gloss; see J. H. Gallee's Altsachsische
Sprachdenkmaler, p. 287, 11. 26-27. The source is there given as a Karlsruhe ms. that is not further identified.
An exhaustive examination of all the evidence supporting the existence of Old Saxon dasga needs to be made.
The gloss may reflect a false back-formation from the Old High German word, a pedant's error; or it could
be a copyist's misreading. In addition to the doubtful Old Saxon form dasga, there are various citations of an
Old High German form dasga.

96

5 PUFF BALLS, FILTH, AND
VERMIN

A/Lore names are reported in English for the puffball than for any other kindof mushroom. There is the fanciful 'devil's snuffbox', which recalls the corresponding chortova perechnitza or 'devil's pepperpot' of the Russians. There is'frogcheese', designating the young puffball before it dries up. There is thatcurious word 'bunt', now dying out. In the Oxford Dictionary it follows
hard on another word, identically spelled, that is defined as 'a swelling, a pouchor bag-shaped part of a net, sail, etc.', and both words are put down as of
unknown etymology. Surely, from the swelling growth of the puffball andthe many associations of the fungi with the idea of pouches and bags and swellings, we may regard these words as one.
However, in England and throughout western Europe the distinctive association of the puffball is scabrous. 'Puckfist' is the English archetype, whence depend a number of variants: puff-fist, bullfist, fistball, fuzzball, pixie-puff, andfinally the cleansed and devitalized survivor of the lot, our puffball, of which
the bad-smelling origin is lost almost from memory. In human speech as in thephysical world there operates a law of entropy that saps the strength from once
virile metaphors, until only bookworms (ourselves perhaps devitalized!) detect
and relish with rarefied connoisseurship the faded flavors that have lain stale
for centuries. 'Feist' was the word once commonly used for the silent flatus;
it and the noisy 'fart' are simply different phases or 'grades' of the same word,
etymologically identical. ('Feist' rimes with 'enticed', but in 'puckfist' the V
is short.) They correspond respectively to the French vesse and pet. Just as theLatin p of pater corresponds to the 'f' of 'father', so the p of the French verb
peter in ah1 likelihood corresponds to the 'f' of our English words. One of thefamous creations of the French pastry-cook is the pet de nonne1: here in thissingle term, as in a capsule, the spirit of Gallic humor was caught, though
today it trips off the tongue of Frenchmen with no thought of its pristine
flavor. A French wine that is petillant is one that fizzes slightly, and originally'to fizz' was the English verb that corresponded in scabrous meaning to thenoun 'feist'. In the beginning the petard was an enormous pet, and he who ishoist by his own petard is the victim of a peculiarly personal rocket action such
as Hieronymus Bosch actually depicted in his Last Judgment.
The metaphor of the silent flatus appears to have attached itself to the puffballi. Cf. Dutch hoerendrcetje and nonnenfortje for similar delicacies, words that, if literally rendered, would shock
the English ear and turn the stomach.

97

CHAPTER FIVEin earliest times, before the linguistic break-up of the Indo-European peoples.
For the English, as we have seen, the puffball used to be the puckfist or imp's
silent flatus. In French it is the vesse de loup, or wolf's silent flatus, and similarly
in Dutch, wolfsveest; and in Danish the sources give the corresponding ulve-fiis,
but this is not a drawing-room word. Some Frisian islanders speak of the toad's
flatus, but the more common Frisian term is ulefyst, or owl's flatus, which
may be traceable to an erroneous popular rendering of the Danish term. In Russia
the genteel name for the puffball is the devil's pepperpot, as we have seen; but
there circulates an earthier term, bzdjukha, the silent flatus. The Basques speakof the ass's flatus, astaputz; and in Romansch we find in the Engadine, wolf's
flatus, toffas d'luj, and in the Surselva, cacs tgapper, or crow's droppings. The
mushroom manuals report cuesco de lobo, wolf's flatus, for the Spaniards, and
we ourselves report pedo de lobo in use in the Castilian countryside. The
standard name in Italian is vescia di lupo, but in the Trentino dialect we haveslofa, which is a low word for the membrum virile. In Catalonia we find pet deHop and pet de bou, wolf's flatus and ox-flatus, this latter paralleling the English
bullfist. By far the most interesting of all, however, are two other Catalan
terms: bufa del diable and bufa del dimoni. Bufa like 'feist' is a silent flatus, and so
in both these Catalan expressions we find exact equivalents of the obsolete
English puckfist. But the ramifying interplay of semantic and phonetic associations does not stop there, for in the Catalan language bufa also means 'bladder'and a cluster of kindred things, and this transports us at once to the maze of
meanings that we found clinging to the Irish puca, the Latin bulga and its derivatives, and indeed the whole cluster o£pogge words. In Irish, according to a reliable
source, the puffball is cos-a-phouka,1 'Puck's foot', which reminds us of the
Old French word, le bot, meaning both Satan and 'toad'.
In the puffball vocabulary we discover a subtle interplay of sounds and meanings, where strict etymologies are lost in a common pool. The idea of the devil
underlies all-in pixie and puck and the diable and dimoni of the Catalans;and, as it were behind a mask, the Evil One is hidden in toad and wolf, thosecreatures steeped in terrible folk associations. The owl of the Frisians is anevasive substitute for the wolf, and the crow of the Surselva may hide, throughtranslation and metamorphosis, the German Krote or the French crapaud. In
addition to the devil, the scabrous exhalation of gas is everywhere - in feist,fuzz (i.e., fizz), puff", vesse, pet, bufa, and behind the euphemistic face of thebull and bou, and probably behind the enigmatic Bo- of B0f zsL'Ball' in 'puffball'
I. See A. B. Steele, 'Fungus Folklore', in Transactions of the Edinburgh Field Naturalists' and MicroscopicalSociety, vol. 2, 1887, pp. 175-183.

98

PUFFBALLS, FILTH, AND VERMIN

is a happy dilution of the same theme, an acceptable alliterative substitute.
In 'puff' there is the phonetic overlap with 'puck' and the semantic overlap
with 'feist'. Like those modern clutches in automobiles that move imperceptibly
from speed to speed, the peoples of western Europe, when they speak of thelycoperdon, slip from sound to sound and metaphor to metaphor, under pressures of primitive tabu and the modern sense of propriety. On this phenomenon
suggestive of punning the scholars bestow the name of paronomasia. There isin our case a pool of sounds and a pool of meanings and a pool of evasive substitutes, mingling together in step with the pulsation of underlying ideas andemotions. Our own inquiry is keyed to the association of fungi with toads,
and here there remains one notable observation to add. So far as we know,
bufa has never designated the toad in Catalonia. But phonetically and semantically (because of the toad's aptitude for prodigious inhalation of air and exhalation), the Latin bufo, meaning toad, and the Catalan bufa are close kin,and etymologically, though neither is derived from the other, they must bothspring genetically from the same verbal tree. Thus there is a further strange
analogy between 'puckfist' and bufa del dimoni: 'puck' and bufa mean 'imp'
and 'feist' respectively, but in addition each is pregnant, so to speak, with thelatent idea of 'toad'.1
Our survey of the puckfist names has been confined to the Indo-European
peoples and Basques, and chiefly to Europe. Think of the horizons for researchthat open up when we ask ourselves what metaphors are used for the puckfist
elsewhere in the Eurasian land-mass, and then in the other continents. What afield for scholarly enterprise is here, and how learned and mad must that inspired
scholar be, after the manner of a Norman Douglas character, who will devote himself to this pursuit, his journeyirigs and questionings to be financedof course by some noble Foundation with a nose for the more subtile cultural
aromas!
Throughout the puff ball world there is present one element that we did not
find in the pogge words, and this new element is the scatological. The puffballs,
which in their 'frogcheese' phase make good eating, despite this virtue arelinked throughout western Europe with the filth of hindwind. And this leads
us into a fresh area for exploration. The High German word for 'toad' is Krote,of which the etymology has defied the efforts of massive German scholarship.
I. The flatus metaphor is also found in the Panjabi fungal vocabulary: padd bahera, 'gall-nut flatus", is a mushroom name. The bahera is a tree famous in the India trade and known in botany as 'belleric myrobalan'.
It yields a kind of gall-nut used in dyeing and tanning, and also in Indian medicine. It would be tempting toassociate the Panjabi padd, 'flatus', with Dutch padd, 'toad', but no kinship is possible. The Panjabi word is
cognate with the two English words of the same meaning discussed on p. 97.

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CHAPTER FIVE

We dare not aspire to trace this word to its lair, but as a fresh approach to avexed problem, we submit that German Krote is the same as the Rhineland
word krotz, meaning originally the dung of domesticated animals; i.e., dungwith value for the farmer. The same word appears in Flemish krotte, and itturns up also in the familiar French crotte and crottin, whose primary meaning
was also 'dung'. Indeed, if this surmise be well received, we venture further.
The French word for 'toad', crapaud, is certainly not related etymologicallyto any root meaning dung, being akin to the Provencal word grapal, but the
precise shape that this word has taken in modern French seems to be traceable
to popular pressures that seek to associate the loathsome creature and its namewith crape, a French word whose scatological English counterpart is known
wherever the English language is spoken. The Oxford Dictionary offers us a
Scottish and English dialectical word for the dung of domesticated animals,'tath' or 'tathe', which in Norwegian and Swedish dialects becomes tad. Do
we not here find the identical semantic transfer? Perhaps we are in thepresence of three doublets, the Germans referring to the toad as 'dung', theEnglish and Scandinavians doing likewise, and the French word for toad
being re-shaped to resemble crape. In the Danish pattern of fungal metaphors,
we find that dung is an alternative to the toad in a pair of fungal words paddehat, 'toad's hat', and skarnhat, 'dung hat'. How felicitous for our argument
is the word 'cowpad', wherein the second element here means 'dung', butelsewhere as we know means 'toad'!1 On an earlier page we considered thepossibility that 'toad', a word of unknown origin, might be descended from a
Celtic adaptation of the Latin word for 'poison', and certainly in Anglo-Saxon
times the loathed creature was linked with venom. But on balance the Nordic
tad, meaning 'dung', seems to us the likelier source.2
In modern English no filthier word for the fungi exists than 'smut', thename of the fungal parasite that afflicts corn. It is cousin to the German word
Schtmttz, 'dirt', and its evil potency comes out in its figurative use for con1. 'Cowpad' is in wide use throughout the English and American countryside, and it is therefore surprising thatneither the Oxford Dictionary nor Webster's reports it; nor do we find it in Wright's English Dialect Dictionary.
Wright reports a single citation for 'pad' in the sense of'dried cow's dung as formerly used for fuel'. This citation
is from East Anglia, and Wright declares the word obsolete.
2. Franciscus van Sterbeeck in his Theatrum Fungorum, Antwerp, 1675, said on p. 227 that in France a certain
mushroom considered foul by him was called la crate. If true this would add striking additional evidence forour thesis of a common pool of words and meanings for toads, mushrooms, and excrement. We have not yet
found corroboration for Van Sterbeeck's statement in French sources. Van Sterbeeck relied heavily on thegreat Historia Plantarum Universalis, 1650-1, of Jean Bauhin, who on p. 846 described a certain mushroomthat he had gathered on a hill in Montbeliard called La Crotte. Did Van Sterbeeck misconstrue Bauhin's Latin
text and think the name belonged to the mushroom? Professor Georges Becker, the great mycophile, is a
citizen of Montbeliard, and he has confirmed to us the former existence in that city of a hill called La Crotte,
razed to make way for railroad facilities.
IOO

PLATE XIX
Jean-Henri Fabre. Lycoperdon furfuraceum Pers. ex SchaefF.
English: puffball, puckfist;
French: vesse de loup.

PLATE XX
Napoleonic caricature.
By courtesy oj Frank Altschul, Esq., Overbrook Farm,
Stamford, Conn.

PUFFBALLS, FILTH, AND VERMIN

demning scabrous language. To the Englishman the two meanings of 'smut'
seem so fittingly wedded that he could not imagine things otherwise. Yet the
Englishman's disgust with fungal smut is an acquired cultural trait, not instinctive in the human species. The Indians of the Valley of Mexico have always
considered smut a culinary delicacy. The kind they use grows on maize, and'ustilago maydis' seems to be its scientific designation. But in the market place
the Nahuatl name, cuitlacoche, circulates in Spanish too, and the best familiesof Spanish descent delight in eating cuitlacoche prepared in a variety of ways.
Moreover, when English-speaking guests taste the cuitlacoche, perhaps served
like piroshki with cocktails, it moves them to rapture — until they discoverthat they are eating smut. The Nahuatl word is built from cuitlatl, 'excrement'.
Today, as we have already said, in standard High German the toad is nolonger linked with the fungi, though traces of this association survive in Pennsylvania Dutch. Yet in the German mushroom manuals we occasionally find
Krotenschwamm as a common name for the poisonous amanita pantherina.
Perhaps this is one of those mushroom names that circulate only in manuals.
But the same word applied to the same species appeared in the treatise onmushrooms by Carolus Clusius published in 1601,' and we suspect that itwas current in his day. If so, and if we are right about the source of Krote,
it follows that toads and dung were intermingled in the minds of simple Germans,
and both were linked with fungi in Krotenschwamm. If we have successfully
recaptured the semantic associations and feelings of the people who used thesehumble words, then here we discover a very citadel of mycophobia, wheretoads and fungi with loathing were spewed forth on the dungheap. Against
this background, it becomes clearer that 'frogcheese', 'toadsmeat', and theWelsh 'toad's cheese', as well as the French pain de crapaud, hark back to excretions of toads, rather than to food that toads were supposed to eat. We haveseen that the Surselva countryman thinks of puff balls as the droppings of crows.
R. C. A. Prior in his treatise on English plant names, published almost a century
ago, suggested that the stool of 'pixie-stool' referred to the devil's droppings.
I. His Rariomm Plantarum Historia (Antwerp) contained a section on mushrooms of Hungary. Clusius wasCharles de Lecluse, a Frenchman of Arras. He is sometimes called the father of scientific mycology. Krotenschwamm has appeared recently in the Kleiner Pilzatlas of H. Strohschneider, Vienna, 1948, p. 22. We have discovered
no modem citation of the word in High German other than in mushroom manuals. Clusius' work was a treatiseon the mushrooms of the Pannonian plain (Hungary) and he gives Krottenschwammen [sic] as the German
name of the mushroom (amanita pantherina) that in Magyar was called bagoly gomba, or 'owl mushroom'.
Thus the German word was certainly not a translation out of the Hungarian. Clusius also reports Froschemtuel[sic] as the German name for another mushroom. Here he may have been translating the Low German poggenstul,thus spelled by Valerius Cordus in the middle of the i6th century when he called it to the attention of the learned
world in his Adnotationes on Dioscorides. Our own view is that these words were still current, though disappearing, in standard High German in the time of Clusius; that they have long been obsolete; and that the compilers
of manuals retain them by oversight.

IOI

CHAPTER FIVE

He was mistaken, but doubtless in the long course of English speech there
have been others whose mycophobic thoughts turned to dung as they spatout the expletive 'toadstool'. When the English caricaturist devised a satiricalcoat of arms for Bonaparte, his symbol for the Corsican Devil was a toadstool,and it sprang from dung, the lineage that he thought befitted his villain. Trueto the Englishman's unfailing ignorance in fungal matters, the artist did notlimn a deadly species, or even a fly amanita, as the reader will observe in the
reproduction of this old print that we present.
Some years ago an episode took place in France that was curious for various
reasons, and not least because it linked birds' droppings with mushrooms. On
Sunday, January 6,1926, in the village of Bombon (550 inhabitants, eleven miles
from Melun in the Department of Seine-et-Marne) the beloved and respected
cure of the parish church, the Abbe Desnoyers, 50 years of age, had retired tohis sacristy after Mass when twelve persons, ten women and two men,strangers to the community, burst in upon him, seized, gagged, and bound him,threw him to the floor, and proceeded to flog him with knotted cords until
he almost fainted. A few minutes later the twelve assailants quietly submitted
to arrest. It developed that the twelve had come by car all the way from distantBordeaux, that they were members of a religious circle known as the Groupe deNotre-Dame des Pleurs, that they were the disciples of the founder of thislittle sect, one Madame Marie Mesmin, formerly a concierge, and that they
attributed Madame Mesmin's bad health to spells cast upon her by the Abbeof Bombon across hundreds of miles of intervening countryside. One of thetwo men, the street-sweeper Maurice Lourdin, at the Magistrate's hearing on
January 24, had no trouble in identifying the Abbe Desnoyers as Satan himself,
one of the most powerful sorcerers of the age. Only by flagellation could thedemon that possessed this priest be exorcised. Lourdin bore witness that the priest
of Bombon had sent birds (we are not told the species, alas!) to Bordeauxcarrying diseases. They had flown over Madame Mesmin's garden, and fromtheir droppings had sprung up a crop of fungi that took obscene shapes, whose
appalling stench had smitten all and sundry with horrible diseases.1 For a briefspell the Parisian press was agog with amused excitement about the happening
in Bombon, and cabaret singers made much of it. Thirty years have passed, but
I. There may be an echo of the same association between birds' droppings and fungi in a curious theory advanced
to explain fairy rings by a Mr. Johnson of Wetherby, England, early in the igth century. He thought they werecaused by starlings which "when in large nights frequently alight on the ground in circles, and sometimes are
known to sit a considerable time in these annular congregations". This reference is to be found in the edition ofGilbert White's Selborne annotated by Captain Thomas Brown, of which the first printing appeared in 1833,
on p. 327.

102

PUFFBALLS, FILTH, AND VERMIN

there are those who still remember it: Aldous Huxley has recalled for us one of
the refrains:
Frappons, frappons, en union
Sur le Cure de Bombon.

The account of this anachronistic episode can be found in The Times in theissues of January 6, 7, and 25, 1926. The obscene fungi could only have been
stinkhorns. The Times correspondent did not remark on the number of theassailants: twelve. With Madame Mesmin their leader, this made thirteen, thefull complement of a witches' coven. We seem to be in the presence here of theposthumous twitchings of witchcraft, the religion of the Horned God, and of
the folk association of fungi with excrement.
In the Italian language there is a word to designate a venomous snake, scorzone,
which is etymologically identical with one of the Spanish words for 'toad',
escuerzo. The Basques, as we have seen on page 78, sometimes call the marasmius
oreades the Viper-fungus', suge-perretxiko, and sometimes the zapo-perretxiko,or 'toad-fungus'. According to Clusius, in the i6th century two innocent kindsof mushrooms bore in German the name of Natterschwamm, or adder-fungus,1and the Magyar term was a translation of this - kigyo gomba. Traveling farther
east, we have already called attention to the 'toad-fungus' and 'viper-fungus'
of Slovakian usage. Far more important is the Russian word poganka, thesupreme expression among the Slavs of the folk association between the fungi
and vermin. In Great Russia, poganka is a term of condescending affection for
the inedible mushrooms: the word has lost some of its sting among the mycophilic Russians. But this same word poganka, derived from the Latin word for'pagan', circulates throughout the Slavic world, and in one region or anotherit designates not inedible mushrooms but all things unclean: mice, rats, snakes,
pimples and other organic swellings and tumors, and (in Serbia) dung. The
inedible mushrooms are unclean, they are vegetable vermin, so to speak, andthe word used for them was also transferred to all other vermin and filth.
The presence of pimples and tumors among these meanings arrests attention,
for here we hark back to our familiar theme of the pogge cluster.
Farther east, in the Indo-Aryan world of Asia, the theme of the serpent
recurs in the fungal vocabularies of various peoples, but there is no trace of thetoad. The oldest figure in the fungal metaphors of these Eastern peoples isneither the hat nor the stool, but the parasol - Sanskrit chattra. Perhaps the
I. Natterschwamm is unrelated to the 'natterjack' (vide p. 74); the English equivalent of Natter drops the initialletter to become 'adder'; by contrast, what was originally an 'atterjack' in early English added an initial 'n' to
become the 'natterjack'.
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CHAPTER FIVE

earliest surviving reference to mushrooms in Sanskrit, going back several
centuries before Christ, is ahi-chattra(ka], 'snake's parasol', in the text called
Nirukta. The same word is found in Pali, and in the Hindi sap ki chain, all withthe same meaning; and also the Persian catr-i-mar. Another Hindi word for thefungi is sap kiroti, 'snake's bread', and a Sindhi expression is sapido, a diminutiveof sapu, 'snake'.1 It is curious that elsewhere than in the Indie languages wefind the 'parasol' figure applied to fungi only in the Spanish dialect of Jocotan,
Guatemala, as we mentioned earlier: sombrilla de sapo, wherein sapo means 'toad'and not 'snake'.
I. This Eastern word for 'snake' recalls the Spanish word for 'toad', sapo, and suggests an analogy between thispair of words and the alternative Spanish word, escuerzo, 'toad', with its Italian cousin, scorzone, meaning'viper'. But the Spanish sapo and its Eastern homonym are not directly related to each other. The Spaniards could
have borrowed the Eastern word only from the Spanish Gypsies, who in fact use it in the sense of 'snake'.
However, the Gypsies did not arrive in Spain until the I5th century, and the Spaniards were applying sapo
to the toad long before then. We find the word in Don Juan Manuel's Libra del Caballero et del Escudero, written
at the beginning of the I4th century. The Hindi word comes down from the Sanskrit sarpa, and 'serpent' belongs
to the family.

IO46 THE SPONGE
CLUSTERJN ow the moment has arrived to examine the basic fungal words of Europe.
The tie that joins toad and fungus continues to be our theme. But for a few
paragraphs we shall immerse ourselves in evidence that may seem remoteto our readers - if readers there be who are still with us. Some of that evidence
is well attested, but we are going to advance certain conjectures of our own,
and if perchance these survive competent scrutiny, we shall have succeeded
in discerning links between toads and fungi over a far wider area, and at agreater depth in time, than we would willingly have imagined when we asked
ourselves, at the outset, our innocent and casual question about the lowly
toadstool. As amateurs, we are rash in what we are about to do, and if we do
not constantly qualify our probing remarks with locutions of modest timidity,
this is to spare the reader at the cost of our inclinations.
In 1901 the eminent philologist Holger Pedersen, then a young man, brought
out a notable paper1 in which he established the etymological identity of thebasic fungal words that we are about to consider, despite the disparity in theirlooks. They circulate in all the languages of Europe, often two or three ofthem in the same language. In the Germanic world we may take the HighGerman Schwamm as our type; in the Slavic languages, the Russian guba;in the Mediterranean world there is the Latin fungus and the Greek σπόγγος,'sponge'. Only in the Celtic languages have we found no native examples.
In Germanic and Slavic the words mean both fungus and sponge. In the Mediterranean, by semantic differentiation the Greeks confined their word to thesponge, and the Romans theirs to the fungus, the Romans borrowing the
Greek word for the other sense.2 There is no evidence that any of these words
in recorded history has ever been linked in the minds of Europeans with thetoad. But there is abundant evidence that all of these words have carried, intheir very core, the idea of an organic swelling or excrescence or tumor. Thus
the Greeks spoke of scrofula and of the tonsils as sponges, and parallel examples
are common for the other words of the group.
There is one remarkable quality that distinguishes all the words of our sponge
cluster: they are emotionally neutral, by contrast with the pejorative flavorof the fungal words heretofore discussed. It is as though this whole family
1. Published in Polish: 'Przyczynki do gramatyki porownawczej jezykow slowiariskich', in Materyaly i Prace
Komisyi Jgzykowej Akadetnii Umieigtnosci w Krakowie, vol. I, no. I, pp. 167-176; Cracow.
2. But the morel appears to have been called by the Romans spongiolus, which comes down into modern Italianas spugnolo.
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CHAPTER FIVE

of words had always possessed a tough underlying personality persisting throughthe centuries, over immense areas, among peoples in every stage of culturaldevelopment. Even when a word of this group describes something disagreeable
like a tumor, it retains a detached tone, by contrast for example with 'cancer'.
In the English language the Anglo-Saxons used swamm for 'mushroom',and this member of our sponge cluster lingered on through Middle English
into early Modern English. We can pinpoint its last recorded appearance:

Fig. 6DESCRIPTION OF FOMESOFFICINALIS

Last reported use in English
ofswamm (misspelled swamp)in the sense of mushroom,
referring to fungal growth
on larch.

in the second edition of Naturall Philosophy or A Description of the World, by
Daniel Widdowes, published in London in 1631, where it is used in describing
the fomes officinalis, the agaricum of Pliny. Swamm in the end surrendered thefield to the loathsome 'toadstool', to the toothsome 'mushroom', and to thelearned 'fungus'. But another word of our cluster is current in the name that the
English give to wet, spongy land - the swamp. And perhaps there survives yet
another word, of greater importance.
On an earlier page we saw that the idea lying behind the pogge cluster was adistensible sac, a bag or pocket or pouch, a belly or bulge or bilge. The English
word 'womb' comes down from the Anglo-Saxon wamb, and this in turnis cognate with various Germanic words of similar sound and meaning, including the Gothic wamba. As the Oxford Dictionary points out, the same root
turns up in the rare word 'gameson', designating the quilted or padded garmentthat medieval knights wore under their armor to avoid chafing. This garment
tended to bulge and belly, being designed to do so. Philologists have been106

THE SPONGE CLUSTER

uncertain about the ultimate affiliations of the underlying root of 'womb'
and 'gameson'. We suggest that 'womb' and our sponge cluster spring fromthe same source, and that in 'womb' and the sponge cluster we discover aperfect semantic parallel for those elements in the pogge cluster that relate todistensible bags and fungi, and also for the Irish fungal bolg.
Perhaps there is another extraordinary example, hitherto unidentified, ofthe same Indo-European root in Late Latin. During the early centuries of
the Christian era the Roman legions were being hard pressed by the barbarianhorsemen erupting out of Asia. In the art of warfare the innovation of the day
was the cavalry, and the Roman authorities were struggling to overtake thealarming lead of the enemy in the handling of horses. Whenever they could,
they incorporated into their own forces barbarian elements versed in horsemanship. It is not surprising that at this time important texts by veterinaries maketheir appearance in Latin. One of these veterinaries, Vegetius by name, writing in the early 5th century, describes a pathological swelling above the hoofof a horse by the adjective gambosus, the first recorded appearance of this wordin Latin. Surely this is our familiar gamba, borrowed from the barbarians,
used in its essential sense of 'swelling', under historical circumstances that makeits appearance natural.1 (There is a curious and significant analogy for gamba,
in the sense that we suggest, in the modern Dutch word hanekam, of which
the primary sense is 'cock's comb'. It carries two other meanings: it is thevulgar name of the chanterelle, and it also designates a swelling on the hockof a horse.)
The words of our sponge cluster have displayed a singular potency in graftingthemselves into the vocabularies of alien peoples. Thus in Basque one of thethree generic words for mushrooms is ondo, borrowed from the Spanish hongo,
which in turn descends from the Latin fungus. (This borrowing, must havebeen relatively recent - in the course of the past millennium or so. Of more
subtle interest is the fact that the Basque word for 'toad', apo, possesses as asecondary meaning the idea of sponginess. We shall revert to this.) The Magyar
I. This etymology, original with us, must stand up against the conventional one. French jambe and Italiangamba, 'leg', are usually traced through Vegetius' gamba to a Celtic root meaning 'bend' or 'curve'. That thewords for 'leg' come from the Celtic root we do not question. It is less clear why a veterinary writing in the
5th century should refer to a swelling on a horse's leg as a 'leg' or as a 'bend'. We know that there was a closehomonym for the Celtic word in Germanic and Slavic, that homonym meaning 'swelling' or 'tumor' or 'womb'.
We are not inventing a homonym for our argument. If we are right, the form of the word as used by Vegetius
would indicate that it was borrowed, not from Germanic, but from Slavic, and this would confer on gamba
the distinction of being the earliest recorded loan-word from Slavic in the Western languages. Heretofore theearliest recorded Slavic word is strava, 'funeral banquet', used by Jordanis in his account of the funeral of Attila
in A.D. 453. For the crisis in war technology precipitated by the barbarians' use of the horse, see the opening pagesof Ferdinand Lot's L'Art Militaire et les Armies du Moyen Age, Pans, 1946.
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gomba or gamba was drawn from the Slavic, as was we believe the Lappish
guobbar. In Armenian our sponge cluster turns up in sunk, meaning mushroom,and this Armenian word was the source of the Georgian soko, which in theneighboring Svanetian language becomes sok. On the northern side of the
Caucasus the Ossetians speaking the Ironian dialect of their language borrowed
their word zoko from the Georgians, and by a not abnormal transposition,
the other Ossetians of the Digorian tongue say kozo - a far cry from Schwamm
and fungus perhaps, yet genetically stemming from the same ancestry.
In the valley of the Volga, to the east of the Slavic homelands, there live
the Chuvash people. They are probably the descendants of the original Bulgars.
When a part of the tribe, some fifteen centuries ago, began their slow trek tothe land that we now call Bulgaria, the others remained behind and they retain
to this day their non-Indo-European tongue. In the Chuvash language theword for 'fungus' is kampa. The nasal sound in the middle of that word is of
singular interest. The Chuvashi could have borrowed kampa only from theeastern Slavs, who for a thousand years and perhaps more, ever since the Russian
language was first put on parchment, have been saying guba. The Chuvash
word offers proof that long ago, when the Chuvash people took over theword - we cannot say when this happened - the Russian guba was pronounced
gomba. Like the fly caught and held in amber, the Chuvashi have held for us
the ancient and lost form of the Russian word. That Chuvash word is noteworthy also for its other meanings. It is used for certain tumors of the humanbody. It is also used for the genitalia of the cow, and thus recalls the Gothic
wamba and the English 'womb'.1
In the Indo-Aryan languages of the Middle East and India there is a startlingfamily of words that seem both phonetically and semantically to belong toour sponge cluster. Thus in Hindi we find that khumbi means 'mushroom';in Sindhi, khumbhi; in Panjabi, khumb; in Lahnda, khumb. These are all traceable
to a Sanskrit word, kumbhika, meaning 'pot' or jar' - the bellying utensil that
we have already encountered in the Anglo-Saxon bile, meaning both 'belly'
and 'pitcher'. In Sindhi we also find phungi, which is seemingly a mutation
by metathesis of khumbhi, paralleling the identical mutation in Europe, where'sponge' and gomba are identical etymologically, as are Schwamm and fungus.
In the Waziri dialect of the Afghan language known as Pashto we find for'mushroom' the word xomba, and in the Mohmand dialect xumburi, both derived from xumb, 'pot'. Surely all these words bear witness to the ubiquity ofI. Our information about the Chuvash kampa comes from N. I. Ashmarin's Thesaurus Linguce Tschuvaschorum,
Book vii, p. 142, published in 1934.

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THE SPONGE CLUSTER

the idea that underlies the thinking about fungi throughout the Indo-European
world, and of the verbal root that expresses the idea. These Eastern words
stir up a further reflection. A few pages back, when we were discussing thepogge cluster, we saw how Puck and other imps and sprites resided in the distensible sacs, the toads, and the puffballs that we were examining. If we may relyon the Arabian Nights, the jinn of the East were confined in pots and jars,
whence they would escape, rising wraith-like in gaseous wisps, to condense
into organic shapes and wreak their will on men. Is there here too a common
denominator in the Satanic association of the fungi, linking the East with
Europe?
Up to this point we have shown the diffusion of our basic fungal words
throughout the Indo-European world and among a few small adjacent tribesof other origins. How about the Semitic peoples; Here we uncover a surprising
thing. Of the important words for 'mushroom' in Arabic, one is kam or kam'a.
Its etymology is unknown. It belongs both to classical or literary Arabic and tothe colloquial language. In its application it is both generic and specific, sometimes embracing the whole mushroom world, but also designating that speciesof terfezia which among Arabs holds pride of place as a gustatory delight. It isreported in modern Persian, where loan words from Arabic are numerous,
and in its specific sense is said to be commonly used by the market vendors ofDamascus. Nor is this root confined to Arabic. In the Old Testament no word
for 'mushroom' occurs, but in the Babylonian Talmud and the Midrashic literature we find the cognate root KMH in both Aramaic and Hebrew forms.
If our Semitic root was borrowed from the Indo-European world, it goes backfar. 1 Or are both words descended from a pre-Indo-European root? Or are
we dealing with unrelated words that happen to resemble each other?
Now we return to Pedersen's classic paper. 2 He undertook to reconstruct
1. The Arabic kam' suggests the Germanic and Slavic forms of the Indo-European words, rather than the Greek
or Latin. In the Jerusalem Talmud we find the root SPG in the form s'fog meaning 'a porous luxuriant growth,mushroom, sponge', but this was undoubtedly a Hellenistic borrowing of the Greek σπόγγος The parallel
between the Arabic and Russian words for 'mushroom' reminds us of an astonishing parallel in fungal metaphors.
A certain mushroom is called in Arabic shahinat al-ard, literally 'fat-of-the-earth'. This corresponds to the Russian
maslenok, which James Collins in The Present State of Russia translated by 'fat-of-the-earth' in the iSth century.
Yet another basic fungal word in Arabic, classical and colloquial, is faq', fuqqa', orfaqqd", from the root FQ',
meaning 'whiteness'. Whether this name designates a white kind of mushroom, or whether, as in Russian andBasque fungal names, whiteness here connotes excellence, we do not know. See pp. 7 and 10.
2. Pedersen's careful and elaborate argument in favor of a common origin for Slavic gomba, German Schwamm,Latinfungus, and Greek σπόγγος seems to us conclusive, and is accepted in substance by Emile Boisacq in his
Greek etymological dictionary. A. Ernout and A. Meillet in their Latin etymological dictionary suggest a Mediterranean origin for the Latin and Greek words, without however dealing with Pedersen's argument, which isavailable only in Polish. Occasionally there are clusters of words that the philologist ought to study together,and such is the fungal vocabulary of Europe, a semantic field pervaded by related figures of speech and emo
tional responses. No philologist has pursued this method. Our basic fungal words of northern and southern109

CHAPTER FIVE
the lost Indo-European root that was the progenitor of our sponge cluster. He
considered several possibilities differing only in details, and of these 'sgwombho'
may be considered typical. And at this precise point, after a long absence, ourtoad rears its head and thrusts itself once more into the stream of our argument.
Curious about the origin of the Latin word for toad, bufo, we turned to
Walde's Latin etymological dictionary, and discovered to our surprise thatphilologists are disposed to consider it genetically related to the Russian word
for toad, zhaba, through an intermediate form, gabawo, found in the dead
Baltic language known as Old Prussian. For bufo Walde devises a hypotheticalIndo-European ancestor, 'guobho'. Thus leading scholars, without regard foreach other's problem, arrive at hypothetical archetypes:[sjgwombho as
the ancestor for 'fungus' andguobh5as the ancestor for bufo, which thus differ in only one essential respect - thepresence of the nasal infix in the word for mushroom! Though we are thefirst to propose that these two words are doublets distinguished only by thenasal infix, the Indo-European languages offer other examples that parallel ours
perfectly.1
This ancestral convergence of the two words could be regarded as accidental,
provoking perhaps an ancient semantic overlap through paronomasia or punning, were it not for the weight of evidence that we have already developed,
indicating an association of toads with fungi in the minds of primitive Europeans.
In the face of this evidence, accident becomes the long and unlikely arm ofcoincidence. Perhaps traces of the underlying unity of zhaba and gamba survive
in the vernacular terms of the Ukraine and Slovakia that we cited on page 78.
Perhaps there is a trace of that unity, hidden behind translated words, in theBasque word for 'toad', apo, linked as it is semantically with both 'sponginess'and certain wild mushrooms.
According to Pedersen's analysis, Schwamm and gamba differ from the Latin
fungus and spongia only by a transposition of consonants, the common phenoEurope possess identical semantic attributes. They mean the same things— organic excrescence, sponge, fungus.
They evoke identical turns of phrase, proverbs, epithetical use. In short, the words occupy the same semantic
terrain, which would be unh'kely if they descended from unrelated sources. We offer this as additional evidence,
circumstantial in character, in support of the Pedersen thesis. As we shall see on p. 144, this does not altogether
rule out the possibility that the same root is native to languages outside the Indo-European family. In short,both Pedersen and the Latin philologists could conceivably be right.
I. The interested reader will find a detailed survey of such nasal infixation in the book of the distinguished
Polish linguist Jan Otr^bski, 2 Baddn ttad infikscm nosowym u> jgzykach indoeuropejskich, published by the Polish
Academy of Sciences as the I5th issue of the Transactions of its Linguistic Commission, Krakow, 1929.
IIO

THE SPONGE CLUSTER

menon known as metathesis. Thus gamba becomes [s]pongos in Greek. Pedersen
chose to reconstruct his Indo-European archetype, the hypothetical 'sgwombho',from the northern forms. But was he justified in this; The northern forms haveshown themselves fluid throughout the fifteen centuries of their recorded history.
The Greek σπόγγος attested in Homer, has displayed a notable stability throughout the twenty-five centuries of its recorded history. May we not supposethat the Greek word is nearer to the archetype? If so, we suggest our own reconstruction of the hypothetical root:(s)p(h)ongAnd at this point the attentive reader will perceive that we are back in thecompany of those words that we associate with the Low German pogge, meaning 'frog' and 'toad', the essential difference being the nasal infix that distinguishes all words of the sponge cluster.
And so we now emerge from our arduous excursion among the words ofthe sponge cluster with a theory of our own. We believe that these words Schivamm, gamba, fungus σπόγγος - stem from the same genetic root as thebasic word 'womb', and that all these stem from the same genetic root as thewords of the pogge cluster. That root was imitative in origin, and keyed tothe idea of swelling. The progeny of that root has peopled the vocabularies
of Europe with numerous words embracing bags, pockets, toads and frogs,
imps, tumors, mushrooms, wombs, and sponges.
Just as physicists discover the 'unified field' where, at great depth, the disparate
phenomena of matter and force turn out to be one and the same, so in our
linguistic pursuit we may have arrived at the unified field underlying all of thosedisparate phenomena that, as we have seen, men associate together, subtly andhalf unconsciously, to this very day.

