“We live in a moment when most of our myths have lost touch with their original root systems”. There’s a mycelial solution for that

From the Myth and Mycelium course

We were intrigued by this online event taking place on 19 July to 23 August, titled Myth and Mycelium. The catchline is:

What if hidden beneath contemporary narratives of progress and domination there was a mythic root system of earth-based wisdom? How does Jesus, a Galilean healer, with a penchant for nature-based storytelling get mistranslated by empire and coopted by patriarchy?

Originally inspired by the rhizome thinking of Deleuze and Guattari, course leader Sophie Strand digs deeper into the science of mycelial/fungal networks, and compares them to the evolution of myth. She explains further below:

Long before patriarchy and imperialism, long before there were human beings and human myths, long before there were even trees and flowers, there were fungal root systems already laced into the soil.

Almost 500 million years ago, the first oceanic plants made it onto dry land. But these plants were not the sturdy, stalk-stiff sentinels we know today. They had no roots to keep them anchored into place. They had no way of accessing the rich nutrients in the soil.

Luckily enough, mycorrhizal fungi in the soil collaborated with these early plants, acting as surrogate root systems for millions of years and slowly teaching them how to form their own twining rhizomes.

I like to think that just as fungi taught plants how to root into the soil, so do myths teach us how to root into relation with our ecological and social ecosystems. Myths are the earth talking to itself, seeking to express ultimate truths with personified elementals.

They narrativize a deep understanding of our connection to more-than-human time scales. Provided that they remain rooted in the soil.

What happens when you forget the root system of a myth? What happens when you uproot it from its original ecosystem and network of kin?

From the Myth and Mycelium course

A Galilean rabbi [Jesus] who calls himself a drunkard, a glutton, and a bridegroom, is murdered by empire. How does the radical, wandering healer, known for his nature-based storytelling and communal feasts, become the instrument of the very systems of domination and hierarchy he so vehemently opposed? What gets lost when he is translated away from his language, his home, his environment? What gets mistranslated? 

Myths arrive from the same impulse as scientific inquiry. The poet and ethnographer Robert Bringhurst believes that myth isn’t antagonistic to science, but rather an alternative “science” in itself.

“[Myth] aims, like science, at perceiving and expressing ultimate truths. But the hypotheses of myths are framed as stories not equations.” While a scientist quantifies reality, he explains, a myth teller personifies it.

The mythteller asks the earth, “How can I understand you so that I can best take care of you?” And the answer that arrives is a story. Storms are gods. Weather patterns are narrative climaxes. Information about harvest schedules arrives as sly jokes from bad-tempered ravens.

In oral cultures, where a word lasts only as long as a breath, ecological knowledge and cultural inheritance are best communicated as a compelling narrative that can be easily remembered and passed down from generation to generation. 

Just as trees and plants are nourished and steadied by their underground fungal allies, tied into a web of kin, so are myths kept resilient and flexible when they are deeply rooted and responsive to a specific place.

Just as specific ecological knowledge cannot be transplanted to an entirely different place and climate, so do myths lose their environmental meaning when they are abstracted from their original contexts – ecological, cultural, and spiritual.  

We live in a moment when most of our myths have lost touch with their original root systems and lapsed into abstract dogma. Our contemporary narratives are like houseplants, cut off from the mycorrhizal complexity of the soil, and therefore unable to refruit as something freshly adapted to our current environmental conditions and social circumstances.

But what if we could replant those myths in the original context, compost them with our current science, knowledge, and inquiries, and retell them in such a way that they respond to new environmental concerns? 

Each of us is rooted in a different place. And each of those places constitutes an assemblage of animals and insects, fungi and flowers that has specific stories and wisdom to share. How can we become a mouth for the more-than-human world?

How can we understand that beneath the monologuing monomyths driving climate collapse there is a forgotten root system of vegetal gods, anarchic magicians, and ecological storytellers? 

If you’d like to join this event, register here.