The Greeks named the Pygmies of Ethiopia after the little people who already existed in the realm of myth. The bandy-legged dwarf was a divinity who incarnated the most primordial and elemental powers of Nature, a kind of Great Spirit, older than the separation of the divine into more or less unified and coherent pantheons. The gods of those most primordial times have as one of their characteristics the ability to materialize as dwarfs. When an actual pygmy was discovered, he fell into the magical paradigm and was considered a being with all the power of an entheogenic guide. Dwarves continued to be a favorite in the courts of Europe and Turkey. The famous dwarf of Queen Henrietta Maria was reportedly an implausible eighteen inches tall.
Come home immediately. Hurry and bring with you this pygmy that you have taken alive, healthy, and unharmed from the country of the people of the East, for the dances of the gods, to gladden the heart, to delight the heart of the Pharaoh. When he boards the boat with you, see to it that there are able-bodied men around him for protection, to keep him from falling into the water. When he sleeps at night, see to it that able-bodied men sleep around him in his tent. Go to check on him ten times each night. My Majesty desires to see this pygmy more than the produce from the land of the mines.
—Letter from Pharaoh Pepi II
On discovering a living pygmy
The traditions of Classical antiquity have a menagerie of such little creatures that materialized from the land of myth with attributes of the mushroom guide. Pride of place belongs to the Shade-foots or One-foots. They are a tribe native to India with but a single foot and a leg of extraordinary agility. They leap up vigorously, and when they tire, they fall on their backs to rest in the shade cast by their foot that is the size of sunshade. Their likeness to an anthropomorphized mushroom is obvious, and their Indian habitat identifies them as the Vedic Aja Ekapad, the ‘Not born Single-foot,’ one of the epithets of the intoxicating plant god, Soma.
The attribute of not being born refers to the apparently seedless appearance of the mushroom as it bursts suddenly from the ground, thrust up by its powerful leg. Siberian tribesmen inebriated with the Amanita muscaria imitate this characteristic, as they jump up and down, even pushing their heads through restraining membranes. The dancing leg is like the depiction of the mushroom-men in the rock-shelter Neolithic painting of the Selva Pasquala.
Through him who is the Heart of Heaven, One-leg by name. One-Leg Lightning-bolt is the first. And second is Dwarf Lightning-bolt.
—Popol Vuh
On Huracan The mushroom creator god
Shade-foots were first mentioned in Aristophanes’ comic parody of a mystery initiation in the Clouds, along with other similar creatures, which leaves little doubt that they were all well known to the ancient audience as anthropomorphisms of the initiatory fungal plant guide. The same materialization is documented for Mesoamerican shamanism, and depicted as such in some of the Mayan mushroom-stones. The shade of the Greek creatures that forms their foot is an umbrella or sunshade, but a shade is also a ghost or spirit. The others in Aristophanes’ troupe were the One-Eyes—Monophthalmoi, who were called Arimaspians in their Scythian language. An ancient poet reported seeing them on his ecstatic trip. They were often engaged in battle with the griffins that guarded the gateway to the gold in the netherworld. The griffin was a monstrous hybrid composed of a winged lion with the head of an eagle, often with a mushroom growing from its beak. The griffins are not difficult to recognize as shamanic familiars, guarding the pathway of the one-eyed guides. The single eye, as we have shown, is emblematic of altered vision.
She saw in a moment why they had looked like mushrooms. They had been lying flat on their backs, each with its single leg straight up in the air and its enormous foot spread out above it.