111

7 PUNK, FIRE, AND
LOVE
About the things that man eats he is acutely sensitive. The mere thought ofinviting food starts up his salivary glands, and puts him on tiptoe of eager
expectation. By contrast, the suggestion that he consume things unclean gives
him a spasm of revulsion. The attitudes that we have called mycophilia andmycophobia hinge on whether fungi are considered delectable food or foul andfilthy poison. But primitive man had other uses for wild fungi, and he wascapable of regarding these growths from a detached utilitarian point of view
without regard to ingestion. We believe this explains the neutral tone of the
sponge cluster of words. These words are often bestowed on edible fungi, butthey usually yield place to others in the context of food - Pilz, grib, champignon.
If we try to see the fungi as our ancestors saw them, we may divide theirthoughts and feelings about them according to the ends they had in mind:
I. INGESTION
1. As poison (a) accidental(b) for murder
2. As intoxicant (amanita muscaria), and for divination
3. As aphrodisiac (including perfume)
4. As medicine-purgative, styptic, etc. (fomes omcinalis); for contraception
5. As food.
II. OTHER

1. As tinder or touchwood, to catch the spark and start the fire, and to keep a fire ina smouldering state.
2. To produce a stupefying smoke, effective with bees when extracting honey fromthe hive, etc.

Modern man, especially the urbanized literate, is almost incapable of imagining
the importance to his ancestors of fungi for the making of fire. One species
was especially prized for this purpose - the fomes fomentarius, the amadouvier
of France, the Zunderschwamm or Feuerschivamm of Germany. But many otherkinds served this purpose too, such as 'bunts' or dried puffballs, and the dry,friable innards of fungous-infested tree-stumps.
This brings us to a curious trio of English words, 'punk', 'spunk', and 'funk'.
We believe all three are members of our sponge cluster, siblings descended
from the Mediterranean fimgus- σπόγγος word family. All three possess one
thing in common: they designate, or at some time in the past have designated,112

PUNK, FIRE, AND LOVEthe shelf-fungi that serve as touchwood for making fire. This meaning is not
the oldest recorded use of any of them, but nevertheless as a working hypothesis
we propose that 'touchwood' be regarded as their primary sense, in which sense
they circulated in humble discourse for untold centuries, accumulating derived
and metaphorical meanings as time went on, until finally, when the words
were consigned to paper, it was these secondary and more fashionable meanings
that first achieved the dignity of writing.
Let us take 'spunk', for example. That it belongs to our sponge cluster is
attested by the corresponding Irish word sponnc, which means both sponge
and touchwood. (We find a similar semantic association in Dutch, where
zwam means both fungus and tinder; for 'sponge' the Dutch resort to spons.)
In the Oxford Dictionary's earliest citation of'spunk', in 1536, the word meant'spark'; to this day it is still occasionally so used. In 1582 it appears in the senseof tinder, and in 1665 as the name of the fungus that makes tinder. Oliver
Goldsmith toward the end of the i8th century offers us the earliest known useof 'spunk' as the moral quality of mettle or pluck. Here in the word 'spunk'
we have a name for touchwood that gathered to itself nobler secondary meanings
derived from the spark that was the end-product of its use. The word 'spark'
itself is mysterious: it is known only in the English, Frisian, and Low German
languages. The question suggests itself whether it is not simply a different phaseor grade of'spunk' - touchwood in its final act of transfiguration.
'Funk' also meant 'spark' in the earliest citations, in the I4th century. We
first hear of it as fungous touchwood in 1673. Haifa century earlier it was being
used in the sense of a strong smoke and stench, as from tobacco. This use stems
back to the shelf-fungi that served to generate a stupefying smoke, to put bees
to sleep when extracting honey from hives. Before modern sugars became
common, honey was a commodity of notable importance, both for its sweetness
and as the base for mead, and in the apiculture of the time, the part played byfungal smoke was important and a commonplace. It was natural that those who
disapproved of tobacco in the early days should have first associated this smoking plant with the familiar smoke-generating fungus. The depressing moral
connotations of 'funk' first appear in the i8th century: he who languishes ina funk is in a moral stupor, overcome in a smoke-cloud.
Most interesting of the three words is 'punk', which in the sense of touchwood
first appears about 1707. As with the other two words, the lexicographers saythat the origin of 'punk' is obscure, but they give reserved recognition to atheory that it was borrowed in colonial times from an Algonquin word, phonetically similar, meaning dust or ashes. 'Punk' is the ordinary English word for113

CHAPTER FIVE

touchwood today, and it is prima facie incredible that an Algonquin term forso ancient and domestic a commodity should have swept the English-speaking
world and won general acceptance late in cultural history. We think there iscircumstantial evidence to show that the word was securely established in
English in Elizabethan times, and this leads us directly into the strange erotic
associations of our punk-spunk-funk triplets.
In the i6th century 'punk' meant a strumpet, as it still does, and what is a
strumpet but the tinder that whips into flame the gay young spark allured byher favors? Let no one dismiss this figure as fanciful. For 'touchwood' theFrench say amadou, which is simply the Proven9al word for 'lover'. Lovers,
like tinder, are quick to take fire. The French verb amadouer means to coax,
just as we 'coax' a fire with tinder. In modern English slang 'punk' is a contemptuous adjective for things of low quality - a natural semantic extensionof the brothel word. The erotic association of 'punk' is feminine. That of'spunk' is primarily masculine: in certain English circles and at certain levelsof conversation, it is the accepted word for the seminal fluid of the humanmale. 'Sparking' a girl used to mean 'courting' in American slang, and theDictionary of American English also records the far stronger 'spunking'. We
have seen how the nasal infix of the words of our sponge cluster comes andgoes, associating this large verbal family with the pogge constellation. If wedrop from 'funk' its nasal infix, we are in the presence of the supreme erotic
word of the English language. The Russian word for touchwood is trut (riming with 'brute'), and it is directly derived from the Russian word for 'rub'.
Though trut itself carries no erotic meaning, it is the key to certain ancientRussian riddles where the erotic sense lies hidden. The generating of fire by
the friction of wooden surfaces - a technique in which one wood must be softand the other hard - may explain why, among the many forms that 'mushroom'has taken in English, we find 'mushrub'.
And now the thread of our argument leads us from philological clues over
the threshold into anthropology, where we begin to discover the deep erotic
symbolism of the mushroom world.
Throughout most of human history and down into our own times, men haveusually made fire by either of two methods - by percussion, striking flint
against pyrites or (in later times) against iron to generate sparks that will ignite
tinder, or by the friction of wood on wood through the aid of a simple device
for which the English anthropologist Edward B. Tylor devised the name 'firedrill' in the last century. The usual fire-drill consists of two wooden members,
a flat smooth piece of soft wood held horizontal, and a round stick of harder
114

PLATE xxi. Etruscan Mirror. Ixion on his wheel. London, British Museum.

PUNK, FIRE, AND LOVE

wood. The stick is pivoted perpendicularly in a notch on the horizontal faceof the soft wood, and then rapidly rotated, sometimes between the hands but
more often with the aid of an ingeniously disposed thong or strap or bowstring. A pulsating pressure is applied to the rotating stick, as it rotates firstclockwise and then counter-clockwise. The stick by friction widens and deepens
the hole in the soft wood, and fine wood-dust gathering in the hole becomes
red hot, until when tinder is applied to it, by blowing the tinder catches fire.
For us the interesting thing is that among the peoples who use the fire-drill,
the horizontal piece of soft wood is called the 'female' and is sometimes evencarved crudely to suggest a human figure, and the stick is called the 'male'.
The engendering of the fire is regarded as a sexual act, and is pregnant withemotional significance and hallowed by mythological overtones.
Over the past century there have been published a number of papers byanthropologists on the methods used by our ancestors and other early peoples
for kindling fire.1 The percussion method can be traced to remote times, thanks
to the survival of the artifacts employed - the flints and the irons, and the massesof decomposing pyrites used before the iron age. By contrast, the perishable firedrill - the wooden members that by friction yield fire - must generally be studied
among our primitive contemporaries, although Egyptian records establish its
use in ancient Egypt. These two primitive methods for making fire, percussion
and friction, survive to this day by lineal descent in our 'lighters' (the French
briquets] and matches.
Our own interest lies in tinder, that humble but indispensable condiment in
the generation of fire, the highly inflammable material, otherwise worthless,that is the nexus between the spark on the one hand and the kindling on theother. The kinds of tinder that have been used in various parts of the world aremany: charred rags, lint, down, the flower stalk of the agave, dried moss, driedbark, and fungi. Many kinds of fungi have served this purpose, including
ordinary mushrooms in a dried state, puffballs, and, according to the classicallexicons, the fomes officinalis - the agaricum or 'female agaricke' of the oldpharmacopoeias. (While this medicinal shelf fungus could certainly have served
the spark-catching function, we have found no classical text supporting thelexicons, and its value as medicine would seem to have made the humbler service
unlikely, especially as it had to be imported from beyond the Bosphorus.)
Down to our own times the writers about tinder have almost always been
confusing in their use of fungal names: they have seldom been competent in thei. For a recapitulation of the subject and further references, see Arthur Bernard Cook's Zeus God of the BrightSky, Cambridge University Press, 1914, vol. I, pp. 325-330.
115

CHAPTER FIVE

technicalities of the industry that served the market with commercial tinder.
We believe, however, that there is agreement among competent students:
in medieval and renaissance times, and indeed into our own era, the best commercial tinder of Northern Europe was always made from the shelf-fungus
known to mycologists as the fomes fornentarius, a species that must not be
confused with the mis-named fomes igniarius. Indeed, today we know that thisuse of the fomes fomentarius for tinder goes back far. It has been found in thehuman settlements at Maglemose, on the island of Seeland in Denmark, in
conjunction with flint and the remains of pyrites.1 It has been found repeatedly
in the Danish peat bogs of the same era. The Maglemose finds go back to theoldest stone age in Denmark, c. 6,000 B.C. The final ice age had drawn to aclose c. 12,000 B.C., and after an interval of tundra ecology, a forest growth
succeeded, including the birch trees with which invariably the early specimensof fomes fomentarius have been associated. The making of tinder from thisparticular fungus may well be the oldest surviving industry with a continuous
history in northern Europe. We suggest as an hypothesis that this fungus was theobject to which the name Schwamm or 'punk' in earlier forms was originally
bestowed. These words dealt with the fungal world from a utilitarian pointof view, not gustatory; with inedible shelf fungi, not mushrooms. This would
account for the emotional neutrality of the sponge cluster of words, as contrasted
with the pronounced values, negative or positive, of 'toadstool', 'champignon',and many others. Or rather, to speak with more precision, this would accountfor the two distinct emotional responses evoked by mushroomic words. Where
ingestion is concerned, the response, whether favorable or unfavorable, issharp and keyed to the gustatory sense. Where fire-making is concerned, thearchaic emotion that lingers on in such words as 'punk' and 'spunk' is an erotictransfer.
In ancient Greece the god of fire-making was Ixion. He hailed from Mount
Pelion, a center of Helladic culture, where he fathered the Lapiths, the Satyrs,
and the Centaurs, tribes that were kin to the Etruscans and that enjoyed singular
repute for sexual potency. According to the myth, Ixion was bound to a greati. The fomes fomentarius found at Maglemose was described by the Danish scholar, Dr. G. F. L. Sarauw:'Le feu et son emploi dans le Nord de 1'Europe, aux temps prehistoriques et protohistoriques", in the Annales du
XX Congres archeologique et historique de Belgique, i., pp. 196-226. His use of the name fomes igniarius was erroneous, as Professor N. Fabritius Buchwald, of the Kgl. Veterinaer- og Landbohoejskole, Copenhagen, pointed
out in his superseding papers, which in the present state of our knowledge are the latest word on our subject.
See his paper on the history and use of the tinder fungus published in 1930 in Meddeleher fra foreningen til svampckundskabcns fretnmc, Copenhagen; also his later paper, written with Sigurd Hansen, on post-glacial finds ofthe tinder fungus, 1934, Dcmmarks geologiske Undersoegelse, IV Rskke, Bd. 2, Nr. n, Copenhagen. The Danish
title of this paper is, 'Om Fund af Toendersvamp (Polyporus fomentarius [L.] Fr.) fra Postglacialtiden i Danmark'.

116

PUNK, FIRE, AND LOVE

wheel (the sun-wheel) and sent spinning for eternity into space because he had
permitted himself to become enamored of Hera. Before this sentence was meted
out, unbeknownst to him his guilt was proven by trickery: a cloud was made tocondense into the figure of Hera, and Ixion did not resist temptation.
In the British Museum there is an Etruscan mirror, variously attributed tothe 3rd, 4th, or 5th centuries B.C., on which Ixion is depicted undergoing his
punishment. Nude, bound to a seven-spoked wheel, he is in the running posturethat denotes speed. Between the spokes of the wheel we discover two designs,of which one is almost entirely lost. The scholar A. B. Cook, describing thismirror in his work on Zeus, dismissed these signs as meaningless. But it will
be observed that the two designs are not components of the ornamental border.
They are functional elements in the iconographic message. They possess ameaning, but what meaning? Robert Graves, who drew them to our attention,suggests that they are mushrooms. He is surely right, and if so, this Etruscan
mirror offers us the earliest known representations of fungi in European art;
and we observe that the role they here play is related not to food or poison
but to the generation of fire. The eroticism of the design tells us a story intimately linked with the Ixion myth. On one level we see a capped mushroom
representing no particular species. On another level we observe that the mushroom consists of two members, symbolizing the male and female organs of afire-drill, and they are engaged in the supreme act of fire generation. Earlier
we have suggested that certain basic words for the fungi are keyed to words forthe womb. We now remind our readers that the Greek word for mushroom,
1
P.UXYJ?, also means the membmm virile. There are the same bi-sexual correspondences in the mushroom vocabulary that anthropologists discover in the names
for the two parts of the fire-drill. The pattern that we discover on the Etruscan
mirror is, we think, a pictograph symbolizing the generation of fire, the functionof Ixion. This interpretation is in harmony with the verbal and semantic ties
that, by independent evidence, we have discovered in Europe's mushroom
vocabulary. The artist of the Etruscan mirror offers us three messages in one
design - a fire-drill in the act of generating fire, a sexual performance, and themushroom with stipe stabbing the pileus (i.e., μύκης and vulva) that is the symbolof the other two.2
The medicinal shelf fungus known today as the fomes officinalis used to be
1. This double meaning survives in the scientific name for certain microscopic fungi, 'penicillium' (whence thepopular 'penicillin'), which like 'pencil' is derived from a diminutive of'penis'.
2. Pertinent to our argument is a representation of Ixion on an Etruscan vase from Cuma;, reproduced in A.
Baumeister's Denkmdlcr des Klassischen Altertums. In this case, in place of the mushroom theme, the figure on thewheel is enclosed in a double aureole of flames.

117CHAPTER FIVE

called in English the 'female agaricke'. This sexual attribution in one formor another goes back to Dioscorides and Pliny. The explanation that they
offer for it seems a little forced. According to them, the female agaric possessedstraight veins resembling the teeth of a comb, and was white and light throughout, at first sweet to the taste and then bitter - an observation that suggests
a cynical view of womankind. This was the only kind recommended for medicinal use, and the description fits the fomes officinahs. The 'male agaricke',which seems to have been a term applicable to the fomes fomentarius andfomes igniarius, was brown or reddish, sticky, long, hard, and heavy. These
descriptions, more suggestive erotically than enlightening mycologically, originated in the ancient authorities, but were repeated tirelessly until we findthem in such English pharmacopoeias as William Salmon's Pharmacopoeia Londinensis, or the New London Dispensatory, London, 1682, and A Treatise on Foreign
Vegetables, by Ralph Thicknesse, M.D., London, 1749.
We can adduce startling evidence proving the hold on the Greek imaginationof the sexual associations of shelf fungi. In a loth century Byzantine codex
of Dioscorides now owned by The Pierpont Morgan Library, the section on
the άγαρικόν is illustrated by the miniaturist, but his design bears no resemblance
to the fomes officinahs! He must have been totally ignorant of it. Drawing his
knowledge solely from the text with its account of the male and female kinds,
he has given us two drawings inspired by the male and female genital organs!
Our loth century miniaturist may have been copying an earlier manuscript,
but we know not how far back this aberration goes. Some five centuries later,in the year 1491, in the earliest printed book carrying fungal illustrations, theartist was clear and accurate in his delineation of the agaricum (Fig. 7).
Fungi and fire - the tie that weds these two disparate elements was indeed
old, strong, and far-reaching. Consider the following additional evidence. In
ancient Greece there was a mushroom that bore the name κεραύνιον. This word,
like joudre in French, conveys the idea of both thunder and lightning, and themushroom designated by it was therefore the 'thunderbolt-fungus'. We do
not know exactly what species it was, but in Latin it was rendered contemporaneously by tuber, and therefore it was probably an underground growth, perhaps a truffle or a species of terfezia. Many ancient writers refer to the common
belief that thunderbolts made this fungus grow plentifully. Galen speaks of
it. Plutarch in his Convivial Essays devotes a table conversation to the question
why thunder should engender 'thunderbolt' fungi, an essay both graceful andunenlightening. Pliny the Elder in his Historia Naturalis, in Book xix, is careful
118

PLATE XXII
Fomes officinalis. Miniature from a loth century Byzantine
codex of Dioscorides.
By courtesy of The Pierpont Morgan Library,
New York.

PUNK, FIRE, AND LOVE

to distinguish between the influence of the rain and of the thunderbolts: it is
not the rain but the thunder that makes the mushrooms grow. Pliny sounds as
though he were simply repeating a tiresome adage, after the manner of thoseFig. 7
I5TH CENTURYWOODCUTOF

THE AGARICUM

from Hortus Sanitatis, Mainz,
1491.

who say it is not the heat but the humidity that causes distress in summer.
Juvenal in Satire v: 116 speaks of the longed-for thunder in springtime that
replenishes the table with mushrooms:
Post hunc tradentur tubera, si ver tune erit et facient optata tonitrua cenas maiores.

Athenasus, writing in the 3rd century after Christ, quotes Theophrastus five
centuries earlier on certain unidentified underground fungi called οἰτόν in Thrace:119CHAPTER FIVE
Concerning these a singular fact is related, viz., that they grow when autumn rainscome with severe thunderstorms; the more thundering there is, the more they grow, thepresumption being that this is the more important cause. [BOOK n: 62]

One could not demand better documentation for this ancient notion which
the most intelligent men of the day accepted without question. What explanation is there for it; Plutarch had none. Modern mycologists have none. Does
thunder perhaps shake the soil and precipitate a crop of fungi that would otherwise emerge over weeks? There is no evidence to support this. We believe thatthe classical writers were repeating words whose portentous religious meaning
was already in their time forgotten.
The ancient belief must have survived the classic world, but we have foundonly one sure evidence of it in modern Europe. In Littre under tniffe we readthe statement that when it thunders, people in some parts of the French countryside say, "Voila un bon temps pour les truftes" — "There's fine weather for
truffles."1 Professor Georg Morgenstierne of Oslo, however, has turned up for
us amazing data proving that the link between fire and fungi lingers on to thisday in certain parts of Asia. (To Professor Morgenstierne we are deeply indebted
for all our information concerning the Iranian and Indie languages.) In Kashmir
the gilled mushrooms known as hedur and henda are said to be engenderedby thunder. They are eaten by both Hindus and Muslims, cooked with ghee;
they are preserved by drying and used in broths and stews. The mountains ofKashmir produce great quantities of another mushroom, kana-g"ch, which means'ear-morel', and it too emerges from the earth in response to thunder.
More remarkable still is the testimony from that valley southeast of Samarkand
where Yaghnobi is spoken, a dialect descended from the ancient Sogdian language, related to Persian and of course belonging to the Indo-European family.
The folk who speak this tongue believe that when the highest god shakes his
winter coat, the air is rent with thunder, and then the children must say:
I. From the ifith through the i8th century various English writers attributed 'fairy-rings' to lightning; thus
Robert Plot's The Natural History of Stafford-shire, 1686, Chap, i; Erasmus Darwin's The Botanic Garden, London,
1791, i: 36:
So from dark clouds the playful lightning springs,
Rives the firm oak, or prints the Fairy-rings.
The evidence indicates that this belief had no roots in folklore but sprang from the New Learning, a 'scientific'
explanation to replace outworn notions about the dancing of midnight fairies. Moreover, whereas today 'fairyring' immediately suggests mushrooms, the early writers such as Robert Plot discuss fairy-rings at length without
mentioning fungi. It was the grass of darker green that made the ring, not mushrooms, and the link between
the two is first mentioned, so far as our knowledge goes, in a book published in London in 1717-18, Richard
Bradley's New Improvements of Planting and Gardening. Therefore, despite superficial appearances, we think wemust rule out the English fairy-ring association with lightning in our discussion of the ancient belief in a thundermushroom.
12O

PUNK, FIRE, AND LOVE
Katta xarcak man, pullja xarcak tau.
The big mushroom is for me, the small one for you.

Not far away, in the upper Zarafshan valley where we find a Persian dialect
known as Tadzhik, the children cry, "Puri, puri, xorc", xorc'meaning 'mushroom'and puri being a thick-stalked annual that springs up early in the season andquickly dies away, both stalk and root being eaten raw by the natives. Someone
should tell us which mushroom these children near the Pamirs have in mind. In
Yaghnobi, and also in Tadzhik as spoken in the vicinity of the town of Match,
there survives an old belief that when the divinity known as Mama, 'Grandmother', shakes her baggy trousers, she lets fly a swarm of lice to the earth, andfrom those lice, after thunder storms, an abundance of mushrooms spring up.1
Today in Persia the common word for 'mushroom' is qarc, but there is one
kind, perhaps a terfezia, that is called dumbalan (plural of dumbal, 'boil', 'pustule','bubo'), and people say they grow in the desert 'after thunderstorms'.
Again thanks to Professor Morgenstierne, we are able to pin-point the earliest
reference in surviving Sanskrit literature to this belief in the 'thunder-mushroom'. It is in Kalidasa's lyrical poem Meghaduta, 'The Cloud Messenger', written about A.D. 400. In verse n the exiled yaksha or demigod addresses therain-cloud drifting northward over India:. . . and when they hear thy sweet-sounding, fertilizing
thunder, which is able to cover the earth with mushrooms. . .

The word used for 'mushroom' here is s'ilmdhra, of unknown derivation, probably taken over by Sanskrit from some earlier unrelated tongue of India.
'Sili' might mean a frog or toad, and then -dhra would mean 'carrying': 'toadcarrier' or something akin to our 'toadstool'. But this tempting explanation of
the ancient word is far from established.
Is it not deeply stirring to contemplate these surviving traces of a folk association uniting thunderbolts with fungi - a belief accepted by ancient Greece andRome, queried by Plutarch, and holding on in Kashmir and the Pamirs?
Angelo de Gubernatis in the second volume of his Mythologie des Plantes (Paris,
1882), when he discusses mushrooms, observes that the solar hero was said
sometimes in antiquity to hide behind a mushroom, and he supposes that by'mushroom' a cloud was meant. The direct and simple meaning seems preferable. The solar hero, a projection of divine fire, lies dormant for the nonce ini. See Heinrich F. J. Junker, Arische Forschungcn, 'Yaghnobi-Studien', I, p. 106 (Abhandlungen d. philol.-hist.
Klasse d. sachsischen Akademie d. Wissenschaften, Band XLI, No. n, Leipzig, 1930). His source was M. S. Andreev,'Po etnografli tadzhikov', in Tadzhikistan, sbornik statej, edited by N. L. Korzhencvskij, Tashkent, 1925, pp. 172-3.
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fungal tinder, ready to leap forth on divine command, just as the dormantφαλλός; rises in ίθύ-φαλλος. Here then is a partial answer to Plutarch's question: thefungi, saturated in sexual associations, are intimately associated as tinder withthe making of fire, and fire expresses metaphorically the procreative act. On
every plane the fungal world is redolent with the spirit of generation. Even thephosphorescence that some fungi emit must have deepened the mystery,augmented the awe. The very fungi were called into being by the gods, by
those bolts of celestial fire hurled to earth with the crackling and deafening roarof thunder.
Let us pursue this theme further, to the very core of ancient Rome's religious
beliefs. Rome's eponymous heroes sprang from the union of divine fire withvestal virgins, and fungi seem to have been officially present at the consummation. Sir James Frazer in The Golden Bough summarized the legends andpointed out their meaning.1 It seems that when Ocrisia, handmaiden to Tanaquil
the wife of King Tarquin the Elder, was offering cakes and libations of wineon the royal hearth, a flame assumed the shape of the male member and shot
forth from the fire, impregnating her with a child who was destined to reign
as Servius Tullius. The child's divine paternity was well attested later when an
aureole of lambent flame was seen to play around his head. Concerning Romulus
and Remus Plutarch records a similar legend, which he took from Promathion's
History of Rome: in the house of the king of Alba there hovered over the hearthfor days a phantasma in the shape of the male organ of generation, which in
the end, by one of the handmaidens, gave being to the twins.2
Nowhere in surviving versions of these legends are fungi mentioned. Whatthen was our surprise when we discovered that Professor Arthur Stanley Peaseof Harvard University, in a note in Classical Philology in 1947, urged that a natural
phenomenon be sought to explain these miracles and volunteered the surmise thatthe key would be found in the mushroom that he called the ithyphallus impudicus, that astonishing fungus which from its sac or cod shoots forth to its proudheight in the course of minutes. This, says Professor Pease, is what underlay
Ovid's line in the Fasti, vi: 631:.. . hie inter cineris obsceni forma virilis.
1. See The Golden Bough, vol. n of The Magic Art and the Evolution of Kings, pp. 195 ff, where he also gives
the sources; a fuller discussion appears in Frazer's translation and discussion of Ovid's Fasti, published by Macmillan in 1929, vol. IV, pp. 300-304. For Arthur Stanley Pease's note, see Classical Philology, vol. 42 (Oct. 1947),
P- 2532. Plutarch for the phallic apparition used μόρτον άνθρός. (Plutarch's Moralia, Loeb edition, vol. rv, p. 360)
If μόρτον by etymology or punning was linked with μορύσσω (vide E. Boisacq's Diet. Etym. de la Langue
Grccque), the association with the phallic morel would be clinched. See discussion of'morel', pp. 153-4.
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PUNK, FIRE, AND LOVE

Professor Pease's happy suggestion may be refined. The morel, though far removed in mycological classification from the phallus impudicus, embodies in
its shape the same erotic symbol, and unlike the phalloidacese shows a remarkable predilection for sites of wood fires. J. G. Gleditsch in his Methodus Fungorum, published in Berlin in 1753, told1 how just recently the old peasant womenof Brandenburg, observing this predilection, had taken to making bonfires
in the woods to induce the growth of morels, causing thereby so many forest
fires that the authorities had banned the practice. Dr. Ramsbottom in his
Mushrooms & Toadstools reports that during and after the first World War thesites of burned houses in northern France and of abandoned trenches became
veritable gardens of morels, and he also relates a personal experience confirming this biological nexus between morels and fired places. Indeed this affinity
is a commonplace of fungal lore.
We place then a morel rather than the stinkhorn in those ancient hearths ofRome's eponymous founders. And this leads us to venture a daring conjecture
concerning the origin of the Greek work for 'mushroom', μύκης. In modern
times we are in a position to observe how the words of the sponge cluster - thebasic words for the fungi in common Indo-European - yield place sometimes toother words that express a fashionable facet of man's evolving attitude toward thefungal world. From a name for a single edible species, mousseron in 'mushroom'
becomes a designation for any edible species and even for all species. The Frenchchampignon, once applied only to the common field mushroom, acquired overshadowing importance when the art of its cultivation was mastered, and now
this word embraces in French all fungi, even the microscopic kinds. In German
Pilz is a newcomer, but already competes with Schwamm, and in Russian guba
has largely surrendered the field to the toothsome grib. Thanks to the importanceof a particular mushroom species, its specific name can become generic. In
Greek σπόγγος lost its fungal meaning early - the surviving records never report it- and its terrain was wholly occupied by μύκης. What potent forces could havecaused this early substitution? Our surmise is that μύκης originally was the name of
the morel, and that its awesome religious and magical meaning, its link withthe generation of fire and divine procreation, so far eclipsed all other fungal
associations that it took over the whole semantic area of the fungi. The
Greeks never won honors in mycophagy and there was no competition fromfungi as food. Let us see whether, as we progress in our argument, we comeupon supporting evidence for this possibility. The sacred role of the μύκης as weenvisage it, could have been a legacy of the Etruscans or some otherI. p. 60; the references in Dr. Ramsbottom's book are on pp. 76-77.
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Mediterranean culture. In neither ancient nor middle Greek is there any wordthat scholars translate by 'morel', so that the way is open for our suggestion.
The specific name in Latin was spongia or spongiolus in imperial times, a survival
in Latin of the lost fungal meaning of σπόγγος.
Just as in French one distinguishes the specific and the generic uses of champignon, so in ancient Greek the reader must decide whether in a given context
μύκης meant the morel or the whole fungal tribe. As an example let us take atext from the Geoponica, an agricultural treatise assembled in its present form
before the end of the first millennium A.D. In Book xn Chapter 41 we find apassage that reads thus:
If you would have μύκητας to grow from the ground, you must select a spot of light soil
on a hill where reeds grow ; there you must collect together twigs and other burnable
things, and set all on fire just before rain is expected. If rain come not, you must sprinkle
the place with pure water, but the (μύκητας thus produced are poor ones.

How reminiscent this is of Gleditsch and Ramsbottom! The Greeks also knew
what the German and the Englishman tell us, and in this Greek text μύκης, in
our opinion, must carry the specific meaning of 'morel'.
Up to this point we have linked fungi only with the gods of thunder andlightning in the Indo-European world. But the association is far more extensive.
On a later page we shall see that the Bedouin of the desert, when electric storms
are severe in our month of October, know for sure that the crop of esteemed
terfezia will be heavy four months later, and at the appointed time they make their
way to those places where experience has taught them to seek this delectable fare.
A Philippine mycologist, Jose Miguel Mendoza, reports1 that the natives
throughout the islands commonly believe that thunder and lightning cause thegeneration of mushrooms, and in the spring of the year when they hear thethunder roll, they rush into the meadows to gather the edible kinds. In the
Pampango tongue, spoken in central Luzon, the collybia albuminosa is called thepayungpayungan kulog, the first word meaning 'parasol-like', and the second
being 'thunder' in both Tagalog and Pampango. The culture of the Philippines
is an accretion of many layers, and this belief in the thunder-mushroom could
be Malayan or Indian or Chinese.
Yes, Chinese. By good fortune we are able to document the Chinese associationof certain mushrooms with thunder. There came into our possession in 1951 arare, 8-volume work on ethno-mycology entitled The History of Mushrooms,
I. See his 'Philippine Mushrooms', published in The Philippine Journal of Science, vol. 65, Jan.-April 1938, which
the author has supplemented for us in private correspondence.
124

PLATE XXIII
Jean-Henri Fabre. Morchella vulgaris Pers.
English: morel; French: morille;
Russian: smorchok.

PUNK, FIRE, AND LOVE

dated 1811 and written by Ishiwara Gusha ('the Fool from the town of Ishiwara'),a pen-name for the Japanese classical scholar Katashi Masujima, professor in
Yedo at the school for samurai called Shoheiko. (Another of his pen-names
was Ran-en, 'Orchid Garden'.) In this curious, hand-written work the author
gathered together everything that had been said about mushrooms by Chineseand Japanese authors, and it is our hope to present it some day to our readersin an annotated translation. With the help of our friends Mr. and Mrs. Wango
Weng, we have discovered in the sixth volume extensive discussions of threekinds of thunder-mushrooms. All three make excellent eating. First there is
the lei-ching t'an, 'thunder-aroused mushroom':which springs forth when the worms are stirring and the east wind brings thethaw and the earth loosens and the air grows warm. (This suggests the morel,but later the author speaks of the 'parasol' of the mushroom.) The second is thelei-sheng chun, 'thunder-peal mushroom':which grows in the grass after thunder and rain in summer and autumn, 'leaping
forth when the thunder calls'. Finally we have the lei chun, the simple 'thundermushroom' :Though our Japanese author quotes Chinese sources that refer only to theregions of Soochow and Kwangsi Province, this does not mean that the association of thunder with mushrooms is confined to those parts of China. Indeed,
we can document the survival of this theme on the very periphery of the Chinese cultural world. In a letter written to us by Charles Evans, the Himalayan
explorer and climber, he tells ut that the Sherpas, who culturally are Tibetans,believe that thunderstorms make mushrooms grow. On the other hand Masujima, himself a Japanese, is silent on the thunder theme in his treatment ofJapanese mushrooms: apparently the Japanese know it not.
But this is not all. In the language of the Maori of New Zealand, the word formushroom is whatitiri. The word for thunder is the same: whatitiri or whaitiri.
As a proper noun Whaitiri is the name of the mythical ancestress of the Maori
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people and all the other branches of the Polynesian race. People think of her as
the thunderer, and her grandchild, Tawhaki, shoots forth bolts of lightning
from beneath his armpits. Eponym, fire, fungi - how astonishing that we shouldfind the same pattern in Oceania as in the Mediterranean! Some years ago
Professor Heim drew attention to a curious belief in Madagascar, where Polynesian influences have been strong.1 He is describing the mushroom lentinus
tuber regium Fr., called olatafa by the natives of the Tanala country. According
to the local chief, the practice is to dry this fungus, and shred and rub it toa powder with the aid of a hard stone, and then to the powder the natives
add a little water. When a thunder storm breaks and reaches alarming violence,
it is the custom to take some of the paste into the mouth, and when the lightning
flashes, spit it forth into the sky, crying out "Fotaka!", or else, " Fotaka malemy!",which means, "Earth!" or "Soft earth!", thereby giving utterance to a prayerthat the thunder will be mild as mud. Professor Heim confirmed this practicewith other informants in the region of Fort-Carnot. It seems that tafa in thenative language designates a person momentarily off balance, and this word
may underlie the name of the mushroom and the incantation. Whatever thelayers of meaning that underlie the Tanala practice, for us its importance is thetie that binds certain mushrooms with bolts of celestial fire. The explanation
given to Professor Heim is not convincing: it sounds like a rationalization bypeople who have forgotten. That mushroomic spittle tossed into the teeth of
the storm, into the flash of lightning - may it not incorporate the seminal idea,
the procreative aspiration, a prayer to the divine begetter > This is not a rhetoricalquestion. It is a suggestion for anthropologists working in Madagascar.
Here we bring to an end, but only for the present, our discussion of thecultural tie that links mushrooms with lightning. On page 316 we shall returnto this mystery, and with the aid of further evidence of our pandemic theme
in archaic cultures, we shall submit a surmise to explain it.
I. 'L'Olatafa', by Roger Heim, published in the Archives du Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle, in the Volume du Tricentenaire, 6th series, Tome xn, 1935, pp. 549-554.

