Kingdom of Funga: A Mycelial Reading List on a Strange and Surreal World Around Us
June 17, 2025 at 03:30PM
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“Holy mother of god, what?!”
“Yeah, it’s true, the fungus burrows into the moth larva when it’s underground, then when the time is right, it bursts out of its head. I could show you.”
We had gone way up the mountain. Our group was back from the trek and tending to the ponies we had left behind at lower altitude. One of the Tibetan guides, the handsome one, is fiddling with the saddles and grinning as he imparts this arcane knowledge to me.
“And you eat this miscegenation? Why?!”
“Well, it gives you . . . powers.”
I nerdily squirrel away this information, impressed.
Later, I recount the story to my friend over chai. With her brown poncho hood sticking up like a witch’s pointy hat and one eye temporarily taped shut from snow blindness, she wags a delphic finger at me for my remarkable density. I hadn’t registered the information for what it was, an invitation.
That was years ago. Ophiocordyceps sinensis, also known as yarchagumba, or caterpillar fungus, is available solely in the wild. It commands $40,000 per kilo on the open market today—for the hideous specimens, that is. The best ones fetch upward of $100,000. The international demand for this fungus, on par with ivory and rhino horn, has created mafia-level operations in Nepal, Bhutan, and Tibet. Villages are razed for it, people are murdered.
Yarchagumba is a story of sex, money, and international intrigue. For sex beyond dreams, money beyond reason, acts beyond comprehension.
But these twilight beings—fungi—have enchanted and terrified us for millennia. Faraway lands, myth and magic, fairy tales and folklore. Psychedelia, religion, explorations outer and inner. Food, medicine, and poison. Music, poetry, and art. Technology and space travel. Science fact and science fiction. Zombies.
Fauna. Flora. Funga.
As my editors and I put the finishing touches to this list, what should I receive in my inbox but an entire Orion issue dedicated to fungi! It looks lovely—check it out.
This is what the big picture’s been missing all along—full recognition of the Third Kingdom of Funga, comprising some 2.2–3.8 million species, 92 percent of which is still “dark matter.” To a reading list on these mind-bending entities at a planetary tipping point, welcome. What you see here are only some fruiting bodies, the rest lies underneath.
Mycelium, Mycology, and Metaphor (Eugenia Bone, Eugenia’s Substack, May 2025)
Taking the Simard “wood-wide web” debate further, amateur mycologist and chef Bone investigates what the use of “mycelium” as an all-purpose metaphor or “mycelial” as an adjective does to our understanding. Is it helpful, or is it harmful? In our efforts to be scientific, or at least science-adjacent, shouldn’t we try to understand exactly what such words mean?
One of the most influential and controversial figures in modern mycology, described by Michael Pollan as “an amateur in the best sense, self-taught, uncredentialed, and blithe about trespassing disciplinary borders,” fungal evangelist Paul Stamets presents a TED talk called “6 ways mushrooms can save the world.” And if you want to save the world by letting mushrooms devour you and all your toxins postmortem, here’s another from artist Jae Rhim Lee, “My mushroom burial suit.” Both talks come with transcripts and translations.
“A mycelium is a web of microscopic tubes that seeks and consumes food. It contains a fungus’ genetic info, it can regenerate when torn apart as it has no front or back, and it can fuse with other, compatible mycelia. A mycelium grows from a spore. . . .” In illustration, I’ve used “mycelial” as an adjective in the title of this reading list. If this list is a spore that seeks, connects, and (for better or for worse) assimilates longform essays as it grows, might this be an appropriate use of the term, after all? Maybe the symbolic power of a metaphor should not be underrated.
Read the Spanish version of this essay, translated by Pablo Duarte and illustrated by Rodrigo Arteaga Abarca.
It seems to me that the “mycelium network” metaphor is based on two cherry-picked ideas. The first is that mycelium is by nature a magnanimous organism. It is not. It is the thallus of multicellular fungi, some of which are parasites, some saprobes, some mycorrhizae. Mycelium has become a stand in word for a mycorrhizal fungus and its role in a forest ecosystem.
The second cherry-picked idea is that mycorrhizal fungi play an altruistic role in the environment. You can look at that role as being beneficent, but there’s no proof of that characterization. Indeed, there may be more evidence supporting the idea that mycorrhizal fungi function based on self-interest. . . . We love a story because it makes us feel good and it helps us relate. But let’s not confuse metaphor with mycology.