—C.S. Lewis
Voyage of the Dawn Treader
One-Eyes are a version of the Orb-Eyes or Cyclopes, like the dwarfish henchmen at the alchemical forge of the god Hephaestus. The fungal anthropomorphism is explicitly portrayed on the large ceramic burial vase or urn from the mystery religion enacted at the ancient Greek sanctuary of Eleusis. The neck of the gigantic amphora depicts the episode where Odysseus plunges the burning timber into the single eye of the drunken Cyclops Polyphemus. As the eye sizzles, it drops a single tear in the shape of a mushroom. The area around the figures is decorated with the entopic visionary frets or grecas. The use of the amphora as a burial urn is significant since it might be expected to incorporate mythical motifs related to the Mystery initiation and the terminal life journey. The sacred road to the Eleusinian sanctuary was lined with such funeral monuments. On the body of the vase, Perseus is harvesting the head of the Gorgon Medusa, who is the most enduring anthropomorphism of the sacred mushroom. This scene also incorporates grecas, and the Gorgons are represented with cauldrons for heads. Traditionally, art historians have seen no relationship between the two themes depicted on this vase.
I once wrote that the bemushroomed person is poised in space, a disembodied eye, invisible, incorporeal, seeing but not seen.
—R. Gordon Wasson
Road to Eleusis
Along with the Shade-foots and the One-Eyes in Aristophanes’ parody are another people called the Tongue-in-Bellies or Englottogasteres. Their version of the anthropomorphism consists in converting the cap of the mushroom into the creature’s upper body, so that it has only a head supported by its leg. Naming the top of the mushroom its ‘cap’ commonly implies this, as if a hat sat atop a creature wearing it. This is inescapable even in botanical nomenclature where it is called the pileus, which is Latin for ‘cap.’ It is not simply a cap, however; it is a skullcap, often used also to refer to the Phrygian cap, associated with Mithraism and with manumission of slaves or liberty.
In this latter significance, it was used to name the liberty-cap mushroom, a species of Psilocybe. The pileus was frequently worn under a helmet, and the helmet was of the same shape, like the ones worn by the helmeted corybantic dancers. Not infrequently, the initiatory entheogen is employed in sub-visionary dosages for warriors on the battlefield. Heavier dosages would be involved in the visionary experience of initiatory induction to the military fraternity, as in Mithraism and the Nordic berserkers.
Mithras, wearing the Phrygian cap, tauroctony.
In the ranks of these little creatures were also the Cover-Mushrooms—Kaulomyketes. Here we have the truth revealed that they were actually ‘mushrooms’ or mykes, but they materialized as little warriors, whose shield was the cap, and they used their stem or stipe as a spear.
These ecstatic creatures of the wilderness were given fuller materializations in Classical mythology as hybrids of humans and various animals or plants. Satyrs or goat-men are the personification of the divine possession experienced by the bacchants or maenads. These goat-men represent the wild botanical antecedents of the god, before he came to be identified with wine and the art of viticulture. In addition to their prominent ithyphallic attribute, they had some equine characteristics. The horse zoomorphism is more pronounced in the silens, to whom they are very similar.
Tezcatlipoca, brother of the beneficent Quetzalcoatl, epitomizes conflict and instability throughout the universe. His name means Smoking Mirror, and he is commonly represented with an obsidian disk positioned at the back of his head and another replacing one of his feet—a prosthesis that locates him within the realms of both worlds: the upper world of light and life, and the lower world of darkness and death. The smokiness of his mirror alludes to the fog enshrouded nature of the images he reflects.
—Blaise D. Staples
Graeco-Roman Ruins in the New World
The satyrs and silens differ from the centaurs, whose entire lower body is that of a horse. The association of the former with intoxication is obvious because of their involvement with the god Dionysus/Bacchus. The centaurs are similarly mediators with the realm of the entheogens in that they are notorious drunkards and also teach young heroes the art of archery. The bow and arrow, as we have seen, implies the whole metaphoric complex of intoxication.
The botanical essence of various trees, moreover, could also be anthropomorphized as females in the form of caryatids—a nut tree, dryads—oak tree, hamadryads—eight, each of a different tree, and so on. Their male equivalents are creatures of the woodland like the goat-man Pan or the fauns, but they are largely interchangeable with satyrs. Faunus, however, was a handsome young male and could have the legs, smooth-skinned body, and tail of a deer; hence, ‘fawn’ in English for a year-old deer. The deer attributes obviously associate him with the Siberian shamanism and the Amanita muscaria.