126

8 THE GOURD
CLUSTER

1 he French word potiron means 'pumpkin'. In the West of France and as far
south as the Garonne it also means any large mushroom. The word presents
what is perhaps the prettiest problem in the whole fungal vocabulary of Europe. No one has hitherto determined its origin. Littre originally quoted Gilles
Menage's suggestion of a word found in the writings of the Arabic thinker
Avicenna - alphotie. Later in his Supplement he added Marcel Devic's alternative
Arabic source, the word futr meaning 'mushroom'. Oscar Bloch in his turnfavored the Syrinc pdturtd, which he said meant 'morel'. These bizarre suggestions
with their curious bias for the Near East offer no explanation for potiron in thesense of 'pumpkin'. They only illustrate how even philologists, when at a loss,
give recognition to the flimsiest guesses. The Arabic and the Syriac words are
etymologically identical, based on a Semitic root meaning 'to split' or 'to cleave'.
In Latin cucutna means a kettle, cucumis a cucumber, and cucurbita a gourd.
Among primitive communities living in the climatic zone where gourds
nourish, these have always served for cooking fluid food and boiling water.
This primitive practice must still have been alive in the minds of the ancient
Romans when they used words for kettles and gourds that closely resembled
each other, and we think that potiron is a translation (pot meaning 'kettle')of the Latin words, preserving for us the semantic link that was obvious in
Latin. But this does not explain the use of potiron for 'mushroom'.
The pumpkin-mushroom link is not confined to potiron. We discover it inProvenfal, where coucourlo means both the common field mushroom andthe pumpkin. The Italian cocomero means 'pumpkin' but not mushroom;
the Provencal cougoumello is the name of certain mushrooms, but does notmean pumpkin. The general word for all mushrooms in Portuguese is cogumelo;
it is not, however, linked with any gourd. We seem to be in the presence hereof a variety of words derived from one or the other of the Latin cucuma, cucumis,
and cucurbita. But why are mushrooms found in this company?
All words such as these, which live out their lives for the most part in oral
usage, lend themselves to popular contamination with other words. Some
mushrooms when they first break the soil look like eggs, and this is why theamanita caesarea is called in standard Italian the ovolo and the amanita muscaria
the ovolaccio. The French word coque means 'eggshell' and there are colloquial
words in Italian, cocco and cucco, meaning 'egg'. In standard Italian cocco is sometimes used as another name for the amanita csesarea, and this word takes various
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local forms in the North: in Piedmont cocon or coc or cucon; in Lombardy,
jung cocch; in Venice, the boleo coco or coco bon; in Genoa, the cucun. (Our English'cocoon' belongs to the same family.) The names of the amanita muscaria innorthern Italy bear the same stamp: cocch fals or cocch velenos, or cocch bastard in
Milan. The lepiota procera is the coccomelle or cuccamele in Piedmont; in France
this species is called in some regions the coulemelle and in others the potiron.
It would appear that all of these names stem ultimately from the Latin word forkettle, but have been influenced in their shape by words for eggs or egg-shells.
But all this still leaves unexplained why, in the first place, pumpkins andmushrooms got mixed up together.
Another word for 'pumpkin' in French is pepon, for which Frederic Godefroy
gives the following early variants: popon, poupon, pompon, ponpon. 'Pumpkin'in English is a popular form of the Middle English 'pumpion', which in turncomes from the French word that we are now discussing. For the sake of ourargument and in advance of our supporting evidence, let us assume that the
French word pepon originally carried two meanings, 'pumpkin' and 'mushroom'.
It has retained only one in French, and bequeathed only that one to English.
But in Basque papun and panpun mean 'mushroom', and could represent thelost meaning of pepon. The French philologists have been baffled by the word
pompon, which is the English 'pompom', since its semantic tie with gourds
is not clear. But the difficulty is solved if the old French word also meant 'mushroom', for what is a pompon but a 'mushroom'? 1
This hypothesis, supported so far by only two strands of circumstantial evidence, still does not tell us why gourds were linked with mushrooms.
This link is deep-seated, but we believe we can put our finger on it.
At the outset let us examine the word potiron more closely, and especially
its use in the i6th century.
In the sense of 'mushroom' potiron was in use at least as far back as the I5th
century, according to Albert Dauzat. This is the older meaning, antedating thediscovery of America. Potiron as a designation for gourds is confined to squashes
and pumpkins, and they are of New World provenience. In the i6th century
these vegetables were called courges d'Inde and courges d'outre-mer, but potiron began
I. In the United States and Canada, the ordinary woodsman's word for any shelf fungus is 'conk', and becauseof the shape of the growth, the word is supposed to come from 'conch'. But woodsmen do not know the molluscs
and are unlikely to turn to them for metaphors. The Dictionary of American English gives grounds for supposingthat 'conk' is a shortened form of'conkus' or 'konkus'. In the English counties from Lincolnshire to the Scottish
border there has long been a word used for cucumbers: 'congers', 'cungers', and'conkers'. Is the American word
for the fungus cognate with the name for the cucumber, and do we find here another example of the associationof fungi with gourds? In the absence of a bettter etymology, we offer this as a conjecture, to be tested byfurther inquiry.
128

PLATE xxiv. Jan Fyt. Still life. Brussels, Musees Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique.

PLATE xxv. Jan Davidsz. de Heem. Still life. London, Wallace Collection.

PLATE xxvi. Adriaen van Utrecht. Still life. Brussels, Musees Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique.

PLATE xxvu. Frontispiece to Franciscus van Sterbeeck's Theatrum Fungorum, Antwerp, 1675.

THE GOURD CLUSTER

to supersede those nonce names in the iyth century. If there was a metaphoricaltransfer, we must conclude that the New World squash suggested a mushroom
to the French and was therefore called a mushroom. This explanation seems tohave satisfied the philologists Albert Dauzat and Oscar Bloch, but it leaves
us sceptical. To be fair we must point out that there is one small squash withscalloped edges that in color and even in external texture might suggest certain
mushrooms. This is the kind of squash, a variety of cucurbita pepo, known
formerly as the simlin or cymling and today as the patty pan squash or whitebush scallop. A further circumstance might support the philologists' position. The
French were discovering how to cultivate the champignon de couche at the very
moment when they were learning to cultivate the squash, in the first half of
the iyth century, and there is reason to believe that the manured hills of thesquash-patch served simultaneously as mushroom beds. For centuries the country
folk of some parts of western Europe had been encouraging the growth ofvarious kinds of edible fungi by bringing about the conditions under which
they might spontaneously appear. In the iyth century it was known in France
that parings of the psalliota campestris rejected in the kitchen could be thrownon horse manure with a reasonable expectation that they would produce acrop of mushrooms in the warm fermenting dung.1 As we have mentioned
before on page 6, N. de Bonnefons described this practice for the first timein print in his Le Jardinier fran^ois in 1651, and he added the significant advice
that the beds prepared for melons could serve this double purpose. In our
mind's eye we can see the mushrooms growing in the same beds or hills withmelons, pumpkins, and other gourds, and this was taking place at the very
moment when potiron, an old word for 'mushroom', was beginning to be usedas the name for certain exotic gourds, lately introduced from overseas. It wastherefore not unnatural for farmers to associate mushrooms with gourds. Furthermore, the readiness of both squashes and mushrooms to putrefy rather soon
into a watery mess2 might have suggested a kinship that expressed itself in the
1. The use of fungal 'spawn' came later, as did the discovery that mushrooms lent themselves to cultivation incaves and cellars. But there is a baffling sentence in the Satyricon of Petronius Arbiter, written in the first century:
Ecce intra hos dies scripsit, ut illi ex India semen boletorum mitteretur. [Loeb Library, p. 59] Within a
few days, I may say, he has written for a cargo of mushroom seed from India. If boletus here carries its usual
meaning of the Caesar's amanita, it indicates a mastery in the cultivation of these delectable mushrooms wholly
unknown today and never elsewhere mentioned in surviving records of ancient times.
2. Shakespere uses 'squash' on several occasions. Thus in Act. m, Sc. i of A Midsummer Night's Dream Bottom isasking the names of various characters and from one learns that he is Pease Blossom, whereupon Bottom retorts:
I pray you commend me to Mistress Squash your motherand to Master Peascod your father.
'Squash' as a name for the American gourd is derived from a Narragansett Indian word, and Shakespere could
not have known the word and probably did not know the gourd. 'Squash' in the sense of'squeeze' is European
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use of the same name for both, a similarity in putrefaction that Sir Thomas
Elyot pointed out in 1541 in the words that we quoted on page 19. All in all,the evidence assembled in this paragraph would seem to offer an explanation
for the dual use of potiron.
But let us not forget the suggestion inherent in the older forms of the word
pepon indicating that the association of gourds and mushrooms long antedated
the 16th century and the cultivation of the field mushroom.
J_ here is a source of promising evidence relevant to our theme of surprising andfascinating quality in the still-life paintings of the Low Countries in the iythcentury. This was the epoch when the Flemish and Dutch schools were producing innumerable canvases representing the foods of the times - fish, game, meats,
vegetables, fruits. The number of accomplished artists who devoted their talents
to paintings of food is astonishing, and apparently they never tired of their
theme. We have combed these still-lifes for mushrooms, and while of necessity
we cover only a small part of the source materials, it is clear that paintings offood with mushrooms are exceedingly rare. We have found only four, of which
not one is Dutch. All four are Flemish, or from the Catholic side of the religious
line that bisected then as now the Low Countries. On a later page we shall revert
to the significant absence of fungi as food from paintings of the Dutch school.
Of the four paintings we reproduce one by Jan Fy t, and details from a canvas
by Jan Davidsz. de Heem and from one by Adriaen van Utrecht. All three ofthese painters were in the plenitude of their powers at the precise time whenN. de Bonnefons was composing his book on gardening and describing forthe first time the preparation of mushroom beds. A fourth painting, attributed
to the Antwerp artist Frans Snyders, shows a young market woman surroundedby baskets of divers vegetables and fruits with one basket of ceps; it hangs
in the art gallery at Schloss Pommersfelden, Germany. Snyders was a slightly
older contemporary of the other three. Of this painting a iyth century variant
is in the Louvre. All four artists worked in Antwerp or Brussels.
The startling feature of the three paintings that we reproduce is that in all
three we find a. potiron or squash, and in two the potiron is juxtaposed to mushrooms. In the light of the dual meaning of potiron, this juxtaposition justifies
a conjecture that it was not accidental. Thanks to the gracious help of Dr. Hughin origin, and specifically it meant for Shakespere an unripe pea pod or 'peascod'. The pea pod played a familiar
role in amatory folklore in Shakespere's day, and 'peascod' was heavily charged with genito-urinary puns andsymbols; cf. 'cod', 'codpiece', etc. Mistress 'Squash' invokes a parallel female metaphor equivalent to Shakespere's
erotic use of 'medlar' in Romeo and Juliet and elsewhere. Though 'cod', as we have seen, sometimes meant'puffbair, in Bottom's words there is no link with the fungal world or gourds.
130THE GOURD CLUSTER

C. Cutler, Assistant Director of the Missouri Botanical Garden, St. Louis,
we can identify the squashes, and he points out that they are the only vegetables of New World provenience in these paintings. In the Van Utrecht thesquash is the cucurbita moschata, and belongs to the variety now called Dickinson Field pumpkin, familiar in the American Southwest and in central andsouthern Mexico. The squash in the Fyt is probably a cucurbita moschata but
might be a pumpkin, i.e., cucurbita pepo. In Heem's painting we clearly find the
pumpkin. Both squashes and pumpkins may be called potirons in modern French.
As for the mushrooms, Snyders, Fyt, and Heem give us ceps; Van Utrecht
offers us ceps and three apparently gilled mushrooms. If as we believe theselatter are very ripe champignons or roses, they are the earliest known representation of the common mushroom by an accomplished artist.
The mute testimony of these paintings is of extraordinary interest. It mightseem probable that in the painters' minds the squash and mushrooms had anaffinity for each other, and the squashes in question were certainly of American
origin. At the same time the mushrooms painted by them as food were
chiefly boleti, and boleti never grew in a pumpkin patch. Clearly the champignon de couche played little or no role in the market places of Flanders andBrabant, and the affinity of mushrooms with the squash was unrelated to themushroom beds described by Bonnefons. The cucurbitaceae painted by the
Flemish artists did not include the patty pan squash, with its superficial resemblance to a mushroom. Potiron in the sense of'mushroom' has never been known
in the Walloon dialect of French.
The key to the four Flemish paintings is to be found in Franciscus van Sterbeeck's Theatrum Fungorum, published in Antwerp in 1675, the earliest bookdealing solely with mushrooms. The author never refers to the still-life painters,
who were his older contemporaries, but he divulges a precious item of ethnomycological lore. He informs us that the Flemings were mycophobes until
the beginning of the iyth century, at which time certain Italian merchantscame to take up residence in Flanders, and by their example they showed thatmushrooms could be eaten. They launched a vogue for this novel victual, gathering mushrooms themselves, importing dried ones from Italy and Burgundy,
and teaching all and sundry how to distinguish the many good kinds from thebad. In fact, Van Sterbeeck's treatise is itself a tribute to this budding mycophilia, written by an enthusiast to spread the good tidings, the first of hundredsof such missionary efforts brought out in the mycophobic North in the past
three centuries. As there was no Flemish word to designate mushrooms
suitable for the dining room, the Flemings had lately borrowed kampernoeljes
131CHAPTER FIVE

from, the French dialect spoken in nearby Picardy,1 and applied it to all the edible
kinds, especially ceps. Afterwards it gave way to champignons. We reproduce thefrontispiece of Van Sterbeeck's work, with its quaint commentary on early
mycophagy among the Flemings. The author portrays himself in a bust at the topof the architectural design, helpfully telling us that his age was 44. On one sideof him are effigies of happy infants nourished doubtless on the wholesome fungi;
on the other side the corresponding amori are in acute distress from the otherkind. Below we see two gentlemen responding to aggressive selling tactics of themushroom vendors. We suspect that the vendors on the right are ready to sell
the evil wares descending from the wretched infants above.
For Van Sterbeeck, for Jan Fyt and his colleagues, mushrooms were a novelty
like the squashes from the New World. This must have been one reason for
juxtaposing them. Just as the Italians brought mycophagy to Flanders, so they
may have been addicted to the new-fangled gourds. Indeed, Italian artists may
have suggested to the Flemings the very theme for the paintings that we are
discussing. Already in the i6th century the Italian painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo
was giving eloquent expression to the same idea.
Arcimboldo was born in 1527 and died in 1593. He delighted in allegoricalfigures representing the Seasons, the Four Elements, and the cardinal pointsof the compass, which he would contrive to represent by an ingenious arrangement of fruits, vegetables, meats, animals, fishes, or utensils, his selection
harmonizing with his allegory. We reproduce one of his paintings, a reclining
figure that embodies the spirit of Autumn. Until a few years ago it belonged
to a parish church near Brescia, and it now hangs in the Pinacoteca of that city,
not far from Milan. However deficient Arcimboldo was in intellectual andemotional depth, he was an accomplished craftsman, and this painting constitutes
a document of singular value for the ethno-botanist. Most of the vegetables andfruits are of Mediterranean provenience, including the medlars of which no
fewer than four are present. The egg plant had been lately introduced into Italy
from the East. The tuberoses in the figure's hair, the squashes, and the maizecome from America, the first two from Mexico. The maize is of a Mexican
variety also, though it could come from further south.
Our painting is undated, but perhaps we can fix with reasonable certainty theperiod of its execution. From 1562 to 1587 Arcimboldo lived in Central Europe,
except for a visit to Milan in 1566. Both by its traditional location and by theartist's choice of vegetables and fruits, it is clear that the painting was done in
I. The use in the Low Countries of kampernoeljes dates back at least to 1567, for we find it cited in Hadrianus
Junius' Nomendator published in that year.
132

PLATES XXVIII, XXIXPLATE xxvui. Giuseppe Arcimboldo. Autumn. Brescia, Pinacoteca.

PLATE xxix. Giuseppe Arcimboldo. Autumn: Detail. Brescia, Pinacoteca.

THE GOURD CLUSTER

Italy. From what we know about the arrival in Italy of the exotic plants that we
find in the painting, it is far more likely that the artist worked on it after 1587
than before 1562. This means that it was a product of his last years, between
1587 and his death in 1593. These were the very years when potatoes were becoming known in northern Italy, and their absence from our painting favors an
early date within these permissible limits. For the past half century ethno-botanists and cultural historians have been studying the impact on the Old Worldof the plants discovered in the New, especially tobacco, potatoes, and maize.
To document the first phases of these profound innovations they have combed
the writings of the explorers and historians, and searched through the i6th
century herbals. The herbalist Leonhard Fuchs in his De Historia Stirpium,
published in 1542, was the first to offer his readers a picture of maize, a woodcut.
Thereafter such woodcuts appeared in almost all herbals, often copied not fromlife but from a preceding herbal, and often deficient botanically. For workers inthis field the i6th century still-life painters offer an additional source of evidence
that seems to have been ignored. We do not know whether our Autumn by
Arcimboldo is the earliest still-life with maize, but we submit that his paintingof it is incomparably superior to any pictures of maize that have hitherto been
pointed out from the i6th and even I7th centuries. The artist's eye was truer
than the herbalist's, his technique superior to the woodcutter's.1
Our own interest in the Arcimboldo lies in his mushrooms. Mycophiles will
be delighted with the clavaria that serves the recumbent Autumn for beard andmustachios. In the middle of the left thigh is an ovolo or Caesar's amanita. These
are the earliest mushrooms known to us that we can say are well painted, andtheir like was not to be seen again for a full half century. We now draw ourreader's attention to the proximity of the squash to the ovolo, and that squash
happens to be the very one that, on an earlier page, we likened in texture andshape to mushrooms. It is the squash of American provenience variously called
the cymling, the patty pan, and the white bush scallop. What urge prompted
the artist to place mushroom and squash together ? The scallop was an exotic, but
in Italy the edible mushroom was not. Must we fall back on an accidental
juxtaposition as our only resort; Or do we discover here an expression, possibly
I. For data about Arcimboldo's life we have relied on Benno Geiger's monograph, Dipinti ghiribizzosi diGiuseppe Arcimboldo, Florence, 1954. Plates 47, 52, 54, and 69 contain mushrooms. One of these hangs in theJohn and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, Florida, and another of them is the one we reproduce.
A painting by Arcimboldo that closely parallels the one in Brescia is owned by Edward James, Esq., of Chichester, England, who has kindly furnished us with photographs of it. (Geiger mentions but does not reproduce thiswork.) In this variant the clavaria plays the same role. Instead of an ovolo in the thigh, we discover two ovoli,each constituting a cheek of the recumbent god. For the early history of maize in Europe we turned to John J.
Finan's study, 'Maize in the Great Herbals', published in 1948 in the Annals of the Missouri Botanical Garden,
pp. 149-191.
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CHAPTER FIVE

only half conscious on the artist's part, of an ancient association of ideas, suchas we adumbrated earlier and will shortly pursue further? But before we revert
to that theme, we shall conclude our discussion of the mushroom-gourd linkin iyth century paintings by briefly mentioning another aspect under whichmushrooms and gourds were viewed together, the aspect that led Sir Thomas
Elyot in 1541 to warn the readers of his Castel ofHelth to beware of'musherons,. . . gourds, and al other thinges, whiche wyll sone putrefie'.
A favorite theme of some iyth century still-life painters in the Low Countries was the transitory nature of all living things, the vanity of this world ascontrasted with the eternal values of the next. In a private collection known to
us there is a painting by Cornelis de Heem, son of Jan Davidsz. and identified
with the Dutch school, in which this vanitas vanitatis chord finds graceful expression. A shaft of light penetrates from an aperture above to a sepulchral
setting where a lovely flower arrangement is juxtaposed to a bisected gourd
and some growing mushrooms. Unfortunately we have been denied permission to reproduce this extraordinary canvas. The mushrooms are in a shadow
and scarcely lend themselves to identification. They are not pictured as food,but instead as the symbol of decay and death. From the glory of the flowers
in their beauty the eye passes to the doomed segment of the disintegrating
melon and on to the fungal expression of the grave. In this painting putrefaction
and death are the meanings that underlie both gourd and mushroom.
If we are right, there emerged in the iyth century new reasons for associating mushrooms and gourds. But the association in men's minds was far older.
Some indications of this older tradition seem to emerge in the ancient writers.
Take for example the work known in English as Etymologies composed by
St. Isidore of Seville around A.D. 600. He has occasion to list the vegetables
with all their names. Is it by chance that immediately after the cucumbers (cucumeres) and gourds (cucurbitce) he adds the fungi and tubera or truffles;1 Athenaeus
in the second book of The Deipnosophists also discusses numerous vegetable
foods, and what is our surprise to discover that here also the comments on themushrooms and truffles follow hard upon the paragraphs dealing with the
gourds! It is a commonplace of reference works that the order of the alphabet
constantly juxtaposes disparate words and ideas, but the alphabet offers us no
explanation for the sequence of vegetables that we find in St. Isidore andAthenaeus. Pliny is yet another witness to the tie that binds mushrooms togourds. In
i. See J. P. Migne, Patrologia Cursus Cotnpletus, vol. 82, column 637.
134

THE GOURD CLUSTERa sentence in his Historia Naturalis hitherto unremarked by commentators andignored by the editors of Liddell & Scott's Greek lexicon, he tells us, in BookXX, in the chapter that discusses the gourd (cucurbita), about a wild gour/1,
hollow, on which he says the Greeks have bestowed the name spongos, a gourd
growing only on stony soil, of which the walls are of the thickness of a finger,
which when chewed yields a juice wholesome for the stomach.1 Here then in
ancient times is a wild gourd that shares with sponges and mushrooms a namebelonging to the cluster of basic words for the fungal tribe. The dual functionof potiron in the ryth century was a revival and not an innovation, and webelieve that in the root of the Latin word pepo we shall find mushrooms andgourds conjoined.
1 hroughout the Slavic lands there is a distinctive name for the common field
mushroom. It takes various forms, but in the Ukraine it is pecheritza, andpecharka
may be taken as a typical variant in other Slavic countries. The uniformityof this name throughout the Slavic world and its invariable application to thecommon field mushroom are remarkable evidences of its antiquity: it must
antedate the dispersion of the Slavs and the differentiation in Slavic languages.
The Lithuanians do not use the word, nor do the Germanic peoples; but the
Jews of Eastern Europe have adopted it in Yiddish, and refer to a girl dressed
up 'like a pecheritza', as an American might say, 'like a Christmas tree'. Witha transposition of consonants, the word has been taken into both Rumanian,ciuperca, and Magyar, csoporke. Its derivation has never been clear. Some havesuggested that it came frompechora, meaning a cave, since the psalliota campestrislends itself to cultivation in cellars and caves. But this is unacceptable, for
the wild field mushroom does not grow in caves and its artificial cultivation
began in France only after the year 1700. Others have suggested a derivationfrom peek', meaning oven, and gone on to assume that the pecheritza was normally roasted. This is hardly satisfying, for the field mushroom lends itself
to roasting no better than other kinds, and furthermore in the whole richmushroom vocabulary of Europe there is no other name derived from a methodof culinary preparation.
But let us take another look at that Slavic word peek', 'oven'. It is cognatewith the Greek itsztov, the Latin pepo, whence through the French pepon to
the English 'pumpion'. These are ah1 of ancient and well attested lineage, comi. Many editions of Pliny give somphos instead of spongos as the name of this wild gourd. For our purpose thedifference in words is unimportant, since they are cognate. According to the footnote of L. Desfontaines commenting on this textual question (Paris, 1829, vol. 6 of an edition with commentary by various hands, Bk. XX,
Chap, vii [iii]), all Pliny rnss. carry spongos.
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CHAPTER FIVE

ing down to us from an Indo-European root that the French philologists Ernout
and Meillet reconstruct as pekwo, which became kwekwo in the Italian peninsula
and in Celtic. The Latin coquo, meaning to cook, and all its kin and progeny areof this family. Whether cucuma and cucumis belong here, we do not know, buteven if they do not, a semantic blend is possible, for cookery is the common
denominator of them all. Baking and roasting and cooking are the ideas that
underlie the root. That which is baked rises, expands, swells, grows brown
and ripe and mature. It is therefore not surprising to discover that from theearliest times the word carried a second related meaning, the idea of 'ripening
in the sun'. As Ernout and Meillet say, "La notion de 'maturite' est liee a laracine depuis 1'indo-europeen." Whence the application to gourds, and - we
submit - to that species of mushroom, the psalliota campestris, which comes tomaturity in the open fields under the sun. Pumpkins and these mushroomsswell and ripen in the sun. The Provencal concourlo, meaning both field mushroom and pumpkin, is a breath-taking word, for in its specific application to
the field mushroom we witness the toughness of a semantic theme running
through long stretches of time and space.
If our argument prove sound, we have established from evidence gatheredin Eastern Europe the explanation for the link between mushrooms and gourdsthat crops out in the Frenchpotiron and in the Provencal coucourlo.]ust as we haveearlier established what we call apogge cluster of mushroom words, and a sponge
cluster, so now we discover the existence of a gourd cluster. All three appear
to go back to Indo-European roots that resemble each other and that convey
the same innermost idea of a growth or swelling. But only the first of theseclusters directly involves the frogs and toads. In the French word potiron, whereinmushrooms are called pots, metaphorically speaking, the attentive mind catchesa recurrence of the semantic theme that we found in the Indo-Aryan languages,
where a Sanskrit word for 'pot' or jar' has fathered numerous progeny among
the fungal words of various languages, the theme of the gourd, the swellingorganism.
rlere we might end this section, were it not that in the Basque language we
discover an amazing thing. In the Labourdin dialect of Basque the name of thecommon field mushroom is paratxiko, the -tx- in Basque being pronounced
like 'ch' in 'cheek'. By a transposition of consonants we arrive at the Slavic
pecharka, with identical meaning! This is not all. In various parts of Europe
there has always been a tendency for the name of the best known species ofmushroom to be used as a word for mushrooms generally. If, as seems likely,
136

PLATE XXX
Jean-Henri Fabre. Psalliota campestris Fr. ex L.
English: common field mushroom; French: rose;
Russian: pecheritza.

THE GOURD CLUSTER

the general word used for mushrooms in Basque, perretxiko, is a variant ofparatxiko, this would indicate that when the Basques acquired the word, thefield mushroom was for them the dominant species. It is clear that these words
cannot be native to the Basque language, for no native words begin withthe letter p. In Catalonia paratge circulates as a mushroom name, but its specificapplication seems to be variable; we suggest that this Catalan word wasborrowed from Basque. How then does it come about that the Basques use aword that seems to lend itself to identification with a Slavic term?
After pondering this curious question for some time, it occurred to us that
the Gypsies could have borrowed the Slavic word and then, in the course of
their wanderings, delivered it to the Basques. There are numerous lexicons of
the various dialects of Romany, but none of them seem to have been composedby scholars interested in mushrooms. In the end we addressed a blind inquiry tothat specialist in all matters pertaining to Gypsies, the Irish scholar Walter Starkie,
whose experience with the Gypsies goes back over forty years. The reader will
imagine our surprise and pleasure when we learned for the first time from Dr.
Starkie's reply that the Gypsies are great lovers of all kinds of edible mushrooms,
and that one mushroom name used by the Spanish Gypsies is perrechitesl
This is not of course a conclusive explanation of the Basque word. We should
learn more about that Gypsy term - over how much of Europe the Gypsies
use it, and what variations it manifests. The fact that the Gypsies are mycophiles is important. If the fruits of recent scholarship are sound, the Basques are
linguistically related to the Caucasian peoples, and all the Caucasian peoples are
mycophobes; this is true at least of the Georgians, Mingrelians, and Svanetians,
and of the Circassians and Ossetians and Chechens, among whom we have had
an opportunity to locate informants. The mushroom vocabulary of the Basques
is reasonably rich, but consists mostly of borrowed or translated words, as though
they too had once been mycophobes. The Basque country has long been a habitat
for Gypsies. A people like the Basques not steeped in mycophagy is unlikely
to bestow on the mycophilic Gypsies an important word for mushrooms,
and perhaps least of all a word that is itself a loan word in Basque. On the other
hand, mycophilic sojourners in the Pyrenees might have given to the Basques
some lessons in mycophagy. Our hypothesis, after we formulated it, has received
startling collateral support in an observation volunteered to us by a Swedish
friend, the banker Frithiof Ahren. "I have been told", said he, "that the Gypsies
taught us in Sweden to eat mushrooms, in times when food was scarce."137

9
FROM 'PANGGO' TO 'PUPIK'-Cast of Moscow live a Finnish people on the Volga known as the Mordvines.
In their language panggo is the word for mushrooms. North of them and a little
to the east are another Finnish tribe, the Cheremissians, and 'mushroom' forthem is ponggo. Beyond the Urals are the settlements of the Voguls, who say
pangkh; and farther east, on the banks of the River Ob, dwell the last of theFinnish folk, the Ostjaks, with pongkh. Scholars are disposed to accept the likelihood that these Finno-Ugrian peoples have borrowed these words from theWest.1 Somewhat further to the east, in the valley of the Yenisei, the small
tribe known as the Yenisei-Ostjaks are familiar with the amanita muscaria andcall it the hanggo. They are unrelated ethnically or linguistically to the Finnish
peoples, but they too have borrowed the same mushroomic word.
But the diffusion of the word does not stop on the banks of the Yenisei. Far
to the east of them are the Yukaghirs, a tribe culturally and geographically
midway between the Finns and the primitive Paleo-Siberian tribes on the Pacificcoast. According to Waldemar Jochelson, they are mycophobes, considering allmushrooms unclean, springing up from dogs' urine. They have a word forfungus, can-pai, of which the first element means 'tree'. Is -pai related to ourFinnish words;
If we may digress for a moment, the pejorative association of mushrooms withdogs' urine is not peculiar to the Yukaghirs; far from it. One of the fungal words
in Hindi is kUkar-muta, 'dog's urine', and this corresponds with the Marathi term,
kutrya-cem mut. The Jews of eastern Europe refrain from eating the mushrooms
that they call in Yiddish hintishe shvemlekh, 'dog mushrooms', according to an
informant from Chotin in Bessarabia; these are mushrooms that grow in damp
places at the foot of trees, and that are believed to be contaminated by dogs. We
suspect that the same idea lies behind the generic word for mushrooms of the
mycophobic Ingush tribe in the Caucasus. Their word is dzhahnuskul', 'dog's
bride', in which dzhali means 'dog'. In the Germanic language of the Faeroe
Islands, hunda-land, 'dog's urine', is a word for mushroom. For 'dog' the Polessay pies; the feminine form of this word, psica, is not used, but its plural, psice,
1. The diffusion of the word for 'fungus' among the eastern Finnish peoples and eastward in Siberia to the
Chukchees was pointed out by Karl Bouda in his treatise, Das Tschuktschische, Leipzig, 1941, pp. 35-36. He does
not mention the Yukaghirs. We owe our information about them to Waldemar Jochelson's The Yukaghir andthe Yukaghirized Tungus, published by the American Museum of Natural History, N. Y., 1926, as vol. rx inthe series of the Jesup North Pacific expedition, pp. 334, 340-1, 419. For information about the Yenisei-Ostjaks,
see Kai Donner's ethnological notes published in the Memoires of the Societe Finno-Ougrienne, vol. LXVI,
Helsinki, 1933.

FROM 'PANGGO' TO 'PUPIK'
is a name bestowed on certain small mushrooms, probably coprini. In France
fungi of this genus are known popularly as the pisse-chien, and we suspect thatthe deliquescent ink-caps underlie the other examples that we have cited. The
pisse-chien of the French becomes thepixacan in the langue d'oc: we have foundit in Gascon, in Catalan, and in Majorcan, and doubtless it occurs elsewhere.
The ending -can comes down from the Latin caninus, of course. When we go
further afield, we discover that in the Arabic spoken by the Sudanese there is amushroom called the 'tree-of-the-dogs', shajarat al-kilab. Arabic scholars havebeen puzzled by it, but surely the meaning is clear. Indeed, the association of thecoprini with dogs is not without justification. Those who care to get to thebottom of the matter will find shrewd and amusing observations on the subject
by Camille Fauvel in the Supplement to the Revue de Mycologie of December i, 1946, wherein this former Commissaire de Police and counter-espionage
agent reveals his discovery that the distribution of urinals and of the coprinus
atramentarius in the environs of Paris is complementary: i.e., the fungi are seldom found within a reasonable range of a urinal, but abound beyond that range.
In the Kamchatka peninsula there live, among other tribes, the folk known as
Korjaks. The word for mushroom in their language is pion - yet anotherexample of our word. For more than two centuries the Korjaks have enjoyeda peculiar renown among anthropologists, ever since the Swedish traveler PhilipJohan von Strahlenberg discovered that they eat the dried amanita muscaria for
its intoxicating virtue. It is to be observed that the Korjaks do not use the word
pion for the fly agaric. This they call wapaq, meaning whale-bone, and here is why.
The tribesmen of eastern Siberia bend spits or skewers of whalebone, insert themthus into tallow, freeze the tallow, and then scatter the lumps of frozen tallow
for hapless wolves to swallow. The death-throes of the stricken beasts explain
the use of the word for the fly amanita, the trigger that sends men into frenzy.1
North of the Korjaks, in the extreme eastern corner of Siberia, facing Alaska,
He the settlements of the Chukchees, a tribe related to the Korjaks. For 'fungus'
they say pongpong or pompong. This doubling of a syllable is characteristic of the
Chukchee tongue. Here, then, we find the same word that we have now followedfrom the Mordvines in Europe across all of Siberia.
The range of this word of European origin for 'mushroom' is a breathtaking
I. Waldemar Bogoras in his treatise on the Chukchees assumes that the primary meaning of wapaq was 'fly
agaric', the word being then transferred to the whale-bone spit used in killing wild beasts. He offers 110 supporting
evidence. Since words for the divine usually recede from common use and give place to euphemisms, we suggestthat the primary sense of wapaq was the whale-bone spit and that it was transferred as a vigorous metaphoricaleuphemism to the psychogenic mushroom. We know of one expression derived from fungal wapaq: the spiritsof the fly agaric are called wapdqual(fnu, but as this means simply 'fly-agaric men', it tells us nothing about theorigin of the word.
139

CHAPTER FIVE

thing. What is the explanation? Why should it have stabbed its way across thefrozen wastes of the North to the Bering Strait? Unfortunately we know nothing
about the use of our word among these remote and primitive peoples. We do
not know its precise applications in the fungal world. The lexicons say that in
Ostjak and Vogul it designates the fly amanita, and this is certainly true of thehanggo of the Yenisei-Ostjaks. We do not know which uses of fungi are in theminds of the people when they utter these words, nor what other meanings they
may carry, nor the figures of speech in which they play a part, nor their role inproverbs and folklore. We know nothing of their emotional flavor. They were
not borrowed from Russian, for the Russian language possesses no word that
could have been their source. We do not know whether they are associatedwith toads.
Clearly these Finnish and Siberian words come down from one of our threefungal clusters - the pogge or the sponge or the pumpkin group - or froma common ancestor. Is it possible that the word sped east long ago, along witha new technique for making fire - the use of punk for tinder» This would
suggest that the sponge cluster was the source of the word. (In considering thispossibility we must keep in mind that the superior virtue of the fomes fomentarius
for tinder was known in northern Europe in neolithic times, some 8,000 years
ago. Perhaps punk was one of Europe's earliest export products.) But there is noevidence known to us to support this inviting surmise, which remains to betested in the field. Not only should every aspect of the words for mushroom andfungus be examined, but the whole vocabulary for the primitive methods offire-making as well - spark, tinder, flame, dust (soot), and ashes. In the courseof our inquiries we have assembled straws of superficial evidence indicating acommon phonetic element in the words for tinder, dust, and ashes running all
the way from Europe through Siberia into the Algonquin languages. When the
English colonists found the Algonquin Indians referring to ashes or dust as'punk', could they have been confronting their own word, after a journey aroundthe world?
By good fortune we do know that the Korjaks use punk for tinder, though
we do not know their word for it. Waldemar Jochelson in his treatise on the
Korjaks, page 565, has this to say:
The ancient method of making fire, by means of a drill, is at present employed only in
religious ceremonies. Since the fire-drill is esteemed as the most important protector of
the family, it may be concluded that the Korjaks looked upon fire as a beneficent agent.
There are sacrifices in honor of the fire; fire is also a mediator between man and the deities,
since offerings are burned in it. . . Tinder is prepared from a fungus that grows on the140F R OM ' P A NG G O ' T O 'P UPI K 'stumps of birch trees. The fungus is stripped of its hard outer layer, and the inner spongy
mass is boiled in water. Then it is dried, and a light, brittle, and highly inflammable punkis thus obtained.

