To fully appreciate the brilliant ways prehistoric sculptors expressed the notion of A. muscaria as essentially a stalk with a cap that yielded a milk, we only have to look at the three figurines in Figure 1. The early Bronze Age, Cretan figurine on the left is headless, because it was designed to depict the cap of a  mushroom as a breast and the mushroom's stipe as a neck. However, everyone — including art historians, archaelogists, museum curators and their students — has failed to recognize that this objet d'art is polysemous, insofar as it is actually an inverted mushroom.

Figure 1. Left: Bust comprising an inverted mushroom cap personified as breasts and arms.  (Archaeological Museum of Athens). Center: "Cernavoda Goddess," from Romania's Neolithic, Hamangian culture depicting an inverted mushroom cap with breasts over a vulva, rotated to resemble a mouth. Right: Rear view of Cernavoda Goddess (Click for expanded views)

Similarly, although the so-called pillar headed Cernavoda Goddess from Romania's Neolithic, Hamangia culture (Figure 1, center) has been viewed as a headless female, the figurine's neck can now be viewed correctly as the inverted stem of a mushroom, and the figurine's breasts as the mushroom's cap swollen with milk. The artist cleverly personified the volva, from which the mushroom emerges, as a human vulva, and rotated it to resemble a mouth, thereby alluding to the anciently widespread knowledge that ingesting A. muscariae could inspire people to prophesize.

It is also possible that these mushrooms were inverted specifically to suggest they had been eaten. But in any case, the Cernavoda Goddess should be considered a prototype of the "tongue-in-belly," Iambe Baubo, who figures prominantly in the Hymn to Demeter and the related Eleusinian Mysteries — which I will later show originally revolved around the ingestion of an entheogenic mushroom tea called kykeon.

Unfortunately, in considering these and similar figurines merely reflective of some unexplainable style,  archaeologists, art historians, and museum curators have taken the figurines' headlessness for granted, as part of a more general failure to appreciate how important sacred mushrooms were in antiquity. The significance of these and many other brilliant works of art have therefore never been fully appreciated.