“My childhood superheroes weren’t Marvel characters,” Merlin once said to me, “they were lichens and fungi. Fungi and lichen annihilate our categories of gender. They reshape our ideas of community and cooperation. They screw up our hereditary model of evolutionary descent. They utterly liquidate our notions of time. Lichens can crumble rocks into dust with terrifying acids. Fungi can exude massively powerful enzymes outside their bodies that dissolve soil. They’re the biggest organisms in the world and among the oldest. They’re world-makers and world-breakers. What’s more superhero than that?”
Science, Fiction, and Fungi: What The Last of Us Gets Right (Corrado Nai, Reactor, March 2023)
All right. Let’s address the bloater in the room. It’s 2003, and a mutated strain of the Cordyceps fungus has ravaged the planet, infecting humans, making monsters of them.
Vladimir Lenin was a mushroom. Lenin-grib, literally. In 1991, scientist Sergey Kuryokhin was interviewed by Sergey Sholokhov on a Soviet TV program called Pyatoe Koleso, or The Fifth Wheel. As part of his research into the Bolshevik Revolution, Kuryokhin had—with documentary evidence, he claimed—uncovered something. Its leaders had consumed such large quantities of hallucinogenic mushrooms that they had turned into mushrooms themselves. Lenin, chief among them, had naturally gone a little farther—he had turned, post-mushroom, into a radio wave. And coming as it did amid all the perestroika and glasnost, this absurd comedy hoax by a performance artist reached far and wide.
The HBO show The Last of Us, based on a video game of the same name, has whipped up a fungal froth of fear and frenzy. How do you survive this particular apocalypse? But seriously, fungi can control robots now. Could such a pandemic happen to us in the real world? I mean, look at the Salem witch trials. The short answer is: no. To begin with—there’s a lot more to it—fungi cannot survive the human body’s internal temperature of 37º Celsius (well, okay, most of the time). Here’s the long answer: maybe. Because the planet is changing. But let’s calm our fungal paranoia with facts and learn “fungal looking.”
Just kidding. If you’ve been hiding under a rock, check it for fungus. And equip yourself with the knowledge of all the infected types that may be out to get you.
To appreciate the science behind The Last of Us, let’s imagine ourselves in the shell of an ant for a fleeting moment. Once the fungus infects our ant-bodies, we do what the fungus wants us to do. Now, we are hollow ant-vessels: nourishment, transportation, and final home all in one. We are the walking dead, bringing the “zombie-ant fungus” within us inside the colony, effectively acting like a Trojan horse.
The mycelium feeds inside our ant-bodies, but it does not reach the brain—yet. Instead, with some sort of chemical signaling, the fungus compels us to erratic behaviour: We seek altitude, something which, as ants, we would not normally do. As our ant-bodies wither, we reach our ultimate destination. A twig, or the veins on the underside of a leaf: perfect spots for the fungus to complete its life cycle. The fungus sends a final command to the brain: bite. We tighten our ant-mandibles in a death grip as the fungus reaches the brain and mushrooms burst from the head. Raining spores will infect the whole ant colony.
The Understory (Robert Macfarlane, Emergence Magazine, June 2019)
What do we know about these mysterious entities called fungi? This essay—a long walk through London’s Epping Forest that Macfarlane undertakes with mycologist Merlin Sheldrake (“truly, that is his name”), talking about what lies beneath our feet, beneath the forest floor—is a very good place to start. Opening with Suzanne Simard’s work on tree-fungus mutualism, the essay moves, with Sheldrake, into the “understory’s understory,” entangling life and language.
A few years ago, Netflix dropped a Louie Schwartzberg-directed documentary called Fantastic Fungi. This lovely film is no longer streaming, but you can rent or buy a remastered edition with new scenes and bonus content. Also on Netflix, check out “Chapter 02: Psilocybin” of Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind. And available in select locations, Fungi: Web of Life, Merlin Sheldrake’s IMAX film narrated by “Björk doing David Attenborough, except with her own, inimitable intonation.”
But is the beautiful “wood-wide web” theory wrong, after all? The formerly charmed scientific community seems to be arguing about it now, doesn’t it? Did Richard Powers’ Pulitzer-winning, Booker-shortlisted The Overstory (partly based on Simard) oversell things? Time will tell, and research. But for now, as Robin Wall Kimmerer says, “All flourishing is mutual.”
Continue the walk with Sheldrake and Macfarlane in “Fungi’s Lessons for Adapting to Life on a Damaged Planet” at Literary Hub, and best of all, read Sheldrake’s amazing book Entangled Life. And if you still have extra time on your hands, listen to “Mycelial Landscapes” (transcript available).