At this point our excursion into the Arctic would have ended, had not the demonof our curiosity driven us to address a letter of inquiry to Professor L. L. Hammerich of Copenhagen, the authority on Eskimo linguistics and cultural traits.
We asked him what word the Eskimos use for 'mushroom'. He replied that from
Northwest Alaska to Greenland the word is pupikl Here we seem to discover

once again the phonetic unit that by now we know so well. Professor Hammerichwent on to say that the word is used for various diseases - in Greenland for
leprosy; in the Kuskokwim district of Alaska for an eruption, itch, or small-pox.
(The reader will recall that Low German pogge is etymologically cognate with'pox', and the European words are constantly associated with tumors and organic
growths. Leprosy is often accompanied by gross physical deformities.) At Nelson
Islandpupiki is a person with small-pox. Then Professor Hammerich continues:
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CHAPTER FIVE
In the mind of an Eskimo the word pupik must needs associate itself with the root pu,'inflate, rise to the surface'; cf., e. g., Greenland pue, 'tumor'; puak, 'lung'; poq, 'inflatedbag'; puisse, 'seal' (which pops out of the sea); Kuskokwim pugoq, 'rises to the surface';pugtartoq, 'the seal emerges from the water for air'; andpugtaun, 'inflated bladder'.

The reader who has followed step by step our argument will share the excitement that Professor Hammerich's letters justify. Phonetically and semanticallythe information that he supplies seems to place the Eskimos with the Europeansin what we might call the same mushroom orbit. What is the explanation ?
Before suggesting certain possibilities, there is additional evidence to submit, also
supplied by Professor Hammerich. Among the Eskimos who live south of theBering Strait, the word pupik in the sense of 'mushroom' seems to be unknown.
Thus on the island of Nunivak mushrooms are tumrat ciutait, or 'devil's ears' — ametaphor that echoes the demonic theme of the North Sea mushroom vocabulary, and also the common name of the hirneola auricula-judse of the mycologists, a species of edible tree fungus known in certain European vernaculars as the
Jew's ears or Judas' ears. The Aleuts, who are not Eskimos but whose culture is
Eskimoid, use an expression that is semantically identical, qu^ani tutusi, 'devil's
ear'. There is current today among certain specialists in Eskimo matters a theory
that the culture of the Eskimos originated in Southwestern Alaska and radiatedthence north and east to Greenland. We might look then to the Eskimos of that
region for evidence of the archaic mushroom nomenclature. However, our information about the attitude toward mushrooms of the Eskimos is still so meager
that it would be premature to draw inferences from the distinctive terminologythat seems to be current among the Aleuts and neighboring Eskimos. Careful
inquiries specifically directed to our theme would probably uncover much information now unsuspected. On its face, a term like 'devil's ear' for a mushroom
sounds like a euphemism replacing an older term that has fallen under a tabu.
There is yet further evidence of a common substratum in the Eskimo andEuropean fungal thinking. Arthur Thibert in his Eskimo dictionary publishedin 1954 gives tunnuksak for 'mushroom'. Professor Hammerich informs us that
this word means literally 'something like a tallowy boil'. In the old dictionaryof Eskimo as spoken in Northern Alaska, by R. Wells and John W. Kelly,
published in 1890, the word for 'mushroom' is ahyo''ok, where again the sense is'swelling', 'boil'. Thibert also gives puyut in the sense of 'dried mushroom';
the Eskimo word's literal meaning is 'means of making smoke'. Do we not rediscover here the early use of dried mushrooms for generating smoke that gave
to English the word 'funk' ? We can carry these recurring themes to a higher
plane. In the Eskimo dialect of East Greenland the earliest Danish scholars con142

FROM 'PANGGO' TO 'PUPIK'
cerned with Eskimo linguistics discovered a word for mushroom that is written
thus: tarndydp poqattd. It has been closely examined by a long series of eminentauthorities: John Petersen, William Thalbitzer, L. L. Hammerich, and Erik Holtved. They agree that it means 'the hunting bag of the little robber of souls',
the second element, which begins with our familiar syllable poq-, being the bag
and the first element being derived from tame, 'soul'. Here then, exactly as in northern Europe, is an association of mushrooms with psychic or demonic powers.
The Eskimos thus link mushrooms with tumors, small-pox, and inflated bladders, and on another level with psychic disturbance, and phonetically we rediscover among the Eskimos words that suggest our pogge cluster. There areseveral possible explanations for this surprising parallel.
First, the word that we have pursued across Siberia to the Chukchee pongpong
may have leaped the Bering Strait and spread across the top of America, bypassing the southwestern Eskimos. On the western shores of the Bering Strait
live the Asiatic Eskimos, in cultural contact with the Chukchees. To weigh our
initial hypothesis, we should ascertain the word used by the Asiatic Eskimos formushroom. This word is not known to us, and as the Asiatic Eskimos cannot
now be reached, the question remains unanswerable. 'Phonetically,pongpong could
become pupik, for Professor Hammerich points out to us that the Asiatic Eskimo
saming, 'wherewith', becomes sumik in Greenland, and the Asiatic Eskimo tamlaxtoq, 'brings to the shore', becomes tulagtoq in Greenland. But the difficulties
with the loan surmise are serious. When a people absorb into their vocabularya word taken from their neighbors, they do so to fill a specific need, and theycare nothing for the etymological and semantic associations of the borrowed
word. Such associations become dilute or are lost altogether, and a fortiori when
the borrowed word has filtered through a series of languages. If, then, the Eskimo
tookpupik from the Chukchee pongpong, we are constrained to divorce pupik fromthe cluster of Eskimo words referring to tumors, skin eruptions, and distensible
sacs with which the Eskimos themselves, with happy insight, consciously link it.
A second possibility is that the Eskimos once dwelt far to the West, in contact with peoples of European cultural stock, and took over the word and its
associations intact, and then preserved them in a singular deep-freeze, until today
we of European stock have re-discovered this cultural common denominatorwith us. Fanciful as such a suggestion sounds, serious scholars such as C. C.
Uhlenbeck have discovered numerous verbal roots that seem to be identical inEskimo and in the Indo-European languages, and have postulated a remoteperiod of cultural contiguity between the two worlds.
Third, we must consider multiple genesis: that is, the possibility that an ono143

CHAPTER FIVE

matopceic root could spring up in more than one place in response to an
identical imitative instinct. If this were the explanation, we should expect to findyet other peoples as remote culturally as the Eskimos from Europe who will befound to possess indigenous pupik clusters of mushroom words.
Each of these explanations, examined severally, inspires little confidence. Thereremains a fourth possibility.
Let us go behind the common Indo-European language that is the hypothetical ancestor of all the Indo-European tongues of today, to that earlier linguistic stratum from which common Indo-European was itself descended. The
archetype of our mushroomic root may descend lineally to us and to the Eskimos, as well as those Siberian peoples that possess it, from the era before ourown linguistic family was differentiated from an earlier stock. In this case theEskimo pupik is not a loan word from Indo-European, nor is (s)p(h)ongo a root
borrowed by Indo-Europeans from some other linguistic family. We are simply
carrying back our linguistic tree to a remoter generation.
On page 109 in a footnote we pointed out that certain philologists consider
fungus and σπόγγος as words of pre-Indo-European origin, taken originallyfrom some lost Mediterranean language. They question the identity of thesewords with the German Schwamm and the Slavic gamba. The conjecture that
we now offer would reconcile the apparent contradiction. We would concedethat in languages remote from the Indo-European family we find true cognatesof σπόγγος. We would suppose that this word, as it descended through the IndoEuropean line, assumed a variant aspect in the Germanic and Slavic worlds.
The persistence through many millennia of a recognizable root for the wordthat signifies 'fungus' would be a remarkable thing. It might testify to the singular importance of the role of the fungal world in the culture of these exceedingly remote ancestors of ours. The religious and mythological and erotic associations of the mushrooms would explain this role, associations that we arestill able to detect, though today they fade from men's memories and must besought by combing the oldest records. Furthermore, these associations are of
the very kind that would explain the dichotomy between mycophobic andmycophilic peoples. Things that involve man's deepest emotions are viewed
by him through a mana of supernatural potency. That which is tabu is bothfeared and loved, unclean and holy, shunned and worshipped. As the old beliefs
slowly faded away, each cultural community, no longer able to maintain
alive the balanced tensions of the original involvement, clung to one face or
the other of the primitive emotions, either rejecting the mushroom world or
embracing the strange growths with a quasi-erotic devotion.
144

10 MUCUS, MUSHROOMS, ANDLOVEocholars have not found the derivation of 'mushroom', and therefore the fieldlies open for amateur inquirers. The word has circulated in English for some five
centuries at least, in many forms, and the variant 'musheron' is still often heard
in the United States. It is clear that the English borrowed the word from the
French language spoken at court in the Middle Ages, the French word surviving
in modern French as mousseron. Either the Normans or French showed the English
for the first time that certain wild fungi could be eaten, and the need for aname for the edible fungi was met by 'mushroom'. In the course of time it hascome to designate edible fungi in general and specifically the psalliota campestris.
This specific use developed later, after the art of cultivating the field mushroom
gave to it unique importance - such importance, indeed, that its French name,champignon, superseded mousseron as the generic word for mushrooms in France.
It used to be thought that mousseron sprang from mousse, meaning 'moss', but
for a long time not a single French philologist has espoused what is certainly
a popular etymology, which was first propounded in print in 1651 by N. de
Bonnefons, the gardener. It is clear that the present spelling of mousseron has
come about to satisfy the popular association of ideas. Among the oldest formsof the word in French are two - moisseron and meisseron - that could not belinked to moss.1 Both Oscar Bloch and Albert Dauzat arrive at the conclusionthat the word is of pre-Latin origin - a convenient catchbasin, in the worldof Romance languages, for all problem children of etymology.
Our word is not confined to English and French. Jean-Baptiste Barla, a first-classmycologist and faithful observer, reported that in the Provence, around Nice,the natives say moussairoun and mousselet.2 The Catalans speak of the moixerno.
The word also appears in a single dialect of Basque, in Lower Navarre, where it
takes the form of motxolon. Wherever the word is used on the Continent, in
French, Provencal, Catalan, and Basque, it designates the species of mushroom known as the tricholoma gambosum or georgii. The dialectical variantsof 'mushroom' in English have been numerous, and among them several stem
back to the obsolete French forms: mesheroom, mesheroon, and mishroom.
1. French philologists cite a Latin passage in the 6th century medical writer Anthimus wherein occurs mussirionetn, standing in the accusative case. This would be the oldest citation of our word. But Professor Joshua
Whatmough of Harvard has shown that it is an interpolation. Of the seven ms. sources for Anthimus, five thatgo back in part independently to the archetype do not include the passage in which this word occurs. Of theother two, one is an nth century ms. and the other refers to an event that took place in A. D . 849. The evid
ence seems to point to the 9th century for the interpolation.
2. Les Champignons des Alpes, Nice, 1888.
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There is a Welsh form, maesrin (pronounced 'mice-rin'), which may have been
only a bookish word, but which preserves for us the early sound as known to
the Welsh when they borrowed it.
Some years ago Robert Graves suggested to us that we consider the Greek
word for mushroom as the source of the French and English terms. We think
he was right. Our readers will recall that in German Schivamm means both
fungus and sponge, but that the Greeks limited the corresponding word in theirlanguage, σπόγγος, to 'sponge'. For mushroom they used μύκης, whence thescience of 'mycology'. The Greek word is inextricably associated with μύζα,which in Latin becomes mucus, or when referring to nasal mucus, tnuccus. All
these words are repulsive for us. For the Greeks mushrooms were mucoid things,
slimy growths, a far remove from the Russians' 'fat of the earth'. There isabundant evidence that the Greeks were and remain mycophobes. The evolution of Greek μύκης into the Provencal, Catalan, and obsolete French words
is not hard to reconstruct, so far as the first syllable goes.1
But this does not solve our problem, for we must still explain the ending (e}ron of the French word. Proceeding on the surmise that it is a suffix, wesought to determine its value by assembling a list of as many French words
ending with it as we could find. (It is surprising that in a language so thoroughly
dissected as French no one had done this before.) Our inquiry was fruitful. The
nouns ending in -(e)ron fall into three groups, according to the purpose
served by the suffix. First are the words that designate an occupation:
1. bucheron, woodcutter,
2. forgeron, blacksmith, and3. vigneron, vine-grower.

There is a second group in which the ending is a diminutive, a variant of thediminutive -on, as in ourson, little bear, and raton, 'little rat'. The variant in -ron
is used where there is need to preserve the value of the final silent e of theoriginal noun:2
1. aileron, small wing,
2. boteron, small toad,
3. chaperon, small headgear,
4. coteron, cotteron, diminutive of cotte, English 'coat',
5. courgeron, kind of courge or gourd,
6. laideron, an ill-favored woman,
1. It is necessary to assume that the Greek word passed through unrecorded popular Latin forms in mux- andmix-, sound mutations that can be paralleled in other words.
2. Cuceron, cusseron, the insect, an enemy of vegetable gardeners, seems to have developed from cusson, cosson,by a false popular analogy with puceron.
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MUCUS, MUSHROOMS, AND LOVE
7. lisseron, liceron, diminutive of lisse, lice,
8. mancheron, short sleeve,
9. moucheron, gnat,
10. napperon, napkin,
11. paleron, shoulder-blade,
12. pelleron, baker's scoop,
13. piqueron, diminutive of pique,14. puceron, plant-louse, aphis, and15. vesceron, a small species of vetch, diminutive of vesce.

The third group, which is the one relevant to our argument, consists of thefollowing words, of which no less than four refer to mushrooms:
1. auburon,
2. mousseron,3. potiron, and4. sauceron,5. biberon,
6. bourgeron,
7. culeron,

8. fumeron,
9. grateron and glouteron,
10. laiteron, laceron, and lacheron,n. liseron,
12. longeron,
13. quarteron, and14. secheron.

In every instance the suffix adds particularity to a less determinate idea conveyed
by the stem. The general condenses into the particular. A 'mass' noun becomesa 'countable' one.
Let us examine these fourteen words one by one. A biberon is a feeding-cup
or baby's bottle, from the Latin verb bibere. A bourgeron is a jacket made from amaterial formerly called borge. A longeron is a girder that runs lengthwise. A
fumeron is the half-burnt charcoal that gives off smoke. A quarteron is a quadroon.
Secheron is the word used in the mountainous east of France to designate a meadowthat is chronically parched. The culeron is the 'crupper loop' that passes aroundthe horse's tail. The other words are all names of species of plants. Grateron (=glouteron) is a kind of briar. Laiteron (= laceron, lacheron} is milk-weed. Liceron, fromUs, is the bindweed or morning-glory. Potiron is a species of gourd and a fungus.
Sauceron is a regional word reported in the Saone-et-Loire for 'mushroom',presumably from the verb saucer, to sop or soak or dunk, referring to thewetness of many wild mushrooms. Auburon is the most interesting of all. It
is current in the East, where the French and German worlds meet. It designates
the lactarius piperatus, and it comes down from the Latin albus, white. Sometimes it is written oberon. This is a large, fleshy, white mushroom. In a goodmushroom season, when the forest floor is carpeted with an immense numberof mushrooms of many kinds, the big, sturdy oberon dominates its world, kingof its realm. From afar it can be sighted, and as the sun sets and the shadows147

CHAPTER FIVE

deepen, its brilliant whiteness seems to catch and hold the light a little longer.
It is no wonder that Oberon is king of the fairies. Yet so far as we can discover,no one has hitherto recognized the fungal ties of this famous character in French
and German folklore, whom Shakespere summoned to his stage.1 In Russia theauburon or lactarius piperatus is called the gmzd', and, as we have seen on an
earlier page, the gmzd' plays a role in Russia's fungal folklore that recalls Oberon's.
Our common nouns ending in -(e)ron are mostly rare and archaic words.
Since our etymology for mousseron is persuasive only to the extent that we
succeed in explaining its suffix, we welcome the abundant additional testimony
supplied to us by a different category of words - family names. With theseproper nouns lies the primary role of our suffix, and it is precisely here thatparticularity is of the essence: the general term is reduced in its application to a
distinctive family unit. Attributes of physique or personality, occupation, geographical origin, social status - the common nouns and place names become
individualized as family names by the addition of -(e}ron. Furthermore, in thislist we sense the common denominator that links together the three divisionsof our common nouns, and find that they all belong really to a single class,
not three. Our suffix, in essence, contributes particularity to the primary word.
The reader who desires to arrive at the meaning of these proper nouns willconsult Albert Dauzat's Dictionnaire Etymologique des Noms de Famille et Prenoms
de France, published by Larousse in 1951.
Bauberon
BiberonBoucheron
Bouveron
Brosseron
Brugeron
Chalveron
ChaperonChaumeron
Chauveron
Chaveron
CucheronFougeronGagneron
Goutteron
Guederon

Langeron
LegeronLigneron
Manceron
Mancheron
ManseronMarceron
Marcheron

Masseron
Merceron
Moucheron
Pailleron
PercheronRongeron
Secheron
VacheronIf, then, we are right in our argument, the mushroom or mousseron was once,
metaphorically, a glob of mucus.2 Its original meaning long forgotten, the word
1. Oberon in English is a literary character, without indigenous roots, borrowed from the French, where heappears in Old French in Huon de Bordeaux. He is 'Alberich' in the medieval German poem Ortnit, a name thatsuggests the German Alp, 'elf. But Jacob Grimm in his Teutonic Mythology, London, 1883, vol. n, p. 453, links'Alberich' with whiteness, from the Latin albus, a view that, as we now discover, is reinforced by the vernacularname given to the dazzling-white lactarius piperatus along the eastern marches of the French-speaking world.
2. And also a glob of froth, if our suspicion is right that mousse, 'froth', has the same origin. But this word mousse
and its homonym meaning 'moss' are so tangled together in their histories that we merely mention the pos
sibility without arguing the case.
The obsolete meckeron, 'wick', 'little wick', was derived through Latin from Gr. |iu£a, and is cousin therefore
to meisseron, tnoisseron, mousseron. Surely the obsolete adjective mescheros, 'dirtied', 'blackened', has the same
148

PLATE XXXIJean-Henri Fabre. Lactarius piperatus Fr. ex Scop.
French (east): oberon; Russian: gruzd'.

MUCUS, MUSHROOMS, AND LOVEhas shifted in status (as occasionally words do), and from its mucoid origins has
become appetizing. We believe that the Basque language offers us circumstantial
evidence in support of our theory. As we have seen, in the Basque dialect ofLower Navarre our word appears as motxolon, and it carries the same meaning
as mousseron in French. In the Souletin dialect the same species is the buxeti;
we trace this also to mousseron, for the Romance letter 'm' can become 'b' inBasque; e.g., the Spanish word for 'mill', molino, appearing as borin or bomin certain Basque dialects; also the French word for 'cabinet-maker' or joiner',memiisier, becoming in Soule beniise. In many other sections of the Basquecountry, ziza takes the place of motxolon, designating the tricholoma gambosum and also tending to associate itself with other edible species. Thus it is a
precise translation of mousseron. The derivation of ziza has never been determined. But we discover that in the Souletin dialect of Basque, zintz means 'nasal
mucus', and is probably a word of imitative origin. Professor Rene Lafon
informs us that phonetically ziza could be related to zintz. We suggest that itis derived from zintz or an earlier form of that word, and that it was thus atranslation of mousseron made at a time when the original meaning of the French
word was still present in men's minds. If we are right, mousseron appears in
Basque as motxolon, a borrowed word, in Lower Navarre; as buxeti, also a borrowing, in the Soule; and as ziza, a translation, elsewhere. Thus, if this argument
stands up under scrutiny, we provide a satisfying etymology for the Basqueziza and simultaneously buttress our fungal word pattern derived from μύκης.
For 'mushroom' and mousseron we have dared to propose an etymology and alatent meaning where scholars have been at a loss. There is another French fungal
word, le cepe de Bordeaux, where we shall challenge the conventional etymology.
The standard sources have accepted the popular notion that le cepe is the sameword as le ceps de vigne, 'vine-stock', both descended from the Latin cippus,'stake'. As to le cepe, we think the case has gone by default, the philologists
having admitted a popular etymology by inattention. The boletus edulis does
not suggest a stake, nor has such a metaphor any parallel in the fungal vocabularyof Europe.
We know much about the role of the boletus edulis in the social history ofWestern Europe. The Romans called it the snillus, 'swine-mushroom', a wordthat apparently survived as silli in the dialect of Naples down to the end ofderivation and refers to the wick's snuff. Philologists have been baffled by the origin oftndchurer, 'to blacken withsoot', and mdchuron, 'smudge' or 'smut' (on the face), 'smudged impression' (in printing). Should they notconsider mecheron and the wick's snuff as the key to the etymon? The vowel change parallelcs tache, 'stain',descended from the older teche.
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the 18th century.1 In standard Italian it is the porcino, 'porcine' mushroom. Why
these names? Some say the mushroom in its appearance suggests the swarthy,
rotund rear-end of a porker. Some point to its greasiness when cooked fresh:
it exudes quantities of viscid fluid that gastronomes associate with rich, melted
butter, but that to mycophobes suggests loathsome mucus. When dried theboletus edulis tastes like meat, which explains the addiction to it of the monks
in the Russian church during the long fasts. We have seen how the Flemings
began to eat ceps in the iyth century, a cultural innovation inspired by Italianmerchants. The progress of the cep in the kitchens of the great elsewhere wasslow. We have combed upwards of a score of French cookbooks of the iythand 18th centuries and found no mention in them of the cep, though they all
speak of morels, truffles, champignons, and mousserons. Brillant-Savarin ignoredit, but he ignored all mushrooms save truffles. The earliest French writers onfungi laid no stress on its culinary virtues. Clusius in 1601 described it without
embellishment as a species belonging to his Genus XX of the edible mushrooms.
He said the Germans called it Btiltz, a Germanized form of the recently borrowed
Latin boletus. Clearly the word met the need for an appetising name for mushrooms that were being eaten for the first time. Later Pilz came to embrace thewhole edible mushroom world, and the boletus edulis is today the Steinpilz.
No one seems to have explained why this mushroom is likened to a stone. Do
we have here an evasive substitute for a lost'Schweinpilz' ? Clusius gave vargdnya
as the Magyar name, and he added that it was obscene. Today this word still
circulates but its obscene association is lost. Perhaps it suggested valag, 'arse',of which we may have caught an echo in suillus. We shall revert to Clusius'
curious remark about obscenity on a later page. Just as baffling is his statementthat in French the cep in his day was called materaz. This is a hapax legomenon
that both mycologists and lexicographers have overlooked. In what provinces,in what classes, did it circulate?2
Cepe entered standard French late. Its earliest known appearance in print was
in 1791, in Pierre Bulliard's classic Histoire des Champignons de la France, where hementions cepe as a provincialism for the edible boletus. In 1835 the French Academy placed on it the stamp of its approval by admitting it to the edition of theDictionnaire published in that year. There are regions of France where it is still
1. See Jean Jacques Paulet's Traite des Champignons, Paris, 1793, p. 44.
2. Van Sterbeeck in his Theatrutn Fungorum quoted materaz from Clusius, but Jean Bauhin, the French contem
porary of Clusius, ignored it. Materaz was a variant spelling of matras, a familiar word in medieval French.
It meant (a) one shape of distiller's flask, and (b) in archery, the particular kind of blunt head for the 'bolt' or arrow
used with the cross-bow when the purpose was to stun and incapacitate an enemy or animal without penetrating the armor or hide. We have found no matras of either kind that suggests a cep.
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MUCUS, MUSHROOMS, AND LOVE

unknown. It entered French from the Gascon dialect, and its diffusion in the ipth
century may have been encouraged by a profound man-made change in the ecology of that province. In the late i8th century the French engineer NicolasThomas Bremontier undertook to fix the shifting dunes of the Landes, southof Bordeaux, by planting them to conifers. While ceps are mostly associated withdeciduous trees, the variety pinicola lives in symbiosis with conifers. Was Bremontier's famous achievement responsible for a surplus of ceps which, funneledthrough Bordeaux, reached the Paris markets and became the cepes de Bordeauxof today?
Among the mycophagous Gascons the parent word of cepe carries two meanings. It is the specific name of the boletus edulis and it is a general term for all
mushrooms. Here is one more instance where the dominant edible species has
given its name to the whole fungal race. The word in Gascon takes two forms,
sep and set, and this leads us at last to consider the etymon for cepe. In Spanish
there are two general words for 'mushroom', hongo and seta. Today in Castilian
the two words are synonyms, but from the early dictionary compiled by Sebastian de Covarrubias and published in 1611 we learn that at that time setameant the hongo de puerco, i. e., the porcino or suillusl In short its meaning was
identical with the specific meaning of the Gascon sep or setl The Spanish word
circulates up to the very borders of Gascony, and thus the areas of distribution
are contiguous. There is a further relevant fact: the word for the boletus edulis
is not the only fungal term shared by Gascons and Spaniards. A Spanish word forthe puff ball, bejm, is also the Gascon word, and this points to a common background of the two peoples in mushroomic matters. Juan Corominas traces the
Spanish seta to a Greek origin, σήπτα, 'rotten things', to which the English word
'septic' is kin. The name for the cep in classic Greek does not survive, and theway is open for us to suggest that σήπτα already carried its mushroomic meaning
before it was borrowed by Gascons and Spaniards. It must have been a learned
word of physicians and naturalists steeped in the lore of Dioscorides and Nikander, and it would have reached Gascony, with other Greek cultural contributions, from the Greek colonies in the Gulf of Marseilles, ascending the Rhone
valley and crossing westward by the water-ways to the Bay of Biscay. We
do not contend that the Gascons borrowed set from the Spaniards, nor that the
Spaniards borrowed the Gascon word, but that both came from the same source,
borrowed concurrently.1 We have pointed out that the Greek μύκης likened
I. For the etymology of Sp. seta see Juan Corominas' note in Romance Philology, Nov. 1947, pp. 97-100. For
cepe see Jean Seguy's magisterial treatment of the Gascon fungal vocabulary in vol. I of his Atlas Linguistique de la
Gascogne, maps 193-201, especially those dealing with cepe and champignon. In certain sub-dialects of Gascony
the terminal p of a Latin etymon becomes ts in the Gascon plural; e. g., French coups appears as cots. Our initial151

CHAPTER FIVE

mushrooms to mucus. Semantically the Greek σήπτα likens the cep to putrid
things and to pus. There is a kinship here: thus in French the word morve,
nasal mucus, according to the most eminent philologists comes down from thesame source asgourme, 'pus'. The ancient background of seta and set, of cepe and'cep', is now forgotten, and the mushrooms that they designate have risen tohigh esteem, like ntousseron, but all these words carry concealed the curse of
their mycophobic conception. It is unkind, but piquant, at this late date, toexpose their original sin. As for the cepe de Bordeaux, we believe that all those
who relish the innocent delights of pedantry may safely speak, in place of cepes,of setes; or, to be more precise, since cepe is a Parisian misspelling of a Gascon
cep, we will say les sets de Bordeaux.
In certain localities of France the amanita rubescens is called golmotte and incertain others golmelle. Perhaps the root of these words, golm- was originallygortn-, and if this surmise prove right, then here we have further examples
in French of mushroom names nourished on pus. In words of this kind, whichlive out their lives in humble currency, on tongues of country folk rather thanon the written page, remote from the cerebrations of book-men, all sorts of'contaminations' and blends take place, through semantic or phonetic associations that are hard to trace. Take golmelle and golmotte as examples. Let us assume
that gourme, 'pus', is their point of departure. By gradations, and probably under
the pressure of lateral influences, these words pass through a spectrum of identifiable shadings until they emerge as the Proven9al cougoumello, already discussed
on an earlier page:

We have discovered no evidence that the detached attitude of the Greeks toward the fungi, which they expressed by calling them globs of mucus, was everassociated with toads. But the figure of speech latent in their word suggests certain
supposition that the variation between sep and set was traceable to this phenomenon collapsed when we discovered from Seguy's maps that the distribution of the two forms did not correspond at all to those sub-dialects.
We suggest that the alternation between p and t in sep and set marks a variable survival of the p and t of the
Greek etymon σήπτα, plus contamination with the ccps de vigne. For the cultural background of Greek words
in Gascon and Spanish the authoritative study in Walther von Wartburg's paper, 'Die griechische Kolonisationin Siidgallien und ihre sprachlichen Zeugen im Westromanischen', in Zeitschr. f. rom. Phil., LXVIII, 1952, pp. 148. He does not mention any fungal words.
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MUCUS, MUSHROOMS, AND LOVE

names for toads current among the northern peoples. The Welsh llyffant seems
to be cognate with either 'slime' or 'lymph' - it makes little difference for our
purpose, for both would refer to the mucoid secretion of the toad's epidermal
glands. There was an Anglo-Saxon word for toad, yce, which survives to thisday through collateral descent in the Low German utze and the High German
Unke. These words appear to be related to the Latin uvidus, moist, and are thus
semantically parallel to the Welsh term. In the vast reaches of uncharted cultural
history-who knows; - the mucus-exuding toad and the glob of Hellenic mucusthat the English call a toadstool may have mingled in the thoughts of men.
JNow we arrive at another area in Europe's mushroom vocabulary where atheme semantically related to mucus may survive. We refer to the neglected
problem presented by the word 'morel'. In French this is the morille, in Catalan
murgula, in German Morchel. The Romansch murachel or burachel (with the stresson the second syllable) is another form. Western philologists assert that thesewords come to us from the Old High German morha and its diminutive
counterpart, morhila, both of which are known to us only in the sense of'carrot'
or 'parsnip'. The semantic link with carrots or parsnips is an unhappy one andhardly persuasive. The Western philologists who have considered the problem
seem not to have stretched their inquiry to embrace the Slavic field. We do notbelieve that the morel was called a parsnip, nor the parsnip a morel. We believethat both owe their names to the same antecedent metaphor, phallic in inspiration.
There is a single name for the morel throughout the Slavic area, and theRussian smorchok may be taken as representative of the various forms that theword assumes. Slavic philologists are agreed on its origin. They say its root issmurk, and semantically it is associated with sniffling, with resin in the tree, witha water-spout. The Russian verb smorkat' means to blow the nose. The Slavic
root is derived from a hypothetical Indo-European root, [s]mer, denoting anoily or buttery or resinous or viscid exudate. It is exemplified by the English
word 'smear', the Scandinavian smjor, meaning 'butter', and the Greek jiupov,'ointment'. If'morel' and the other Western names for this fungus are not genetically identical with the Slavic word, we are faced with a surprising accidental
similarity between the two names for the identical fungal species.1 Surely amore sensible explanation is at hand. In his beautiful monograph on the aphrodisiacs entitled Paneros, Norman Douglas pointed out that both carrot and parsnip
I. The name of the morel seems to have invaded various non-Indo-European languages. Clusius tells us thatin his time the Hungarians called this mushroom szemerchyek, obviously a borrowing from Slavic. In the I2th
century Maimonides writing in Hebrew refers to some sort of fungus, possibly a morel, by a word having theroot SHMRQ', which we think must be a borrowing, but precisely whence and when and by what channels ?

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were formerly esteemed for their love-inciting virtue, and is it not reasonable
to suppose that the Old High German morha and morhila, like the phallic 'morel',
were verbal progeny of the same erotic root?
We have suggested that the specific name in ancient Greek for the morel
was μύκης a word that we think doubled for 'morel' and 'mushroom' generally.
Here let us recall a curious episode told by Pausanias in his Description of
Greece which reminds us of the idea lying behind smorchok. Pausanias offers hisreaders a legendary explanation for the founding of the famous city of Mycenae.
It seems that Perseus chose the site. "Perseus was thirsty, and the thought occurred to him to pick up a mushroom [μύκης] from the ground. Drinking
with joy the water that flowed from it, he gave to the place the name ofMycenae." This is a false popular etymology for the name of the city, but thestory itself, attributing a life-giving fluid to the mushroom, reminds us ofsmorchok and its congeners, and links them semantically, though not etymologically, with the Greek μύκης. We feel sure that μύκης here meant 'morel'. In
the light of the evidence developed on earlier pages, it is singularly appropriate that our eponymous hero should found his race by imbibing strengthfrom the phallic mushroom. Fortifying our argument, Ovid in Metamorphosesvii: 392 recalls the legendary origin of Corinth: "Here, according to ancient
tradition, in earliest time men's bodies sprang from mushrooms":. . . hie aevo veteres mortalia primo corpora
vulgarunt pluvialibus edita fungis.

Fungis here stands for μύκης and μύκης for 'morel'. The children of Corinth, likethe children of Mycenas and of Rome, are sprung from the fungal phallus, fromthe fire-born tinder quickened into flame by the touch of the divine spark.
Corinth was a center of the sun-cult, and it is fitting that the children of Corinth should owe their genesis to the μύκης.
We have seen on an earlier page that 'spunk' in English is a name for theseminal flow of the human male, that the ordinary mushroom stipe sunk in the
pileus is the symbol of the sexual act, and that the Greek P.UXYJC; means not
only 'mushroom' (or 'morel') but the membrum virile. Perhaps the same idea
lies enfolded in the Indo-European root of the Russian smorchok. There isa Norwegian word, troll-smor, or the demon's butter, for the yellowish slimemoulds that are often found spilling over rotten stumps and that scientists
call 'myxomycetes'. We find the identical fungal figure of 'demon's butter'in the non-Indo-European Burushaski language: pfute maltas, the first element
meaning 'demon'. It is our suggestion that 'butter' in such fungal words scarce
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conceals the erotic meaning, corresponding to the erotic vulgarism frontage inthe French langue verte, and the special meaning of 'spunk' in England. In
low English 'cheese' is the designation for smegma. In Syriac there is a word
for 'mushroom', fmama, that C. Brockelman in his Lexicon Syriacum (1928)
derives from the Greek words for 'ointment', 'unguent': a|i^[jLa and ojjLvjy^a.
In Russian the word nasmork (with stress on the first syllable) designatesa cold accompanied by a running nose - the French chandelle. According to Dal',the Russian lexicographer, impudent Russian seminarists used to refer to an
arkhierejskij nasmork, 'archpriest's rhinitis', when speaking of gonorrhoea.
The full sweep of the erotic associations of the fungi in men's minds emerges
with laconic clarity in Pliny's description of them in Book 22, Chapter 46 of
his Natural History. Indeed his few words touch on almost all the scatologicaland genito-urinary aspects of our subject that we have had occasion to uncover,a prescient precis of this aspect of our subject written eighteen centuries ago.
The Elizabethan translators, culturally far closer to the Romans than we, sometimes caught overtones that our modern scholars, with all their erudition, miss,and therefore we supply Philemon Holland's expansive rendering of the passage
in Pliny, and we underline the words that may refer to the seminal fluid:
Volvam enim terra ob hoc prius gignit, ipsum postea in volva, ceu in ovo est luteum . . .
Origo prima causaque e limo, et acescente succo madentis terrae, aut radicis fere glandiferas: initioque spuma lentior, dein corpus membranse simile, mox partus.
And in truth, before that the Mushrome is formed, the earth bringeth forth a certain
pellicle or coat first, called in Latine Volva; for this purpose, that the Mushromeshould lie in it: and then afterwards shee engendreth it enclosed within, much like as
the yolke of an egg couched within the white . . . Moreover, these Mushromes take theirfirst originall and beginning of a slinlie mud, and the humor of the earth that is in theway of corruption: or else of some root of a tree, and such for the most part as bear Mast.
It seemeth at the first, as if it were a kind of glutinous fame or froth: then it groweth to thesubstance of a pellicle or skin, and soone after sheweth the Mushrome indeed, bred,formed and consummat within, as beforesaid.

