UNDERSTANDING THE PREHISTORIC PRACTICE OF PERSONIFYING MUSHROOMS

Mr. Peanut (left), Mr.Potato Head (center), and Bobby Banana (left) all exemplify the same practice of personifying foods that prehistoric sculptors were apparently employing.

Although it was initially hard to understand why prehistoric sculptors had personified mushrooms, the practice eventually proved understandable by considering it a prototype of the modern practice of molding foods to resemble animals or little people, and the practice of personifying plants in comics, cartoons and T.V. commercials. Prehistoric humanoid figurines are thus identifiable as prototypes of, for example, (a) the personified banana known as Bobby, which Dole uses as its logo;  (b) the personfied potato known as Mr. Potato Head, who lent its name to the classic children's game in which potatoes or other vegetables are personified by adding plastic human  parts to them; and (c) the personified peanut Planter's Peanuts uses for its logo. 

Figure 40. British Soldier (left), Old Man's Beard (center) and Lady Slipper (right) are three examples of the many plants that are linguistically personified.

The prehistoric practice of personifying mushrooms is even more understandable when it is considered a variation of the tendency to personify plants that botanists have traditionally used in naming plants and plant parts anthropomorphically. For example, the plant known as old man's beard in the center of Figure 40 was evidently coined to name a green-grey lichen that hangs from trees anthropomorphically after the beard it resembles. The British soldier on the left in Figure 40 was evidently named in a similar way for its red head and erect posture. The lady slipper on the right in Figure 40 was evidently named for its tendency to invoke the image of the little slipper it resembles. And for similar reasons, numerous parts of plants are referred to anthropomorphically as trumpets, heads, horns, skirts, girdles and belts, among other terms.

Without a scientific taxonomy or nomenclature, or the reductive type of analytical thinking that would have been necessary to derive both, it would have been very reasonable for prehistoric shamanic herbalists to use personification as an intuitive way of identifying, remembering and discussing plants. But if those herbalists had been ingesting A. muscariae and other psychotropic mushrooms, as the preceding evidence strongly suggests they were, the tendency to personify mushrooms would have been greatly accentuated by the tendency such mushrooms have of causing people to see personified mushrooms.

For example, according to the Russian anthropologist Vladimir Germanovich Bogoraz's study of A. muscaria ingestion by the Chukchee, a tribe of Siberian eskimos: "Mushrooms appear to intoxicated men in strange forms somewhat related to their real shapes. One, for example, will be a man with one hand and one foot; another will have shapeless body. These are not spirits, but the mushrooms themselves."¹ The tendency of prehistoric sculptors to personify mushrooms would therefore have been a corollary of a tendency to see the spirits of those mushrooms as the strangely shaped people which, as we shall see, decorate the walls of many of the world's caves.

1. Bogoraz, Vladimir Germanovich. (Bogoras, Waldemar) "The Chukchee. Memoir of the American Museum of Natural History. Jesup North Pacific Expedition." Parts 1, 2, and 3. New York. pp. 205-207. Cited by Wasson, R.G. in Soma: Magic Mushroom of Immortality. p. 276.