A thing of beauty is a joy forever, or so John Keats (1795–1821) stated in the opening stanza of his poem Endymion (1818). While the line is well-known, its”meaning in relation to the story of the shepherd Endymion and his complicated love life is rather more obscure. In fact, when you consider exactly what is meant by that opening line, you must wonder if anything should be a joy forever.

Before I get to Keats, I should mention that during the 19th century, the name Endymion was famous because of the book of the same name by Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, a former prime minister and best-selling novelist, beloved by the public for his romanticism, which often came with a political edge. When he published his final novel Endymion in 1880, the newspapers wrote that “first class passengers, especially ladies, carry it with them as they would a favorite pug or a flask of fluid refreshment.” In Disraeli’s novel, Endymion is the son of a disgraced politician, determined to redeem the family name by becoming a politician for the other side. Disraeli’s hero is good, virtuous, and ultimately successful, with the book ending on his assent to prime minister. The connection to the poem is purely superficial, but the name is used to denote goodness and love together with a sense of renewal and revitalization. You could also guess that for the young women clasping the book as they traveled, it was a joy until the last page, if not forever.

The wellspring of the name, well known to Disraeli, was obviously the poem. Keats based his work on the Greek myth of the beautiful shepherd on the slopes of Mount Latmus, named Endymion. From the various retellings, the shepherd was possibly also a prince and an astronomer, but what we can agree on is that he was so handsome that celestial beings placed him into an eternal sleep so they could worship him forever. Licymnius of Chios, an ancient Greek poet, told the story that Hypnos, the god of sleep, loved the shepherd so much that he cast his spell over him with the caveat that Endymion’s eyes remained open so Hypnos could gaze into them eternally. Mercifully, Keats told the marginally less creepy version of the myth, in which the slumbering beauty is visited by the goddess of the moon, Selena (or Cynthia as she is known in this poem). To the relief of all viewers of the art created from said myth, Endymion’s eyes remain closed.

In the traditional myth, Selena, the Titan goddess of the moon, fell deeply in love with the beautiful shepherd and begged Zeus, another of her lovers, to grant Endymion eternal youth so that the shepherd would always be with her. The goddess should have known never to trust Zeus, a tricksy devil at the best of times and one with a grudge in the case of our pretty shepherd. Turns out Endymion had also been the object of desire for Hera, Zeus’s wife/sister, and so Zeus chose to interpret the plea from Selena in a malicious manner. Instead of making Endymion immortal, he put the shepherd into an eternal sleep, preserving his beauty in a permanently unconscious manner.

Not that I’m one to speak in defense of Zeus, but he is not the only one to be petty in this myth. A lesser-known story connected to Endymion is that a girl called Muia found the sleeping shepherd and took a shine to him. He was a great listener, so she would sit and talk to him every night and her endless chatter disturbed his celestial sleep, which is quite a talent. This infuriated Selena so much that she turned the girl into a fly, doomed to annoy sleepers forever with her irritating buzzing. There are no romantic art depictions of this particular myth, unfortunately, so Selena’s shady past can be overlooked on this occasion.

When artists portrayed this poetic love story, the emphasis was always on the gorgeous supine shepherd, his beauty shimmering in the moonlight. Above him, sighing and longing, leans Selena, gazing upon the man she loves who will never gaze back. Anne-Louis Girodet’s 1791 painting The Sleep of Endymion shows a remarkably naked shepherd in all his glory, snoozing under a bush while a chubby child, presumably Eros, parts the branches so the silvery fingertips of moonlight can caress his splendid form. By the time of Jerome-Martin Langlois’s 1822 interpretation, Selena had taken an equally naked shape and is seen floating down on the beams of moonlight to get a closer look at the sleeping beauty with Eros helpfully lifting his blanket. Mercifully, Eros is missing from later paintings as his presence feels both a little unnecessary and rather weird. I’m sure the goddess can sneak a peek under the blanket on her own. By Victor Pollet’s work of 1854, Selena gazes upon the object of her desire alone, her body as pale as the crescent moon that cradles her. Endymion, covered by the smallest piece of animal fur, his shepherd’s crook clutched in his hand, remains an object of glory, the personification of perfection.

Another reason for the departure of Eros from the scene might be an extension of the myth where the moon goddess not only gazed upon her slumbering love but physically visited him every night, giving birth to fifty children by him, which is a little excessive. A magical interpretation appeared in John Atkinson Grimshaw’s 1879 Endymion on Mount Latmus, where Selena, fluttering like a fairy, glows above the object of her desire. It could be that the goddess is departing her love in the glow of the rising sun, curving her body to get a last look at his face, clutching her heart as she is banished by the day.

This rather lustier attraction becomes apparent in later depictions, such as Edward Poynter’s 1902 painting showing Selena skipping down from the sky to find her lover sleeping among the poppies, which denote his endless slumber. A year later, George Frederick Watts painted Selena as a swirling cloud engulfing her lover, creating a circle along with his golden sleeping form. The spirit of the goddess seems to enter the slumbering shepherd, who echoes her body above him, and they appear to form two halves of a whole. They become the phases of the moon together, symbolic of the time passing and the goddess’s love renewing eternally.