Fungi, Folklore, and Fairyland (Mike Jay, The Public Domain Review, October 2020)
“She stretched herself up on tiptoe, and peeped over the edge of the mushroom, and her eyes immediately met those of a large blue caterpillar, that was sitting on the top, with its arms folded, quietly smoking a long hookah,” and here we think of John Tenniel’s beloved illustration of Lewis Carroll’s Alice and the hookah-smoking caterpillar atop a mushroom telling her, “One side will make you grow taller, and the other side will make you grow shorter.”
“The setting was a grocery store in Peoria, Illinois. The owner, John Scoutaris, prided himself on stocking fresh, healthy fruit. But that day in 1943, he found a moldy grapefruit sitting out. He quietly palmed it, then slipped away to dispose of it. But not before a customer caught him. Mary Hunt. To Scoutaris’s horror, Hunt called out. Wait, is that moldy?” Did “Moldy Mary” really help Alexander Fleming come up with penicillin? Or was hers a tall tale?
This mushroom is not Amanita muscaria, the spectacular white-dotted-red fly agaric that is familiar to us from fairy tales and children’s stories, and certainly not that other Victorian mushroom, Phallus impudicus (there there, Aunt Etty*). What happened to liberty caps, Psilocybe semilanceata? What other secrets lie behind Victorian fairylands? (* If you don’t see her, scroll down to the last section, In Culture, on the Wikipedia page.)
Here’s looking at old trip reports and their strange stories, in quite some detail.
In parallel to a growing scientific interest in toxic and hallucinogenic fungi, a vast body of Victorian fairy lore connected mushrooms and toadstools with elves, pixies, hollow hills, and the unwitting transport of subjects to fairyland, a world of shifting perspectives seething with elemental spirits. The similarity of this otherworld to those engendered by plant psychedelics in New World cultures, where psilocybin-containing mushrooms have been used for millennia, is suggestive. Is it possible that the Victorian fairy tradition, beneath its innocent exterior, operated as a conduit for a hidden tradition of psychedelic knowledge? Were the authors of these fantastical narratives—Alice in Wonderland, for example—aware of the powers of certain mushrooms to lead unsuspecting visitors to enchanted lands? Were they, perhaps, even writing from personal experience?
Teonanácatl (Alejandro Zambra, translated from Spanish by Megan McDowell, The Paris Review, January 2022)
In 1908, chemist Kikunae Ikeda identified glutamic acid as the basis for that sought-after fifth taste he named umami (after the Japanese adjective umai, meaning “delicious”). In Shōjin Ryōri, ancient Zen Buddhist vegetarian cuisine, dried shiitake mushrooms, with their guanylate-glutamate synergy, impart powerful umami to food. Here are some recipes, especially one for Kenchinjiru, a hearty shiitake-vegetable soup. Lest you think umami is an acquired taste, glutamate is found even in amniotic fluid.
R. Gordon Wasson was a JPMorgan banker who hated mushrooms. Valentina Pavlovna was a pediatrician who loved mushrooms and turned him on to them. Together, the husband and wife team was responsible for popularizing “magic mushrooms,” going against the wishes of their Mazatec curandera María Sabina, thus stirring both great good and great harm in their wake. But mushroom is as mushroom does, as anyone who’s ever made their psychedelic acquaintance can attest. An amoral, entangled intelligence beyond good and bad is par for the course.
Regardless of the various traditional interpretations of the role psychedelic fungi may have played in the origins of religion, regardless of the contemporary countercurrent of thought, one thing is clear: A trip might do you good. Michael Pollan said it out loud in the now-famous “The Trip Treatment.” This piece offers a contemporary trip report.
PS: If not a trip, just a meal. Even Ötzi the Iceman knew enough to put birch polypores in his medicine pouch.
Teonanácatl. That’s what the Aztecs used to call the mushroom known today as pajarito, or “little bird.” My friend Emilio recommended it as a treatment for my cluster headaches, and he got me a generous dose in chocolate form. I stashed the squares in the fridge and awaited the first symptoms with resignation, though I sometimes fantasized that the mere presence of the drug would keep the headaches at bay. Sadly, soon enough I felt one coming on, and it was the very day we had planned a first-aid course. My wife Jazmina and I had just had a child, and after attending a clumsy, tedious introduction to first aid, we’d decided to call in a doctor, and ended up inviting other first-time parents to an exhaustive four-hour program that would take place at the house next door. But in the very early dawn of the designated day, I woke up with that intense pain in the trigeminal nerve that for me is the unequivocal sign of an imminent headache. My wife proposed that I forget about the course and stay home to take pajarito.
