What if the truths we discover through microscopes has long been told in myth — rooted in the threads of timeless story beneath our feet? Modern science is only now catching up to the quiet wisdom of fungal folklore that has always been humming beneath the forest floor since ancient times. Beneath the mulch of memory, mushroom lore holds the spore-seeds of stories—tales of wild women and earth-born wisdom, of how the world first woke and began to weave itself alive.

Elder women and healers were the original keepers of this fungal lore, bridging worlds above and below. In Russian folklore, mushrooms and Baba Yaga both dwell in liminal spaces of death, decay, and renewal. Here in this handcrafted linocut print, I’ve depicted this folk heroine and forest witch surrounded by Fly Agaric, Fairy Inkcaps, Death Caps, Morels, Liberty Caps, Bridal Veil Stinkhorns, and mosses, inspired by the deep-rooted timeless magic of fungi! This comes in two colors: witchy green and periwinkle.

In the heart of Africa where all human life began, the indigenous Bantu-speaking Peoples of the Congo Basin have an ancient folk heroine named Alonkok, known as the "Mushroom Mother of All Things" who is thought to be the creator of the universe. As if spored from the same ancient root, far north in Latvia, within the Baltic and Ugric religion, there is a goddess who is the “Mother of Mushrooms” named Sēņu Māte, an earth mother who presides over mushrooms, their growth, abundance and their gathering. As though whispering from the same fungal folklore thread, among the Koryak people of the Russian Far East, old stories tell that the Earth first emerged as a red-capped mushroom — Wā’paq, the Fly Agaric — gifted by the Great Spirit and revered for its visionary power. Though shamans who use it are now mostly male, ancient carvings show mushroom-beings with feminine form, echoing the mushroom’s enduring connection to the feminine and the earth’s birth. In Nordic folklore among the Sámi reindeer herders, it was well known that reindeer love eating the Fly Agaric mushroom which would make them leap and dance as if lifted by the wind itself. These people would speak of a great Reindeer Goddess, Beaivi, associated with motherhood and fertility who flies across the winter sky during the darkest night of the year, carrying the sun between her antlers to bring back the light and new life. Then there is Mycene, a Greek water nymph linked to springs and fresh water, who shares her name with the root word mykes, meaning "mushroom" — the very origin of the word mycology, the study of mushrooms. As springs in myth are often tied to creation and renewal, Mycene embodies the deep, ancient link between water, mushrooms, and the generative forces of life.

To think of the mushroom as the mother of life on earth feels not just fitting - even modern science now speaks of what these ancient myths and folktales already seemed to know. It was the Kingdom of Fungi that came first, long before animals roamed and plants unfurled, shaping the ground beneath us. Modern science understands mushrooms to be the visible fruit of a vast, hidden web—mycelium—that weaves through the soil, breaking down what has died to feed what will grow and make life possible. Though science may be the modern story that speaks of these networks and nutrients, long before science, ancient stories told of fungi as the weavers of the world’s underwomb — the dark, fertile cradle where endings become beginnings.

But here is where the real meaning and heart of mushroom folklore begins to reveal its many-layered form: across time and culture, fungi are almost always entwined with the presence of powerful women — as goddesses, healers, witches, fairies, pixies, shamans or wild mothers. If these beings were not mushroom dieties themselves, they were their gatherers, and repositories of ethnobiological and mycological lore passing down through the generations inherited folk knowledge of certain plants and fungi. These women understood which mushrooms were poisonous, which ones were edible, and which ones were medicinal. It has been documented that Hungarian elder herbalists used fly agaric for love potions, and Swedish witches of the 17th century made salves of mushrooms also used for storing hemp, opium and henbane. Among many Bantu-speaking peoples in Southern Africa, including the Zulu and Xhosa, many traditional healers, or Sangoma, are women, some of whom work with psychoactive or medicinal fungi and serve as intermediaries between the living and the ancestral realm.