The tale of Endymion, the sleeping shepherd, adored in his unconsciousness, is remarkable for the passivity of the male protagonist. Our hero is eternally snoozing because a goddess wanted to possess him. His best qualities are being submissive, silent, and decorative—talents usually required of heroines and yet this feminization of a hero is accepted as a triumph and the pinnacle of romance. There is also a reflection of nature and its joyful cycles. You can interpret Selena’s swooping down to Endymion every night as the lowering of the moon so that the sun can rise, as his name may be derived from the Greek word for “to dive into.” Thus Endymion’s power is to tempt the moon down every night so that the sun can rise and day can come again. In that way, his beauty is his power, keeping the world turning even from his endless sleep. Likewise, Selena’s love is not destructive like that of some of her fellow immortals, but revives each night, new and passionate, to last forever.

Photos by Ileah Lutz of Propel the Moon Photography

I love many things about fantasy films—the dazzling costumes, otherworldly beauty, and pristine nature. Tall trees and mountains that disappear above ocean mist. There’s a stark contrast between fairy-tale forests and the dusty arroyos and grassy plains of my eastern New Mexico hometown. However, one state further west looks the very picture of fantasy fiction. When I think of Oregon and its verdigris trails of moss, it overtakes every stone and rooted path in my mind. Just the very thought of its rainy days gives me a sense of melancholic longing. Then recently, I received an invitation to meet with creatures who dance in moonbeams and run with wolves. It was a chance to join a heavenly host of adventurers whose odyssey began in the pages of tomes.

Novel Escapes is an event-production company in Portland that creates bookish escapes for curious daydreamers and draws vivacious readers to their productions like a moth to a flame. This fall, I will be an honored guest.

Anastasia P. founded Novel Escapes in 2024 to create high-quality, whimsical events that reflected her love for books as well as her community. She partnered with author A.B. Daniels-Annachi, who shared her passion for literature and offered his experience with publishing and organizing. The team also includes newcomers Ashley B. and Bri H., who create community engagement opportunities like Discord role-playing and social media activations.

The beckoning light that Novel Escapes cultivates is reflected in the faces of the people who attend each event. “I really think that there’s something about making space for diverse voices, for hiring a diverse cast,” Daniels-Annachi says when discussing what makes their work so special. Safe spaces are defined as environments that protect against harassment, discrimination, criticism, and other emotional harm. It is this very promise of comfort and security that draws in guests from all walks of life. Like delicate threads woven together, each storytelling guest becomes part of a rich tapestry and binds their unique experiences. When somebody attends one of the events, “they’re going to see that we’re really putting effort into making sure everyone feels represented,” Anastasia emphasizes. As a plus-size woman myself, I was delighted to see a variety of body sizes, skin colors, and talents included in their cast of goddesses and gods for their Pomegranates and Styx event last winter.

Because there truly is immense wonder in the rain-soaked forests of Oregon, there are animal familiars who contribute to the delicate fibers that Novel Escapes creates. Saaya and Echo are two wolfdogs known as Of Wolf and Shadow on Instagram. Their handler and photographer Jade found an opportunity to introduce fantasy lovers to wolfdogs and the challenges their wolf ancestors currently face. Anastasia recalls Jade saying, “I see so many people who would take a photo with a wolf or read a story about a wolf but have no clue about any of the environmental stuff or know that wolves need saving.” Through each photo, the subjects and curious observers become just a little more informed about the conservation of wolf territory and the forest sentinels themselves.

It’s safe to say I accepted Anastasia and Daniels-Annachi’s invitation and was honored to experience their work firsthand through our collaboration last spring for Black Fae Day, a celebration of Black fantasy enthusiasts and culture. The craft of bringing fantasy to this mundane life sometimes requires balancing advocacy with respite. And no doubt, much sacrifice is required. But as delicate as the result may be, the experience Novel Escapes creates leaves an indelible mark on the hearts of all their patrons.

If you’d like to experience the magic for yourself, their next seasonal event is Faerie Revelry—A Bookish Retreat. Experience a cozy weekend getaway with role-playing, meals prepared by an award-winning chef, book talks with vending fantasy authors, and the wilderness of Brasada Ranch, August 22 to 24. Visit their website for more information: novelescapesllc.com/faerie-revelry.

Visit Jasmine La Fleur online at blackfaeday.com. You can hear more about Novel Escapes and other magical guests on her podcast, Faebies and Friends, available on Apple Music, Amazon Music, iHeart, and Spotify.

Author and fairy expert Karen Kay has been hearing fairy whispers since she was a young girl—and it started in her grandmother’s wild, rose-filled garden. Kay would gather up the fallen rose petals, place them in a bowl with water, and crush them to make perfume for the flower fairies she knew inhabited that enchanted space. She’d leave the perfume out overnight, and it would always (of course) be gone in the morning. She saw the fairies, she writes, as tiny points of vibrant light, out of the corner of her eye, piercing through from the fairy realm into this one—and she does to this day.

And now she’s written a book about them. Fairy Whispering, which was published by Hay House last November, contains 111 ways to connect with the fairies through magical practices, including gorgeous rituals, spells, meditations, incantations, and visualizations. One of these spells, based on that most alluring and gossamer of fairy plays, is below.

Midsummer Night’s Dream Spell

Many of us are familiar with William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream—a play telling the tale of fairies playing games with humans on this most enchanted of nights!

Midsummer’s Eve is certainly a potent and magical time, during which fairies pierce the veil into our realm. This makes it the perfect time to connect with fairies.

