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This nOde last updated June 16th,
2024 and is permanently morphing...
(first emerged October 29th, 1997)
mushroom
mushroom (mshrm,
-rm) noun
1. Any of various
fleshy fungi of the class Basidiomycota, characteristically
having an umbrella-shaped cap borne on a stalk, especially any
of the edible kinds, as those of the genus Agaricus.
2. Something shaped
like one of these fungi.
verb, intransitive
mushroomed,
mushrooming, mushrooms
1. To multiply, grow,
or expand rapidly: The population mushroomed in the postwar
decades.
2. To swell or spread
out into a shape similar to a mushroom.
adjective
1. Relating to,
consisting of, or containing mushrooms: mushroom sauce.
2. Resembling a
mushroom in shape: a mushroom cloud.
3. Resembling mushrooms
in rapidity of growth or evanescence: mushroom towns.
[Middle English
musheron, from Anglo-Norman moscheron, musherum, from Old
French mousseron, from Medieval Latin musario, musarion-.]
mushroom
mushroom, fungus
characterized by spore-bearing
gills on the underside of an umbrella- or cone-shaped cap. The
term mushroom is properly restricted to the plant's
above-ground portion, which is the reproductive organ. Once a
delicacy for the elite, edible mushrooms are now grown
commercially, especially strains of the meadow mushroom
(Agaricus campestris). Although mushrooms contain some protein
and minerals, they are largely
water and hence of limited nutritive
value. Inedible, or poisonous, species are often popularly
referred to as toadstools; one of the best-known poisonous
mushrooms is the death angel (genus Amanita).
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"I've mentioned that
psilocin, which is what psilocybin quickly becomes as it
enters your metabolism, is 4 hydroxy dimethyltryptamine.
It is the only 4-substituted indole in all of organic
nature. Let this rattle around in your mind for a
moment. It is the only 4-substituted indole known to
exist on earth. It happens to be this psychedelic
substance that occurs in about eighty species of fungi, most
of which are native to the New World.
Psilocybin has a
unique chemical signature that says, "I am artificial; I
come from outside." I was suggesting that it was a gene
- an artificial gene - carried perhaps by a spaceborne virus
or something brought artificially to this planet, and that
this gene has inssinuated itself into the genome of these
mushrooms."
- Terence McKenna
-
_Archaic Revival_
604 track _Spores From Space? (A Microscopic
Trace)_ MP3 by Cosmosis off
of
_Synergy_ 12"x2
on
Transient
book _The Sacred
Mushroom and the Cross_ by John M. Allegro. A dense work of
etymology tracing the roots of christianity back to Sumerian fertility
cults, with particular
focus on the possible central position
of psychedelic mushrooms in mystery rites among early
christians. Valuable analysis of the sexual connotations of
mushroom
morphology,
and of encrypted mushroom-related
information in the _New
Testament_. Allegro was one of the original Dead Sea Scrolls
scholars.
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shroom farming ![]() |
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"As the years went on and our knowledge
grew, we discovered a surprising pattern in our data: each
Indo-European people is by cultural inheritance either
"mycophobe" or "mycophile," that is, each people either rejects
and is ignorant of the fungal world or knows it astonishingly
well and loves it. Our voluminous and often amusing evidence in
support of this thesis fills many sections of our new book, and
it is there that we submit our case to the scholarly world. The
great Russians, we find, are mighty mycophiles, as are also the
Catalans, who possess a mushroomic vocabulary of more than 200
names. The ancient Greeks, Celts and Scandinavians were
mycophobes, as are the Anglo-Saxons. There was another
phenomenon that arrested our
attention: wild mushrooms from
earliest times were steeped in what the anthropologists call
mana, a
supernatural
aura. The very word "toadstool" may have meant originally the
"demonic stool" and been the specific name of a European
mushroom that causes hallucinations. In ancient Greece and Rome
there was a belief that certain kinds of mushrooms were
procreated by the
lighting
bolt.