Regrettably, much of this ancient mushroom knowledge was and is dismissed as fantasy, folklore, or witchcraft and forced underground, hidden beneath veils of magic or demonized. Though often persecuted and repressed for centuries, this wild wisdom has endured, its richness revealed through fungal folklore that still thrives in the shadows.

Across Western Europe and the British Isles, mushrooms were long tangled in the lore of witches — growing where spells were cast, fairies danced, and secrets were buried in the soil. The Germans call fairy rings Hexenringe - literally “witches rings” - referring to the circular patch of dead grass that the fungi circle leaves behind, believed to be the remnants of the footprints of witches as they gathered in circles at night. In France these fungi circles are called Ronds de Sorcieres or “witches rings”, and some French words for mushrooms include Œuf(s) du diable (“eggs of the devil”), doigts du diable (“devil’s fingers”), and pain de crapaud (“toad bread”). In Estonia, Fulgio septica, a large yellow slime mold is called nõiapask (“Shit of a Witch”). An edible yellow fungus, Tremella mesenterica, Exidia glandulosa, and Dacrymyces chrysospermus, commonly found on dead branches is called “Witches butter” in English, tripe de sorcière (“witch’s tripe”) in French, and heksenboter (“witch’s butter”) in Dutch.

Among Russian, Baltic, and Ugric peoples, old Slavic folklore and folk illustrations repeatedly show a link between mushrooms and Baba Yaga, the wild witch of the woods. Though rarely central to her tales, mushrooms frequently appear as visual motifs. Sometimes, the gathering of mushrooms provides an entry point for the heroine to encounter Baba Yaga—fitting, as both Baba Yaga and fungi are bound to the cycles of death, decay, and transformation. Even in China, the Goddess Kuan Yin is depicted in Chinese art with the Lingzhi mushroom in her hands, and both goddess and mushroom are associated with immortality, longevity, health, the alleviation of suffering and sickness and divine power.

Mysterious and many-faced, mushrooms hold both poison and potion, death and nourishment; they enchant and bewilder, lure and heal, and open hidden doors between the living and spirit worlds. Throughout history, they have been deeply intertwined with powerful women, their dualities and transformations reflected in mythology and folklore. These stories carry ancient wisdom—knowledge of connection, identity, and transformation—that science is only just beginning to uncover. In Forest Ecologist Susan Simard’s groundbreaking book Finding The Mother Tree: Discovering The Wisdom of the Forest, we discover how trees communicate and support each other by exchanging nutrients and resources, communicate each other about possible environmental dangers through the underground mycorrhizal networks which are like underground fungal highways. Simard’s discovery suggests that trees and plants do not operate as independently as we thought but are much more interdependent.

This same truth pulses through folk-mycology, in the way mushroom mythos of one culture often mirror another’s — not through tidy categories, but through a shared fluidity of form and meaning. Are Alonkok, Sēņu Māte, Wā’paq, Beaivi, and Mycene truly separate beings, or simply many faces of the same ancient earth mother? Might there be a folklore fungal highway — an underground cultural current of myth — nourishing these tales as they circle the globe? Whether through science or story, the study of fungi points us to the same revelation: we are not solitary islands, but threads in a vast, entangled cultural tapestry.

Perhaps most profoundly, the study of fungi disrupts the idea of the “individual” on so many levels. Mycologist Merlin Sheldrake writes in the May 2025 issue of Orion Magazine that the study of fungi unearths a kind of wisdom that modern science is only beginning to name. He speaks of a “being with-ness,” a way of existing that “disrupts the neat notion of individuality.” In the tangled threads of the mycelial world, he sees a “cocreative relational field between relating organisms,” one that invites us to “feel part of something bigger.” These are not merely scientific revelations — they are echoed in the ancient stories, where nothing exists in isolation and all life is bound by the great weaving. Folktales, like spores on the wind, drift and root where they’re needed, feeding the folklore forest of our interconnectedness.