This spell can be done indoors or outdoors. I always say that doing it outside is best. However, I know that this is not always possible, and doing it inside works equally well.

You’ll need some fairy dust (biodegradable glitter), a white or light‐ colored candle (ideally unscented), a small jar or lantern if going outside, and some rose essential oil and rose petals to represent midsummer.

The spell is to be performed any time between dusk and midnight on Midsummer’s Eve.

Place a few drops of the rose essential oil in your palm and put a small dab onto your third eye area (between your eyebrows). Then pick up your candle and, using your index finger and thumb, rub the oil from the top to the bottom. As you do this, say: I call upon Oberon and Titania, king and queen of the fairies, to help me to love all that I see, and to accept with good grace what life gives to me. I call also on Puck, to bring me good luck and good fortune forever more. I am knocking upon your fairy door.

Next, light your candle, and say: With this flame I ignite this spell, for the highest good of all, wishing everyone well.

Then sprinkle your fairy dust over the flame. Hear it crackle and pop as the energy rises. Take care when doing this and keep your face and eyes at a distance. Next, take your rose petals, hold them up high, and allow them to fall gently over your head, energizing you with their sweetly scented energy. While you are doing all of this, hold the intention of inviting the king and queen of the fairies to connect with you. Be mindful that Puck can and probably will play games, as he is prone to do!

Follow Karen Kay on Instagram @karenkayfairy and find Fairy Whispering wherever books are sold.

Some people carry wicker baskets into the woods and fill them with chanterelles and morels. They gather wild mushrooms to plop into soups and sprinkle on salads. I occasionally enjoy mushrooms myself, baked into focaccia or simmered with vegetables. But when I go into the woods with an eye toward fungi, I’m not usually hoping to harvest dinner. I’m hunting for glimpses of wonder.

interesting, but bioluminescent mushroom species—often referred to as foxfire—are especially precious, because they glow with living light. Foxfire turns forest floors into dreamworlds, the realm of fairy tales and mystical creatures. The mushrooms seem too magical to be real, but foxfire—ounce for ounce, arguably the most enchanted fungi in all the land—is as real as real can be. And you can find it all over the world. Bioluminescent mushrooms glow in North American hardwood forests, under the rain-dripping leaves of Brazil, and among the bamboo groves of Japan. Spin a globe under your finger and you’ll likely find foxfire not far from wherever your pointer lands.

Historically, various species of foxfire were collected in jars to serve as lanterns. The mushrooms have been used to outline pathways in the dark, and they once illuminated the hulls of early submarines. Our word foxfire is thought to have derived from the French faux, for “false,” making the term “fake fire.” But whatever the etymology, almost everywhere foxfire is found, folklore associates it with mysterious, supernatural forces—and often with those fire-furred woodland animals. In Japan, for example, foxfire is associated with ghostly light said to appear in the presence of foxes. In Finland, foxes are famously known to move through the woods with brushy tails that twinkle. It’s rumored that they’re sometimes able to even ignite things with their tails, as though they’re painting with fire.

In my home region of southern Appalachia—where foxes flit out of woods with regularity and foxfire fungi is abundant— foxfire species include jack-o’-lantern mushrooms, large and orange as pumpkins, and bitter oysters that in the dark looklike coins of light. To find them, I’ve learned that patience is required. Glowing mushrooms are subtle; they reveal themselves only to those who allow their night vision to ripen.

When I set out to find foxfire, I take time to experience light sifting out of this world. I rest on mossy logs and let my eyes adjust slowly, in unison with dusk. In time, I can often see mycelium consuming fallen leaves, like glowing cotton candy on the forest floor, whereas before dark I saw only clumps of ordinary leaf litter. Sometimes only in the dark is the ordinary revealed to be extraordinary. Of this, foxfire is a beautiful reminder.

Many mushrooms release their spores in tiny clouds that swirl in the wind. I have never seen it myself, but I’ve heard that when bioluminescent mushrooms do this, their spores glow in midair as miniature clouds of light. That seems worth seeking out—a quest yet to be undertaken. In the fungal world, there’s always something magical awaiting.

Many mushrooms release their spores in tiny clouds that swirl in the wind. I have never seen it myself, but I’ve heard that when bioluminescent mushrooms do this, their spores glow in midair as miniature clouds of light. That seems worth seeking out—a quest yet to be undertaken. In the fungal world, there’s always something magical awaiting.

Bitter oysters are not something you’d want to simmer in stew or toss in a salad. But it’s impossible to question their value if you’ve ever seen them alight. In a world that seems so overexplored and overlit with artificial light, discovering glowing mushrooms in natural darkness delivers a giant helping of awe. In this way, foraging inedible foxfire provides its own sort of nourishment.

Henion’s book Night Magic, published by Algonquin Books, can be found wherever books are sold. Learn more about Leigh Ann Henion at leighannhenion.com.

Art: Nature Picture Library / Alamy Stock Photo

Feature Image: Hollow Bones by Katrina Haffner

As I’m down on all fours, balanced on one hand and one knee with my opposite leg suspended in the air behind, I hear the instructor intone, “How we begin is not how we end.” He means that our physical state is always changing, that we walk out of the barre studio a little stronger, a little more flexible than we were when we came in.

The year is preparing to turn as I write this, and as it does, millions of people will resolve to begin the New Year by acting, speaking, eating, working, relating to others, and simply being in a way that is different from and hopefully better than whatever they did before. A lot of coaches like to focus on how quickly many resolutions are forgotten or broken, but I think it’s remarkable that we always resolve to change, and how deep down we know that how we begin is not—and doesn’t have to be—how we end.