Both Pan and Faunus played the syrinx or panpipes. This musical instrument, like a harmonica composed of hollow reeds, implicates them in the botanical complex of an entheogen and ecstatic possession since Syrinx was a maiden, like Apollo’s Daphne, who was metamorphosed into the hollow water reeds from which the panpipe is made in order to escape an amorous encounter with Pan. It was reportedly water maidens who rescued her in this fashion; hence they are probably versions of the mermaid, and ultimately of the primordial mermaid, the Gorgon Medusa. A version of Pan, in fact, was a goat-fish, who became the constellation Capricorn. Both Pan and Faunus could be multiplied into a whole host of identical creatures of the woodland.
The haunting music of the panpipe was thought to induce a transcendent trance. Pan’s psychoactive nature is preserved in the word ‘panic.’ Sometimes the double flute is substituted for the panpipe. The flute brings us back to the Gorgon Medusa since it was supposed to reproduce sound the of the rasping hissing of the serpents that formed her chevelure. The double flute, which was voiced by vibrating reeds like the oboe, was supposed to induce lascivious sexuality.
The haunting music of the panpipe was thought to induce a transcendent trance.
Fortunately, since Athena made the Medusa into a hideous monster, men are reluctant to engage with her, although she really is surpassingly beautiful and voluptuous. Both the panpipe and the double flute—aulos—are musical instruments that serve as surrogates for a mind-altering entheogen. The same is true of Apollo’s lyre—phorminx, which is an instrument like a kithara). The stretchers for the strings are cow/bull horns, and the plucking of the strings imitates the twanging of the bow with its toxic arrows, but instead of causing death, the sound plunges the entire universe into a transcendent musical enchantment.
Although Pan is probably etymologically derived from the verb ‘to pasture,’ as in his role as a herdsman, it could also suggest the ‘All’ that is the totality of being. Hence, there were traditions that claimed he was the child of the empyreal ether, encoded in the mystical dictum that ‘All is one,’ pan to hen.
The little creatures are known as the wee folk in Celtic lore. The most generic name is fairy, derived from Latin fata, as a ‘fate’ deity. The fata are etymologically what has been ‘said.’ This implies a foretelling of the ultimate journey to the realm of the dead, with connotations of inspired speech, ecstasy, and madness. Their identity as anthropomorphisms of the mushroom is a commonplace in the tales told of them. To their ranks belongs the whole troupe of creatures like gnomes, pucks, elves, trolls, leprechauns, and the like. They, too, are commonly depicted in folk art as fungal anthropomorphisms, usually with the red cap spotted with white characteristic of the Amanita muscaria.
Inevitably, since they are anthropomorphisms of the entheogen, they are associated with special tables. In addition to their mushroom tables spread with dainty morsels, they were said to leave round cakes or breads of barley or oatmeal about on the ground, but the food was cursed and should never be eaten except in times of the severest hunger. The scabby white remnants of the Amanita’s universal veil that shatters as the cap fully expands to the likeness of a tabletop immediately suggest the bits of forbidden food with which it is spread. A similar taboo lurks in the naming of the mushroom as a loathsome toadstool. Fairies are notorious for kidnapping people away to their realm, in a rapture possessed by a fairy wind. Conversely, a piece of bread was the surest amulet to ward off a blast of the dangerous kidnapping fairy wind.
A little mushroom table spread, After short prayers, they set on bread.
—Robert Herrick
Oberon’s feast in Hesperides
In Classical myth, the fairy table occurs as the tables desecrated by the droppings of the ‘raptors’ or bird-women called Harpies, who similarly were thought to materialize in a whirlwind to snatch someone suddenly away to the other realm.
Upon a mushroom’s head, Our table we do spread.
—Queen Mab’s Invitation