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We made the further
discovery that this particular myth, for which no support
exists in natural science, is still believed among many widely
scattered peoples: the Arabs of the desert, the peoples of
India, Persia and the Pamirs, the Tibetans and Chinese, the Filipinos
and the
Maoris
of
New Zealand, and
even among the Zapotecs of Mexico... All of our evidence taken
together led us many years ago to hazard a bold surmise: was
it not probable that, long ago, long before the beginnings of
written history, our ancestors had worshiped a divine
mushroom? This would explain the aura of the supernatural in
which all fungi seem to be bathed. We were the first to offer
the conjecture of a divine mushroom in the remote cultural
background of the European peoples, and the conjecture at once
posed a further problem: what kind of mushroom was once
worshiped and why?
"Our surmise turned
out not to be farfetched. We learned that in Siberia there are
six primitive peoples--so primitive that anthropologists
regard them as precious museum pieces for cultural study--who
use an hallucinogenic mushroom in their shamanistic rites. We
found that the Dyaks of Borneo and the Mount Hagen natives of
New Guinea also have recourse to similar mushrooms. In China
and Japan we
came upon an ancient tradition of a divine mushroom of
immortality, and in India, according to one school, the Buddha
at his last supper ate a dish of mushrooms and was forthwith
translated to
nirvana.
When Cortez conquered Mexico, his followers reported that the
Aztecs were using certain mushrooms in their religious
celebrations, serving them, as the early Spanish friars put
it, in a demonic holy communion and calling them teonanacatl,
"God's flesh." But no one at that time made a point of
studying this practice in detail, and until now
anthropologists have paid little attention to it. We with our
interest in mushrooms seized on the Mexican opportunity, and
for years have devoted the few leisure hours of our busy lives
to the quest of the divine mushroom in Middle America. We
think we have discovered it in certain frescoes in the Valley
of Mexico that date back to about 400 A.D., and also in the
"mushroom stones" carved by the highland
Maya of Guatemala that
go back in one or two instances to the earliest era of stone
carvings, perhaps 1000 B.C. "Little by little the properties
of the mushrooms are beginning to emerge. The Indians who eat
them do not become addicts: when the rainy season is over and
the mushrooms disappear, there seems to be no physiological
craving for them. Each kind has its own hallucinogenic
strength, and if enough of one species be not available, the
Indians will mix the species, making a quick calculation of
the right dosage. The curandero usually takes a large dose and
everyone else learns to know what his own dose should be. It
seems that the dose does not increase with use. Some persons
require more than others. An increase in the dose intensifies
the experience but does not greatly prolong the effect. The
mushrooms sharpen, if anything, the
memory, while they
utterly destroy the sense of
time. On the night that we have
described we lived through eons. When it seemed to us that a
sequence of visions had lasted for years, our watches would
tell us that only seconds had passed. The pupils of our eyes
were dilated, the
pulse
of ran slow. We think the mushrooms have no cumulative effect
on the human organism. Eva Mendez has been taking them for 35
years, and when they are plentiful she takes them night after
night.
The mushrooms present a chemical problem. What is the agent in them that releases the strange hallucinations? We are now reasonably sure that it differs form such familiar drugs as opium, coca, mescaline, hashish, etc. But the chemist has a long road to go before he will isolate it, arrive at its molecular structure and synthesize it. The problem is of great interest in the realm of pure science. Will it also prove of help in coping with psychic disturbances? "
- Robert Gordon Wasson, banker. From an
article in _Life Magazine_ (June 10, 1957)
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psilocybin mushrooms
The most
organically prevalent--and therefore, some would
argue, most safe and effective--psychedelic drug.
Use of mushrooms containing the psychoactive
substance psilocybin is thousands of years old;
modern U.S. use was popularized through ethnomycologist R.
Gordon Wasson's
_Soma:
Divine Mushrooms of
Immortality_ (1971) and
through the writings of
Timothy Leary, who conducted
experiments with
prisoners
and synthetic psilocybin during the late '60s.
Terence McKenna,
in _Food of the Gods_ (1992), argues that mushrooms
possibly represent the infiltration of an
alien intelligence on
earth and may even have been responsible for humankind's
acquisition of
language.
The long-acting tryptamines in Stropharia cubensis, the
most common street mushroom (besides the
dealer-doctored store-bought variety), are usually taken
in doses of from one to five grams and give a visually complex
five-to-seven-hour high similar to
LSD.