I like to take my prayers outside. Next to the swing and the backyard fountain is a patch of dirt that wasn’t always there. When we first moved into the house there was a tough, gnarled tree stump in its place. I don’t know what happened to the tree, but I do know that our local mushroom population loved that stump. I watched as a variety of fungi worked on the wood, slowly breaking it down until it disappeared completely. Although it didn’t, not really. It just changed.

I’ve always loved mushrooms. Forever associating them with magic and the line that they straddle—nourishment and healing on one side, death on the other—I find their folklore and their varieties endlessly fascinating. In school we learned to call them decomposers, a special class of plant and fungi that feeds on organisms already dead, thus transforming death into something that can support life once more.

Death is not an end but a new beginning may sound like a cliché, but the fact is that everything in and around us is constantly dying, transforming, and becoming something else. Fungi are the allies that remind us that such a cliché also happens to be absolute truth.

Interestingly, advanced medical research into fungi reveals similar functions on a less physical or literal plane. Many people ingest reishi and lion’s mane to bring life back to overtaxed immune systems. Some scientists are experimenting with various species of psilocybin, exploring their use not just for a good time but also to help people trapped in psychological death states, which might include emotional paralysis, deep depression, and trauma that leave them feeling frozen and isolated.

In his wonderful book on all things fungal, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures, Merlin Sheldrake points out that the treatment of bacterial infections with antibiotics is being challenged in a deep way by fungal infections, which are poised to become more frequent and deadly. This danger has spurred medical researchers to find new and better treatment protocols and has served as a reminder to all of us that an overreliance on antibiotics leaves everyone vulnerable.

I spread truffle-infused honey on a slice of hot buttered bread for my oldest son. He’s been through so much: loss of vision in one eye, the possibility of losing vision in the other eye, the relief when the medical procedure worked and preserved that second eye’s sight. Through it all—the trauma, the surgeries, the fear—he has been so brave … and he’s grown so tall that he now towers above me. He’s grown too in talent, in his ability as a cellist, pianist, and composer, and most of all in wisdom. I think about the changes he’s been through, and then my gaze falls on an orange and blue ceramic piece made by my youngest son. It’s a mushroom. I keep it on my desk to remind me that how we begin is not how we end. Living life leaves a mark.

I am back in class, this time doing forward and reverse lunges at the barre. I breathe into the motion. I reflect on how the greatest quality of fungus is not that it decomposes or that it can open doors of perception, but that it connects. Tiny white hyphae reach for each other, fungal filaments that we now know are required for life, because connection is required for life.

Connection of tree to tree and tree to forest and forest to forest; connection of soil to soil, of each web of life to all others.

My hair is damp with sweat; my thoughts turn to spring and that patch of dirt in my backyard where there used to be a stump of wood. What shall I plant there this season? What new life has death made way for? What is ready to grow? I’m not sure yet, but I’m ready to find out.

i choose a drizzly day in the gloaming to wander through the emerald cathedrals of the Cascadian coastal rainforest. I love days in the rain—something about the soft filtered light just brings all the colors of the woods to life! Today I feel as giddy as I used to on Easter morning, envisioning colorful candy eggs
waiting to be found.

Every walk in the woods feels like a treasure hunt to me. Will I find a cluster of golden chanterelles, redolent with their apricot perfume? Will I stumble across a fairy circle of amanita mushrooms, their scarlet spotted caps reminding me to tread carefully? Maybe I’ll walk over the crest of the hill to see a bunch of delightfully chubby porcini scattered below …

Not today. Today something truly magnificent is waiting for me. I’m on hands and knees, softly crawling through the moss up the steep slope, when right in front of my nose appears the empress of the woods. There she stands in her amethyst glory, covered in velvety purple so dark it almost appears to be black. In all my time in these glorious woods, I’ve never been in the presence of any sort of violet webcap before. The moment feels transcendent, and I get a twinkling sense of a thinning of the veil. I can feel the magic here. Of course I can.

There’s something about mushrooms that casts a spell of enchantment. Flowers are lovely and I would never slight the smell of a wild rose, but they’re all sweetness. Mushrooms, on the other hand, are tricksters. They’re unpredictable and elusive, alien and strange. And don’t we all love a chase?

I lie down in the moss and imagine that I’m a mushroom myself, sending invisible tendrils of mycelium down into the earth below me. I let myself melt into the moss, let the forest consume me in my soft bed.

Soon I see fae creatures dancing, each one bearing a resemblance to a particular mushroom.

Their faces are obscured, but their movements are unmistakable. The chanterelle queen is elegant and just a bit flirtatious.

The porcini fae is shy but lovely.

The mysterious ink cap elf looks up slyly, inviting me to join a realm I daren’t wander into. Then the Empress of the Forest arrives in her violet velvet, and all the fae hush in awe at her grandeur.

