Fly Agaric : 無料・フリー素材/写真
Fly Agaric / Giles Watson's poetry and prose
| ライセンス | クリエイティブ・コモンズ 表示-継承 2.1 |
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| 説明 | "Mere withered stalks and fading trees,And pastures spread with hills and rushes,Are all my fading vision sees;Gone, gone are rapture's flooding gushes!When mushrooms they were fairy bowers,Their marble pillars overswelling,And Danger paused to pluck the flowersThat in their swarthy rings were dwelling.Yes, Poesy is on the wane,Nor joy nor fear is mine again."- John Clare, 'Decay'.www.lulu.com/shop/giles-watson/a-witchs-natural-history/p...CHAPTER 9:CRYPTOGAMS: THE SPORE-BEARING PLANTSMy over-active imagination was first influenced by the power of the non-flowering plants when I was nine years old. My father had picked some shaggy cap mushrooms, Coprinus comatus, growing under pines, and that evening, he seethed them in milk. I ate them with relish, then spat into my sleeve compulsively in fear of poison. I remember them well, still sizzling in their buttered bath, in a white dish, and the way their pink-white flesh slithered through my lips, a paroxysm of sense, the melting in the mouth of my first initiation.Later that evening, the final episode of an adaptation of Robert Graves’ I, Claudius was on television. I watched with delicious horror, my limited knowledge of mycological toxicology throwing my fancy into convulsions. Suetonius, Tacitus and Dio Cassius all agreed that Claudius was poisoned with a dish of mushrooms. Some sources add that the emperor’s final meal was prepared by Locusta, at the command of his wife Agrippina. In all likelihood, Claudius thought that he was eating the prized esculent Amanita caesarea. A servant versed in elementary mycology would no doubt have found it easy to substitute one of these delectable orange-capped mushrooms for a specimen of the green-capped Amanita phalloides, aptly dubbed the Death Cap, the most poisonous mushroom in the world. Around ninety per cent of recorded deaths from mushroom poisoning are caused by this, and only a few grams are required for a fatal dose. It is hazardous even to breathe the spores, but the baleful effects of the poison do not exhibit themselves for around twelve hours after ingestion. By this time, there is normally irrevocable damage to the liver and other body tissues. After two or three days, the symptoms seem to subside, but this remission is the cruellest ruse of all, for afterwards comes delirium, coma, and slick and clammy death. Fortunately, my father knew his Coprinus from his Amanita; indeed, he knew one Coprinus from another, for had he and my mother consumed the Shaggy Cap’s near relative Coprinus atramentarius with their customary glass of wine, they would have been throwing up all night.There can be few more fertile interchanges between science and lore than that which has revolved for centuries around cryptogams. The name itself is inspiring, for while on the surface it tells us, rightly enough, that the sexual lives of these plants are hidden and mysterious, the novice who begins to pay attention to them will quickly realise that so much more has been encrypted. Most witches, it is to be hoped, can identify a range of flowering plants, but spore-bearing plants are much more difficult to pin down. Perhaps we overestimate the difficulty sometimes, since it hardly matters if we cannot place a species of Geranium, but a misidentification of a species of fungus could be catastrophic. Ferns, with the exception of a few very common or remarkable species, are rarely differentiated in the folk mind at all, so much so that most of their ‘common names’ are merely translations of their generic and specific ones. Mosses, for most, are simply padding for plant pots, and the club mosses, despite their name, are only vaguely related. In order to become authoritative, one must be initiated into the mysteries, and this can only happen when one can speak the language, and distinguish a decurrent gill from one that is adnexed, or determine whether a rachis is branched or unbranched. And just when the arcane discipline seems to be mastered, more fundamental questions begin to vex the enquirer, such as whether fungi are really plants in the first place.Nor is it surprising that Lewis Carroll placed his hookah-smoking caterpillar on top of a mushroom, for when it comes to exploring the lives and folklore of these plants, or researching the narcotic effects of a few of them, we really are through the looking glass. The Siberian shamans known as the Koryak, for example, revere the Fly Agaric mushroom, Amanita muscaria, eating it to achieve transcendental states, and they tell the tale of Big Raven, who is charged with the Herculean task of rescuing a whale, stranded far from the sea, by carrying it in a big grass