Sensitive as is Philemon Holland's rendering, we think that in Pliny's own
words our ear detects, clear albeit faint, a double layer of meaning that escaped
the English translator. Pliny mentions no particular kind of tree, such as theoak. He links mushrooms with such trees as bear 'mast', i.e., acorns. The acorns
are the thing. His word is glandiferce., 'acorn-bearing'. Already in Pliny's time
the word for 'acorn' -glans- also designated the glans penis. This we know
from the writings of his contemporary, the physician Celsus. It was natural for
Pliny to place mushrooms, soaked as they were with erotic meaning, at the155

CHAPTER FIVE

foot of trees yielding equally erotic acorns. The ancient association of ideas survived into the iyth century when John Parkinson referred to the glans penis
as 'the nut of the yard'.
At this point in our argument the reader may protest that our interpretationof Pliny's text is over-bold. But before he leaps to his conclusion let him consider
the following evidence. We have seen that in the Greek mind 'mucus' and'mushroom', μύζα and μύκης, were yoked together, perhaps with the morel
playing a phallic role as an intermediary. We have seen that the word for mushroom also meant the membrurn virile, and if our interpretation of the Etruscan
mirror is sound, the mushroom and membrum virile were intimately associatedwith the making of fire. We now call to the reader's attention certain further
semantic associations with fire that link together the two Greek words. The
word for mushroom also meant the half-carbonized end of a wick, which in
English is called the snuff- a word with nasal ties. This half charred end of awick is of course tinder. The Greek word for mucus also meant the nozzle of alamp. This same Greek word for mucus crops out in Latin as myxa, and in
Latin it meant 'wick', and we discover that in Latin fungus was the snuff of awick. The Latin word for 'wick' in turn gave to the French their meche, and fromthe French the English acquired 'match'. Why should the match that we strikecome down to us from Greek words for mucus and mushroom? Why thispersistent association between fire on the one hand, and mucus and mushrooms
on the other, with the membrum virile also playing a role in the same affair?
In low English 'wick' is still potent with erotic meaning, as the English soldierlets us know when he 'dips his wick' or complains that someone 'gets on his
wick'. The cap of a morel suggests a burnt clump of tinder, and what is a nozzle
but a 'cock'? Both 'nozzle' and 'schnozzle' are variants of'nose'.
For the burnt end of a candle-wick the Spaniards have two expressions: moco
de pdbilo, 'mucus of the wick', and seta, the word for mushroom that Corominas
traced to the Greek word for putrid things. In French the corresponding word ismoucheron, from moucher, meaning to snuff and to wipe the nose. When a lighted
candle sputters and gutters because of the presence of a foreign particle, calledin English the 'thief or the 'stranger', the French speak of it as the champignon;
and the French call a running nose a chandelle, or candle. In English until modern
times the burnt end of a candle-wick was a 'snot', but when this word in its
primary sense fell into disrepute around A.D . 1800, its place was taken by'snuff'. The Danish verb snyde, from the same root as the English 'snot', means
both to snuff a candle and to wipe the nose; and the Dutch snotneus is an oldfashioned oil lamp with a long spout. But in the Germanic languages the fungal
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association seems to be absent. We have mentioned the word for 'mushroom'
in Syriac, s e mama: we now point out that it carries the additional meaningof 'lamp black'.
Here then is a persistent association of ideas, triangular in design, between
mucus, mushrooms, and candles or lamps. Like the candle-wick itself, the ideas
are plaited together, weaving in and out in a slow measure down the centuries. It
is easy to see why the mycophobic Greeks regarded mushrooms as globs of mucus.
But why the lamp nozzle? Why the burnt end of the wicke Why the candle?
Perhaps the reader has already discovered the common denominator that underlies these disparate ideas. Relying on certain straws of evidence, we have conjectured a deep-seated semantic association between nasal mucus and seminal fluid.
The primary use of the fungi among the primitive Europeans was for the makingof fire, a rite instinct with sexual associations. The Greek member of our 'sponge'
cluster, σπόγγος ,was deprived in Greek of its other meaning of 'fungus', and we
discover its normal fungal meanings in [ifoojc;, semantically yoked with themembrum virile and a burnt lamp-wick, a word adapted from [Au£a, meaning'mucus' and also 'lamp-nozzle'. In the burning candle guttering with heat, inthe dripping nozzle of the hot antique lamp, we discover the supreme figure of
dynamic sexual metaphor, wherein the discordant ideas of mucus and fire aresuddenly and boldly reconciled. In Hungary there are to this day women mindful of their reputation who will refrain from offering a light for a man's cigarette,lest their act suggest an improper invitation. Early in 1955 a late evening television program on channel KABC in Hollywood was abruptly discontinued
because of public protests that it offended decency. In it a statuesque blonde
called Voluptua would prepare for bed while she chatted invitingly with aman offstage. Just before slipping into her big bed, she would breathe on unlighted candles and they would leap into flame.1 When Rabelais' Friar John,near the end of Book v, swears by the faith of a Lanterner, the attentive reader
has learned to catch the meaning, for Rabelais has made a great play with lanterns
and candles in this book, especially in chapter 33, where the Queen is served ahuge stiff flaming taper of white wax somewhat red at the end, and everyone
else has flaming chandelles. 'Heaven knows', says Rabelais, 'what a glorious lightthey gave.'
As we have already said, the Greeks did not link mushrooms with toads but
instead with lamps. In Egypt we discover that lamps, in turn, were linked withfrogs. (We seem forever discovering new permutations of the same symbols.)
For the Egyptians the frog was a symbol of Hiqit, goddess of birth and rebirth,
i. New York Herald Tribune, February 2, 1955, p. 14.
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CHAPTER FIVEand in various collections of Egyptian artifacts are to be found lamps in the
shape of frogs dating from the early centuries of the Christian era.1 On theselamps is written in Greek: 'I am the resurrection', and sometimes they bear across. They appear to have been artifacts of an heretical sect denounced in the
Code of Justinian under the name of Batrachitse, but their batrachian error
was certainly of pre-Christian lineage. Just as in Greece the mushroom and thelamp stood for the engendering of life, so in Egypt a similar message foundexpression in the frog-borne flame. Toads are of the order of frogs, of course.
The womb that lies behind certain names for the toad and toadstools in northern
Europe reappears in the frog-womb of the Egyptian cult.
Some of the terms of the science of mycology are neo-classicisms, the inventions ofmodern workers in the field. But others perpetuate ancient usage. In Pliny's text
we have discovered that Volva' was already familiar to him as the designation of
the cup out of which some mushrooms grow. Do not the 'ring', the Veil', andthe 'hymenium' belong to the same vintage? Here are sexual metaphors applied tomushrooms that reinforce our argument, and what an astonishing concentrate ofsexuality they all evoke! If we are right about the sponge cluster of fungal words- Schwamm, fungus, gomba, and σπόγγος - they enfold within themselves the ideaof the womb. The Greeks in μύκης substituted for the womb the idea of thephallus. The French, by some quirk in cultural history, followed the Greek
example, preferring mousseron to a derivative of fungus, and in the second
element of champignon is the same phallic idea latent? Not etymologically, ofcourse, but by phonetic association. Gastronomically the Greeks, as we said, were
mycophobes. Their interest in the fungi was less aural and gustatory than erotic.
In Arabic the basic word for a mushroom is futr, as we saw on page 127,with the initial /by normal mutation often yielding place to p. The Arabists
seem in no doubt about its etymology: it comes from the verb 'to split', 'tocleave', and they suggest that this recalls the breaking of the earth as the mushroom emerges. But so jejune a notion does less than justice to the virile Arabianmind. Here also we think we detect a metaphor of generation, probably at the
deepest layer onomatopceic in origin, paralleling in sense and sound the Greekφιτύω, Latin futuere, and French foutre, though etymologically unrelated to these.
Mushroom, candle, nose: down to today these metaphors have retained
their phallic potency. The phallus is called a mushroom, and on certain mushrooms even mycologists bestow phallic names: the phallus impudicus and themutinus caninus. A learned friend of ours, always on the alert on our behalf
I. See La Revue Critique d'Histoire et de Litteratllre, New Series, vol. vrr, 1879, report on sessions held Feb. 21
and 28, pp. 175 and 199.

158

MUCUS, MUSHROOMS, AND LOVEfor tidbits of fungal knowledge, was thumbing one day through a native
Pashto dictionary, when in its pages he came upon a name, not Pashto but
Persian, for a mushroom, small and edible but not otherwise identified: qabih-ker
i xarak, which means the phallus erectus of a jackass. A few months later hecame upon the exact equivalent in Pashto: xargina. In Sudanese we find a mushroom called zibb al-wata , 'penis of the earth', and in Persian the identical fungal
metaphor in kuldhi zamin.
There must be many such terms that have escaped the nets of word-collectors.
For metaphorical usage in the reverse order we find ample documentation,
notably in the langne verte of France as captured and delicately served up in
Alfred Delvau's Dictionnaire Erotiaue Moderne, an undated work published in Bale.
To one Alexander Pothey he ascribes this ditty on the champignon de couched
Si son champignon Ressemble
a son piton [nose], Quelchampignon -gnon, -gnon,
Qu'il a, Gandon -don, -don!

In the early days of motor cars the accelerator was called in French a champignon, and 'to step on the gas' was ecraser le champignon, an expression that
French gentlemen hesitated to use in the presence of ladies.
As for la chandelle, elle brule, elle coule, et ensuite elle fond. It is noteworthy
that in this erotic sense, only chandelle is used and never bougie nor cierge.
Thus when a Frenchman with generous courtesy disclaims knowledge of analleged adulterous liaison, he is almost certain to remark that il ne tenait pas lachandelle - an observation that refers to either of two degrees of intimate
knowledge. Shakespere knew well this double meaning. In The Merchant of
Venice Lorenzo addresses his mistress:
Descend, for you must be my torch-bearer. To which thatprovocative minx Jessica, fully alert, replies: What, must I hold acandle to my shames>

That same candle burns fiercely when Falstaff erupts with his thunderous pasan
to carnal love in the Merry Wives, which he rounds off with a staggering line:
Send me a coole rut-time, Jove, or who can blame me to pisse my Tallow >I. Is it by coincidence that 'conk' means 'nose' in American slang, and 'shelf-fungus' in the parlance of American
woodsmen? See Note i, page 128.
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The burning tallow-candle is the symbol of office carried by Robin Goodfellow
when he enters upon the nocturnal rites of his coven, as is shown in the woodcutthat we have reproduced on an earlier page. Who can hold a candle to this proud
Devil?
A proverb dating back to ancient Rome and Ennius observes that when alantern gives light to a candle, the giver by the gift is made none the poorer.
Innocent in itself, this old saw takes on an erotic sense when Chaucer's Wife ofBath in her Prologue admonishes her doddering husband not to begrudge herdalliance with other men. Here the candle is phallic and the lantern is the'queynte' or pudendum:
For, certeyn, old dotard, by youre leve,
Ye shul have queynte right ynogh at eve.
He is to greet a nygard that wolde werne [forbid]
A man to lighte a candle at his lanterne.

Let us revert to Pothey's suggestion about Gandon's piton. He was echoing
an ancient folk-belief general in Europe and also in America:
Regarde au nez et tu verras combien Grandest celui qui aux femmes fait bien. Regarde aupied pour au rebours connaitre Quel levaisseau d'une femme doit etre.

Thomas Wright in A History of Caricature and Grotesque in Literature and Art,
published in London in 1875, reproduced the figure of a Roman mimus as preserved for us in an engraved onyx. A vulgar character given to indecent roles in
the low comedy of the time, the mimus in this case is adorned with a pendulous
nose that speaks eloquently for its lengthy alter ego, and in his whole get-up
he seems intended to illustrate the quatrain found in Delvau:
CEil etincelant, Doigt
vif et galant, Nez debon augure Et bonne
figure.

Let no reader balk at these baudy citations, for they serve only to confirm thecontinuing vitality of the layers of meaning that we suggest for Pliny andPausanias, and that without these citations might appear to secluded scholars
both tenuous and wilfully indelicate. All things sprout from the μύζα and theμύκης, in union with σήπτα.
Yes, σήπτα, the Greek word that has given us the Spanish seta and we think
the French cepe, words whose primary fungal meaning was the boletus edulis.
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MUCUS, MUSHROOMS, AND LOVE

Corominas in his note on seta pointed out that in widely scattered parts of Spainit has also designated the cunnus.1 We suspect that in this sense also seta goesback to an original Greek usage, and that σήπτα stood symbolically for thefemale counterpart of the μύκης, 'cep' and 'morel' being sexuallycomplementary. Under its swarthy mons the cep when heated turns soft andyields a mucoid exudate. In the fungal vocabulary of the Gascons we discover
the same obscene figure of speech, though a different word is used. This
pejorative term is for the boleti that turn blue on exposure to air. Professor
Jean Seguy in his Gascon linguistic map 201 reports it as kunsanmas, andbehind the face of this strange word he discovers cunnu sagma, which in French
would be con d'anesse.
We are far from having exhausted the complex of interrelated meanings. In
various parts of Spain seta carries the sense of 'swollen lips', 'snout'. With theother erotic meanings before us, we suggest that it is impermissible innocence not
to see in these lips the labia majora and ring.2
In Middle Flemish there was a word sete that was used in the oath bi Cools sete,'by Nick's arse', corresponding to the Old French por le cul lien. Apparently
the origin of the Flemish word has not been determined. When we have inmind the sexual associations of the cep in Spanish and the obscene associationthat Clusius pointed out in Magyar, we suggest that the Flemish word is anothersemantic extension of our mushroomic word, with a scatological rather than anerotic emphasis.
In Old French we also find a word sete. It survives in seven or eight citations.
Its meaning has never been certain. It was used always as a simile for stench:
the leper's boils stink like sete. In recent years several scholars have examined
the word and suggested that it might mean 'excrement' or 'latrine' or 'privy
seat' or 'arse'. One of them linked it with the Flemish word. Surely here also we
discover our mushroomic word, in its scatological phase. If we are right, theword was circulating in French seven centuries ago, disappeared, and then reentered as cepe in the i8th century.3
Today in southern Europe the fig is used metaphorically as the boletus edulis
1. For an analogy among the Quiche Indians of Guatemala, see p. 280.
2. The basic Slavic word for mushrooms, which survives in Russian asguby, means 'lips' in that language today,with gubka meaning 'sponge'. The primary sense of 'mushrooms' also lingers on, but for this meaning griby
is ordinarily used in the standard language.
3. For our case to be valid, the value of the vowel in Old French sete must have been e, and this is what it was.
We know this by the variant spellings seite and sette in the mss. We also know it by the words with which it wasmade to rime in verse :fete from Latin/arfwm, degete from Latin jactare, neste from Latin nitidus. We postulate themissing π of σήπτα. For discussions of Old French sete see Erik von Kraemer's critical editions of two 'Miracles'of Gautier de Coinci, Du dcrc quifatne espousa et puis la lessa, 1950, p. 114, and De la bonne enpercris qui garda
loiaument sen manage, 1953, pp. 244-5, both published in Helsinki in the Annales Academics Sdentiarum Fennicce;
also see the review of the latter in Speculum, Jan. 1955, p. no, by Professor Urban T. Holmes.

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used to be. To the mushroom and fig we must add the third of the trinity, themedlar, that fruit which is properly enjoyed only when rotten ripe. Down to
Shakespere's time it was known also as the openarse, a name that survives indialectical use until now. Shakespere played with the words in what are perhaps
his most scabrous lines, in Act n, Sc. i of Romeo and Juliet, the lines that aresaid to have prompted Logan Pearsall Smith, in his little book on Shakespere,
to exclaim how lucky it was that only specialists sensed the range and depthof Shakespere's indecencies:'He can't mean that', the shocked reader cries out; but oh, my dear reader, he doesmean it, and his meaning, if you are a nice person, will make you blush all over.
[On Reading Shakespeare, p. 9]

But Shakespere was not inventing his imagery. He was drawing on a fund of
erotic symbolism of immemorial antiquity. In English the word 'medlar' wasre-shaped to pun with the verb 'to meddle', in the erotic sense now little used;
but etymologically medlar was identical with the French nefle and the Spanish
nispero, and all three descend from the Greek μέσπιλον, where the philologists
stop, saying they find no earlier root. But surely the Greek word, broken down
into its two elements, incapsulates our same erotic metaphor, meaning 'amidst
the hair', where the second element, πιλον, is the word that comes down to us in
the mushroomic 'pileus'. Just as the erotic association of the boletus edulis
seems to have passed over to the scatological in Flanders and France, so the nefle
becomes the cul-de-chien in the east of France.
When Corominas hit on σήπτα as the etymon for seta, he may not have divined
the nest of felicitous semantic associations that support his discovery. The Greek
word belongs to a cluster that includes σηφ, the designation of a poisonous serpent.
The Greeks believed that mushrooms and serpents and the holes of serpents
had an affinity for each other, just as the peoples of northern Europe link
mushrooms with toads. In the Dorian dialect we discover the variant σάπω,identical phonetically though not semantically with the Spanish word for 'toad',sapo. We submit that just as the Italian scorzone, 'poisonous serpent', gives us the
Spanish escuerzo, a second word for 'toad', so the Greek word offers us a parallel
herpetological metamorphosis.1 The snake-mushroom association of Greece andi. The philologist Meyer-Lubke in his Romanisches Etymologisches Wortenuch dismisses out of hand σάπo as an
etymon for Sp. sapo, but perhaps here, as elsewhere, his fiat calls for re-examination. The obstacles to our etymology are two-fold, phonological and cultural. (In Spanish the names of plants are often of Greek origin, but
not animals.) But philologists should give full weight to the mana in which all words relating to toads werebathed in the early centuries, and such words, subjected to pressures of tabu, commonly exhibit irregular wordhistories. Until the philologists find positive evidence favoring an alternative etymology, they should not
close their minds to the semantically felicitous Gr. σάπω. Whether the Basque apo, 'toad', is borrowed from
Spanish or (as Karl Bouda surmised) is related to apxw, the word for 'frog' in the Caucasian language known
as Svanetian, need not conceni us here.
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MUCUS, MUSHROOMS, AND LOVEthe Indie world, with all its baggage of associations, becomes the toad and toadstool glyph of the West. With all these symbols woven together, we are hardly
surprised when we discover that Emile Boisacq in his Greek etymological dictionary links the Greek words that we are now discussing with the Sanskrit kydku,'mushroom'.
As for phallic 'noses', surely nowhere in literature is there another such apostrophe to them as Laurence Sterne composed in Part iv of Tristram Shandy, alongwith the chapters that lead up to and away from that noble excursus. Here indeed
is a savory dish of salacious mushrooms, a display of candles enflamed. The baby
Tristram, we learn, had got his 'nose' smashed at birth, whereupon his father,
all disconsolate, had embarked on an exhaustive study of'noses' and their sizes.
He read Erasmus, with scant satisfaction, and then turned to the authors that
had concentrated on his topic, to wit, Prignitz, Scroderus, Andrea Paraeus,
Bouchet's Evening Conferences, and finally the unrivalled Hafen Slawkenbergius,
who in the course of his stupendous opus pauses at one point to recall how fora full month all Strasbourg, both the Lutheran and Catholic factions, had once
been set by the ears because of a certain long 'nose' and the awe and incredulity
with which everyone, of every age, in every walk of life, of low and high degree,
viewed its dimensions.
In a paragraph of concise and damning irony Tristram describes the monumental 'nasal' monograph of Slawkenbergius, and what he says causes us to tremble,
for his words are equally applicable to this our own beloved treatise. If thereader will substitute us for Slawkenbergius, and mushrooms for the noses thatare their metaphorical synonyms, he will learn what we consider a truthfuland humiliating appraisal of our own enterprise:
And to do justice to Slawkenbergius [says Tristram], he has entered the list with astronger lance, and taken a much larger career in it than any one man who had everentered it before him, and indeed, in many respects, deserves to be ennich'd as a prototype
for all writers, of voluminous works at least, to model their books by - for he has taken
in, Sir, the whole subject - examined every part of it dialectically - then brought it intofull day: dilucidating it with all the light which either the collision of his own naturalparts could strike - or the profoundest knowledge of the sciences had impowered him
to cast upon it - collating, collecting, and compiling - begging, borrowing, and stealing,
as he went along, all that had been wrote or wrangled thereupon in the schools andporticos of the learned: so that Slawkenbergius his book may properly be considered,
not only as a model - but as a thorough - stitched DIGEST and regular institute of noses[that is, mushrooms], comprehending in it all that is or can be needful to be known aboutthem.

CHAPTER FIVE

Defying Tristram, we return to trie 'long nose'. When a German macht einelange Nase, he is doing what a Frenchman does when the latter fait un pied de nez,for in this expression the Frenchman speaks not of a pedal extremity but of twelve
good inches and true. For the same rude gesture the Englishman says that hecocks a snook, and the American thumbs his nose. On July 4, 1936, a certain
Nazi official known as Herr Greiser drew world attention to himself by thumbing his nose at the League of Nations in Geneva. The correspondent Vernon
Bartlett in his dispatch to the London News Chronicle, using the English idiom,declared baldly that the man had 'cocked a snook'. There followed a lively
discussion in the British press. Winston Churchill used the vulgar term inCommons, and thus it gained a nosehold in Hansard. For a month readers of
The Times addressed letters to their editor about the episode and the gesture,letters urbane and amusing, but sadly genteel. Only the most knowledgeable
and perceptive reader could have detected the obscene inspiration of the antique gesture. Yet in those circles where low words pass as common coin, thefleeting passage of thumb and fingers across the nose finds its natural accompaniment in two terse English syllables that tell the story. Here once more we comeup against that chandelle, that champignon, that pied de nez, of the vulgar Roman
mimus. The 'snook' is a pendulous appendage. From the main body of theHoly Isle of Lindisfarne there stretches out a lengthy promontory, and weunderstand, when we look at the chart, why the Northumbrian folk know that
promontory as 'The Snook'. He who cocks a snook cocks a 'nose'.
If there be those who are sceptical of this meaning, let them read Chapter
xix of Rabelais' Pantagruel, wherein Panurge and the Englishman engage in aunique colloquy. As neither speaks the other's language, the conversation
goes forward with gestures, in the presence of the villagers, who follow it with
rapt attention and the enjoyment that is the proof of understanding. Panurge
starts off by cocking a snook at the Englishman, who replies in kind. Neverhave there been more eloquent performances of the ancient sign, nor description
thereof put on paper with such solemn elaboration of detail. Here is Rabelais'
text, which we offer with only one further comment: where Rabelais speaksof la pinne du nez, W. F. Smith in his admirable translation hit on 'the gristleof the nose', an inspired rendering, since in certain English dialects 'gristle'means 'nose' and also the membrum virile:
Panurge soubdain leva en 1'aer la main dextre, puis d'icelle mist le poulce dedans lanavire d'icelluy coste, tenant les quatre doigtz estendus & serrez par leur ordre en ligne
parallele a la pinne du nez, fermant 1'ceil gausche entierement, & guignant du dextre
avecq profonde depression de la sourcille, et paulpiere. Puis la gausche leva hault, avecques164

MU CU S, MUS H RO OMS , A N D L O VE
fort serrement & extension des quatre doigtz & elevation du poulce, & la tenoit enligne directement correspondante a 1'assiete de la dextre, avec distance entre les deuxd'une coubdee & demie. Cela faict, en pareille forme baissa contre terre 1'une et 1'aultre
main: finablement les tint on milieu comme visant droict au nez de 1'Anglois.
. . . Lors feist 1'Anglois tel signe. La main gausche toute ouverte il leva hault en 1'aer,
puis ferma au poing les quatre doigtz d'icelle, & le poulce estendu assit sus la pinne dunez. Soubdain apres leva la dextre toute ouverte, & toute ouverte la baissa, joignant lepoulce au lieu que fermoit le petit doight de la gausche, & les quatre doigtz d'icellemouvoit lentement en 1'aer. Puis au rebours feit de la dextre ce qu'il avoit faict de lagausche, & de la gausche ce que avoit faict de la dextre.
Panurge suddenly raised in the Air his right Hand, then placed its Thumb within
his Nostril on that Side, holding his four Fingers extended and closed in their orderin a Line parallel with the Gristle of the Nose, shutting the left Eye entirely, and blinking
with the right with a profound Depression of the Eyebrow and Lid; then he raised theleft Hand aloft with hard Clinching and Extension of the four Fingers and Elevation of
the Thumb, and he held it in a Line directly corresponding to the Position of the rightHand, with a Distance between them of a Cubit and a half. This done, in like form helowered towards the Earth both one and the other Hand; lastly, he held them in the
Midst as though he were aiming straight at the Nose of the Englishman.
Then the Englishman made a Sign like this: His left Hand wide open he raised high in
the Air, then closed into his Fist the four Fingers thereof, and placed the Thumb extended
on the Gristle of his Nose. Suddenly afterwards he raised the Right wide open, andwhile wide open lowered it, joining the Thumb at the Place where the little Finger ofthe left Hand closed, and the four Fingers thereof he moved slowly in the Air; thenreversing them he did with the Right what he had done with the Left, and with theLeft what he had done with the Right. [Translation by W. F. Smith]Fig. gROMAN TOM FOOL165

II THE SECRETS OF THE
TRUFFLEIt might seem that by now we had exhausted the erotic imagery of the fungal
world, wherein fire, mucus, noses, candles, and mushrooms dance together in a
throbbing surrealist fandango, the whole obscene performance conducted insidethe uterine envelope of the primeval gamba. But not so. We have yet to speakof truffles.
The Greeks used various words for underground fungi, but we think we canprove that the ύδνον was our truffle. In the Morgan codex of Dioscorides there
is a miniature accompanying the section on the ύδνον that gives us our earliest
pictorial representation of a tuber buried in the earth, and an excellent representation it is.
The truffle in Latin was the tuber, which took the form of tufer in an Oscan or
Umbrian dialect. The Romans knew various kinds of tuber. The most esteemed
were from Africa, and were probably not true truffles but an underground fungus
known to science today by the name of terfezia. From the Latin word came theFrench truffe, the Spanish trufa, and the English 'truffle'. From a form supposed
to have been terrae tufer the Italians arrived at the modern tartufo and a diminutive tartuffola. The surprising thing is that this last word turns up in Germanas the name for the potato, Kartoffel, and from there spread eastward throughout
the Slavic lands, until today half of Europe calls the potato by the word thatoriginally meant 'truffle'! In our view the explanation for this curious transfer of meaning lies in the preoccupation with aphrodisiacs of i6th century
Europe.
When Ponce de Leon embarked on his quest for the Fountain of Youth,
he was bent on discovering a sensational aphrodisiac of lasting virtue. What a
prize would be his if he could present to the Old World a miraculous bath tosupersede all the amatory prescriptions in traditional use! Among those traditional
inciters to venery none enjoyed higher esteem than truffles, and indeed thisreputation of theirs survives into our own times. No pages in Brillant-Savarin's
Physiologic du Gout are more delightful than those devoted to a judicial weighingof the evidence in this matter of truffles and love. There are many kinds ofsubterranean fungi, of which some are entitled to be called truffles; and of thesetrue truffles, a few species are esteemed by gourmets. In Spanish, trufa is thename given to a truffle of high culinary worth. There are two other terms usedgenerally for the underground fungi: turma and criadilla de tierra. These are bothinteresting, expressing as they do the aphrodisiacal virtue attributed to the whole
166

THE SECRETS OF THE TRUFFLE

tribe of underground fungi. Turma in Catalan means 'testicle', and in Spanish
it means both 'testicle' and 'truffle'. It is an old word, probably of pre-Roman
origin, coming down from the same Indo-European root 'tu' that gives to Latin
tuber and tumor, the idea of organic swelling being inherent in them ah1. Criadilla is the standard word in Spanish for 'testicle'. It is the word used for lamb's
fries, the French amourette. The Spaniards' words for the truffle reveal the precious
virtue that these earthy growths were supposed to possess.
Immediately after the Spaniards fell on America in the idth century, they
discovered in the New World first the sweet potato1 and then the potato, thebatata and the papa. They found the batata in the Antilles, probably in Hispaniola: the word first appears in 1516, a borrowing from the Taino Indians who
were then living in the Greater Antilles and Bahamas. (Their name should hepronounced in three syllables, as though written 'Taino'.) The Tainos deserveda kinder fate than was theirs: they and their language are now dead these many
generations, and few today know even the tribal name of these first victims of
the invaders from Europe. The Tainos possessed a tongue belonging to the
Arawakan family of Indian languages, which were spoken by tribes scattered at
the time of the Conquest all the way from Florida and the Bahamas on the norththrough the Greater Antilles and across the tropical belt of South America as
far south as what is now known as Matto Grosso. These Tainos of the Islands
were a gentle folk: they seemed to lend verisimilitude to the medieval dreams
of a Golden Age, and gave impetus to the notion of the Noble Savage that was
destined to captivate intelligent men in the Age of Reason. The blameless Taino
cultivated sweet potatoes and maize, smoked tobacco, slept in a hammock,and plied the sea ways in long 'canoas'. The Spaniards remarked on the uniformity of the Taino language throughout the various Islands - clearly in the Tainoworld the sea was a highway to speed communications and not an insulating
barrier. Today even scholars often confuse the winsome Tainos with their ferocious enemies, known variously in the idth century as the Caribs or Calibs or
Canibs, a race of savage warriors who when the Spaniards arrived had alreadyseized the Lesser Antilles and were harassing the Tainos on the larger islands.
The Europeans quickly overwhelmed them both. But all unawares, by a naturalfiltering of the Indian vocabularies, the world distinguishes to this day between
these two lost and almost forgotten peoples. From the language of the Tainos
we possess a legacy of five common and friendly words: potato, maize, tobacco,hammock, and canoe. From the Canibs came our 'cannibals', and the bestial
I. We are familiar with the evidence indicating prior knowledge of the sweet potato in Polynesia, which has
stirred up discussions that do not concern us.
167

CHAPTER FIVE

Caliban whom Shakespere placed in the still-vex'd Bermoothes was the literary scion of the Calibs.
The Tainos certainly did not attribute aphrodisiacal powers to the batata or
sweet potato. They could not have been under illusions about this humble
vegetable, so commonplace for them. But the Spaniards, obsessed by the idea ofaphrodisiacs, were quick to discover in the batata a new and more potent truffle.
(Were they under a temptation to hold the novel food to blame for their excesses
with the native womenfolk?) A few years later they discovered the white potato
in the Andean highlands, the papa as it was called in Quechua, the language of
the Inca and his people. Now the story repeats itself: Agustin de Zarate, in hisclassic account of the conquest of Peru, published in 1555, informs his readersthat the white potato is like the turma de tierra, 'earth's testicle', the truffle ofprecious virtue:... y los indios comen unas rakes que llaman papas, que son de hechura y aun casi
sabor de turmas de tierra. . . [ BOOK , in, Chap. 12]

This work was promptly translated by Thomas Nicholas and published in
London in 1581. Since truffles were unknown to the English, we were eager
to see how the excellent Nicholas met his difficulty in rendering the sentence
where they are mentioned:... The Indians of this province eateth certaine Rootes called Papas, whiche are verie
like bothe in makynge and taste Turnepes.

How the humble turnip is here exalted, and the truffle humbled! Were
truffles ever so grossly maligned before or since?
Shortly after the batata, the Spaniards brought back from the New World
the white potato, and from Spain it reached Italy before 1588, where it wascalled taratouffli, the Italian word for 'truffles', a translation of the Spanish namebut without the strong erotic association of turmas. Quickly thereafter it appeared in the Low Countries, Switzerland, and Germany, and then in France.
It arrived in England after the sweet potato but before the end of the century.
The two vegetables became deeply entangled in verbal confusion. In Spanishspeaking America the white potato is widely known to this day as the papa,a name clothed with all the rights of chronological and topographical primacy.
But this word took no hold in Europe and batata served for both vegetables,
finally in England attaching itself for good to the wrong plant. The Spaniards
compounded the confusion by also bestowing on the new vegetables their own
name for truffles. To this day in some parts of Colombia potatoes are turmas or
168

PLATE xxxn. Tuber. Miniature from a loth century Byzantine codex (No. 652) of Dioscorides.

New York, The Pierpont Morgan Library.

THE SECRETS OF THE TRUFFLE'testicles', and in Spain they were known as criadillas and trufas. In the dialectof Aragon trufa has been reported in the form triunfa - a popular malformationthat suggests the amorous triumph assured to the hopeful consumer of criadillas.1
For a time potatoes remained a rarity, priced high in keeping with the virtue
attributed to them. Their appearance in England points up a curious cultural
phenomenon. Reaching England by way of Spain, both kinds of potatoes
while in transit assumed like changelings the amatory reputation of the truffle.
Thus it came about that England took delivery of America's gifts with a Spanish
billing, never suspecting that the humble vegetables from the New World
were now sailing on a false invoice, their genuine virtues lost from view inthe resplendent aura befitting a newly discovered and miraculous aphrodisiac.
The craze for aphrodisiacs seized England too. Falstaff in The Merry Wivesof Windsor invokes them. "Let the skie raine Potatoes", he exclaims, and "haile
kissing-Comfits, and snow Eringoes", these latter being the candied root of thesea-holly, known to science as the eryngium maritimum. Caviar in Elizabethan
times was yet another erotic stimulant, as Sir John Harington, godson of the
Queen, reminds us in his unabashed epigram 'Against an Old Letcher':Since thy third cariage of the French infection
Priapus hath in thee found no erection: Yet eatst
thou Ringoes, and potato Rootes, And Gaueare[caviar], but it litle bootes. Besides at thy bedsheads', a bottle lately found, Of Liquor that aquart cost twenty pound.
For shame, if not more grace, yet shew more wit,
Surcease, now sinne leaues thee, to follow it. Somesmile, I sigh, to see they madness such That thatwhich stands not stands thee in so much.