When I wake, I wonder if it was a dream, a daydream, or something else entirely. The violet webcap still stands nearby, inconspicuous. I give her a wink as I stand up, my heart bright with magic and my mind swirling with inspiration …

A year later I watch those dreams come to life with a group of incredible magical women from all over the country, drawn as

I am to the mycelial magic of the coastal rainforest. Read more about this magical gathering and find everything you need to host your own at patreon.com/misswondersmith. There are a few things you’ll definitely want to include, the first of which is a crown for every participant. Keep reading to learn how to make an amanita one!

by Sara Cleto and Brittany Warman

“The dead don’t walk. Except, sometimes, when they do.”
—T. Kingfisher, What Moves the Dead

In recent years, mushrooms have appeared in some very particular realms of speculative literature— horror and the Gothic. It turns out that mushrooms are the perfect vehicle for scary stories. Part of it is their sheer liminality. Despite all of our scientific advancements, we still don’t really understand them. They’re not exactly flora, not exactly fauna, but something entirely different—something that resists categorization.

What cannot be put into tidy boxes quickly becomes fodder for tales of horror. In high-theoretical terms, monsters frighten us because of their “hybridity”—they aren’t quite one thing or another, and the ambiguity is deeply unsettling. This is easy to see with classical monsters like Medusa or Scylla, whose beautiful human bodies are transformed by the addition of snakes or extra heads. Now hybrid composites, they are no longer entirely human, but they’re not animals either. They’ve become monstrous.

Mushrooms, which never fit into a neat category to begin with, are very ready to be made monstrous.

One of our favorite books that explore the sinister potential of the mushroom is T. Kingfisher’s What Moves the Dead, a 2022 retelling of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Fall of the House of Usher.” As in Poe’s story, the narrator (here named Alex Easton) arrives at the home of their friend Roderick Usher and his sister, Madeline, only to see that the house is falling into ruin. Something is very wrong: While the reason for Madeline’s illness and the house’s decline is never made explicit in Poe’s story, Kingfisher places the blame squarely on the parasitic mushrooms that thrive in the unwholesome landscape. These are mushrooms that can literally move the dead, and when Madeline dies, she’s also reanimated by their power. Remember what we said about hybridity and monstrosity? Madeline becomes part woman, part corpse, mostly mushroom. Eat your heart out, Medusa.

Sylvia Moreno-Garcia’s superb 2020 novel, Mexican Gothic, takes the idea of mushroom-based life extension even further. Like What Moves the Dead, the story begins with our protagonist visiting an old Gothic home and finding it overrun with problematic mushrooms. Noemí, the book’s heroine, goes to check on her cousin Catalina, who has married into the English Doyle family. Noemí quickly realizes that their mansion is overtaken with mold, fungus, and rot, which disgusts her but seems to be weirdly acceptable to the Doyles.

It turns out that the house’s mushrooms have developed a symbiotic but decidedly sinister relationship with the Doyle family. They offer healing properties, but they also seem to sap something vital from the people who dwell in the house.

Eventually, Noemí discovers that the family patriarch, Howard, uses the fungus to grant him an incredibly long life. But what’s much worse is that the mushrooms also grant him dominance and power over all his family members. He has learned to literally take over the consciousnesses and bodies of younger family members through the mushrooms’ power.

So once more, a human fused with mushrooms proves to be bad news. Like the oppressive colonial powers in Mexico to which the Doyle mushrooms are deliberately alluding, it seems like an impossible situation, but Noemí’s solution is both satisfyingly dramatic and extremely warranted.

If you want to explore more sinister mushroom tales, other books that feature them include Stephen King’s Dreamcatcher (2001), Creatures of Want and Ruin by Maggie Tanzer (2018), Agents of Dreamland by Caitlín R. Kiernan (2017), and a collection of short stories entitled Fungi (2012), edited by Orrin Grey and Moreno-Garcia.

But be warned: After reading any of the books mentioned in this article, we doubt you’ll be able to look at a seemingly innocent portobello the same way again.

Feature Image: Fairy Resting on a Mushroom (1860), by Thomas Heatherley

The house we lived in when I was a child had a storage cupboard outside the front door. Possibly inadvisably, my father grew mushrooms in there, making the cool, dark, tiled space smell earthy and magical. Outside, our modern home bordered a wood rich with puffballs, ink caps, and all manner of strangely named fungi.

I always knew that the mushrooms in the cupboard were safe, but it was best not to touch the ones in the wood. As a little girl, I did not understand why; I was too young to tell the poisonous from the delicious, so I rationalized that those mushrooms in the woods were homes to fairies or pixies and that it would have been rude, not to mention risky, to disturb them.

I was being unexpectedly Victorian in my reasoning, as the 19th century love of mushrooms was science tinged with fairy folk. The growing interest in vegetarianism in the latter half of the century celebrated the “meaty” delights of some of the larger specimens, while the button mushroom was a little gem to be added to stews.

And with more and more lady artists casting about and searching for suitable subjects for their still-life paintings, it seems unsurprising that they’d be attracted to the smooth white caps, velvet gills, and pops of color that marked the different varieties of fungi. And still-life pictures of nature were considered safe and appropriate.

Not only the mushrooms themselves but the genteel peasants who gathered them became the subject of works of art. In The Mushroom Gatherers (1878), James Clarke Hook showed a girl holding a wide basket full of fungi, her little brother on the ground in front of her pulling up a particularly large specimen. Similarly, in James J. Edgar’s The Mushroom Gatherer (c. 1860s), a beautiful young woman in modest working clothes sits beside her equally beautiful basket of shrooms, all pale and ripe like their collector.