Future Space Travel Might Require Mushrooms (Nick Hilden interviews Paul Stamets, Scientific American, August 2021)
Fungi have been around a lot longer than us. And now they will come with us in our hand luggage to space. Or they ought to, according to Stamets, who has had a Star Trek: Discovery character named after him.
Terraforming, a term long familiar to readers of science fiction, is the (hitherto hypothetical) practice of modifying the environment of another planet, rendering it habitable to humans. In this NASA-funded astromycology project (which falls under astrobiology, the study of extraterrestrial biological forms), research is ongoing to find out how “fungi can be leveraged to build extraterrestrial habitats and perhaps someday even terraform planets.” Mycomaterials are already producing stunning, potentially usable results.
But it’s not just terraforming that fungi can do. Pack some psilocybin in there, and you get a bunch of non-lonely, non-depressed astronauts happily growing food on fungi-enriched alien soil.
What separates Star Trek from other science fiction, you know, is it really pioneered the importance of inclusivity, recognizing that the diversity of the members of our society gives us strength. And, indeed, that’s what I’ve learned as a mycologist: the biodiversity of our ecosystem gives our ecosystem resilience. Ultimately, diversity wins.
So I told them terraforming with fungi on other planets is very plausible. Fungi were the first organisms that came to land, munching rocks, and fungi gave birth to animals about 650 million years ago. We’re descendants of the descendants of these fungal networks.
I said, “You can have all these concepts for free. I’m a Star Trek fan; I don’t want anything for this.” I said, “But, you know, I always wanted to be the first astromycologist.” And at the very end, they go, “Astromycologist, we love that! What a great phrase; we can use that.”
Exhibit H (Jeff VanderMeer, Weird Fiction Review, April 2017)
“Before there was Area X, there was Ambergris.”
In October 1962, Galaxy Magazine published a short story called “Come into My Cellar.” “Boys! You can raise giant mushrooms in your cellar—and that’s by no means all!” Its author was none other than Ray Bradbury. Hold your thoughts, and turn to page 29 for a Very Special Delivery.
The fruiting bodies of The Southern Reach Series—Annihilation (no, the film’s not a patch on the book), Authority, Acceptance, and Absolution—brought VanderMeer worldwide fame. But long before that, he had already written what would become a cult classic. The Ambergris Trilogy—City of Saints and Madmen (which The Guardian called “fiction to stand alongside that of Calvino and Borges”); Shriek; and Locus, Nebula, and World Fantasy-finalist Finch. In the beautiful and perilous city of Ambergris, “everywhere, on the walls of courtyards and churches, an incandescent fungus of mysterious and ominous origin.” Ohh.
In this short story, Exhibit H is one of the world-building “supplementary texts” of this fungal dystopia, purportedly “An Excerpt from Hoegbotton’s Comprehensive Travel Guide to the Southern City of Ambergris.”
Such a naive traveler (unless having had the good sense to buy this particular guidebook, available in Ambergris itself only at The Borges Bookstore [see Ch. 8, “Cultural Attractions”]) may not at first, or even on second or third glance, discern the connection between the flags, as uniform and well-positioned as surveyors’ marks, and the preternaturally clean quality of the city’s convoluted alleyways. The unobservant or naive traveler, therefore, may never come to understand the city itself, for these flags mark out the territory, and are the only daylight sign, of those unique inhabitants of Ambergris known in the vernacular as “mushroom dwellers.”
A Call to Action
Following a thoughtful meditation on language and nomenclature, Fungi Foundation, founded by Chilean mycologist Giuliana Furci, has set up an initiative called Fauna, Flora, Funga. This offers the term “Funga” alongside “Fauna” and “Flora” that “elevates fungi’s conservation status by advocating for their inclusion in international laws and policies.” This critical planetary initiative is endorsed by Re:wild, IUCN Species Survival Commission, and United Nations Biodiversity, among others.
I don’t think I’ll ever think of the kingdoms the old way again. I’ve signed the statement. Will you?
Kanya Kanchana is a poet and philologist from India.
Editor: Krista Stevens
Copyeditor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/06/17/kingdom-of-funga-a-mycelial-reading-list-on-a-strange-and-surreal-world-around-us/
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