Those 'potatoes' in Shakespere were certainly sweet potatoes; in Harington,
we are not sure.
For almost a thousand years after the fall of Rome, there seems to be no
mention of truffles in surviving documents.2 In the I3th century Albertus Magnus
1. We are indebted to Professor Juan Corominas for the etymology of turma. For the early usage of names for
potatoes and sweet potatoes, there is a beautiful monograph by Pedro Henriquez Urefia, Para la Historia de losIndigenismos, published by the Institute de Filologia, under the auspices of the Facultad de Filosofia y Letras of
the University of Buenos Aires, 1938, to which Professor Yakov Malkiel called our attention. See also entry
under Criadilla in C. Torres Fornes' Sobre Voces Aragonesas usadas en Segorbe, Valencia, 1903. But neither Henriquez Urefia nor Torres Fornes mentions the erotic theme injected into the potato nomenclature by the Spaniards.
The early references to the potato in the herbals are fully discussed by Redcliffe N. Salaman in his History
and Social Influence of the Potato, Cambridge University Press, 1949.
2. We except of course the references in copies of the ancient authors. The reference in the Etymologies of St.
Isidore of Seville is no more than a repetition of ancient sources.
169

CHAPTER FIVE

speaks of them in De Vegetabilibus, but hesitantly and vaguely, and without
reference to aphrodisiacal properties. This vagueness seems not to have been
accidental. In the Hortus Sanitatis, printed in Mainz in 1491, the artist who madethe woodcuts showed more courage than discretion when he illustrated thesection on the tuber. Never has there been a more grievous misrepresentation

Fig. 10
From Hortus Sanitatis,
Mainz, 1491.

of a fungus. We know not whether Albertus Magnus and he had never seen atruffle, or whether, knowing truffles, they failed to identify them with the Latin
tuber. In the earliest of printed cookbooks, De Honesta Voluptate, published in
Rome in the middle 1470'$ and attributed to Bartolomeo de' Sacchi called
Platina, there is a short section on truffles. The author speaks of those that comefrom Africa and the Near East, and then he refers to the species that sensual men
of fashion consume to whet their appetite for love-making. With an amusing lack170

THE SECRETS OF THE TRUFFLE

of humor he goes on to observe that if this is done for procreation, it is praiseworthy, but if for debauchery, as is the case (he says) with many idle and intemperate persons, it is to be altogether despised. No trace of scepticism diluted
the faith of this author in the peculiar virtue attributed to truffles. Doubtlessthere are earlier references to these as aphrodisiacs, but we have not comeupon them.
By the i6th century the fashion for truffles was at its height. They reached thispeak of esteem at the moment when potatoes arrived from the Andes, via Spain.
The two were confused in Spain, as we have seen, and it is hardly surprising
to find that they came to be confused in France, Italy, and Germany. Tartufi
bianchi has been an alternative designation for potatoes in Italy down to recent
times, a use of tartufo that is facilitated by the supremacy in Italy of a white
truffle, the tuber magnatum. This is the truffle that in Italian restaurants is commonly served raw, in thinnest slices. It suggests the flavor of garlic, but unlike
garlic does not repeat itself. Across the Alps in the Dauphine, the peasants intheir patois have been reported in modern times as using the term triffe niere
to designate both the truffle and a kind of potato with a purplish flesh.1 In
Germany there is a common fungus, with white flesh, about five inches indiameter, that grows either half-buried or just under the ground in oak forests.
It is aromatic and edible, and mycologists know it as the choiromyces meandriformis - the meandering pig-fungus. It looks like a potato, and the initialconfusion between the familiar fungus and the novel potato must have contributed to the permanent hold of the word Kartoffel in Germany, whence it
spread with the potato in due course to Scandinavia and the Slavic lands. In
turn the Russians carried the word across Siberia and to the Eskimos of Alaska,
where in various dialects of the Eskimo language we find the potato of the Andes
called by names that reach straight back to the tuber of Pliny: kaltu:jilaq andkaltu:Jaq and kaltuvaq and kaltu:xaq?
That initial confusion of potatoes with truffles which began in Spain in Renaissance times has never completely died. Van Sterbeeck surprises and amusesthe modern reader when in his Theatrum Fungorum, a work exclusively dealing
with fungi published in 1675, he devotes a section to potatoes and other membersof the nightshade family! If the reader will examine again the frontispiece to
Van Sterbeeck's book, which we reproduce on Plate XXVIII, he will discoveramong all the mushrooms one basket that is spilling potatoes on the ground. In
1. See La Truffe, by Adolphe Chatin, Paris, 1892, pp. 303 ff.
2. See L. L. Hammerich's paper on 'The Russian Stratum in Alaskan Eskimo', Slavic Word No. 3, Dec. 1954,
published by The Linguistic Circle of New York, p. 409.
171

CHAPTER FIVE

Russia down into the present century the Old Believers of the Moscow region
were still rejecting potatoes, which they would spurn as sobach'i mude, dog's
testicles; this was recorded in 1915 by Roman Jakobson in the neighborhoodof Vereja. We discover the same associations lingering on in certain metaphorscurrent in Spanish America, but here we arrive at the inner meaning only bya series of transitions. The Spaniards thought truffles were aphrodisiacs, andthey considered sweet potatoes, the batatas of the Antilles, a superior truffle.
The word batata never spread much on the American mainland, where sweet
potatoes came to be called camotes, the name for the vegetable in Nahuatl, thelanguage of the Aztecs. Today in many parts of Spanish-speaking America
camote is a metaphor used for 'being in love'. It also means a lie or exaggeration,and thus recalls the disillusion of those who relied on the virtue attributed to thesweet potato.1 Finally, the old error, fossilized, persists to this day in circles
where one might least expect it: botanists and mycologists use the word 'tuber'
for both potatoes and truffles, thus embalming in their unhappy nomenclature
the hoary blunder.
There is a tradition that the vogue of the truffle in France and Italy came from
Spain during the Renaissance, and that it attained its exalted place on the tablesof the mighty in the reign of Francois I. It certainly soared to new renown in
the 16th century, but the survival in France and Italy of the local names derived
from the Latin tuber is evidence that on humbler and less articulate levels thetruffle had not been wholly forgotten in the silent centuries reaching back to
Roman times. In Paris, however, the truffle was adorning only the most aristocratic tables down almost to the French Revolution, Brillat-Savarin assertsthat therevival of the truffle is quite recent. . . One can even say that the present generation has
almost witnessed it. Toward 1780 truffles were rare in Paris, to be found, and then insmall quantities, only at the Hotel des Americains and the Hotel de la Provence. A turkey
stuffed with truffles was a luxury to be found only on the tables of the great, or in thehomes of kept women . . . At the moment when I write these lines [1825] one can saythat the glory of the truffle has reached its apogee.

With the rise of the bourgeoisie following the French Revolution, new layersof society acquired a taste for the delicacy and by their demand for it brought
about an immense increase in the harvest. In the i6th century various kinds oftruffles had competed for favor in France, but by Brillat-Savarin's time thetuber melanosporum of Perigord had established its primacy and become perhaps
I. The metaphorical meanings of camote are cited by Hennquez Urefia in his monograph to which we acknowledged our indebtedness in a footnote on page 169, but he does not try to explain those meanings.
172

THE SECRETS OF THE TRUFFLE

the supreme delight of the haute cuisine. Meanwhile that other tuber, the potato,
thanks to the ingenious and bold promotion of the famous Antoine-Augustin
Parmentier, had finally, in the lyyo's, gained acceptance as a worthy food for agentleman's table in France.
The reputation of the truffle as an erotic stimulant has an elusive history. This
reputation was certainly endemic in Spain, expressing itself as it did in the names
criadilla and turma. The culture of the Iberian peninsula is strong in archaic
traits, and this would suggest that the peculiar repute of the truffle goes backfar. We have not arrived at the indigenous names for the truffle in the otherIndo-European languages, such as those of India. In the Sind, as an example,
there is a fungus that in Sindhi is called saitan jo pelo, Satan's testicles. But weknow not its identity: is it a truffle?
Perhaps the Spaniards in their century of great influence were responsible for
spreading the belief that truffles were aphrodisiacs. This is a tempting hypothesis.
Yet there is certain subtle evidence suggesting that an indigenous tradition of
the same kind prevailed in Central Europe, notably in Germany and Bohemia.
For centuries the hunting of the stag in Europe was the noblest expression of
the chase. This stag was the male of the red deer. Norman Douglas in Paneros
has pointed out that the genitalia of the stag were coveted as precious inciters tovenery. Now here is an interesting fact that Douglas did not know: there exists
an underground fungus distinct from the truffle that is called in German the
Hirschtruffel - the stag's truffles. In English botanical works already a century
ago it was called 'hart's truffle', and also 'hart's balls' and 'deer balls'. The corresponding names in French and Spanish are truffe du cerfznd criadilla de ciervo.
We have no evidence that these words circulated outside the covers of books:
they could be bookish renderings of the German term. One should look forsuch terms in the vocabulary peculiar to traffickers in aphrodisiacs and theirclientele, and source materials for this dubious area of cultural activity haveeluded us. We suspect that our hart's truffles would be found therein. The
scientist's name for this genus of fungus is a scientist's neo-Greek renderingof the German name: elaphomyces.
As to the ripe age of the German name there can be no doubt. Before 1544
Valerius Cordus, in his Adnotationes, commented most curiously on the stag's
truffle. Truffles were thought to be earth's testicles and aphrodisiacs, and thestag's testicles were also aphrodisiacs. From this it was only a step to suppose thatthe underground fungi were generated from the spilled seed of stags! Hereis a pretty illustration of the way men's minds work by false analogies, taking
figures of speech literally. But this is not all. Why were these underground fungi
173

CHAPTER FIVE
related to the genitalia of stags and no other animals > We believe that beneaththe surface of the words of Valerius Cordus we detect a further punning analogy,
a foolish confusion caused by homonyms, and yet a confusion possessing a certain
extraordinary iridescence.
There are two words spelled Venery' in English. One of them is derived
from 'Venus' and means sexual lust. The other is derived from the Latin venari,meaning 'to hunt'. In sound these two words run parallel to each other throughout the Romance languages and medieval Latin. Indeed, when we go backbehind Latin, we discover that both words, Venus and venari, descend from thesame root, a root cousin to the English verb 'to win'. He who pursues andbrings down the game is engaged in the same order of activity as he who brings
down a mate. 'Venery' in its application to the chase relates to the noblest kindof hunting, the coursing of the stag. And this leads us to suggest the play onwords that probably explains the kinship of truffles to stags. The aphrodisiacal
truffles in the earth are earth's testicles, fruit of the stag's truffles, and both areshot through with venery. Venery in both senses loomed large in the consciousness of the 16th century European. We suggest that this common denominatorof the homonyms, albeit unexpressed in the text of Valerius Cordus, was in theback of his mind, consciously or unconsciously, as he wrote out his quaintobservations about hart's truffles:
Pharmacopolse etiam in suis OfEcinis Fungos habent, quos Boletos et Fungos ceruinos
vocant. Ferunt eos in sylvis ex semine cervorum enasci, et propterea Venerem stimulare:
sed falsum hoc est. Inueni enim hos Ceruinos fungos in prseruptissimis montium syluis,
quo ne Damae et Rupicaprse quidem peruenire possent, nedum cerui. Nee verisimile est
eos venerem stimulare, cum frigidum, pituitosum, crudum, et malignum succum inhumane corpore gignant. Quae enim Venerem accendere debent, contrarias facultates
et qualitates habere necesse est.
Apothecaries, in fact, have in their establishments fungi which they call boleti and stag
fungi. They say that these originate in the woods from the seed of stags, and hence
excite the sexual impulse; but this is false. For I have found these stag fungi in thedensest mountain groves, which not even fallow deer and chamois could reach, not tomention stags. Nor is it likely that they excite the sexual urge, as they engender cold,
phlegmy, raw, and evil humor in the human body. Things that are to inflame the sexual
impulses must have opposite faculties and characteristics.

Cordus, who was German, was writing this passage shortly before 1544, theyear of his premature death. His text does not suggest that the lust-inciting virtue
attributed to the fungi was a novelty for him, nor foreign in inspiration. He
was clearly challenging a tradition native to his German world. But Cordus,
174

Fig. 11 THE HORNED GOD. Prehistoric painting of a man disguised as animal.
Caverne des Trois Freres, Montesquieu-Avantes, Ariege, France.

CHAPTER FIVE

steeped from his earliest years in the New Learning, was far removed fromthe well-springs of the primitive beliefs of his race. Perhaps he was revealing
the innocence that often goes with education when he labored his point about
the stags in the mountain groves. Did not the erotic names for the truffles referrather to the Horned God of the pagan world? In 1920 the Abbe Breuil andCount Begouen published1 a prehistoric design that they had discovered engravedon the walls in the innermost recess of the Caverne des Trois Freres, at Montesquieu-Avantes, Ariege. It represented a man costumed for a primitive religious
rite. On his head he wore antlers. The upper part of his face was owlish, thelower part covered by a long beard. The skin of a wild beast, perhaps a stag,is swung over his body. His hands are in a clawing posture. A horse's tail protrudes from the rear. He could easily be the remote progenitor of the Robin
Goodfellow illustrated on page 83. The ancient artist leaves the beholder in
no doubt concerning the importance that he attributes to las criadillas de ciervo,
the hart's truffles. By this interpretation the aphrodisiacal metaphor suddenly
takes on a pulsating vitality, and the two meanings of 'venery' coalesce. The
horns of Robin Goodfellow and of the god of the prehistoric cave also appear
in a new light. Our ancestors never tired of their jokes about the cuckold's
horns - the symbols of his humiliation. R. Lowe Thompson in his Historyof the Devil, published in New York in 1929, suggested that originally thesehorns were the horns of the 'Satan' who ofEciated at the rites of the witches'coven. Certainly this interpretation quickens a stale figure of speech, and gives
added piquancy to the priapism of Robin Goodfellow.
Vv e might now call a halt to our discussion of fungal aphrodisiacs, were it
not for a singular phenomenon that we discover in the Czech language. Alone
among the Slavs, the Czechs pay attention, by native tradition, to the world of
truffles. For the underground fungi they possess two words, both native. The
true truffle is lanyz, and the hart's truffle is thejelenka. The name of the true truffle
comes from Ian, the word that designates the roe or hind of the red deer. The
name of the hart's truffle comes faomjelen, which designates the stag. A peculiar
aspect of these words is the shift in genders that takes place:
MASCULINE

FEMININE

jelen (stag)
lanyz (true or hind's truffle)

Ian (hind)jelenka (hart's truffle)

I. Comptes rendus des Seances de 1'Academic des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, Institut de France, 1920,
pp. 303-310. Our reproduction is from the half-tone there published.
176

THE SECRETS OF THE TRUFFLE

What lies behind this criss-crossing of genders ? In some medieval Czech text
someone may discover the answer, perhaps in a manuscript dealing with love
philtres. Meanwhile we suggest as a working hypothesis that the hart's truffle,
jelenka, was prescribed for women, and the hind's truffle, lanyz, for men. In
addition to the hart's truffle, jelenka is the Czech name for the mushroom
known as the phallus impudicus, and a related name, jelenice, is used for thehydnum imbricatum, a species that by its shape is also erotically suggestive.
The Czech jelenka in its fungal application is semantically and mycologicallya precise equivalent of the German Hirschbrunst, 'hart's rut', showing that
Czechs and Germans shared a faith in the aphrodisiacal virtues of the phallus
impudicus (Hirschbrunst iiber der Erde) and the hart's truffles (Hirschbrunst unter derErde). J. G. Gleditsch in his Methodus Fungorum (1753) wrote condescendinglyof the Moravian peasant girls who used certain dried phalloidaceae to curewarts and corns, according to him without success; and how these fungi, airdried or smoked, were thought to stimulate venery in dogs and horses. He
added that rustics used them even on themselves. Mrs. Ulehlova-Tilschova inher book on Czech folk food, Ceska strava lidovd, has lately reported an East
Moravian name for true truffles, barant vajca, 'lamb's fries' or testicles.1 Later inthe same work she calls attention to the important role played by fungi in theritual dinner on Christmas eve in Bohemia, when the mushrooms are servedin a soup or as gravy or mixed with cereal. The precise meaning of the mushrooms consumed on this annual occasion survives in men's memories in southern
Bohemia, near Tabor, where the mushrooms are served with millet and thedish is called kuba or manas. The word ntanas means a lusty male, and he who eatsof the dish is imbued with extra virility for the coming year.
John Parkinson, obviously relying on Central European sources, publishedin his Theatrum Botanicum2 in 1640 certain curious facts about the use of hart's
truffles or elaphomyces as aphrodisiacs and in medication:
These be not eaten in the same manner as the former [true truffles], that is for meate
or food, but as a medicament being cut into peeces, and dryed upon strings put throughthem to be used upon occasion: while they are fresh they have a strong and evill sent,
which they lose in the drying, and are used either alone one dramme and a halfe in pouther,taken with sweete wine or with other things as provoke venery, as also to increase milke
1. See pp. 54-5 for this and other examples of the rich popular terminology for fungi in Czech; for the references
to the mushrooms served on Christmas Eve see pp. 345 ff. In standard Czech barani vajca would be beranl vejce.
2. Parkinson in this work offers us the first reference in English to truffles, which he calls 'Spanish trubbes'. 'Trub'
would suggest a Spanish form truba, which has never been reported. Parkinson cites a passage in Athenaeus
as authority for the aphrodisiacal virtue of truffles, but we have not found it. The ancients probably held such abelief, but we know of not a single reference in ancient writers to fungi as aphrodisiacs, in spite of the phallic
symbolism of the μύκης.
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CHAPTER FIVE
in Nourses breasts, taken in some ptisane drinke, and a little long pepper added thereto:the smoake thereof when it is burned taken underneath, helpeth women troubled withthe mother, and openeth the passages when they are close: they are thought also to expell
poyson, and the venome of creatures, to be taken in pure wine, and also applyed outwardly.

Both Gleditsch and Parkinson were unfriendly informants repeating hearsay.
Mrs. Ulehlova-Tilschova, centuries later, is at last tapping the genuine sources offolk beliefs, of which many in the intervening generations must have vanishedforever. In low English the word 'hart' preserves to this day an erotic sense,
unrecorded in the dictionaries.
rdere our story of the truffle would end, had not Moliere by a stroke ofgenius created the character of Tartuffe. By the criterion of price, by theprestige of its parfum, by its erotic associations, the truffle holds a position ofprimacy in the fungal world. To all these distinctions it adds literary immortality:
in Tartuffe hypocrisy finds its supreme artistic incarnation. In Tartuffe's fungalname the truffle was woven into the very warp and woof of Europe's cultural
tapestry.
What led Moliere to 'Tartuffe' ? This is not a French family name: the nearest
approach to it is 'Truffier', which might be rendered 'Truffleman'. At first
blush truffles do not suggest hypocrisy. Moliere's choice was brilliant. But why
does it ring so true, and how did he arrive at it >Scholars have applied themselves to this problem, but with meager results.1
More than a century ago Francois Genin diverted into a fresh channel the flowof speculation on this subject. He announced that Moliere had not invented thename, but had borrowed it ready-made from the Italians. He had discovered aline in the lengthy iyth century poem, II Malmantik, by Lorenzo Lippi, wherein
one of the characters is called il mal tartufo. These words are to be found in
Canto xi, stanza 47. They refer to a dwarf, by name Batistone, whose behavior
makes him ridiculous and gets him into trouble. However, whatever his faults,
the misshapen little man was no hypocrite and therefore no true precursorof Tartuffe. Moreover, Lippi's work came from the press only in 1676, sevenyears after Tartujfe was first presented on the stage, and we should have to assume
that Moliere read it in manuscript, which he could have done but for which
there is no evidence. Genin made a virtue of this chronological difficulty, obI. For summaries of the discussions, see Grand Dictionnaire Universe! (Larousse) under 'Tartufe'; also the noteby Casimir Jarecki, 'Sur 1'Origine, la Signification, et 1'Orthographe du Nom de Tartufe', in Archivum Neophilologicum, I: i, Krakow, 1930, pp. 38-42.

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THE SECRETS OF THE TRUFFLE

serving that here was proof of Mohere's alertness to everything affecting his art!
Carrying Genin's line of inquiry further, Max J. Wolff in 1916 improvedon the citation in Lippi's poem.1 In a play by Giambattista della Porta, L'Astrologo, dating from 1606, tartufo occurs in a curious context. One of the characterssurfers from amnesia. In Act iv: 7 he is asked whether he is a horse, or an ox,
or an ass, and finally, "Sei tu tartufo?", to which the unhappy man replies,"Sto fresco", which is to say, "I'm in for it now." However, here again noone knows what double meaning this tartufo conveyed to the early 17th century
audience; but it was certainly unrelated to hypocrisy.
Della Porta superseded Lippi in the quest for Tartuffe's progenitor, and recently
Della Porta in his turn has had to give way before a fresh find. Our contemporary
scholar Alfred Rebelliau has drawn attention to a pamphlet published in 1609
entitled Le Mastigophore auauel Tout brisees les brides a veaux de maistre Ivvain
Solanicqiie, written by Antoine Fusy, a parish priest of Paris. In it he vituperated against the warden of his church, Nicolas Vivian:Tu n'es qu'un tartuffe, qu'un butor, qu'une happelourde.
You're nothing but a tartuffe, a lout, a paste-jewel.

Butor means a bittern, but metaphorically it means a churl, lout, clodhopper,
oaf, dolt. What did this angry priest mean by tartuffe 2 If butor was a synonym,
he meant what Lippi may have meant by tartujo - a dunce, with bad manners
to boot. If happelourde developed the sense, then pretense and hypocrisy begin
to appear. In Mohere's 'Tartuffe' there might be an echo of the colloquialismthat survives for us in Antoine Fusy's diatribe. But Tartuffe was no dunce,
and anyway the question still stands for us: why should hypocrisy have attacheditself to the truffle?
We have pursued the thread of scholarly research from Genin to Wolff,
and from Wolff to Rebelliau, from Lippi to Della Porta to Fusy, from one
dubious clue to another. This evidence is relevant but secondary, and suggests
a fallacious analogy with the philologist's quest for the etymon of a word. Surely
the problem calls for different handling. We have to do with a creative mind in
the act of choosing a name for a great dramatic character.
But before we venture our own comments on the origins of 'Tartuffe' let
us return for a moment to Genin. In the course of his discussion of Lippi's
tartufo, he suggested that the Italian word corresponded to the use of fungus
as an epithet in ancient Rome. He recalled a character in a play by Plautus
who, when he discovered how he had been hoodwinked, exclaimed:
i. See Archiv fur das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen, vol. 134, p. 148.
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CHAPTER FIVE
Adeon' me fuisse fungum est qui illi crederem.
Was I such a fungus as to believe him!

an exclamation that Genin rendered in French: Aije etc assez cornichon . . .
Then Genin made a remarkable observation: for the Latin use of fungus as anepithet signifying stupidity, said he, the French substitute cornichon, melon,
citrouille — names of gourds. Thus it comes about that Genin discovered a common denominator between fungi and gourds in their metaphorical use, and so
he furnishes startling circumstantial evidence in support of our thesis, developedon pages 127 ff., of a deepseated association in men's minds between gourds andfungi.
There is another passage in Plautus that leaves no doubt as to the meaningof fungus in contexts such as we are discussing. Act v of Bacchides opens with it,
Nicobulus senex bursting upon the stage with these verses:
Quicumque ubi ubi sunt, qui fuerunt quique futuri sunt posthac
stulti, stolidi, fatui, fungi, bardi, blenni, buccones,
solus ego omnis longe antideo
stultitia et moribus indoctis.
Of all the fools, chumps, dolts, fungi, oafs, drivelers, and mouthing idiots, wherever or whenever - single-handed I top the lotof them in folly and clumsy behavior!

Genin could have cited parallel examples in English - Shakespere's 'toadstool'
as an epithet, and Sir William Perm's 'mushroom'. We will go further and makebold to suggest that the perfect translation offungus as Plautus used it is the colloquial 'gump', a humble word that in a wide variety of forms circulates inEngland, Scotland, Ireland, and America. Its wide use and many forms testify
to its long lineage. In Wright's English Dialect Dictionary we find gump(h),gomf, gamp, gamf, gaump, gawmp. We find also sumf and sumph. All these
connote human stupidity. As we have seen, words etymologically identical tofungus are the Slavic gamba, German Schwamm, and the English 'swamp'; there
is another cognate in English - 'sump', a water-filled trap or excavation. Are
not 'gump' and 'sumph' etymologically the progeny of the same verbal family?
In Plautus' Bacchides are not fungi simple 'gumps'?
But however fascinating for mycophiles and ethno-mycologists these fungiof Plautus and ancient Rome are, what have they to do with truffles, hypocrisy,
and Tartuffe ? Was not Genin pursuing the wrong scent - barking up the tree
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THE SECRETS OF THE TRUFFLE

where Sterne's Smelfungus grows, rather than grubbing for the habitat of
Mohere's truffle?
The creative mind in literature is often made manifest in the selection ofnames for the characters. Dickens is famous for his names. Take Tulkinghorn
in Bleak House: who has not had the misfortune of meeting his replica in thelegal profession? The syllables of that name, savored singly or together, suggest
by homonymic echo other words and ideas that become a harmonious compositeof the repugnant human being to whom Dickens introduces us. When Tristram
Shandy's father sought out the treatises on 'long noses' that would help him in
coping with his infant's problem, Sterne characteristically devised names faintly
smelling of his salacious theme: Prignitz, Scroderus, Parseus, not to speak of the
Evening Conferences of Bouchet - names of such subtle craftsmanship that only
the attentive reader catches the message, and then only if he is already familiar
with Sterne's prurient nose. The art of devising names for fictitious characterslies in choosing sounds that suggest the sense without declaring it baldly, sounds
that reach out like antennae to catch meanings and emotional associations whichof themselves go far toward evoking the character whose acquaintance the reader
is invited to make. Shakespere's Caliban and Ariel, by an alchemy of phonetic
and semantic echoes, offer in their names a foretaste of their roles, and those roles
in turn fulfill, richly amplify, and clinch the names, until names and characterso thoroughly and unforgettably interpenetrate each other that they are one.
Moliere alone could tell us how he hit on 'Tartuffe', and he failed to do so.
This leaves the field open for others to suggest some of the associations thatmust have lain in his mind, and in particular to explain how the idea of hypocrisy
emerged from the truffle.
Truffles live out their lives in the dark, dank, cold underground, a fit habitat
for repugnant things. The truffle of France is almost black, like the sombre
habit and soul of Tartuffe. He was a lecher, and in the iyth century truffles were
the supreme aphrodisiac of France. The big, congested nose that we associatewith gluttony and wine-bibbing is today in France une bonne truffe: Tartuffe nevermissed a chance to gorge himself at others' tables. There may even have beena Germanic influence in Tartuffe: the German name for the Devil, der Teufel,
gave to French the oath tarteifle, recorded in Larousse. If this was known in
Moliere's time, the phonetic echo would have been felicitous.
Underlying all these, however, was another idea - fraud. In Old French
truffe and truffer meant 'fraud' and 'to defraud'. Truffa in Italian and trufa inSpanish signify 'swindle' to this day, and the parallel truhdn, meaning 'scoundrel',has had a long and vigorous history in the Iberian peninsula. These various forms
181

CHAPTER FIVEof the same word turned up in Middle English as the verb 'to truffle' and 'totrifle', as when one speaks of trifling with a girl's affections. In Scottish cant 'to
truff' has meant 'to befool' since before A.D. 1500, somewhat before the 'Auld
Alliance' with France. There is no evidence that Chaucer was conscious of theexistence of truffles, but he knew the word in its derived meaning, for in
The Canterbury Tales his Parson defines the sin of idleness as:
the thurrok [i .e., bilge, or sump, or sink] of alle wikked and vileyns thoghtes,
and of alle jangles, trufles, and of all ordure, [line 715]

wherein jangles, trufles' mean idle chatter and deceits.
All of those words stem back to the Low Latin truffactor, a swindler. There isalso the Italian truaare, the French troauer, which give to English the verb
'truck', meaning 'trade'. Equally striking is the Italian trafficare, the French
trajiquer. The unpleasant flavor of these words survives in some contexts in the
English 'traffic', but, as befits a nation of shopkeepers, with diminished intensity.
'Traffic' and 'truck' are sometimes synonyms, as when the righteous man
declares he will have no traffic (or truck) with yonder early prowling, baseinforming, sly, litigious, plaguy knave. The origin of truccare and trafficare hasremained obscure. We suggest that they are related to truffactor, and that theyand truffactor itself are all secondary meanings originally derived from the Latin
tuber, tufer, the word for the truffle. The truffle-dealer was a notorious tradesman,and he became a by-word. If we are right, the verbal progeny of the truffle,in the figurative sense, arrived in English in the I3th century, almost four
centuries before the Englishman came to know the truffle that was the originof the word.
The Oxford Dictionary in tracing the history of 'trifle' points out that some
philologists have suggested an association with the truffle, but adds that noone has ever proposed a semantic connection. We believe that we can supply
such a connection. There is a reason why truffles are associated in some regionswith fraud to this day, and why 'truffle' at an early date became a colloquial
metaphor signifying fraud. This reason is one that neither philologists nor professional mycolo gists are best attuned to catch.
When truffles are for sale in the market places of the Mediterranean, caveat
emptor! The truffle dealer is even now a by-word among his fellows. He mixes
dirt with his truffles to add to their weight. He includes truffles in bad condition.
He sells inferior species for the best. He adds swarthy fungi that are not truffles.
Truffles, in short, are merchandise that lends itself to fraud. They call for unusualexperience in the buyer who would avoid deception. In Adolphe Chatin's
182

THE SECRETS OF THE TRUFFLELa Truffe, already cited, the author devotes a whole chapter to frauds habituallyperpetrated in the retailing of truffles. He reports that in the Dauphine, theProvence, and Perigord, where triffe means 'truffle', the ordinary locutions forcalling a man a swindler are "Tes un trrrier" and "Tes un trurfaire". Every
truffle fancier teaches his disciples in the first lesson to be on their guard against
these perils of the truffle traffic, lest haply they be (as one might say) trifled withand truffled.
This proverbial dishonesty of the truffle merchant has escaped the notice ofthe philologists who have wrestled with our cluster of words. It supplies thelink that the Oxford Dictionary found wanting. It plumbs in depth, back throughcenturies, the mores of the small-town market-places of Italy, the Provence,and Spain. It supplies the background of double-dealing that appealed to
Moliere when he hit on the doublet 'Tartuffe' for the name of his character.
To have used 'Truffe' or 'Truffier' would have been crudely blunt and a flaw.
The Italian tartufo never took to itself the secondary meaning of fraud. By
resorting to it Moliere was achieving his purpose - hitting on a name thatevoked a penumbra of subtle associations, none obvious but all of them of akind to conjure up the villainy of his hero; associations that are felt rather
than thought out, a parfum so elusive that it works its influence and passes
undetected. All words are enveloped in such a penumbra, which no lexicographer can pin down, and the essence of great writing is the art of utilizing to
the full these emanations, which after all express the most intimate emotionsof men in communion with one another.
In 1836 there appeared in Paris a book entitled De la Truffe, the authorshipof which is attributed on the title page to 'MM. Moynier', about whose identity
we have discovered nothing further. Early in that book the reader is told how
Moliere came to choose the name 'Tartuffe'. The episode is believable andrings true, but there is no way to verify it. All of the influences and 'sources'that scholars laboriously unravel and dissect and ticket are here synthesized
for Moliere in a flash, and the tuber of the Romans, the turma of the Spaniards, thetrujfe of the French rises from the crucible of the playwright's mind sublimatedand transfigured, imbued as by magic with the immortal attributes of Tartuffe.
For Moliere's Tartuffe possesses an eternal vitality, of an order far different fromand superior to that other tawdry lure of eternal youth which spurred on
Ponce de Leon and his companions, beguiled as they were by childish illusions
about batatas and miraculous fountains, doomed as they were in this world,like Tantalus in another, to an endless round of recurring hope and recurring
frustration.
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Here then is the genesis of 'Tartuffe', as related by MM. Moynier: The
authors begin by informing their readers that the story is told to them by
the Superior of a congregation of Capuchin friars who in 1826 were still
living in Aix-en-Provence. The Father Superior explains that from earliest
days the truffle was known to the members of his order, and also its renown as
an aphrodisiac. In the course of time, he says, it came about that on a particularoccasion Moliere was observing one of the worthy fathers consuming sometruffles. Moliere was struck by the rotundity of the friar's face and thevermillion coloring of his cheeks, as he sat there ingesting the truffles at his
superior's board. He was swathed and muffled in an enormous woollen
habit, and the garment even seemed to envelop a goodly part of the table overwhich he was hunched. He was a picture of deep meditation. As he savored his
truffles, the holy man appeared to be either in a state of ecstatic contemplation
before a vision of the Blessed Virgin, or else relishing in deep, long draughts
certain intimate internal pleasures artfully contrived. "What do you call thisthing ?", said Moliere to him. "A truffle, my dear Sir," replied the contemplative.
Then said Moliere to himself: " Of truffe I shall make Tartuffe, and thou, poor
fellow, shalt be he."184

12 'GRIPAU' AND'GRIB'For 'toad' the Catalans say gripau, and a word of the same root, grib, is reserved by Russians to designate the mushrooms that they esteem most highly.
What is the common semantic theme here, and do these words point to a commingling of toads with mushrooms in primitive thinking, long ago ? Early in
our argument we mentioned this strange evidence and promised to return to it.
The words for 'toad' in Europe, as we have seen, are numerous. They are all,we believe, evasive in character, euphemisms resorted to as a refuge from an earlyword that fell under tabu. That archaic term is unknown to us - unless it be theGallic craxantus, which comes down to us in a single citation. If our findings
prove acceptable, there are about ten basic euphemisms for 'toad' in Europe.
We discover 'the Poisonous One' in 'natterjack', in the Anglo-Saxon tosca,
Breton tousec; and 'the Burning One' in the Danish tudse and Swedish tossa.
The Irish combine these two when they say 'the Poisonous Burning One' losgann nimhe. There is 'the Moist - or - Slimy One': Welsh llyffant, AngloSaxon yce, Low German utze, and High German Unke. To these we add a clusterof words for 'toad' from Eastern Europe: the Czech and Polish ropucha, Lithuanian rupUze and krupe, and Slovenian rapuch, stemming back to words meaning
pus, foul eruption, rash, coarseness.
The Spaniards see in the toad a skin or hide - escuerzo; and so did the Cornishmen when they still spoke their own tongue - croinoc. The idea of gaseous
distension lies behind the Latin bufo and the Russian zhaba, the Greek cpuaaXog;
and the 'cow's udder' of the Albanian thithelope. We hazard the suggestion thatthe padde of the Low Countries, Scandinavia, and the British Isles is the sameword as the 'padding' of a padded garment. The color of the toad finds expression in the Latin rubeta and the Greek cppuvoc; - unless this latter means 'theBurning One'. The idea of excrement hides behind the German Krote, and was
responsible, we think, for shaping the French word crapaud, and between these
two lie the Romansch forms cratun and crapun. A third Romansch form, rustg,
is mysterious; it could have lost an initial k or g, and in that case might havebeen originally krustg* which reminds us of the Lithuanian word for toad,krupe. Or has it the same origin as the Italian rospo, which by its Latin root
conveys the idea of scratching > The Spanish sapo is, we think, a Greek borrowing, meanning 'snake' in Greek. The idea of swelling and inflation underlie theI. Cf., e.g., German Kreide, chalk, which becomes Romansch rida.
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Austrian words, brattling and brotze, and the Bavarian broz and perhaps braste
also. Finally there is the Old French word, le hot, 'the Cripple', with its demonic
associations, for which a parallel may be found in the Austrian bratze.
There remains to be considered the Catalan gripau with its Proven9al
cousin grapal. The French crapaud evolved from the latter, and we find an additional derivative in the Romany dialect of central Europe, where the toad iscalled grapodo. Perhaps there are other traces of the same word. The Latin rana,frog, would normally evolve in French into renouille but the actual word is
grenouilk, and that initial g has given rise to considerable learned discussion.
Surely it is borrowed from the name of the toad. There is a familiar Frenchsaying: 'Fin comme Gribouille qui se jette a 1'eau de peur de la pluie', or else 'depeur de se mouiller': 'As clever as Gribouille who jumps into the water for fearof the rain', or 'for fear of getting wet'. Scholars have debated the origin andmeaning of Gribouille. Who was this immortal simpleton? We suggest that he
was merely a personification of the toad, which jumps into the water when
disturbed by rain-drops, and that in Gribouille we discover the unique survival
in French of the variant of crapaud that is still current in Catalonia, viz., gripau.
The root behind gripau is grip-, and it means what it says: to grip, to seize,
to hold, to grab. There is one act in the life of the toad that is marked by avice-like grip of altogether astonishing strength and duration. This is the actof mating. Everyone who comes upon toads at that moment in their life cycle,
in the spring of the year, is held in horrid fascination by the spectacle. Countrymen know the sight from childhood. The smaller male climbs on the back of
his mate and embraces her around the armpits. There he chngs for days and sometimes for weeks, and cannot be detached from her by any interruption, evenpermitting himself to be cut up alive rather than let go. Instances have beenreported where the forearms of the male have become ankylosed from theirprolonged immobility. When the males outnumber the females, then the males
clamber over each other on the single mate, and cling to each other and to her,even smothering her to death, and still they cling in a cluster to the corpse as
it begins to decompose. These knotted clusters of toads find apt expression in
the Provencal grapal, related as this word is to the idea of a cluster, as of grapes.1
There is abundant evidence that the sex habits of toads gripped the imagination of our ancestors. Toads were a symbol of lechery, and so were warts andmoles, with which toads were associated. Professor Meyer Schapiro has pointed
out that "the conception of the unchaste woman tormented by serpents at her
I. See F. Angel's La Vie et les Mceurs des Atnphibiens, Paris, 1947, pp. 153-155, for a vivid account of the manifestations of the mating instincts in toads.