604 release _Holy Mushroom_ compilation CDx2
on High Society (1997)
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604 release _Dance,
Trance &
Magic Plants: Otherworld_ compilation
12"x2
on
Transient (1997)
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604
release _The Gathering_ 12"x3
by
Infected Mushroom on BNE/Yo Yo/Balloonia/Cosmophilia (1999)
604 release _Classical Mushroom_ CDb by Infected Mushroom (2000)
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604 release _B.P. Empire_ CD by Infected
Mushroom on Yoyo (2001)
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The term mushroom refers to the above ground
fruiting body (that is spore-producing structure) of a fungus,
having a shaft and a cap; and in extension, refers to the entire
fungus producing the fruiting body of such appearance, the
former consisting of an extensive network (called the
mycelium) of filaments or hyphae. In
a very broader sense, mushroom is applied to any visible fungus,
or especially the fruiting body of any fungus. The technical
term for the spore-producing structure of "
true" mushrooms is the basidiocarp.
Types of mushrooms
The main types of mushrooms are agarics, boletes, chanterelles, tooth fungi, polypores, puffballs, jelly fungi, coral fungi, bracket fungi, stinkhorns, and cup fungi. Mushrooms and other fungi are studied by mycologists. The "true" mushrooms are classified as Basidiomycota (also known as "club fungi"). A few mushrooms are classified by mycologists as Ascomycota (the "cup fungi"), the morel and truffle being good examples. Thus, the term mushroom is more one of common application to macroscopic fungal fruiting bodiers than one having precise taxonomic meaning.
Mushrooms are used extensively in cooking
many cuisines. However, a number of species of mushrooms are
poisonous, and these may resemble edible varieties, although
eating them could be fatal. Picking mushrooms in the wild is
extremely risky far riskier than gathering edible plants and
a practice not to be undertaken by amateurs. This riskiness is due to
the fact that separating edible from poisonous species is
dependent upon the application of only a few easily recognizable
traits. People who collect mushrooms for consumption are known
as mushroom hunters, and the act of collecting them as such is
called mushroom hunting an activity with a potentially deadly
outcome that one should be well prepared for before attempting.
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the mush
room reishi farming |
Mushroom structure
Identifying mushrooms requires a basic understanding of their macroscopic structure. A "typical" mushroom consists of a cap or pileus supported on a stem or stipe. Both can have a variety of shapes and be ornamented in various ways. The underside of the cap (in agarics) is fitted with gills or lamellae where the actual spores are produced. How the gills are attached is another important characteristic used in identification. In the boletes, the gills are replaced by small openings called pores. Bracket fungi essentially lack a stipe, and the cap is attached like a bracket to the substratum, usually a log ot tree trunk. Some bracket fungi have gills, others have pores.
In general, identification to genus can be accomplished in the field using a local mushroom guide. Identification to species requires more work. Realize that a mushroom develops from a young bud into a mature structure and only the latter can provide certain identification of the species. Examination of mature spores, or at least knowing their color, is often essential. And to this end, a common method used to assist in identification is the spore print.
Chemical properties
Of central interest with respect to chemical
properties of mushrooms is the fact that many species produce
secondary metabolites that render them toxic, hallucinogenic, or even
bioluminescent. Toxicity likely plays a role in protecting the
function of the basidiocarp: the mycelium has expended
considerable energy and protoplasmic material to develop a
structure to efficiently distribute its spores. One
defense against consumption and
premature destruction is the
evolution of chemicals that render
the mushroom inedible, either causing the consumer to
regurgitate the meal or avoid consumption altogether.
Currently, many species of mushrooms and
fungi utilized as folk medicines for thousands of years are
under intense study by
ethnobotanists and medical researchers. Maitake,
Shiitake, and Reishi are
prominent among those being researched for their anti-cancer,
anti-viral, and/or immunity-enhancement properties.
Psilocybin mushrooms possess hallucinogenic
properties and are commonly known as "'shrooms". A number of
other mushrooms are eaten for their psychoactive effects, such
as Fly Agaric.
pOrtal:
Multidisciplinary
Association for Psychedelic Studies
Lycaeum