Halls of the Dark Muse

Though I cannot stand to eat mushrooms, ever since I was a kid I have had a certain fascination with wild mushrooms. There was always something about them which would draw me in, and that I took delight in. I loved traipsing around my grandma's backyard looking for mushrooms just to study and observe, and to say the least I never quite grew out of my "mushroom phase."

I still have a sort of whimsical attachment to the mushroom, part of this reason is because of my ever present obsession with death, and the connection mushrooms have to death. In the literal and rather real since, if one is not careful mushrooms can be deadly as there are many highly poisonous species. As well in the more mythical sense mushrooms have a connection to the Otherworld, they grow up from the ground, and the darkness, and are rooted in the earth, so the come from the world of the dead and connect this world to the next.

Along those same lines, another part of the appeal to mushrooms, is there is something arcane about them. They have played an important role for medicinal purposes as well as hallucigens within many different Pagan cultures, and have in old traditions been associated with fairies.

So I have decided as a personal project to start working on what I call my Mushroom Book, part of the purpose of this project is, because I have such an interest in mushrooms, to in a creative and engaging way further my own personal knowledge about different types of mushrooms. My book is going to be a documentation of the many variety of different types of mushrooms I come across, which will include photographs of each different specimens, and for my own personal study I will collect samples of the different types of mushrooms in an effort to try and identify what they are.

Once I am fairly confident in my identification of the mushroom, I will put together a brief fact sheet of the different properties and characteristics of that particularly type of mushroom.

Within I am also thinking about including different legends, myths, and historical information relating to the mushroom.

Though the identification part is going to prove to be quite the challenge, because there are so many different types of mushrooms and all look so similar to each other.

I have already been stumped upon my first mushroom find. It bares a very strong resemblance to a type of Lactarius, but it lacks the milky secretions within the gills that the Lactarius is known for, but I have yet to find another species that resembles it.

Though I am fairly positive that the 2nd specimen I found is a pear-shaped puffball.