Hi all! I’m so excited that I am finally offering a deep dive into the research that went into my upcoming books The Flowering Wand and The Madonna Secret with one of my favorite environmental education platforms ADVAYA.
www.mythandmycelium.com
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? A Galilean storyteller 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?
About the Course:
Examining the tradition of dying-resurrecting gods, we will use fungi to think through the idea of gods and heroes as individuals. Just as fungi teach plants how to root into the soil, so do myths teach us how to root into relation with our biological and social ecosystems. Myths seek to express ecological truths with personified elementals, narrativizing a deep understanding of our connection to more-than-human time scales. While disconnected by time and place, Osiris and Dionysus and Orpheus are mushrooms of a shared, below-ground, mythic mycelial system.
Jesus, then, planted back in the mycorrhizal system of Mediterranean mythology and the nature-based traditions of first century Judaism, takes on an environmentally radical role. The wild healer teaches us how to use ecological storytelling and sacred food rituals to offer both a critique and a cure for empire. As we reroot these foundational myths in their original ecological and cultural context, we also rewild and retell these narratives with modern science, poetry, philosophy, and ecology, freshly adapting them for our contemporary struggle with climate inaction and ecocide.
While this course will offer five lectures firmly rooted in historical, ecological, and anthropological research, it will open to the unexpected, the interruption, and the side-adventure in the spirit of the collaborative storytelling tradition practice by Galilean magicians. The community we will be building prizes the interrogative over the declamatory. We will risk asking questions that must be “lived” rather than answered. Each lecture will be balanced by a practice and discussion that locates us in our bodies and in our local ecosystems. The participants are encouraged to experiment with these exercises, bringing back surprises and observations to share at the following session.
Sessions:
Myth, Mycelium, and Messiahs: Vegetal Gods of the Mediterranean
Session 1: Tuesday 19 July
Jesus, as a dying and resurrecting god associated with fermentation, comes at the end of a long tradition of vegetal gods in the Middle East. How does Jesus inherit and interrupt this mythic ecosystem? We can view the stories of Osiris, Tammuz, Orpheus, and Dionysus as above ground mushrooms of a shared underground mycelium that predates the ills of patriarchy and domination. How does this mythic earth-based legacy inform the social and ecological context of Jesus?
From Breath to Text: Oral Scripture and the Transition into Alphabetic Abstraction
Session 2: Tuesday 26 July
For most of human history storytelling and scripture did not live on the page. Our stories lived in shared breath. Scripture and sacred stories were oral, relational, and adaptive. Oral storytelling encourages resilience and adaptation to shifting social, political, and ecological conditions. In oral cultures and the historical oral traditions, we see narratives that are intimately connected to their environments and concerned with right relationship to land. What happens when we start writing our stories down so that they no longer evolve? What happens when we shift from breath to text, from direct relationship to land to abstracted ideograph? We explore the ramifications of turning Jesus as an oral storyteller into a disembodied word written on a page. What if oral culture’s cultivation of resilient community and adaptability is exactly what we need in an age of ecological peril?
Healer, Magician, Storyteller: Rerooting Jesus in His Galilean Ecosystem
Session 3: Tuesday 2 August
The Jesus of the New Testament is far removed from the wandering magician that healed and told stories on the Galilean seaside. He has been translated into the very language of the Empire that assassinated him: deracinated from his native tongue, his Judaism, his political context, and, most importantly, from the ecology that intimately informed his teachings. Jesus grew up in a tumultuous time, witness to violence and imperialism and a biodiversity of spiritual practices. How does rerooting Jesus in his ecology, his Judaism, and his Galilean community, give us a glimpse of someone much more environmentally radical?
The Kingdom is a Weed: Parables, Biblical Animism, and Ecological Storytelling
Session 4: Tuesday 9 August
Mustard Seeds and fig trees and lilies and birds. Jesus’ primary mode of teaching, parables, were dominated by nature metaphors. The Jewish tradition, within which Jesus was raised, had a profound sense that land was sacred and inhabited by God. The Biblical King David watched the wind moving through trees for messages from God. Elisha saw divinity in a rain cloud the “size of a hand”. Joseph of Egypt “dreamed” with plants in order to predict droughts and crop failures. Second Temple Period Palestine was a richly biodiverse landscape, home to deserts and jungles, lions and leopards, beloved trees and holy mountains and home to a people who honored and depended on plants and animals for their livelihood. It was from these very real kin that Jesus drew his most powerful metaphors and teachings. By reweaving the magician back into his web of relations, how can we understand parables as a mode of ecological storytelling? How can we use this mode of storytelling to come into relationship with our own locales?
Rewilding the Beloved: Jesus the Bridegroom, Mary Magdalene, and Gnosticism
Session 5: Tuesday 16 August
Who was the Magdalene? Why are women so crucial to the story of Jesus, yet so maligned in the evolution of Christianity as an organized religion? Why does Jesus repeatedly refer to himself as the Bridegroom, recalling the famous biblical lover of The Song of Songs? How can we use ecology to expand our ideas of gendered union? We look to the early Gnostic texts and a long tradition of Magdalene folklore to finally reweave Jesus into embodied, erotic existence. The Gospel of Thomas gifts us with a Jesus that will encourage us to create a personal spiritual practices and narratives, rooted in and inspired by our contemporary ecologies and communities.
Tying our Roots Together
Session 6: Tuesday 23 August
This final session will be a space to reflect as a community on the questions, experiences, and stories that have come to light personally and collectively during our time together. We will each share the “parables” we have noticed in our own ecosystems and the beings that make up our own personal kingdom. The gospel we create at the end of this course will be a communal exercise in compost. We will all throw on a handful of seeds, a fingerful of moss, and the questions that lovingly, wildly, refuse to be answered.
To sign up for early bird tickets and for more information about the course, you can visit here.
Awesome! Wonderful to see the mycelial mythic network branching into this line of flight!