bag. He turns to the god of existence, Vahïnin, for aid, who tells him to go to the plains before the sea and look for “the spirits of Wãpaq”, white soft stalks wearing spotted hats. Big Raven does as he is told, eats of the Wãpaq, and the gills turn and whirl like a kaleidoscope. He returns to the whale, finding that it has shrunk to a hundredth of its accustomed, blubber-threshing size. He dances for joy, flips up the grass bag with his little finger, and capers away with the whale like an archetypal eco-warrior, returning it to the deep. Amongst its other hallucinogenic and aphrodisiac effects, the alkaloid muscaridine does indeed cause partakers to perceive surrounding objects as either very large or very small, but any reader determined to test this should be warned that Fly Agarics also contain muscarine, a poison which causes acute gastro-intestinal distress. This, as the Koryac discovered, may be evaporated by baking or drying the mushrooms, and the hallucinogenic effects of the muscaridine can be accentuated by drinking the urine of someone who has partaken of the Fly Agaric.Ergot, Claviceps purpurea, which grows on the seed heads of rye-grass, is another fungus containing psychedelic alkaloids: lysergic acid derivatives which cause the eater’s vision to be suffused with brilliance, and which give men incorrigible erections. Unfortunately, they also cause fever, delusions, convulsions, swollen blisters, and atrophy of the extremities leading to gangrene and death. During the Middle Ages, outbreaks of ergotism were commonly known as St. Antony’s Fire, after the wealthy Frenchman Gaston promised his fortune to the cult of St. Antony if the saint would miraculously cure him and his son of the disease. It is probably significant that medieval portrayals of the temptation of St. Antony, with their plagues of vicious-looking demons, so often appear to be depictions of hallucinations. It has also been suggested that the Eleusian mysteries were probably caused by ergot poisoning, and it is also possible that outbreaks of witchcraft persecution, such as the Salem witch trials in Massachusetts in the early 1690s were also responses to delusions brought on by eating flour contaminated with ergot.Other mushrooms have gained an occult importance not through the efficacy of their active ingredients, but because of their appearance or life history. The stinkhorn mushroom, Phallus impudicus, has always been valued in sympathetic magic. Gerard, it seems, had a fit of doubt as to the propriety of the creator, in whom he appears to have believed, for he printed his diagram of this fungus upside down in an attempt to disguise the obvious resemblance, but gave the game away when he named it: “Pricke mushroom, Fungus Virilis, Penis effigie”. The undeveloped fungus is a round white ball, which reminds me of one of the devil’s testicles, dropped when he was in a hurry, or perhaps cast aside during one of his ritual folkloric geldings. Dodoens (1563) thought that these rounded earth-heavers were the eggs of spirits or devils (“Manium sive Daemonum ova”), and a tradition amongst German hunters, who called the stinkhorn “Hirschbrunst”, held that it grew where stags had rutted. Observation of this fungus over the period of a few days only serves to heighten its mystique. First it thrusts forth out of the ball, the shaft lengthens, and the sticky head aspires to sky. It grows foetid with the sweat of questing, quivers with the pulse of earth. If you listen, you can almost hear it groaning with sperm. At last, plied by flies, it is primed for its own sickly orgasm; the glans all green and engorged, as though a breath of wind could make it blow.Folklore surrounds other mushrooms too: the Jew’s Ear Fungus, Hirneola auricularia-Judae, which, according to an anti-Semitic tradition, first grew on elder trees after Judas Iscariot hung from one, and is an everlasting commemoration of his suicide; and the fairy-ring champignon Marasmius oreades, whose spreading circular mycorrhiza have so long marked points of intersection with the otherworld. Some fungi, such as the Dryad’s Saddle, Polyporus squamosus, have evocative names suggestive of forgotten lore. Others have real life histories which seem stranger than folklore itself, such as Cordyceps militaris. Airborn spores of this insignificant fungus land at random on a champing caterpillar upon a leaf, and germinate. Thereafter, the fungus parasitizes the larva as it pupates underground, its guts and wings and compound eyes becoming a tangle of fungal hyphae, until at last the Cordyceps bursts out of the withered coffin of a chrysalis, and marks the caterpillar’s grave for long enough to spread the spores once more.Reproduction by means of spores has itself become the stuff of legend. It has long been held that at certain