Stepping further into the mystery, we find modern science unveiling that fungi blur the very edges of what we call a self. They confound old ideas of the cell and the self, weaving living entities together in ways our old thinking can barely hold. Though we may like to think of the cell as the fundamental and stable building block of matter and all life, this is not universally true. Fungal cells, called hyphae, are not discrete cells like other organisms: they have porous walls, they can house multiple nuclei, they can fuse and exchange nuclei promoting genetic diversity and can be likened to a super-cellular network. Fungi hyphae also exhibit a wide range of sexualities, with some species having thousands of mating types challenging the assumption of binary sex and gender. As modern mycology reveals complex networks of inter-being and fluid, hybrid, plural, non-conforming identities within fungal life, it echoes the insights that have always been embedded in ancient fungal folklore across cultures and time.

Fungal folklore is teeming with shapeshifters, gender-benders, and hybrid or fluid beings who pay no mind to tidy categories either. Fungi fairies, elves, pixies and witches associated with toadstools blur the lines between one creature and another, and travel between worlds and realms. In the mist-laden glens of Ireland, for example, rings of mushrooms are known as fairy forts — sacred places said to be home to the Aos Sí, a race of shapeshifting, otherworldly beings. Sometimes it’s just their eyes that change color, but other times their ethereal faces stretch and their fingers lengthen. Shifting between captivating and terrifying they are said to transform between crow and black dog, and can shift gender identities, sometimes ambiguously residing between the visible world and the spirit world. The Aos Sí are thought to have resided in the shadows of the emerald green Irish landscape long before the rise of human dominance, and they represent the essence of nature itself, ancient, mysterious, powerful, enigmatic and eternal.

The Fly Agaric mushroom mentioned in this blog post. The Koryak call it *Wā’paq* from which the earth emerged, it shows up repeatedly in illustrations of Baba Yaga from Slavic folklore. Photo Credit: Joachim Lesne on Unsplash.

In the border region of Colombia and Venezuela, the Kayeri is a giant, plant-like being from the folklore of the Cuiva people. With a large mushroom-like hat and a form blending plant and human qualities, all mushrooms in the forest are said to be aspects of this mysterious creature, challenging ideas of what life can be. In Japan’s Shinto tradition, the Enoki mushroom is believed to harbor mountain spirits known as yama-no-kami. These elusive forest entities shift between animal and human forms, blurring the boundaries between species and realms. Also from Japanese mountain legends comes the Yamawaro, a luminous, mushroom-shaped spirit that lures travelers with its glowing light. Known as a trickster, it can transform into human or monstrous forms, unsettling the line between plant, spirit, and human. In Benin among the Dahomey people live the Aziza, fairy-like “little people” closely linked to mushrooms and magic. The Aziza grant secret knowledge to hunters and shapeshift between animal, human, and spirit, embodying the porous, ever-shifting world of the forest. Dutch folklore tells of kabouters—gnome-like beings often emerging from mushrooms. These earth spirits blur the boundary between human and nature, rooted in the soil yet alive with mischief and magic. In the old lore of Britain, the woods are thick with fungal fairies whose shifting forms and slippery identities mirror what science now tells us about fungi themselves. English fairies associated with mushrooms aren't always female but a mix of both male and female beings, and some depictions even suggest they are androgenous. The foxfire bioluminescent glow of honey mushrooms gave rise to legend of Will-o’-the-wisp, a fiery fairy appearing as a ghostly glow or flickering flame hovering above ground rumored to lead travelers astray so omen of death or illuminating path forward. All these mushroom-related beings were often demonized, marginalized, or forced underground, their shifting identities deemed threatening by cultures craving order. Yet their enduring presence in story reminds us life is never tidy but always alive in the spaces between the borders we draw. It’s as though the strangeness found under the microscope echoes the mysteries long held in story — where fungi, like their folkloric kin, teach us that life is not fixed, but ever-shifting, ever-woven. As if myth and mycelium both knew, long before modern science declared it, that life resists tidy edges.