These girls might have been particularly fond of foraging because of its perceived link to witchcraft. In Valentine Prinsep’s Medea the Sorceress (1880), the beautiful witch gathers red-tipped toadstools and places them in her basket, no doubt to fuel her craft rather than her breakfast. Of course she’s gathering the Amanita muscaria, or fly agaric, possibly the best known toadstool, renowned for its narcotic effect. For the Victorians, the red top with its white flecks symbolized positive magic as well as mischief and was even believed to have inspired the robes of Father Christmas (although I’m sure a certain cola company would have something to say about that). Broken into little pieces and soaked in milk, the fly agaric provided a powerful and irresistible poison to flies, and, when dried and swallowed whole, would inspire wild dancing and the spilling of secrets.

The botanist Mordecai Cubitt Cooke published a ten-volume guide to British fungi and wrote extensively about hallucinogenic plants and the mind-altering effects of the fly agaric shroom.

This stunner was also well-known as an antidote to nightshade poisoning, so Medea’s gathering might have been medicinal rather than murderous.

I’ve always wondered what the difference between a mushroom and a toadstool was and the answer is danger.

While there are stipulations that a toadstool has a stalk and a cap, we can all think of innocent white mushrooms that fit the definition but would never be called toadstools. During outbreaks of poisonings such as the epidemic in New York in 1893, the poisoning of the Marchant family in England in 1891, or the Andrieux family in Mureaux, France, in 1882, the perils of toadstools were always blamed. During the latter case, newspapers warned quite dramatically of “the danger of mistaking toadstools for mushrooms.” Quite honestly, all toadstools are mushrooms, but not all mushrooms are toadstools. The very word toadstool is a warning.

It also tells you there is something magical afoot. Do toads need to sit on stools? The toad in my garden needs to sit grumpily under my lavender bush and has never once expressed a desire for furniture.

Of course, where there are toads, other magical creatures usually abound. An interesting example is in John Anster Fitzgerald’s The Intruder (1865; pictured on page 38). The artist had such an obsession with the miniature magical world, he became known as Fairy Fitzgerald and was described by the London Daily Chronicle as “the well-known painter of hob- goblins, fairies, imaginative and classical subjects and portraits.” In The Intruder, wee fae folk confront a toad who wants to access his stool. The situation appears to have escalated fairly quickly with fairies of all sizes getting involved, yet the toad looks completely unbothered by it all—which is very brave because some of those little sprites look terrifying. More sensuous are the fairies of Thomas Heatherley (see page 71), their pink curvy bottoms and flaxen hair spilling over the white flesh of the mushroom cap. These are saucy fairies perched on pearly fungi, perfect and glittering, unconcerned with the matters of man.

There are often accompanying pointy-hatted pixies, mind you, fighting with snails, which is enough to entertain anyone.

As a complete contrast, the fairy ring mushroom, Marasmius oreades, brings such positivity that poet Eliza Cook wrote a whole ode to its glory. Her poem contains the repeated refrain “For, while love is a fairy spirit, / The world is a fairy ring.” While the toadstool seems to shun human interaction and keep company with some very unpleasant types, the fairy ring of mushrooms invites the human in to meet the fae. In Edward Robert Hughes’s Midsummer Eve (c. 1905) a girl stands amid a full fairy ring and jamboree with lots of tiny fairy lights and naked fairies, as one does.

Little Victorian girls seem to have had a particular affinity with mushrooms, seen especially in Edward Atkinson Hornel’s works The Little Mushroom Gatherers (1902) and Gathering Mushrooms (1930) and Florence Small’s The Mushroom Girl (1886). These girls are dressed in picturesque rural attire, with spotless aprons and little baskets and not a dirty fingernail among them. I wonder if the link between young girls and mushrooms is that their innocence chimes with the fae sprites that find them. That’s why it seems perfectly natural that, in the 1917 case of the Cottingley Fairies, it was young Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths who saw the fairies rather than their parents.

If human interaction with fairies and their rings seems to cause trouble, then far more civilized is Walter Jenks Morgan’s A Fairy Ring (1870–80; pictured on page 5). Here we have a very demure circle of fairies, both male and female, fully dressed and listening politely to the fairy who’s speaking. Maybe it’s the presence of humans that makes fairies behave wildly—do we lead fairies astray? I always thought it was meant to be the other way around, but upon further reflection, we humans are a rum lot. Morgan’s fairies obviously conduct themselves in a democratic manner—dressed, neat, free of fighting or debauchery. The pale mushrooms reveal white gills beneath, giving the impression of purity, refinement, and goodness.

These fairies and their mushrooms are positive forces in the world, but that world is not ours.

In the end, the problem with mushrooms may be that they’re not primarily made for humans. Mushrooms in all their guises are unexpectedly beautiful things, so it’s not surprising that people believed them capable of all manner of magic and, by extension, mischief and malice. I was surprised to find that the fly agaric—arguably the archetypal forest mushroom—is in fact a rare sight in Britain’s woodlands. Its dangerous red coat announces that particular toadstool’s poison, unlike some of

its more innocuous, pale cousins native to Britain’s woods. The destroying angel (Amanita verna) and death cap (Amanita phalloides) look very similar to the ones I have lined up for my risotto tonight, as it happens, all pearly white and innocent.

I ought to reassure you that as a sensible coward, I foraged mine from my local supermarket. The advice my parents gave me as a child was wise after all: Do not steal the fairy houses for your supper; you might not live long enough to have the leftovers for breakfast.