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breasts and sometimes toads at her private parts is common in Romanesque andMoslem fantasy".1 Probably the supreme expression of this association of ideas
is in Shakespere, when Othello, obsessed with jealousy, confronts Desdemonawith his monstrous charge, and then in a terrifying passage drains the very dregsof his tormented being, rising to his climax when, at the end, he invokes theimage of mating toads in a figure that would be foully obscene in any context
but this:2
Had it pleas'd Heaven
To try me with Affliction, had they rain'd
All kind of Sores, and Shames on my bare head:
Steep'd me in povertie to the very lippes,
Given to Captivitie, me, and my utmost hopes,
I should have found in some place of my Soule
A drop of patience. But alas, to make me
The fixed Figure for the time of Scorne,
To point his slow, and moving finger at!
Yet could I beare that too, well, very well:But there where I have garnerd up my heart,
Where either I must live, or beare no life,
The Fountaine from the which my currant runnes,
Or else dries up: to be discarded thence,
Or keepe it as a Cesterne, for foule Toades
To knot and gender in!

Bosch shows us this lecherous toad in the detail of his Seven Mortal Sins
that we have reproduced on Plate xm. In Venice there hangs in the ducal palacea singular painting of demonic import, crowded with the creatures of Hell.
It is attributed to a painter of unknown identity who is known as the pseudoHerri met de Bles. In one detail we discover our giant toad squatting on the
double bed and staring at its sinful occupants. In the mosaics of the Battisteroin Florence, executed early in the I3th century, a supine toad is superimposedon the body of a supine woman, and here the meaning is revoltingly clear.
There emerges, then, a clear picture of the toad as seen through medievaleyes - poisonous, pustulous, lecherous, possessed of a strange capacity to innate
itself with air; in its facial expression and in the disposition of its torso and limbs,
the very incarnation of a soulless homunculus, crouching and jerking and func1. Quoted from his article, 'From Mozarabic to Romanesque in Silos', The Art Bulletin, vol. xxi, no. 4, De
cember 1939, p. 328. See also Walter Clyde Curry's Chaucer and the Medieval Sciences, Oxford University Press,
N. Y., p. 84 ff.
2. Othello, rv: 2, 61; on one other occasion Shakespere refers to mating toads, Troilus and Cressida n: 3, 170:
"I do hate a proud man, as I hate the ingendring of Toades." See also Waldemar Deonna's paper on 'La
Femme et la Grenouille', in La Gazette des Beaux-Arts, November 1952.

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tioning like human kind on the animal level of man's dual nature; a horrible
caricature in miniature of sensual man and miserable sinner.
We suggest that the Catalan and Proven9al words for 'toad' were originally
keyed to the mating act. In the fungal world there are many erotic and phallic
associations, as we have seen. It would have been a happy solution to our problem
of grib and gripau if we could have discovered in the Russian word grib the erotic
associations that would have linked it with our interpretation of grip au, but they
do not exist.
The story ofgrib in the Slavic world is the same that we know well from theWest. At one time the word designated a particular class of mushrooms. By its
pre-eminence this class came to stand for the whole mushroom world, and its
name became generic, usurping the semantic terrain originally occupied by the
Indo-European words, gomba and the hypothetical bu-dla, which we discussed
on pages 93-94. A glimpse into this curious history is offered to us by the Book ofRules of the Josif Volokolamskij Monastery for the i6th and zyth centuries,1
wherein we learn from the refectory diary that the monks were served mushrooms regularly on Wednesdays and Fridays, the fast days. The amanuensis
records sliced mushrooms, boiled sliced mushrooms, chopped mushrooms,
mushrooms with sauce, and mushrooms with garlic. For 'mushrooms' he uses
only two words: griby and gruzdi, and it is clear that all kinds belonged to one or
the other. Apparently all boleti were griby and all gilled mushrooms were
gruzdi. Gmzd' still carries traces of this old meaning: it floats uncertainly inits specific application among various lactarii and russulas, though it belongs
specifically to the lactarius piperatus.
Grib circulates chiefly among the mycophilic northern Slavs and the Slovenians. We think it is unknown in Serbian and Bulgarian, but it appears in
Polish as grzyb, in Czech as hrib, in Ukrainian as hryb, and in Slovenian as grib.
The idea inherent in the root is familiar to us: grubbing, rooting, scraping,digging, grabbing, gripping.2 It evokes the activity of the mushroom gatherer
in the forest. Down into Renaissance times the Germans used Griibling as a
1. See Chtenija v Obshchest've Istorii i Drevnostej pri Moskovskom Universitete, 1880, bk. 3, p. 113.
2. Max Vasmer in his new Russian etymological dictionary suggests a novel root £01 grib, linking it with certain
words signifying 'slime'. While slime, as we have shown, is semantically appropriate for a fungal word, theetymology that we espouse is semantically felicitous, and we are fortified in our position by the comments of
Roman Jakobson, which he allows us to quote:"As to^n'fc, I have not the slightest doubt about its origin. The Slavic languages clearly attest all vocalic gradesof the root greb; - (i) greb-, (id) the corresponding prolonged grade greb-; (2) grab-, (20) the corresponding prolonged grade grab-; (3) gr'b-, (30) the corresponding prolonged grade grib-. Thus: (i) Russ. grebti, gresti, Old
Church Slavonic greti, to dig up, dig in, rake, spade, shovel, scratch, scrape, row; Bulgarian greblo, rake, oar;Russ. grebdt', to disdain, grebtd, sorrow, greben', comb; (la) O Ch SI, pogrebdti to bury. (2) Russ. grab, grave;(20) Russ.grdbit', to snatch, grab, iob;grdbli, rake. (3) Czech hfbiti, to lie buried; hrbelec, curry-comb; (30) Serbo-

188

PLATE xxxin. Toads in Hell. Detail from a painting by the pseudo-Herri met de Bles.

Venice, Ducal Palace.

PLATE xxxiv. Toad. Detail from a mosaic. Florence, Battistero.

'GRIPAU' AND 'GRIB'
name for some kind of underground mushroom, perhaps a truffle, and of course
its etymology is identical. Was it accident that led to the use of the same rootin the East for 'mushroom' and in Catalonia for 'toad'; Did not this usage
emerge from the common pool of ideas that we have traced at length, a unified
field of associations, albeit discordant associations inasmuch as the Slavs loved
their mushrooms whereas all peoples rejected the toad?
Croatian griblja, furrow, gribati, to furrow; Russ. grib, mushroom. Similar vowel alternations are present inother Slavic roots."
When Professor Jakobson worked out the foregoing etymology, neither he nor we had discovered the obsolete
German word Griibling, for which German philologists give the same origin as he for grib. German mushroom
manuals give Grubenlorchel as the common name of the helvella lacunosa; if this name is in actual circulation, it
is a survival in Germanic of the grib root.

189

13 THE FLIES IN THE A MAN ITAIn Europe the amanita muscaria is one of the most widely known of thewild mushrooms. It is the archetype for the 'toadstool' tribe in mycophobic
countries, being the first gilled mushroom that the mycophobe learns torecognize, that he may the better curse it. In mycophagic lands all country
folk know it, and have devised for it a diverse popular nomenclature. The
esteem in which the various edible species are held differs in different parts ofEurope, but the obloquy meted out to the fly amanita is uniform and heavy.
Its evil reputation far outruns its deserts. There is a general belief that the victim
who eats it dies; yet we believe that this murderous accusation is unsupported
by a single trustworthy case history. How strange it is that the fly amanita should
be far better known than its truly lethal cousins, which in some parts of Europe,such as Great Russia, possess no common name!
A mushroom that is merely lethal is less interesting than one possessed of thedevil. Here lies, we believe, the explanation for the singular reputation of theamanita muscaria. This mushroom inebriates, it does not kill, and in all primitive
societies inebriation, like delirium and even insanity, is held in awe as a manifestation of divine powers. The problem of the amanita muscaria is one of themost elusive that ethno-mycology has to offer, and one of the most fascinating.
Can we show that its intoxicating virtue was known to our remote ancestors
and that they made use of it? Did it play the role of an important hallucinogenin the early social history of Europe ? For almost two centuries the slow debate
has gone on, and the issue is still moot. Perhaps it is possible to adduce fresh
evidence, but first we shall sum up the discussion to date.
In the early i8th century, the Swedish traveler Philip Johan von Strahlenberg
journeyed extensively in Russia, Tartary, and Siberia. His admirable report,
written in German, appeared first in Stockholm in 1730, and an English translation came out in London in 1736, bearing the lengthy title: An Historical andGeographical Description of the North and Eastern Parts of Europe and Asia particularly of Russia, Siberia, and Tartary. Von Strahlenberg was a thorough andconscientious observer. From his pages the western world learned for the firsttime of the Korjak tribesmen of Kamchatka, and how they consumed the fly
amanita for its intoxicating effect. This nugget of curious anthropologicalinformation drew wide attention throughout the literate world, and the interest
then aroused has continued up to now. Indeed, a bibliography dealing with thisKorjak practice would be surprisingly long. Today we know that traces of190THE FLIES IN THE AMANITA

it survive also among the neighboring communities of Kamchadals, and also
among the Chukchees, the primitive people living in sparse and tiny villages atthe easternmost tip of Siberia, across the Bering Strait from Alaska.
Indeed, we know more. Far to the west of the Korjaks and Chukchees, inwestern Siberia, in the northern lands lying between the Ob and Yenisei rivers,
we have fragmentary but reliable reports that the shamanistic use of the inebriating fly amanita has survived into our own times. Kai Donner, the Finnish scholar,states that the Samoyeds in this region eat the mushroom, and also the people
known as the Yenisei-Ostjaks.1 The Samoyeds are not of the Finno-Ugrianculture, but the Samoyeds and Finno-Ugrians together make up the family ofpeoples known as Uralic. The Yenisei-Ostjaks, though neighbors, are of different cultural lineage, being one of those now scattered tribes, inhabiting themost inhospitable and remote corners of Siberia, grouped together for convenience by anthropologists as 'Hyperborean' or 'Paleo-Siberian'. Donner reports that the shamans of the Yenisei-Ostjaks, to achieve the desired psychic effect, eat seven mushrooms, for which their name is hanggo, a word clearly related to the Latin fungus like the other variants mentioned on pages ijSff.
Well to the east of the Yenisei-Ostjaks, east of the Lena River, but to the west of
the Chukchees and Korjaks, there is another Paleo-Siberian people, the Yukaghirs. According to Jochelson in his study of this people, made two generations
ago, they no longer used the fly amanita in his time but they preserved a tradition of its use in earlier days. Jochelson unfortunately failed to note the Yukaghirname for it, nor did he record the details of the tradition.
More than two centuries have passed since von Strahlenberg published his
book, and for the role of the fly amanita as an inebriant in Siberia we stillmust rely on stray data that anthropologists have happened to catch. A desideratum for Russian and Finnish workers should be an intensive ethno-mycologicalsurvey of all the peoples of Siberia, to discover every trace of the inebriating
mushroom. In folklore, in linguistics, and in the details of contemporary usage,
there must be much evidence concerning it that we now ignore. If we assume,
as some anthropologists have done, that the Paleo-Siberian peoples (Korjaks,
Kamchadals, Chukchees, Yukaghirs, Yenisei-Ostjaks, etc.) once roamed overmost of northern Siberia, and that they were then sent scattering to their present
I. See Donner's Bei den Samojeden in Sibirien, Stuttgart, 1926, p. no; also his 'Ethnological Notes about the
Yenisey Ostjak (in the Turukhansk region)', published in the Memoires de la Societe Finno-ougrimne, vol. LXVI,
Helsinki, 1933, pp. 81-82. The former study has been translated and published (New Haven, 1954) with the title
Among the Samoyed in Siberia, in the series of Behavior Science Translations, Human Relations Area Files. With
that disregard for precision in matters mushroomic which afflicts most Anglo-Saxon work, the translator rendered Fliegenschwamme by 'toadstools'.
191

CHAPTER FIVE
peripheral habitats by irrupting Mongol and Turkic invaders from the south,
then the use among them of a common Indo-European word for the fly amanita
would certainly date back to the time before they were blown to the four corners. The specific application to the fly amanita by certain of these vestigial
peoples of a word that in Indo-European is generic for all mushrooms poses an
exciting question: did these Siberian tribesmen borrow the use of the inebriating mushroom, and with it the name, from the Indo-Europeans >Before the i8th century was out, in 1784, von Strahlenberg's compatriot, thescientist Samuel Odman, advanced the thesis that 'going berserk' in early
Norse times had been a state of excitement produced by the fly amanita. 1
The Odman suggestion was taken up and elaborated more than a century
later, in 1886, by the Norwegian botanist Fredrik Christian Schiibeler in his
Viridarium Norvegicum I. The Odman-Schiibeler theory took popular hold inparts of Scandinavia and even gained acceptance there among writers of scientificand popular handbooks, school textbooks, and encyclopaedias. Indeed, manyeducated Swedes and Norwegians seem to take the theory as accepted fact.
In 1929, a specialist in the medical history of Norway, Dr. Fredrik Gron,undertook to challenge Odman and Schiibeler.2 He dismissed the fly-amanita
explanation for 'berserk-raging' as weakly founded and improbable, pointing
out that nowhere in sagas or other early Nordic source is there a reference tothe fly amanita. In this he has been recently sustained by Professor Magnus
Olsen, the outstanding authority today on Norse literature and traditions.
Furthermore, the ancient writings of the Mediterranean basin make no allusion
to fungal hallucinogens nor is there a single mention of inebriating mushroomsin the voluminous source materials available to us concerning the witchcraft
cult. Odman and Schiibeler had relied solely on the analogy of modern practices
observed among the Siberian tribes.
But their side of the argument has not lacked champions. On November i,1918, the famous Swedish meteorologist H. Hildebrandsson read a paper before
the Royal Scientific Society in Upsala in which he recounted an extraordinary
episode. It seems that in the war between Sweden and Norway in 1814, somesoldiers of the Swedish Varmland regiment were observed by their officer tobe seized by a raging madness, foaming at the mouth. On inquiry, it was learned
1. His paper was entitled 'Forsok at utur Naturens Historia forklara de nordiska gamla Kampars Berserkagarig' ('An attempt to explain the berserk-raging of ancient Nordic warriors through natural history'), publishedby the Kungliga Vetenskaps Akademien, Nya Handlingar, vol. 5, pp. 240 et seq. For all of our references to
the Scandinavian pronouncements on the fly amanita we are indebted to Professors Georg Morgenstierne andRolf Nordhagen.
2. In a paper entitled 'Berserk-gangens vesen og arsaksforhold' ('The nature and causes of berserk-raging'),
Throndhjems Videnskapsselskaps skrifter, No. 4.
192

PLATE XXXVJean-Henri Fabre. Amanita muscaria Fr. ex Pers.
French: tue-mouche, crapaudin, fausse oronge;
Germ an: Fliegensch wamm\Russian: mukhomor.

THE FLIES IN THE AMANITA

that the soldiers had eaten of the fly amanita, to whip up their courage to afighting pitch. We have not seen the Hildebrandsson paper, nor discovered theevidence contemporary with the alleged episode on which he relied, but bothhe and the society before which he appeared enjoy the highest standing inscientific circles, and his paper was quoted by Professor Carl Th. Morner, adistinguished Swedish physiologist, whose avocation was the study of botany
and the higher fungi, in two of his publications on mushrooms.1 The OdmanSchiibeler thesis received further endorsement from Professor Rolf Nordhagen,the Norwegian botanist, in an article in the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten
of January n, 1930.
There is a tradition in Russia that the fly amanita was once used in folk medicine. N. Annenkov refers to this former usage as a fact in his Botanicheskii
Slovar', published in St. Petersburg in 1878. Rudolph Krebel in his Volksmedicin
und Volksmittel verschiedener Volkerstamme Russlands, published in 1858, said that it
had been used to treat lameness, but he is not precise in citing his authority nor
in identifying the practice with a particular place or period. In some kinds ofarthritis the exertions stimulated by the fly amanita might indeed be helpful.
Perhaps there exist earlier treatises on Slavic folk medicine that will amplify
these insufficient hints. In Professor C. Hartwich's great work, Die menschlichen
Genussmittel, published in Leipzig in 1911, we find on page 256 a sentence which,translated, says: "In a letter from a native of Zurich in 1799, in which year
a Russian army under Korsakov was stationed there, the amazing statement wasmade that the Russians gathered and ate fly amanitas on the Ziirichberg. Of
course, the Russians must have learned to do this in their own country." Thepharmacologist Emil Eidenbenz of Zurich has gone to considerable pains for
us in looking for the letter on which Professor Hartwich relied, but with nosuccess. Thus a promising hint, on inquiry, yields meager results.
Our European ancestors had opportunities to witness the inebriation causedby the fly amanita, it only when accidents occurred. There are numerous medicalcase histories of such episodes. One of the best is to be found in a paper by Dr.
M. Roch, a physician attached to the Cantonal Hospital in Geneva, entitled'Les Empoisonnements par les champignons', published in the Bulletin of theSociete Botanique de Geneve, 2nd series, 1913, where he reports on the wilddelirium of four Italian laborers in the Canton of Neuchatel after they had eaten
a mess of fly amanitas. The delirium was followed by sleep, and sleep by a return
to normal sobriety. Such episodes must have occurred from earliest times, and
I. 'Nagra erfarenhetsron om de hogre svamparna. Kritisk ofversikt," in Upsala Lakareforenings Forhandlingar,
Bd. xxrv, Heft 1-2, 1918; also, the same author's Om de hogre svamparna, 1919.
193

CHAPTER FIVE

must have aroused the awe that the astonishing symptoms would naturally
inspire among people whose lives were shaped by beliefs in supernatural forces.
But in the early treatises on mushrooms, before von Strahlenberg's journey into
Siberia, we find no intoxicating properties attributed to the amanita muscaria.
It seems clear that cooking attenuates or kills the distinctive virtue of the fly
amanita. In Italy and France it is not rare to find individuals who habitually eat
this mushroom with impunity. Our friend Camille Fauvel, the mightiest
mycophage of us all, informs us that he has sat down to a mess of fly amanitas
scores of times. He gathers the mushrooms, peels the caps, discards the stems,
and cooks the peeled caps in any of the usual ways. Holger Lundbergh of New
York reports to us that his mother in Sweden was taught by the famous painterAnna Boberg, nee Scholander, to add a snippet of the cap of a fly amanita
in preparing all mushroom dishes, in order to point up the flavor. Whence came
this astonishing culinary secret, uncovered thus in the heart of mycophobic
Sweden? Mrs. Boberg can hardly have hit on it herself. Did she pick it up
elsewhere in Europe? Or was it indigenous to Sweden, the final emanationof some ancient esoteric lore, possibly distorted beyond recognition from its
original purpose and aspect?
For the best accounts of the symptoms of fly-amanita inebriation, we turnto the observations of Waldemar Bogoras and Waldemar Jochelson during
their visits to Kamchatka a generation ago. (Their studies were published by theAmerican Museum of Natural History as parts of the memoirs of the Jesup
North Pacific Expedition.) On eating the mushrooms a period of exaltation
ensues, in which the chewers of the raw mushrooms shout and rage. Then they
engage in feats of prodigious physical exertion and experience illusions of radical
changes in all dimensions, of miraculous mobility, of metamorphosis. The
folklore of northern Europe is filled with supernatural phenomena that remind
us of these symptoms, as for example the powers of mobility attributed towitches and werewolves. But are mushrooms ever mentioned in those tales?
Of themselves, these analogies from folklore carry no weight, and indeed wemust be cautious about false clues. Take for example the strange case of Alicein Wonderland. Shortly after her adventures begin, this enchanting childnibbles at a mushroom, and it produces in her the typical sense of changed
dimensions that we recall in the horrifying accounts of the amanita-eating
Korjaks. All of Alice's subsequent distortions, softened by the loving irony ofLewis Carroll's imagination, retain the flavor of mushroomic hallucinations. Is
there not something uncanny about the injection of this mushroom into Alice's
story ? What led the quiet Oxford don to hit on a device so felicitous, but at the194

THE FLIES IN THE AMANITA

same time sinister for the initiated readers, when he launched his maiden on her
way > Did he dredge up this curious specimen of wondrous and even fearsome
lore from some deep well of half-conscious folk-knowledge ? On first reflectionthat mushroom in Alice, so innocent for the uninformed, seems like a gentle
aftermath, a distant reminder, of awful rumblings from barbaric times now
forgotten; like the long, harmless swell that rocks the sea many days after the
havoc of the hurricane. The temptation is strong to espouse this romantic hypothesis, and for the purposes of the controversy among Scandinavian scholars,
this would tilt the balance, and the ayes would have it.
But we think that Alice's mushroom grew in Kamchatka, not in the forestsof primeval Europe. It was on July 4, 1862, while rowing gently up the Isis to
Godstow, that Lewis Carroll embarked on Alice's adventures, holding threelittle maidens spellbound by the tale. Over the following months he put thestory into final form, and presented the completed manuscript to Alice for
Christmas in the same year. Now it so happens that the earliest popular manualon mushrooms in the English language made its appearance in that same year,
M. C. Cooke's A Plain and Easy Account oj British Fungi. We do not know
exactly when it came on the market, but we know that it was the subject of alengthy review in the October 4 issue of The Gardeners Chronicle and Agricultural Gazette. (The reviewer commended Cooke's efforts, and then conceded
the hopeless mycophobia of the English: "... notwithstanding all that is saidin favour of mushrooms, we suspect it will take a long time to remove the deeprooted prejudice that exists against them in this country, and teach our rustic
population those that are harmless.") Cooke's little volume describing strange
fungal growths was of a kind to attract Alice's creator. On pages 20-21 Cooke
discusses the use to which the fly amanita is put by the Korjaks, and its effects
on the eater: "The natural inclinations of the individual become stimulated.
The dancer executes a pas d'extravagance, the musician indulges in a song, thechatterer divulges all his secrets, the orator delivers himself of a philippic, andthe mimic indulges in caricature. Erroneous impressions of size and distance arecommon occurrences, a straw lying in the road becomes a formidable object, toovercome which a leap is taken sufficient to clear a barrel of ale or the prostrate
trunk of a British oak." (The italics are ours; the reader will note the Gilbertian flavor of the oak that had to be 'British'.) In Lewis Carroll's diaries welearn that he began putting Alice's adventures on paper on November 13,
well after Cooke's volume was on the market. For more than four months histale had been taking shape in his mind, a period when he must have been ripe
for such suggestions as Cooke had to offer.
195

CHAPTER FIVE
With a shout of discovery we leap to the conclusion that Alice's mushroom
is the one that Cooke serves us. The timing is perfect. Surely the progenitor of
Alice, in the cloistered retreat of Christ Church, with Cooke's manual at hand,transmuted the untamed practices of the uncivilized Korjaks into the poetry of
wonderland.1 But no sooner do we reach this presumption than doubt re-enters,
raising an admonitory finger. Can we be sure there was no native memory of amiracle-working mushroom ? We turn to the English translation of Jacob
Grimm's Teutonic Mythology, and there in volume 4, on page 1412, we find thefollowing statement, based on an Irish fairy-tale that we have not succeeded inlocating: "The Elf-King sits under a great toadstool, and whoever carries atoadstool about him grows small and light as an elf." Certainly Lewis Carroll
never read this reference in Grimm, but Grimm's wonder-working fungus of
Irish lineage long antedated Cooke and von Strahlenberg, and Alice on her
journey may have encountered this native mushroom. Once again our inquiries
leave us poised between yes and no.
If on balance we incline to the view that Cooke inspired the mushroom
episode in Alice, this is because Cooke's influence is clearly felt in Charles
Kingsley's famous novel, Hereward, the Last oj the English, published in 1866.
In Chapter 10 Kingsley introduces to his readers an old Lappish nurse, living in
England, who possessed the secret of the "scarlet toadstools". She adds theirjuice to the men's ale, and makes them laugh and roar, "merry-mad everyone ofthem", and thus she extracts from them their secrets. Kingsley in the story
expressly denies that the English of pre-Conquest times knew the virtues of the"strange fungus, with which Lapps and Samoiedes have, it is said, practised
wonders for centuries past". In any case, the historical novelist is not an historical source. He too had read his Cooke, or some other of the earlier writers
about the Korjaks, and to adorn his plot he fathered on the Lapps the practicesof the Siberian tribes remote from them and remoter still from England.
But today we know that he was right about the Samoyeds. Will some persistentinquirer someday discover that the Lapps knew the secret too ?
In the annals of Europe's cultural history it is hard to find a parallel for thepolemic over the fly amanita's role in the Viking world. Odman published theinitial paper in 1784, and at a glacial pace the controversy has simmered sincethen in Scandinavia and nowhere else. In English and German mycological
I. We cannot prove that M. C. Cooke's book was in C. L. Dodgson's possession. We learn from W. G. Hiscock,assistant librarian of Christ Church, Oxford, that Dodgson's library was dispersed after his death, and in theauction sale many books were put up in lots with only one or two titles itemized in the catalogue.
196

THE FLIES IN THE AMANITA

writings one sometimes happens on allusions to it, but only allusions. Yet for
the ethno-mycologist and the student of northern Europe's early culture theproblem will not stay laid, so long as the meager and tantalizing evidence hangsbalanced as it does today.
We believe a new approach to the enigma of the fly amanita is to be foundin the history of word meanings. We intend to propose a novel reason for thelink that binds the famous mushroom with the fly. This is a bold undertaking,for the traditional explanation, the official and orthodox explanation, has seemed
to everyone for centuries to be full, perfect, and sufficient. Indeed, the argument
in favour of orthodoxy in this instance is so strong that if we should succeed inour challenge, our triumph in this our secluded garden of intellectual disputation
would be high drama, even if only in a minor key: caviar for initiates.
Everyone who knows the first thing about wild mushrooms knows why the
fly amanita is so called: it kills the flies that feed on it and until modern times it
was used as a household insecticide on the Continent. This is what all the books
say. What is more, there is a large part of Europe where the untutored rustics,
the people who read no books, also accept the story as part of their legacy offolk knowledge. It belongs to that curious fund of 'facts' that people keep
repeating to each other and believing, without verification or analysis, like thesaying that all Russians are good linguists. The area of Europe where our folk
belief prevails is extensive but not all-inclusive. It embraces the Slavic world,the Germanic world except the British Isles, the Vosges, where Franco-Germanbilingualism prevails, and one or two enclaves elsewhere in France. The ancientauthors, though they have much to say about the fungi, never refer to a flykiller, and in modern Italy among the country folk we believe the association
with the fly is unknown, but ouf inquiry has not been exhaustive. It is unknown
among the Basques, and apparently to all the rural population of the Iberianpeninsula. If we judge by Eugene Rolland's evidence in his Flore Populaire, inFrance the name tue-mouche, 'kill-fly', is indigenous only in Alsace and the Aude,
though thanks to the mushroom manuals, it is now familiar to a sprinklingof educated Frenchmen elsewhere. (Rolland reports that at Val-d'Ajol in the
Vosges the natives hang the fly amanita from the ceiling, where, he says, it draws
flies to their death.) By contrast the German Fliegenschwamm or 'fly-fungus'
has its variants in all the German dialects, and also in Dutch and the Germanic
languages of Scandinavia, but not in English. (The 'fly agaric' and 'fly amanita'
of England are learned inventions of the past two centuries.) The Russians say
mukhomor or 'fly-killer', and parallel terms are found on the tongues of otherpeoples of the Slavic family.
197

CHAPTER FIVEIn short, the fly amanita is linked with the fly almost solely among the Germanic and Slavic peoples of northern Europe. We can trace it back six centuries,
and in a series of quotations we are going to document this folk belief from theMiddle Ages down to the Age of Science. We shall prove that its credentials
have been seasoned with time. We shall suggest that what has long been believed
may be only part of the truth, or even wholly false.
The earliest reference to the fly amanita known to us is in De Vegetabilibus,
the considerable work on the vegetable kingdom written in the I3th century
by Albertus Magnus. Twice he speaks of it and on each occasion refers to its
fly-killing powers:[i]
Tuber enim, quod vocatur muscarum, venenosum est; et si lacti immisceatur, et muscas
cadant super lac illud, gustantes ipsum, inflantur et moriuntur. Est autem illud tuber insuperficie latum, et ad rubedinem declinans, habens in superficie ampullas, sicut sunt ampullae in pelle valde leprosi hominis, in quibus non est humor, sed ventositas quaedam
interclusa. -De Vegetabilibus, BOOK n, Chap. 6: 87.
For the mushroom that is called flies' [mushroom] is poisonous; and if it be mixed withmilk, and flies fall upon that milk, upon tasting it they swell up and die. Moreover, thatmushroom is broad, and tends to redness, having on the surface vesicles, such as are thevesicles on the skin of a very leprous man, in which not moisture, but a certain windinessis enclosed.
[2]

In nostris autem habitationibus invenitur fungus, qui latus est et spissus, aliquid ruboris
habens in superficie, et in illo rubore habet multas ampullas elevatas, quarum quaedam
fractae sunt, quaedam non: et ille mortalis est, et statim interficiens, et vocatur fungus
muscarum, eo quod in lacte pulverizatus interficit muscas. Idem, BOOK vi, Chap. 7: 345.
Among our dwellings, moreover, there is found a fungus that is wide and thick, having
a little ruddiness on its surface; and in that ruddiness it has many raised vesicles, of whichsome are broken, some not; and that [fungus] is death-dealing, and kills immediately, andis called flies' fungus for this reason, that when pulverized in milk it kills flies.

The quotations are taken from pages 136 and 517 of the text edited by Carl
Jessen and published in Berlin in 1867.
A century later, in the years 1349-50, another German, Konrad von Megenberg, wrote Das Buck der Natur, the earliest work on natural science in theGerman language. He devotes a paragraph to various fungi, and ends up withsome quaint sentences about the amanita muscaria. Writing in the BavaroAustrian dialect, he said:
Es ist auch einer anderley schwammen die seind zuomal unreyn die seind breit und198

THE FL IE S IN T HE AM ANIT A
dick und oben rot mit weyssen bleyterlen. Wann man die zuo milch mischt so deet er die
muggen. Darumb heyssen es muggennschwammen. Und zuo latein mustineti[?].
There is also another kind of fungi which is wholly unclean; they are broad and on
top red with white little plaques. When one mixes them with milk, they kill flies.
Therefore are they called muggennschwammen [i.e., 'fly-fungi'] and in Latin mustineti[?].

We have taken our text from the earliest printed edition, dated 1475.
Our third author is likewise German, Valerius Cordus, known sometimes as
the father of modern pharmacology, whose untimely death at the age of 29
in the year 1544 was considered by his Renaissance contemporaries, the scholarsof the New Learning, as the crudest of blows and an irreparable loss. In his
Adnotationes or commentaries on Dioscorides he too devotes one paragraphto mushrooms, and one sentence to the fly amanita. In his text we find the earliest
use known to us of the modern German name Fliegenschwamm:Sub Betulis arboribus in candido & rufo colore varii nascuntur Fungi, quos Fliegenschivemme, id est, Muscarios fungos vocamus, quoniarn muscas lacte intriti occidunt.
Under birch trees, white and red in color, spring up various fungi that we call Fliegenschwamme, that is, 'fly-fungi', since when crumpled in milk they kill flies.

The father of the science of mycology is the designation that has often been
bestowed on Charles de Lecluse, a Frenchman of Arras, whose contributions
to botany make him a major figure in the history of that branch of knowledge.
The year 1601 saw the publication in Antwerp of his Rariomm Plantarum Historia,
an important work in which a sizeable section was devoted to the fungi of
Hungary, or 'Pannonia' as the region was called. Carolus Clusius, the name bywhich De Lecluse is better known, was the first writer on mushrooms who
fixed on them his gaze, describing them with the fidelity of a man who seesand puts down on paper what he sees. His description of the amanita muscaria
is exact, and then he refers to the flies:
Invenitur etiam hsec species in caeduis silvis Francofurto ad Mcenum vicinis, underustics mulieres lectam, in urbem deferunt venalem, cum non ignorent plerosque empturos
ad muscas necandas: nam cum, ut dixi, muscse libenter illi insideant, divulsam in fragmenta, varijs in conclavi locis ante fenestras spargere solent, ad quae invitatae & excitae
muscas, succum sugunt ipsis perniciosum, & paulo post etiam lethalem.
This species is also found in the aged forests around Frankfort-on-the-Main, where it iscollected by peasant women and brought to the city for sale. Since most of the buyers
know it well, they buy it to kill flies with. And so, as I said before, since the flies like tosit [on these mushrooms] people scatter them in pieces around the room and strew them
before the windows; the flies, attracted and excited, suck the juice which is poisonous
for them and soon die.
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CHAPTER FIVE

Albertus Magnus, von Megenberg, Valerius Cordus, Carolus Clusius - here
is a formidable foursome supporting with their testimony the traditional viewof the fly amanita. A critic, however, might find occasion for certain reservations.
All four were Germans or writing against a background of German experience.1
Why did not the Greek, Latin, French, and Italian writers report the same
phenomenon > The credibility of Albertus Magnus is somewhat impugned byhis description of the mushroom: the amanita muscaria has no windy pustulessuggestive of lepers. The Doctor Universalis must never have focused his eyeson the fungus he was describing: at least part of what he said was hearsay. Von
Megenberg exposes himself to the same criticism. Just before the sentences
about the fly amanita, he has described another species, the Pfijferling, which
in his day meant the lactarius piperatus, and he erroneously declares that it is amortal poison. Here, translated, are his words: " One must watch out, for they
are often most poisonous and can sometimes make a man deathly ill. . . We
have an instance of this in Austria: a man ate a dish o£ Pfifferling and then drankstrong mead, and he died at once in front of the barrel. This is true, by God!"As witnesses, both Albertus Magnus and von Megenberg would be in trouble on
cross-examination by opposing counsel: their writings are a blend of the learningand the hearsay of their time. Valerius Cordus' brief statement adds nothing
beyond his own adherence to a popular belief. Clusius introduces a new note:he is the first to inform us that the use of the fly amanita as an insecticide was
exceptional: he places the custom around Frankfort, and by implication tells usthat it was not known elsewhere. He was a traveled man, and he lived in Frankfort from 1587 to 1593.
There is a peculiar thing about Clusius' remarks on the fly fungi. He does
not consider these mushrooms a species. He describes them under the headingof Genus XII of pernicious mushrooms, and this genus he sub-divides into
five or six species, all of which he says kill flies. With the aid of Clusius' watercolors preserved in Leiden, the Hungarian scholar Dr. Gy. Istvanffi de CzikMadefalva has identified these species, two of them being russulas, one of themcertainly a cortinarius, and two of them amanitas.2 When Clusius reports theuse of a fly fungus by the housewives of Frankfort, he is referring to the amanita
muscaria. As Clusius was a reliable reporter, we must keep in mind that in
1. The largest and most popular old Polish herbal, written by a Cracow Professor of medicine named Syrenius(f 1611) and published in 1613 in Cracow, says under muchomor on p. 1394: "One boils fly amanitas in sweet
milk; then one pours it into bowls. Flies fly down to the milk and perish." We have not seen this work. The
reader will observe that Syrenius boils his concoction, which would certainly not help its insecticidal powers.
2. See this author's Etudes et Commentaries sur le Code de I'Eduse Augmentes de Quelques Notices Biographiques,
Budapest, 1900.
20O

THE FLIES IN THE AMANITA

former times, when the tradition of fly-killing fungi was still strong in folklore,
not one but several species probably bore this designation.
This leads us to Linnaeus. The great Swedish scientist in his Flora Svecica
repeated the statement about killing flies, but instead of placing the custom inFrankfort, he said it prevailed in Smolandia, a Swedish province where he had
spent his childhood:
Cum lacte occidit Muscas in Smolandia.