How might our emerging scientific understanding of fungi deepen our appreciation of the deep wisdom contained in the stories that have long been whispered over fires? What the old stories always knew, and science now echoes is these set of shapeshifting, boundary-blurring, rule-defying, wildly adaptive characteristics are what gives the mighty mycelial network its potent capacity to midwife, cradle, nourish, nurse and birth all life from the dark womb of the soil. Kaitlin Smith, PhD candidate at Harvard in the Department of the History of Science, says,

“What fungi networks show us is that nature natures through a kind of bustling, diverse place where novelty can be incubated and sheltered, all sorts of experiments in living and experiments in being, and that mirrors in some way the bustling diversity of a healthy ecosystem. And it is precisely this diversity that feeds the fungal highway, that is the foundation for life itself. . .it is the defining characteristic of the beginning of life”.

It’s no wonder the Bantu speak of the Alonkok, the Koryak speak of Wā’paq, and the Latvian have their Sēņu Māte. Aren’t all mothers preparing for birth a blend of two beings in one? Doesn’t a mother’s placenta sound very much like the porous exchange happening among fungal hyphae within the fungal super highway? When a mother nurses her young, is she not porously sharing of her body to feed her child? Like a hidden placenta beneath the forest floor, the mycelial web carries life between worlds — exchanging, nourishing, and midwifing the new into being, just as a mother feeds the unborn through a thread of living connection.

*Tremella Mesenterica* aka “witches butter” in English, *tripe de sorcière* (“witches tripe”) in French, and *heksenboter* (“witches butter”) in Dutch mentioned in this blog post. Photo credit: ezgi on pexels.

And yet, here lies the marrow of it all: so much of this labor—this quiet, persistent work—goes unseen, buried, unacknowledged and unrewarded, dismissed as fiction, or quietly pushed to the margins. The labor of moving between genders, of loving outside sanctioned structures of race or gender, of straddling cultures and nationalities, of thinking and sensing outside neurotypical norms, of crossing linguistic borders, of carrying multiple homelands in a single body, of weaving together religious or spiritual traditions—this is hard work. The labor of refusing fixed categories, of being many things at once in a world that demands singularity, has long been cast into shadow—deemed unnatural, dangerous, or deviant by systems that crave order, control, and neat definition.

But it is precisely this labor of in-betweenness—the straining, stretching, and holding of contradictions—that births new life. It is not passive. It is the work of becoming, of bearing tension without resolution, like a mother in labor, pushing through pain and pressure to deliver what has never existed before. This in-between state is the amniotic fluid of transformation, the womb-space where possibility stirs, the fertile ground from which all new worlds emerge. What science is only now beginning to trace in the entangled life of fungi—their porous, relational laboring—has long been honored and fiercely protected in the veiled language of myth and folklore. It has been passed down through story, carried in breath and song across generations. In a world fractured by rigid borders and divisions, fungal folklore quietly preserves the sacred labor of weaving worlds together. And this ancient, living story of the Kingdom of Fungi is not just a footnote—it is the first. The origin. The mother. The Alonkok, the Wā’paq, the Sēņu Māte: from whom all life begins.

Long before plants unfurled leaves or animals took breath, it was the Kingdom of Fungi — ancient, generative, and womb-like — that prepared the ground, breaking down stone into soil and making life possible; a quiet Great Mother beneath our feet, whose primacy is not just ancient, but foundational. The stories that encircle mushrooms—from ancient goddesses to woodland witches and fungi fairies—have long honored this truth: that the world is not built from tidy edges, but woven through the underground labor of shapeshifting, hybrid beings who stitch connection from complexity, and life from the in-between. What might we recover if, instead of casting fungal folklore aside as fantasy or lesser than science, we bowed in reverence to the the folklore-rich forest floor, the womb-wide belly of Mother Earth—and listened to the stories still alive in the soil? Stories that honor the unseen labor that weaves into being new life.

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