Renowned mycologist Paul Stamets is, simply put, mad about mushrooms. From tame little grocery-store white buttons to flamboyant foraged chanterelles, there isn’t much that Stamets doesn’t know about the funky fungi. A recently discovered species of magic mushroom has even been named after him: Psilocybe stametsii, which was unearthed in a cloud forest in Ecuador.

Stamets is the author of Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World and the forthcoming Psilocybin Mushrooms in Their Natural Habitats, and he has delivered brilliant talks for TED and TEDMed. He’s devoted his life to studying and sharing the magic of mushrooms, yet he’s barely gotten started. That’s because there is just so much to learn—culinarily, medicinally, nutritionally, spiritually, and beyond.

Mushrooms are especially good at building things up and breaking them down. The root structure of mushrooms— mycelium—is so strong that it’s being used to build bricks that might eventually be used to construct buildings. At the same time, through a process called mycoremediation, mycelium breaks down pollutants, pesticides, heavy metals, even radiation in the soil. Mushrooms are scavengers—their entire raison d’être is to digest and decompose other plants—which makes them a rich source of vitamins, enzymes, and active compounds that are being studied to cure disease. When it comes to human and environmental health, the curative possibilities, Stamets says, are potentially limitless.

Mushrooms are creepy, delicious, poisonous, and profound—but mostly miraculous. We talked to Stamets to find out more.

What first attracted you to mushrooms?
My parents warned me about wild mushrooms—that they were dangerous. Yet our family loved button mushrooms. I was always curious about my parents’ fears and was attracted to the study of this “forbidden fruit.”

Why do you think mushrooms have become so popular nowadays? And why should our readers be excited about mushrooms now?
There is a confluence of positive realizations about mushrooms: so many colorful species, so many delicious edibles. Taking family field trips into the woods has centered families in shared positive experiences. Mushrooms also help the immune system and are packed with antioxidants. They can support nerve health. In addition, the research surrounding psilocybin mushrooms has opened up so many new eyes to this exciting yet understudied field of science.

Moreover, the art world has rediscovered mushrooms, as well as the film community. [Stamets was featured in the documentary film Fantastic Fungi, by award-winning cinematographer, director and producer Louie Schwartzberg; along with best-selling author Michael Pollan, Dr. Andrew Weil, Timothy Leary, and others.]

You recently recommended a beautiful fungal lunar calendar designed by artist Grace Ng Dung, as well as some of Heather Brooks’s mushroom collages. [Her art site, Small Woodland Things, is also featured in this issue.] Can you talk about other mushroom-related art you’re enjoying right now?
I’m a big fan of Alex and Allyson Grey, Autumn Skye, Mark Hansen, and many others. I love artists who accurately portray mushrooms. It tells me these artists are not only skilled in painting but know the subject matter personally. They have my great respect.

What are some of the most exciting developments in mycology?
Mushroom mycelium is beneath every footstep you take. It influences and can support the immune systems of diverse animals and plants. Mushroom mycelium is the immune system of the mushroom life cycle, and we can tap into these immunologically active networks to potentially help our health. There is preliminary cutting-edge research showing that mushroom mycelium of turkey tail and agarikon, grown on grain, can support innate immunity. While this study is pending publication, the results are very exciting.

What might surprise our readers the most to learn about mushrooms?That about 90 percent of them have not yet been identified!

How do strangers react when you tell them what you do?
They used to avoid me and the subject. Now they’re excited to speak to me, from children to grandparents. Everywhere I go, people approach me with smiles, curiosity, respect—and often a wink!

What are some of the best mushrooms to include in your diet and why?
Foodwise: shiitake, maitake, oysters, enoki, porcini, truffles, and pine mushrooms. For support of immunity and cognitive health: turkey tail, agarikon, reishi, chaga, and lion’s mane.

Do you forage for mushrooms?
Yes! Every day as I walk. My favorites are pine mushrooms, hedgehogs, chanterelles, winter chanterelles, porcini, oysters, lobsters, and candy caps for culinary purposes; turkey tails and ganodermas for health supporting purposes; cyans and liberty caps for spiritual purposes.

But it is the wide range of colors, forms, and mysterious species that excite me. I don’t have to pick them to enjoy them.

One of the most common revelations for those new to this subject—often students of mycologists—is that they had no idea how diverse and beautiful mushrooms are, and that they’re everywhere. I often hear them question themselves: “How could I not have noticed them before?”

What advice can you share for other foragers?
Join a mycological society. See namyco.org for a national and international registry.

How do you stay enchanted?
Mushrooms and mycologists build bridges across cultures, religions, politics, and generations. They bring us together, and the excitement, the eureka moment, is a shared experience in wonder, delight, science, and comradery. Mushrooms, particularly psilocybin mushrooms, make us nicer people—and smarter too!

When you say that “mushrooms and mycologists build bridges across cultures, religions, politics and generations,” what do you mean? Throughout the world, people have discovered mushrooms, and through trial and error, they have come to know which mushrooms are safe to consume and which ones are not. Moreover, many polypore mushrooms like turkey tails have been used for enhancing health by making teas or used, as in the case of some Native Americans, as a chewing gum for dental health.

When people from one region of the world travel to new lands, they bring that cultural myco-knowledge with them. A good example is the popularity of the pine mushroom, a.k.a. matsutake. In the 1970s, few Americans of European descent consumed these mushrooms.