This is not the only reference to the insecticidal amanita in Linnaeus. In his
famous Skanske Resa ('Journey through Scania'), published in 1751, on page
430, he tells how a certain Swede in Upsala got rid of bedbugs from two of his
rooms by the use of the amanita muscaria. He describes the remedy and thenconcludes with what we consider a most significant statement:
One takes in the autumn fresh specimens of the fly amanita, pounds them with apestle quite small in a jar, lets them stand well closed until they become slimy or likegruel. Then one takes a feather or brush and smears all the cracks and corners where
they [the bedbugs] keep themselves, and this procedure is repeated several times at monthly
intervals. The room stinks for two or three days, but then the smell disappears. Thesenasty creatures die of it as if the plague had come amidst them, and whole bug-families
perish as if from the Black Death. Although this remedy is simple, it is surer thananything else hitherto invented, and with its aid several houses in Upsala have now
become free of bugs.

In a note on the next page Linnasus adds that he has learned of this method forthe first time from a Mr. Bern, Cashier of Interests in Upsala. The text is in
Swedish.
For us the striking thing about this description is that it is a report on a novelty.
Certain families of Upsala were putting the popular reputation of the fly amanita
to a test, and their first impression was enthusiastic. Why had they not beenusing it for centuries? What were their final conclusions, say five years later?
The answers to these questions are not vouchsafed to us.
After Linnaeus the references to the fly-killing potency of the fly amanita inmushroomic writings are innumerable. All the mycologists believe in it - with
one dissenting voice. None puts it to a test - with one exception. The Frenchmycologist Jean Baptiste Bulliard, in his Histoire des Plantes Veneneuses et Suspectes
de la France, which he finished in 1779, dares to strike a sceptical note. Speakingof the fly amanita, he says:
I have never noticed that it kills flies, as several authors assert. I have had specimens, raw
and cooked, for long periods in my apartment. Flies light on them, and seem even
2OI

CHAPTER FIVE
to eat them, without bad effects. But I intend to repeat this experiment with certain new
precautions.

We know not the results of the promised experiments, but we know that when
Bulliard died in 1793, he held the view that a new scientific name should be
bestowed on the amanita muscaria, and he suggested 'agaricus pseudo-aurantiacus,' presumably because he considered the old name false. The mycologicalworld has not deferred to his wishes, nor even tested his premises.
-Dugs, flies, moths, and all kinds of larvae - in short, the insect world - constituted for our ancestors until recent times an order of nature instinct with supernatural powers, mostly malevolent and always awesome. Their strange shapes
and stranger behavior, their incredible numbers and countless kinds, perhaps
most of all their undeniable faculty of metamorphosis, may be at the root of
this role that they played in the thinking of untutored mankind. The fly wasdemonic, and we believe that the 'fly-fungus' originally meant the demonic
mushroom, a name that fittingly designated a mushroom with the virtue of
causing inebriation. We believe that the insecticidal meaning has encroachedupon the ancient and primary sense, and finally shut it out.
We know that bugs and flies were linked with supernatural spirits a longtime ago. The dung beetle or scarab played a conspicuous part in the religion of
the ancient Egyptians. The neighbors of the Israelites in the Old Testament
worshipped Beelzebub, whose name meant the Lord of Flies. In the Greek New
Testament, where that heathen god does not appear, the same name was used asa synonym for the Prince of Demons. The Biblical term crops out in modern
literature, as in line 1334 of Goethe's Faust: Wenn man Euch Fliegengott,
Verderber, Liigner heisst. . . "When one calls you Fly-god, Destroyer, Liar."
In Nordic mythology the god Loki assumes the appearance of a 'fly' to enter thetightly closed apartment of the sleeping goddess Freya. He pricks her, and when
she starts, deftly detaches her necklace and steals it. Whatever that 'fly' was, no
one thought of it as a housefly, for the housefly does not bite.
In English the word 'bug' until the zyth century meant an evil spirit. Then,
when that meaning fell from grace in good society, the word came to designatea creeping insect of the beetle class. Its etymology is unknown. It is current in
Welsh in both meanings, in the simple form bwg and in compounds. It seems
to correspond to Cornish bucca and to Irish bocdn, both meaning hobgoblin.
We suggest that all these words are related to Anglo-Saxon hue, meaning'belly'. The semantic link between inflatable sacs and demonic spirits would
parallel the same double layer of meanings in our pogge-cluster of words. The
202

THE FLIES IN THE AMANITA'Bugge' that in Shakespere's Henry VI Part III 'fear'd [ = frightened ] us all'would stand revealed as an uncouth relative of the nimble Puck in The Midsummer Night's Dream, and in these latter days of the Pooka that bathes the stage
with benign mischief in Mary Chase's Harvey, and of Milne's Winnie the Pooh.
Ernest Weekley in his Etymological Dictionary of the English Language says that 'bug'in the supernatural sense is obsolete, except in the compounds 'bugbear' and'bugaboo', and other lexicographers lean to the same view. Surely they are
mistaken: the tabu that hangs over words in low and colloquial use sometimes
shuts off the minds of scholars from rich evidence. Few words are so dynamic
and versatile as this one is in the United States. Besides bugbear and bugaboo,in compounds we have humbug, firebug, jitterbug, and that contemptuous
word for an insane asylum, bughouse. There are of course the variants in -o-,- bogey, bogeyman, boggart (in England's North Country), possibly bogus,
and the verbs to bogle and to boggle. The Oxford Dictionary in one citation
offers grounds for supposing that 'buggy' was a nickname bestowed in the i8th
century on a new design of two-wheeled vehicle, presumably because themakers had not yet got rid of the 'bugs' and the vehicle was insecure. In the
United States a Big Bug used to be a common designation for an important
person, a madman is 'bugs' and fit for the bughouse, a newly designed engine isusually full of 'bugs', and a specialist in any field is a 'bug' on the subject. In
the course of casual reading in the American press, we pick out repeated uses of'bug' that suggest demonic inspiration. From the Saturday Evening Post on
March 10, 1951, we learn that all Dixie is bitten by the basketball bug. On
March 15 of the same year the New York World-Telegram and Sun launches adrive for circulation with a 'Bugs Bunny Coloring Contest', the 'bugs' inquestion being demonic imps and not insects. On May 8, 1953, The New YorkTimes in its 'Topics' says that Vice President Nixon has been bitten by a golf bug.
On the same date the afternoon newspaper reports that the Allies seek to clear
up the 'bugs' in the truce terms in Korea. On May 17, we learn in a book review
in The New York Times that the defeated United Nations troops in Korea,
when they were falling back as best they could in late 1950, referred to theirretreat as 'bugging out', a term that suggested both devilish resourcefulness andthe goddess Luck. On July 14 the Daily News of New York reported in big
headlines that the 'boat bug bites thousands', meaning that summer throngs
seek to go boating. The idea of distension is dominant in the vulgar American
verb 'to bug out', meaning 'to bulge'. Tennessee Williams in his short story,'Three Players of a Summer Game', has one of his characters say: "I walked
straight up to them both, and you should of seen the eyes of them both bug
203

CHAPTER FIVE

out!".1 If we are right, in this vulgarism the word preserves its pristine meaning,
today largely superseded by a specific and secondary application to tiny, crawling vermin. On the campus of Wayne University, in Detroit, 'buggy' has beenreported in recent years as a students' word for 'upset' or 'mentally disturbed'.2
It is easy to see how Bugg came to be an English family name, for it enjoys
to this day a vigorous existence, with an -s attached, as a respected nickname;e.g., Bugs Raymond the once mighty baseball pitcher, Bugs Baer the beloved
cartoonist and Hearst writer, and Bugsy Siegel, the gangster who died a sudden
and violent death in surroundings of gaudy splendor. In June 1941 Charles
Workman, known as 'the Bug', stood trial in the New Jersey Court of Common
Pleas for the murder of Arthur (Dutch Schultz) Flegenheimer. When one of the
Bug's witnesses reversed his own testimony, the defendant changed his plea
from not guilty to non vult, and thereby avoided the death penalty but bowed
to an inevitable life sentence. In the course of that trial one of the off-stage
figures was Martin (Buggsy) Goldstein.
Let it be noted that in the minds of those who bestow these bug-inspired
nicknames, they are titles in which affection, awe, and envy are mixed. They
are an expression of deference toward the ingenious demons that possess thehonored person. Let it be further noted that current usage inclines toward aplural visitation of imps, though in the case of Bugs Baer we can testify thatin his immediate circle he like Charles Workman is often simply 'the Bug'.
'Bug' also turns up in place-names, as in Bugtussle, in Cullman County,
Alabama. Curious about the origin of such a name, we addressed our inquiry
to a citizen in nearby Bremen, whose reply deserves preservation:
Some forty years ago we had a postoffice here: Wilburn. Two drunks were fighting,Will James and Charles Campbell. James called it Bugtussle. So it has been called
Bugtussle by a part of the people ever since that time. 12-20-49.
[Signed] G. C. Florence.

May Bugtussle forever remain faithful to a name born in Homeric circumstances, commemorating the spot where once strove together the two Big Bugs.
In England we find a Buglawton in Cheshire and a Bugthorpe in the East
Riding of Yorkshire, and Eilert Ekwall in his dictionary of English placenames permits us to associate these towns with our 'bug' of supernatural powers.
'Bug' displays a singular aptitude in America for assuming new meanings
derived from its original sense, a power of verbal metamorphosis that befits
1. The story was published by Intercultural Publications Inc. in Perspectives USA II, pp. 15-39; se£ P- 252. See William White's article, 'Wayne University Slang', in American Speech, vol. xxx, no. 4, December 1955.
204

THE FLIES IN THE AMANITA

the world of six-legged creatures. Take telegraphy, for example. In the earlydays of the telegraph, the transmitting key worked perpendicularly, and thetelegrapher had to lower and release his hand for every dot and every dash.
Later, perhaps half a century ago, a device appeared that permitted much fastermanual transmission. The new key worked horizontally, to left and to right ofa neutral position, making dots continuously as long as it was pressed to one
side. The hand no longer moved for each dot, but only when dots changed
to dashes. The thing seemed possessed of the devil, it went so fast, and everyonein the craft was soon calling it the 'bug'.
With the verb 'to bugger' a double problem presents itself. The meaning thatis written into the criminal law comes from the French bougre, and seems tohave emerged at the time of the Albigensian heresy in referring to the perverted
practices attributed, unjustly, to the devotees of that sect. But throughout the
English-speaking world there has always been an innocent use, as when thesailor says of his gear that it is all buggered up,1 and when a Lancashireman pays
another the compliment of calling him a 'rare old bugger'. In circles where an
improper word is excluded, this verb has nourished down to our own times.
We suggest that this innocent use offers us a verbal form derived from 'bug'
as a sprite, that it is native in English, and that the younger word imported
from France has led until recently a segregated existence. Today the bad word,
becoming more widely known, is driving out the good (as Gresham says),to the detriment of the language. For education as it spreads breeds new misunderstandings and new ignorances.
In an English translation of the Bible that bears the date 1549, it was possible
for pious scholars to render Psalm xci: 5 thus:. . . thou shalt not need to be afrayed for any bugges by night nor for the arrowethat flyeth by daye;a verse that emerges cleansed in the Authorized Version:
Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that fliethby day.

'Bug' in the sense of a creeping, six-legged creature is first recorded early in theiyth century, but it may have been long in use on the tongues of the untutored
people who made up most of the population of England. Are we dealing herewith two words or one? The Oxford Dictionary reserved judgment on thisnice point, but in a study of the word published in December 1935 and 1936
i. See Joanna Carver Colcord's Sea Language Comes Ashore, Cornell Maritime Press, N. Y., 1945, p. 43, forcomments on the innocent use of the term by seamen.
205

CHAPTER FIVEin the PMLA (the journal of the Modern Language Association of America),
Miss Hope Emily Allen established beyond reasonable doubt that the twomeanings belong to a single word. The six-legged beetle was felt to be thehabitation of a demon, and took his name. The Oxford Dictionary reveals aparallel association of ideas in the word 'fly', for this word not only refers to
insects but also has always meant a 'familiar spirit', a usage that survives to thisday in the adjective 'fly', rated as slang by some, meaning nimble, dexterous, sharp.
In the Russian language there is an astonishing parallel for the two meaningsof these English words. Children in Muscovy are admonished to behave lest
the buka get them. The buka is the children's bugbear. The bukashka is any small
flying buzzing beetle. Slavists consider that the two words are related to eachother, and that both are keyed to the basic word byk, 'bull'. Until a thoroughstudy of the demonic vocabulary of Northern Europe has been made, perhaps
the door should be left open for alternative possibilities.
When Albertus Magnus and Valerius Cordus referred in Latin and German
to the 'flies' killed by the fly amanita, what insect had they in mind? Whatmeanings and associations did the words possess for them > Today 'fly' means thehousefly, or, by extension, other species of two-winged insects. But this is amodern concentration of the meaning, the result of increasingly precise observations in the insect world. The Oxford Dictionary establishes the fact that informer times 'fly' ordinarily designated insects as divergent as locusts, moths,
gnats, and the whole dipterous order. To this day there are High German
dialects in which Fliege and Mucke mean both 'fly' and 'mosquito', as does theword mich in Frisian. The older usage survives in the angler's 'flies', which descendfrom all kinds of flying insects. In the Indian and Iranian languages the words
for 'fly' are often used for 'bee' or are the base from which their words for 'bee'
are formed.
Good illustrations of this early generic usage are to be found in Basque,where the primitive form of the word 'fly' was uli. In a variety of forms thisword enters into the names of many insects: eltxo, mosquito; uli farfalia, butterfly; eltzar, caterpillar; eltxu, locust; and, perhaps the most interesting of all,a word used by the Basques of Guipuzcoa, eultza, meaning a bee-hive, the secondsyllable being simply a collective suffix. A bee-hive is a 'fly-hive', and in the
dialect of Bermeo in the same province, a wasp is an ulabio, the first element
meaning 'fly' and the second being derived from the Romance word for 'bee',abeille and abeja.1
I. See Gerhard Bahr, 'Nombres de animales en vascuence', in Revue Internationale des Etudes basques, vol. xxvn,
1936, pp. 73-118, especially p. 77.
2O6

THE FLIES IN THE AMANITA

The variable application of the words for 'fly' in former times was not a conscious use of a general term. It is to be explained rather by the ordinary man's
inability to distinguish among flying insects, so that he was disposed to use
without precision such words as he possessed for the insect world. This wascommon to the period, and therefore to all languages. The ordinary syrphus or
carrion fly was considered for thousands of years to be the same as the honeybee and bore the same name: this is the insect that Samson found swarming in
the carcass of a lion. The fact of metamorphosis in the insect world was known,
and maggots and other carrion worms were known to be kin to the insect
world, but the successive transformations were not carefully distinguished by
species. In Dutch the word for 'moth', which is mot, serves for maggots also.
Sometimes accidents of sound led to confusions in names. In English 'flea' and'fly' are words of different origins, but the phonetic similarity caused them tobe used interchangeably. In Henry V we learn that when Falstaff lay dying, he
saw a 'Flea' stick upon the toper Bardolph's flaming nose, whereupon he said
it was a 'blacke Soule burning in Hell'. What he saw was of course a fly, and theblack soul in hell was, according to the beliefs of that day, its incorporeal
counterpart, the Demon domiciled in every fly.
For all insects used to be considered agents of demonic powers and wereclothed in a fearsome aura of mystery and magic. We believe we can adduce newand striking evidence of this. On an earlier page we pointed out that Satan was
known in France at one time as le Bot, 'the Cripple'; and that this name came to
be transferred to the toad, and in the form hot volant to the nightjar and the bat,nocturnal flying creatures of evil omen. We suggested that the form of the
English word 'bat' is attributable to the French word, but we did not then pointout the wider applications in English of the French word. 'Bot' in English is
the larva of the gadfly; it occurs also in 'botfly'. What was originally a euphemism for Satan himself thus turns up in English as a word of the insect
world. Satan resides in the botfly and in the larva of the gadfly. In Joseph Wright's
English Dialect Dictionary we find that 'bot' and 'bat' are dialectal variants ofeach other, and that in various parts of the United Kingdom 'bat' is used for'moth'. (The larger moths, nocturnal in habit, were formerly 'flies' of speciallyevil potency.) In many counties of England 'bot' has been used colloquially for
all kinds of grubs and larvas, even turning up in Wright's pages as a designation
for the flying 'bat'. The dictionaries declare that the origin of'bot' is unknown;
we think they have overlooked the multivalent service rendered by the French
bot and failed to detect the common Satanic denominator between it and theEnglish term.
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CHAPTER FIVE

The word 'maggot', in turn, besides designating larvae, has always meant
an evil caprice. John O'Donnell in the New York Daily News on October 28,
1952, devoted his column to 'Mr. Truman's Maggot', by which he meant "amaggotty individual full of whims", and the use of the word in this sense isrichly documented in the Oxford Dictionary. In Smollett's The Reprisal; or,
The Tars of Old England one of the characters says that "now we man [must] . . .
defend her from the maggots of this daft Frenchman", who had been " sent awa'
with a flea [sic] in his bonnet". The etymology of 'maggot' is unknown, according to the dictionaries. But if we view this word against the background of
double meanings that it and 'bot', 'fly', and 'bee' carry, the likelihood presents
itself that 'maggot' (which was spelled 'magot' in its first recorded appearance
around the year 1400) is related to 'magic', and both are then to be explained as
derived, via French, from the Necromancers known as the Magi. When the
Flemings and Dutch in former times called mushrooms the devil's bread, theymust have had in mind the demonic larvae, maggots, and 'flies' that batten on
the flesh of many wild fungi.
In the Middle Ages delirium, drunkenness, and insanity were attributed toinsects that were loose inside the head of the victim. This belief, strange for themodern mind, survives in many familiar locutions. A man has a bee in hisbonnet, a fly (or bug) in his ear, or demonic bats (= 'bots') in his belfry. The
Norwegians get flies into their heads or put flies into others' heads. To 'put abee on someone' means to fix him willy nilly for a given purpose: in thislocution the demonic intent is scarcely fossilized. It used to be said in French,when a man was getting excited, that 'la mouche lui monte a la tete', a fly isgetting up into his head. Down to recent times avaler les mouches was a phrase
for saying that someone had summoned up his courage, and the flies thus
swallowed were of course demonic. Rabelais at the very end of Book IV makes
the coward Panurge protest that, far from being afraid, he is braver than if he
had eaten all the flies cooked in the pastries of Paris betwixt St. John's Day
and All Saints'.There is a colloquial expression that circulates around Lyons andperhaps elsewhere: 'Ne prends pas la mouche': don't catch a fly, don't get excited.
Of a man who is unbalanced one says, '11 a 1'araignee dans le plafond', he has aspider in his ceiling, i.e., in his upper story. The Czechs use an identical phrase:
miti mouchu (or pavouka] na mozku, 'to have a fly (or spider) on the brain'. In
Russian, we say of a man who is tipsy: on c mnkhoj, so-and-so is 'with fly'.
There is a gesture peculiar to the Russians that we feel sure stems from thisassociation of psychic possession with flying insects. The Russian when he suggests having an alcocholic drink is like as not to perform a fillip against his neck208

PLATE xxxvi. Hieronymus Bosch. The Hay Wain. Left Panel.

Madrid, Prado Museum.

1. Sterile base of Lycoperdon
or of Calvatia sp.
2. Russula (palumbina?)
3. Russula emetica
4. Amanita muscaria
5. Psalliota (sylvicola?)
6. Clathrus cancellatus

7. Volvaria speciosa
8. Coprinus micaceus
9. Coprinus micaceus

PLATE XXXVII
Otto Marseus van Schrieck. Moth with mushrooms.
Bale, Offentliche Kunstsammlung.

10. Young Bovista or
Lycoperdon
11. Coprinus niveus
12. Mycena (galericulata?)
13. Cladonia sp.
14. ?
15. ?

THE FLIES IN THE AMANITA

below the ear: this is so habitual that it is become a Pavlov reflex. Does not thatfamiliar fillip invoke the demonic 'fly' entering the mind? According to the
Icelandic-English lexicon of Cleasby-Vigfusson, under fluga, in Icelandic belief
sorcerers would bewitch flies and send them to kill their enemies. This explains
the modern Icelandic phrases, 'to swallow the fly' or 'to carry the fly', meaning'to be the tool of another man in a wicked business'. In Basque folklore, sorcerers
and other malevolent beings would work their will through demons that assumed the shape of flies, and sorcerers would carry the demonic creatures in asheath such as anglers use for their flies today. In America little children to thisday sing a nonsense ditty that invokes the 'bug' of demonic possession:
It's raining, it's pouring,
The old man is snoring,
He went to bed
With a bug in his head, Anddidn't get up until morning.

Hieronymus Bosch, the greatest of Europe's painters of the demonic world,presents us with a superb illustration of flies in their demonic role. We find it
in the left hand panel of the Hay Wain, where the momentous events thattook place in Paradise leading up to Man's First Fall are portrayed with moving
beauty. We reproduce the upper portion of that panel, wherein the observersees that the angels tumbling down from Heaven assume the form of 'flies' - adiverse lot of winged demons, Beelzebub's host. The old meaning is far fromdead even today. Recently The Times Literary Supplement published a poem by
H. S. Mackintosh containing these sprightly lines:
Has Freud not hit the Devil on the snout?
Is not Beelzebub destroyed by Flit? Are
we important? Do we really sprout
Immortal souls that priests may manumit?
[Issue of Oct. 2, 1953]

Perhaps the reader will perceive the direction in which our argument isheading. We have seen on an earlier page that when the French refer to theamanita muscaria as the crapaudin, this by way of the Old French word for toad,bot, means the demonic mushroom. It is a word unrelated to insecticidal uses.
In English that demonic word bot is transferred to the insect world, and shareswith 'maggot', 'bee', and 'fly' the idea of demonic possession. When we find thecrapaudin called the Fliegenschwamm in German, we sense a semantic identity.
Both words are singularly appropriate for the inebriating mushroom, and they209

CHAPTER FIVE
inform us that long ago, much earlier even than Albertus Magnus, the secret of
this mushroom was known. And if it was known, why should it not, on appropriate occasions, have been put to its own great, even fearsome, use;
One of the most interesting examples of the Satanic fly in European literature
is to be found in that classic of the Danish stage, Ludvig Holberg's Jeppe of theHill, first produced in 1722. Two physicians are conversing. One of them speaksof his Lordship, who has had a strange, ugly dream, which so excited him that heimagines himself a peasant. Whereupon the other physician recalls a remarkablecase ten years back: "... a man who thought his head was full of flies. He could
not rid himself of the delusion, until a most clever doctor cured him in thefollowing manner. He covered his patient's whole head with a plaster in which
he had embedded masses of dead flies. [Query: were they the Spanish flies of thePharmacopoeia >] After a while he removed the plaster and showed the flies tothe patient, who naturally believed that they had been drawn from his own head
and therefore concluded that he was cured." Here is a beautiful instance of theway a dramatist (or physician) puts to use an outworn belief that lingers on in
the penumbra of man's consciousness.
Old and forgotten beliefs often survive in strange places, in usages that on theirface are baffling. Miss Allen has pointed out that in the nursery language oflittle children, the homely words used for dried or inspissated nasal mucus,
such as 'buggy bear' and 'bug', are linked with the spirit world. In Russian thecorresponding word is kozjavka, which means larva or any small creeping thing.
There is an expression, vsjakaja kozjavka lezet v bukashki - 'every larva would
be a fly'; and bukashka is a diminutive of buka, bugbear. We believe that thesenursery words for dried nasal mucus are a legacy of the medieval belief thatwhen sanity returns to a man who has been out of his mind, an observant
attendant can catch sight of an insect emerging from the nostril of the patient.
Thus that escaping bug or maggot or bot or fly survives to this day in a
metaphor on the tongues of unknowing children. We should add that thisinterpretation is ours, and not Miss Allen's.1
This belief in the demonic role of flying and creeping insects is not confinedto Europe and the Mediterranean. We think we find telling evidence in favorof our argument in that the area of diffusion of this belief embraces the Chukchees
and Korjaks, the very peoples where the use of the fly amanita survives. Jochelson
in his treatise on the Korjaks reports that if the eater of the fly amanita vomits,
I. For material relating to our discussion, see E. Hoffmann-Krayer's Handivorterbuch des Deutschen Aberglaubens,in the article Fliege', also the papers by Miss Hope Emily Allen to which we have already referred, as well as
her paper on Bogus in American Notes & Queries, Sept.-Oct. 1941, and on the wood-louse in the Journal of American Folklore, April-June 1935.
2IO

THE FLIES IN THE AMANITA

the people believe that the spirits of the demonic mushroom can be found in thevomit as 'worms' which then quickly vanish into the earth.1 Bogoras in his
study of the Chukchees says that the shamans think psychic disturbances arecaused by insects, and they use insects in their treatment of mental disorders.
The shaman catches an insect from off his drum, swallows it, spits it up, andapplies it to the head of the victim; he then sucks the sick man's head. Sometimes
the insect is imaginary, sometimes real.2
It befits the amanita muscaria, with its unique prestige among country-folk
as the villain of the fungal world, that the pattern of vernacular names for it
should be correspondingly subtle. Over large areas it is the mushroom with'flies' in its cap. In France it is the domicile of the hot or toad, by which is meant
Satan; and in the Basque amoroto we find the same presence. This raises thequestion whether the English 'toadstool' was not once the specific name of the
fly amanita, just as in the Haute Saone Eugene Rolland reports bo as a designation for any gilled fungus, and in the Loire, botet, both presumably meaning,by way of 'toad', the Satanic fungus. We have said before that Rolland reports
tuo-mouscos, 'fly-killer', in the Aude, and there this name, significantly, competes
with another, mijoulo folho, the 'mad-mushroom', as though the two weresynonyms. The idea of madness is reported in several other common names forthe fly amanita: mujolo folo around Toulouse, coucourlo fouolo in the Aveyron,and oriol foil in Catalan, 'mad oriole', the oriole being the amanita csesarea.
In the dialect of Fribourg, Switzerland, the amanita muscaria is the 'devil's
hat', tsapl de diablhou. In all this nomenclature the toad and the fly are synonyms
and complementary, and both mean madness and Satanic possession.
On a later page we shall discuss the small group of painters, mostly Dutch,
who devoted their talents in the iyth century to still-life studies of demonologicalsubjects. These painters, superb technicians, have seldom been surpassed in theirsolicitude for portraying nature faithfully. They assembled their curious compositions, not capriciously, but to express folk-beliefs that were already waning, and therefore their canvases offer us folkloric documentation of high value.
So far as we know, this aspect of their art has not yet been studied. We reproduce one of these paintings, a canvas by Otto Marseus van Schrieck, which hangs
today in the Bale art museum. The composition is admirably handled. In a small
field there are more than twenty mushrooms, most of them identifiable. Dominating the center of the scene is the latticed fungus known as the clathrus cancellatus,
here slightly constrained to suggest a death's head. On the extreme right is one of
the coprini, caught in its moment of active deliquescence. There is a grass snake
I. Jochelson, op. tit., pp. 582-4.

2. Bogoras, op. tit., p. 464.
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CHAPTER FIVE
(natrix natrix), a green or wall lizard of the lacerta genus, and a gecko not native
to the Netherlands. The snake is about to seize a beetle. A dragon fly with a pronounced curvature approaches the large mushroom that seems to be a stropharia
semiglobata. Of highest interest for us is the 'fly' that descends on the amanita.
The Bale museum calls this insect a butterfly (Schmetterling), but this is an error.
It is a moth, the most sinister of the 'flies', and the painter was so intent on an
accurate statement of his message that he permits us to identify the moth as
belonging to the family called saturnine, i.e., one of the saturniidse. Thus here
in this nocturnal gathering heavy with demonic import we discover a 'fly', the 'fly' that gives its name to the fly amanita, a 'fly' that for our ancestors was
saturated with magical potency. Missing from the scene are the amphibia:
neither toad nor frog do we see. Van Schrieck knew the virtue of economy
in utterance, and the omission of the toad was for him obligatory. In the presence of the 'fly', the padde or hot would have been redundant, iconographicallyotiose, an intruder speaking the same message but in a different idiom. Itspresence would mean piling not Pelion on Ossa, but paddestoel on vliegenzwam.
The fly amanita holds an altogether extraordinary place in the folk culture ofnorthern and eastern Europe. The deadly fungi are as nothing in comparison,and in the mycophobic world of the Germanic peoples no edible kind was of importance until recent times. For us it is altogether incredible that the grip of thisFliegenschwamtn on the imaginations of countless generations sprang from any insecticidal power that it may have. It possessed in men's minds a supernaturalpotency, the potency of the 'flies', and though direct, affirmative testimony ismeager, we believe that the prestige of the fly amanita descended from a knowledge, in at least some circles at some period, of its divine or demonic powers.
Up to this point our argument about the fly amanita has been an intellectual
exercise. We have offered an alternative explanation for the name. We have
impugned the traditional explanation by challenging the credibility of thewitnesses. Albertus Magnus and Von Megenberg were relying on hearsay, andso indeed was Linnaeus when he quoted a Mr. Bern about the bedbugs. Most
writers place the fly-killing use at a distance from themselves in time or space,
Clusius in Frankfort, Linnaeus in Smolandia, John Ramsbottom in Poland,
Bohemia, and Rumania. Mr. Ramsbottom1 also says that the fly amanita was'formerly' used in England and Sweden for killing bedbugs, and thus he justifies
the occasional occurrence of the name 'bug agaric'. But this term can not bereally old, for Linnaeus by his great authority imposed the name 'agaric' on
I. See his Poisonous Fungi, Penguin Books Limited, 1945, p. 21.
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the gilled fungi and the use of 'bug' for 'bedbug' appears to be a modernism,
whereas 'fly' and 'bug' in their demonic sense are truly old. Only Bulliard put
the fly amanita to the test, and his findings seem to have been cleanly negative.
But in support of Bulliard's scepticism we can add a story told to us by a Russianfriend, Ekaterina Apollinarievna Bouteneff. Her nurse in childhood was an unlettered peasant woman from the region of Riazan. Our friend remembers having
seen this good woman time and again put out a saucer with a crushed cap of the
fly amanita in it, a lump of sugar on top of the fungal mess. This was going tokill the flies, she would always say. But our friend always observed that the flies
did not die. When she would ask her nurse why they did not die, the reply was
always the same: "They are sure to die later."In the summer of 1953, on our suggestion, the mycologist F.-E. Eckblad of
the Botanical Museum in Oslo, working under Professor Nordhagen, undertook
the experiments that were a desideratum for our case. In a letter addressed to us
on September 8 he sent us his preliminary conclusions. They, like Bulliard's,
were negative: "The fly amanita may contain matters poisonous to flies. But
flies are not attracted to it, perhaps avoid it, and are not killed by it when usedin the old way", i.e., mixed with sugar or milk or both. Mr. Eckblad warns
that his findings must be considered tentative, both because his supply of themushrooms had not been so plentiful as he had hoped and because several
species of flies were present in insufficient numbers. But on the strength of
the first season's experiments there was no evidence of insecticidal virtue inthe fly amanita. On the other hand, experiments carried out during the same
season at the Laboratoire de Cryptogamie of the Museum National d'Histoire
Naturelle in Paris gave different results: the flies were drawn to the concoction and died from it, and they died more quickly when the milk was
sweetened with sugar. Once again the evidence leaves us in suspense, and theexperiment calls for retrial by various workers.
Even if the fly amanita kills flies, our conclusions will not be invalidated, forthe name could carry two layers of meaning, one for housewives and the otherfor those initiated in sacred mysteries.
However, if it should develop that the fly amanita never harmed a fly, we
should find ourselves confronted with a new question: how do we explain thelegend ? Why did Albertus Magnus give it the endorsement of his immense
renown? Why is the Fliegenschwamm called 'fly-killer' throughout the Slavic
world and by the peasants in certain provinces of France ?
Let us assume for the purposes of our argument that we are right, and thatthe fly amanita was really the 'demonic fungus' of northern Europe for untold
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centuries of unrecorded history. Let us suppose that it was utilized for its inebriating virtue. Such use was certainly veiled in awe and mystery, and the secret
was the precious possession of esoteric and (need we add?) illiterate circles. As
the missionaries of Mediterranean culture and religion probed the northern
forests and gained adherents, the custodians of the old culture, retreating before
the new, would guard ever more zealously the lore that was their exclusive
possession and that survived solely by oral transmission from generation to
generation. From earliest times, in the pagan era, an alternative explanation for
Fliegenschwamm must have been a convenience in satisfying the curiosity of
the laity, and this popular rationalization was all that reached the ears of bookworms like Albertus Magnus. The use of the fly amanita as an inebriant may
always have been reserved for rare occasions.1
Students of cultural history must ever keep in mind the fact, abundantly
established, that in a single population, living together contemporaneously,
distinct cultures can co-exist largely insulated from each other, like the droplets in an emulsion, juxtaposed but never mingling. Albertus Magnus, though
German-born, was culturally a child of the Mediterranean. The universal
knowledge of which he was repository and teacher was the legacy of classic
antiquity and the Church. He and his like rejected the old culture and werecertainly not privy to its innermost secrets, whatever they were. In the end thechurchmen conquered, of course, and the contents of the modern mind are thefruit of the cultural invasion of northern Europe by such missionaries as he.
The nether face of northern Europe before the advent of the alphabet and theprinting press, the autochthonous culture, is known to us imperfectly, in fragments. By the time of the witchcraft trials in the i6th and iyth centuries, the distillation process was common property throughout northern and eastern Europe,and aqua vitcz, costing almost nothing, had certainly swept away and obliterated
any surviving use or even memory of the secret virtue of the fly amanita.
If the meaning that we have read into Fliegenschwamm should win approval,
we still could not assert that when the Vikings went 'berserk', the fly amanita
was the cause. The debate among Scandinavian scholars would not be settled.
But the affirmative argument would be greatly strengthened.
i. The Russian symbolist, Andrej Belyj, in his novel Vozvrat, published in 1902, has his hero, Professor
Trupov, write a work entitled Mukhomory, 'Fly Amanitas'; furthermore, in the delirium of the mad herocentaurs appear that are obsessed with mukhomory. We assume that the author was drawing his material,
not from Slavic folk memories, but from Korjak practices.

End of Volume I

OF THIS BOOK THERE HAVE BEEN MADE 512 COPIES OF WHICHTWO ARE DESIGNATED A AND B AND THE REST ARE NUMBERED FROM
1 THROUGH 5IO. THE BOOK WAS DESIGNED BY HANS MARDERSTEIG.
THE TEXT WAS PRINTED BY THE STAMPERIA VALDONEGA, VERONA.
THE ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOR AND COLLOTYPE WERE EXECUTEDBY DANIEL JACOMET, PARIS, AND BY FRATELLI ALINARI, FLORENCE.
THE PAPER WAS MADE BY HAND BY FRATELLI MAGNANI, PESCIA,
AND THE BINDING IS THE WORK OF TORRIANI & C., MILAN.
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