Do you believe in fairies and magic? I’d guess that living in the 21st century the answer probably not. However, as I’m sure you realise,  there is a long history in virtually every culture of supernatural creatures and powers of all kinds and belief in them was almost universal.

This post isn’t going to try and convince you to change your mind but instead  follow up on last week’ post and look at the apparent  link between magic and mushrooms and fairies and fungi.

As many of you will know I’ve lectured widely in the history of garden gnomes and one of the things that struck when i was researching for that was how many mushrooms and toadstools appeared in images of them and other  “little folk”, whether in fairy stories or paintings. But why?

I wonder if it’s anything to do with the properties of certain mushrooms? So off we go down another research rabbit-hole.

Perhaps the most common of all these links between fungi and fairies concerns the circles or arcs of mushrooms known as fairy rings.   Theories about them, their origins and meaning vary between   cultures but that link with the supernatural is always there. Did they mark areas where fairies might be seen, or perhaps where an unwary visitor could enter the fairy domain? On the plus side, in some accounts entering a fairy ring on the night of a full moon was supposed to bring good luck – but generally it’s the exact opposite.

Perhaps you’d anger the fairies and they’d  rain curses down upon you and yours, or perhaps they’d drag you inside the ring  and make you dance with them until you drop dead from exhaustion. Perhaps you might be inveigled into their realm and even if you managed to escape it would  be years later with no memory of what happened. All very scary.

The reality is of course less fanciful because these circular growths are actually the fruits of a fungus growing underground spreading  its fruit  to disperse its spores. 

For more on that see Olivia Campbells “How fungi form ‘fairy rings’ and inspire superstitions” in National Geographic May 2024; and for more paintings which include fairy rings see the British Fairies website

So where does that linkage to fairies come from?  It’s not actually that obvious. There are just occasional mentions of mushrooms and fairies in 17thc literature. Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream with Oberon, Titania and all their fairies but no references to fungi,. However,  in The Tempest he has Prospero allude to a superstition that sheep will not eat the grass that grows in fairy rings.
“You demi-puppets that by moonshine do the green-sour ringlets make,
Whereof the ewe not bites, and you whose pastime is to make midnight mushrooms.”

I’ve also found a couple of poetic mentions from the same period. Robert Herrick in  Oberon’s Feast  talks of ‘a little mushroom table spread” for the fairies to eat from, while in her poem The Pastime of the Queen of Fairies Margaret Cavendish describes how “Queen May and all her Fairy fry,
Dance on a pleasant molehill high”
before “.. to her dinner she goes straight,
Where all her imps in order wait.
Upon a mushroom there is spread
A cover fine of spiders web”

However it’s really only in the later part of the 18thc that this link becomes more obvious and part of more mainstream thinking. A rapid demographic shift was taking place with large-scale rapid migration from the countryside to cities.  This was erasing centuries of oral tradition and long-held beliefs about nature and the world and led to a  a  big revival of interest in folklore across the whole of 18thc Europe

One of those most prominent in Britain for trying to preserve these vanishing beliefs and traditions was the Romantic poet Robert Southey.  According to historian Mike Jay, he  saw them “as  picturesque and semi-sacred, an escape from industrial modernity into an ancient, often pagan land of enchantment”.  This  all coincided with the growth of nationalism and the desire to create new national histories and cultures. The result can be seen  with the “invention” of all the myths about the Druids in Britain; collection and adaptation of  of traditional folk stories in Germany by the Brothers Grimm, and even the story of why some Viking went Berserk in Scandinavian histories. Academic explanations of this were not far behind with Thomas Keightly’s The Fairy Mythology published in 18,50 being particularly influential.

Alongside this was a revival in the popularity of Shakespeare’s plays including Midsummer Night’s Dream which was not only staged but became the subject of prints and paintings, especially after the leading print publisher of the late 18thc, and later Lord Mayor of London,   John Boydell decided to  commissioned work by leading artists including Joshua Reynolds, George Romney  and Henry Fuseli for a Shakespeare Gallery.  

 

 

The interest in Shakespeare continue and with the development of theatrical technology by 1856  the 8 year old Ellen Terry playing Puck, made her entrance on a mechanical mushroom.

 

However, I think there’s probably yet another side to all this and it’s to do with what might loosely call the magical properties of some fungi.  Its summed up in an interesting medical case from October 1799 when a man went collecting mushrooms in Green Park for his family’s breakfast as he often did. [Try doing that now!] This time though something went horribly wrong – his vision became blurred, he saw vivid flashes of colour, lost his balance and found it difficult to walk. His family meanwhile had severe stomach pains, suffered from vertigo  and started shivering. He wondered what was happening and  stumbled out to get help, but got confused and lost.

Luckily Dr  Everard Brande lived nearby in Arlington Street  and was called to assist.  He was so intrigued that he wrote up the case in The Medical and Physical Journal.  In particular he reported  the strange symptoms of 8 year old “Edward S.”,who had  “fits of immoderate laughter” , spoke nonsense, and seems to be living in another world. Dr Brande consulted the Professor of Botany at Oxford University who in turn asked James Sowerby who was then working on Coloured Figures of English Fungi or Mushrooms (1803), the first serious study of them in English.

They put the symptoms down to the  “deleterious effects of a very common species of agaric [mushroom], not hitherto suspected to be poisonous”. Yet While “Mr. S. has no doubt respecting the species…a variety of the Agaricus,” yet no-one had previously reported any problems from ” its deleterious quality. This may seem singular, as its effects were so strongly marked.”

Sowerby  identified the fungus in question and later illustrated it alongside another roughly similar looking species. As you can see there was just a slight difference in the shape of the cap – one was  elongated  and the other more rounded.  Sowerby noted  that it was the variety “with the pileus acuminated” ie the more pointy-headed  that “nearly proved fatal to a poor family in Piccadilly, London, who were so indiscreet as to stew a quantity” for breakfast.

This mushroom  was if you hadn’t already guessed Psilocybe semilanceata sometimes known as “the liberty cap” one of the so-called  “magic mushrooms” that can be found in many places across the  Britain every autumn. Its name comes from its resemblance to the liberty cap adopted by the revolutionaries in both France and America at the end of the 18th century.

Perhaps the strangest part of the story is that the effects of eating this particular mushroom were apparently unknown to the medical profession.  That would  presumably imply that people were not eating them in Britain at least.

Yet only 30 or so years earlier Carl Linnaeus had published Inebriantia the first-ever list of intoxicating plants from all corners of the world and scientists and medics were becoming more aware of the widespread use of plant and other substances in western and non-western cultures, and many people were using them.  Southey for example was a regular user of nitrous oxide  or laughing gas.

For more on fairies in paintings, on the Stage, in writing, book illustrations and music see various essays in the catalogue of the 1997 Royal Academy Exhibition