I joined a mycological society around 1975, and our Japanese members brought these mushrooms to our attention. They relished in the fact we had not awakened to them in the Pacific Northwest, as competition for finding them in Japan was fierce, and indeed a “national sport.” The French and Italian cultures helped bring our attention to boletus (ceps, porcini). From Mesoamerica to Russia to South Africa, many cultures have deep love for mushrooms. These are just a few examples of mushrooms bridging cultures across continents. As humans migrate, mycological knowledge is shared and spread.

To learn more about Stamets’s work, visit fungi.com, hostdefense.com, instagram.com/paulstamets, facebook.com/paulstamets, youtube.com/paulstamets, and listen to his TED and TEDMed talks on YouTube.

Note: The statements made throughout this article have not been evaluated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.

My husband and I live in a 125-year-old farmhouse where the land has been producing one major crop these days: Fungus. It is thriving. We have trails of wide- capped parasols, shingled colonies of turkey tails and frilly oyster mushrooms, and high up in one tree, a shaggy, slow-growing lion’s mane that we occasionally harvest because eating it is good for the brain. When we first experienced this bounty, I was dismayed to think that these gorgeous, spongy, odd little (or big) miracles are growing from places where our beloved trees are decaying. I’m just glad that they’re there.

Truth is, this hasn’t been a great couple of years for the trees in our neighborhood, as wind or human so-called developers have knocked them down. But it has been a rich and beautiful time for fungus. Some of the magnolias are said to have stood for more than 250 years, and they’re fine, but the line of elms and maples planted along the drive when the house was new have mostly lived out their natural lives, and individual trees have been dying out too. But the underground fungal web that fruits into mushrooms has been here for … who knows how long? And it is having a grand time helping the trees (and itself).

One particular reason to celebrate fungi is their ability to cooperate with other organisms, most especially Kingdom Plantae. Fungus enables a marvelous system of communication within the plant world, and scientists are only just starting to understand how it all works together. The truth is about as bizarre as an episode in one of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, in which what seems to be completely fantastical breaks down into a logic that not only makes sense but also inspires joy and hope—and reveals an even greater, even more surprising web of sentience, the ability to feel and to make certain connections.

In fact, that’s a good place to start—with Alice. She knows the underground world pretty well.

“Who Are You?”: On Charismatic Species

Without fungus, life on Earth would be unrecognizable. It is all around us (and on us and in us); we just don’t always know how to see it.

That’s why every kingdom needs a poster child, a charismatic citizen that lures others in and makes them care. The fungus kingdom is not short on that kind of rock star, because mushrooms are glamorous. We take their pictures; we tell their stories. We want to be around them, and we beg them to reveal themselves. We revere them as a symbol of spiritual growth.

So let’s talk for a moment about the most famous mushroom in the history of mushrooms, one of the stars of every version of Alice in Wonderland that has manifested since the book was first published in 1865: that strange fungus upon which a blue Caterpillar sits smoking a hookah. (Rather scandalous, I’ve always thought: Shouldn’t we know what’s in that hookah?) Alice stands up on tiptoes to get a good look, and Chapter 5, “Advice from a Caterpillar,” begins:

The Caterpillar and Alice looked at each other for some time in silence: at last the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth, and addressed her in a languid, sleepy voice.

“Who are you?” said the Caterpillar.

This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation.

Maybe not for Alice, but “Who are you?” (emphasis on both words) had been quite the catchphrase in London around 1841 and after—a way of saying hello in a tavern or, I would guess, a hookah lounge.

Who—or what—is Alice, and how does she fit into this strange world? The plot of Wonderland keeps asking how to classify Alice, physically as well as figuratively. The underground world varies confusingly in scale, and she is constantly caught between returning to her old self and adapting to fit each new setting. Along the way, mistakes are made. Her head might

shoot suddenly through a treetop, or she might nearly drown in a sea of her own tears. This is the adolescent condition; it’s also the human condition: looking for your place amid a messy set of deceptive signals and slippery language, growing, shrinking, “saying what you mean” vs. “meaning what you say,” to borrow from a famous conversation between Alice and the March Hare.

There’s a parallel question in Wonderland for all of us: How do we define the objects and creatures we encounter? Or rather, how do we recognize them for what they are, beyond our own preconceived ideas? That mushroom, for example … It might not be what you’ve always thought it was.

Scientists are only starting to untangle the fungus puzzle—how it lives, where it lives, and even what it is. Our word mushroom seems to derive from the medieval French mousseron, which refers to moss. For most of scientific history, fungus was part of the plant kingdom. But then researchers started to scratch their heads: Fungus does not photosynthesize and turn light into nutrients, as plants do. Its cells are made of chitin, like insects’ and crustaceans’ exoskeletons (which are very close to human hair). It is a heterotroph, meaning it cannot produce its own food; to absorb nutrients, it takes in molecules of other organisms—a fancy way of saying it eats basically the way animals do. Some species (like the turkey tails on our fallen logs) secrete digestive enzymes to hurry the process along.

So since 1968, we have recognized Kingdom Fungi. Long may it flourish!

And keep in mind that as we study it, it might be studying us. In The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth, author Zoë Schlanger proves that the animal brain is only one form of “mind,” only one way to think of intelligence, memory, decision-making, and sentience. We need to expand our idea of intelligence to embrace other kingdoms.

Because mushrooms might be smart.