appointed times, the “seed” or spores of ferns can give a person the power of invisibility. It is normally maintained that the spores must not be shaken from the frond, but persuaded to fall by means of a spell or “receipt”. Shakespeare alludes to this folk belief in 1 King Henry IV, Act 2, Scene 1, in which Gadshill insists that “we have the receipt of fern-seed, - we walk invisible.” His companion, the Chamberlain, appears to be something of a sceptic, for he replies “Nay, by my faith, I think you are more beholding to the night than to fern-seed for your walking invisible.” It seems likely that the belief was related to homoeopathic magic: the fact that fern spores are miniscule led to the assumption that they could confer invisibility. The theme is taken up in a little more detail by Richard Bovet’s remarkable Pandæmonium, or, The Devil's Cloyster, Being a further Blow to modern Sadduceism, proving the Existence of Witches and Spirits (1684). Bovet, a Puritan reacting to the scepticism of the rising Enlightenment, argued for the existence of various supernatural agencies, insisted that the spells of witches were potent, and then went on to argue that the Roman Catholic Church was practising a form of witchcraft. Much discourse [he added] hath been about gathering of Fern-seed (which is looked upon as a Magical Herb) on the night of Midsummer Eve, and I remember I was told of one that went to gather it, and the Spirits whiskt by his Ears like Bullets, and sometimes struck his Hat, and other parts of his body: in fine, though he apprehended that he had gotten a quantity of it, and secured it in Papers, and a Box besides, when he came home, he found all empty. But most probable this appointing of times, and hours, is of the Devils [sic] own Institution, as well as the Fast, that having once ensnared people to an Obedience to his Rules, he may with more facility oblige them to a stricter Vassallage.It appears that Bovet eventually fell prey to the notorious Judge Jeffreys, and thus may have ended his days wishing that times were more enlightened than he had hitherto been willing to concede.More obscure ferns than the ubiquitous bracken have been attributed with magical powers. When gathered by moonlight, Moonwort, Botrychium lunaria, is said to be capable of opening locks and loosening nails on hinges, and the alchemists believed it had the power to turn mercury into silver. Culpepper recorded that the plant was colloquially known as “Unshoo the horse”, and insisted that Moonwort was responsible for an incident “On the White Down in Devonshire, near Tiverton, [in which] there was found thirty horse-shoes pulled off from the feet of the Earl of Essex his Horses…” Osmunda regalis, the royal or flowering fern is known in Cumberland as the Marsh Onion, because of the whitish mass which grows within its rootstock. In county Galway, this “onion” is called the “heart of Osmund”, which, when sliced, pounded and left to macerate, is said to be efficacious in cases of rheumatism. The Adder’s Tongue, Ophioglossum vulgatum, was a popular remedy for snakebite; a rather far-fetched application of the doctrine of signatures, given that the fern looks nothing like its namesake. Lowlier cryptogams even than these have been exploited in societies where anything of the remotest utility was appreciated. Sphagnum moss is more absorbent than cotton wool, and the wounded at the battles of Clonterf and Flodden were not misguided when they stuffed their wounds with green bog moss and soft grass. Surgeons on the western front used it too. The Dutch Rush, Equisetum hyemale, a horsetail, contains so much silica that it was imported to Britain from Holland as a scourer. The spores of club mosses (Lycopodium spp.) were used, under the name of Vegetable Brimstone, as a waterproof coating for pills, and since they are flammable, were invaluable for pyrotechnics, stage lighting, and for the special effects employed by conjuring magicians and charlatans alike.There is, as any true witch will tell you, much to be said for the attitude of Tolkein’s Gollum, whose eyes were always cast down on the ground. The cryptogams were the first plants to colonise dry land. Once, there were club mosses which towered over dinosaurs, but now, the spore bearing plants are those which are most likely to be ignored. To know them is indeed to be initiated into the secrets of a living code, with permutations as infinite as spores. If we fail to notice them, it is our loss. They will still be here when we are gone, and some of them will be the prime agents of our dissolution. |
| 撮影日 | 2008-09-12 20:12:33 |
| 撮影者 | Giles Watson's poetry and prose , Oxfordshire, England |
| タグ | |
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| カメラ | E8700 , NIKON |
| 露出 | 0.008 sec (1/120) |
| 開放F値 | f/3.2 |