Show Notes
With the coming of the cool wet weather of autumn, life begins to turn inward again . The fields lie fallow and bare, flowers wither, leaves decay, and all life seems to return to the earth. It's in this period of fading light, that strange and beautiful forms begin to arise from the undergrowth in the temperate regions all over Europe. In woodlands, fields, gardens and along roadsides, colourful fungi and mushrooms of all shapes and sizes quietly spring forth and flourish as if from nowhere, while all else appears in a state of decline.
A short entry in volume 1670 of the Main Manuscript Collection at the NFC contains information collected from around Ireland on the topic of mushrooms in folk tradition. The material contained in this volume, previously unpublished and explored in this podcast episode, explores traditional attitudes to mushrooms in Irish tradition and outlines their uses along with popular beliefs concerning them. Audio from the NFC sound archive also features, along with audio material from the collections of the Irish Traditional Music Archive and the singing group Landless.
My thanks to archivist Danielle Castronovo at the Economic Botany Herbarium of Oakes Ames, Harvard University for her help in filling the gaps of some correspondence between R. Gordon Wasson and the Irish Folklore Commission. My thanks to archivist Maeve Gebreurs at the Irish Traditional Music Archive for forwarding Diane Hamilton's 1957 recording of Robert Cinnamond's rendition of the song 'Gathering Mushrooms'. Thanks likewise to Emmett Gill, archivist at Na Píobairí Uileann for pointing me in the direction of the collection of which this song is a part. Thanks too to Dónal Lunny, copyright holder, for permission to include this piece in the podcast.
A variety of sources are consulted and discussed throughout, some links below:
Prehistoric fungal representations in Tassili Algeria https://www.britannica.com/place/Tassili-n-Ajjer
A Prehistoric Mural in Spain Depicting Neurotropic Psilocybe Mushrooms? https://www.jstor.org/stable/41242925
The Fungus Lore of the Greeks and Romans https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0007153614800077
Dioscorides: De Materia Medica https://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/aconite/materiamedica.html
Mushroom Artwork of Otto Marseus van Shrieck https://bit.ly/3nEwy3n
Plutarch: Essays and Miscellanies https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3052/3052-h/3052-h.htm#link2HCH0065
The Hypothesis on the Presence of Entheogens in the Eleusinian Mysteries https://www.researchgate.net/publication/327838578_The_hypothesis_on_the_presence_of_entheogens_in_the_Eleusinian_Mysteries
Mircea Eliade - Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691210667/shamanism
Nora Chadwick: Imbas Forosnai http://searchingforimbas.blogspot.com/p/imbas-forosnai-by-nora-k-chadwick.html
An Irish Materia Medica: Tadhg Ó Cuinn https://celt.ucc.ie//published/G600005/index.html
William Camden: Brittania https://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/travellers/Camden/32
Seeking the Magic Mushroom: Life Magazine May 1957 (via MAPS.org) https://bibliography.maps.org/bibliography/default/resource/15048
Tina and R. Gordon Wasson - Russia, Mushrooms and History (vols. 1, & 2) [PDF] https://doorofperception.com/2015/04/r-gordon-wasson-seeking-the-magic-mushroom/
Audio featured from the Irish Traditional Music Archive: https://itma.ie
Landless: https://landless.bandcamp.com/
National Folklore Collection online portal: https://dúchas.ie
More from Blúiríní Béaloidis Folklore Podcast
Ailbe van der Heide is Collections Curator at the National Folklore Collection, having joined the staff in 2020, shortly after graduating from the MA in Irish Folklore in 2020. For several years now, Ailbe has managed the National Folklore Collection’s reading room service, along with fielding an array of queries from members of the public keen to explore our collections. Throughout her work, and in response to enquiries made regarding our collections, Ailbe noticed an at times stark difference between the material found as part of our fieldwork collections, and that which can be found online regarding supernatural figures in Irish tradition. Researchers looking for information on supernatural lore would often cite specific terminology which was indicative of literary forms, rather than expressions of folk culture. On the interplay between literature and folk tradition, Anne O’Connor has noted that:
Steve Roud is a Librarian, folklore scholar and creator of the Roud Folk Song Index, which contains upwards of 750,000 entries to around 45,000 English language folk songs, as found in books, recordings, manuscripts and other sources the world over. His index, and ‘Roud Numbers’ (a numbering system employed to identify the same song across many different titles) are widely acclaimed for the scope, breadth, depth and impact. Steve worked as a local studies Librarian in the London Borough of Croydon, and also served as Honorary Librarian for the Folklore Society for eighteen years. He has published books on calendar custom, popular tradition, folk belief, London lore, children’s games, and folk drama. In 2004, he was the winner of the Folklore Society’s Katharine Briggs Folklore Award for The Penguin Guide to the Superstitions of Britain and Ireland. In 2009, he was one of five people to be awarded the Gold Badge of the English Folk Dance and Song Society. This award recognises "those who have made unique or outstanding contributions to the art or science of folk dance, music or song, and/or those who have given exceptional support in furthering the aims of the Society”. For four years now, Steve has been visiting the NFC, parsing through our manuscript and book, broadside and pamphlet collections for entries to add to his index. He is an incredibly gifted, meticulous and generous scholar, who is always glad to share his expertise with us, particularly in discussion around the inherent problems in the description, cataloguing and indexing of folklore materials. It was an honour, and a great pleasure to host Steve at the NFC recently, and during his visit (for our collective benefit) I subjected him to a 75 minute interview, in which we discussed his index, the problems inherent in describing folk song, approaches to the cataloguing of folklore, conducting research in folklore archives, and the problems inherent in the digitisation of folklore records and some scholarly critique of the NFC’s online platform Dúchas.ie.
Video recording of this episode is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OcxwmDuUeU&ab_channel=UCD-UniversityCollegeDublin
Regarding food in Irish tradition, Kevin Danaher, writing in 1964, noted that "Sometimes we get the impression that Ireland, in ancient times, was a land of plenty, and again we get quite the opposite impression - that our forebears lived out their lives on the very edge of starvation. In reality both these impressions are wrong." As an expression of culture that permeates every aspect of life, food holds a central place in Irish folk tradition, and for episode 41 of Blúiríní Béaloidis, I am delighted to be joined by Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire, Senior Lecturer in the School of Culinary Arts and Food Technology at Technological University Dublin to discuss food in Irish folk tradition. Máirtín, along with Dorothy Cashman, was co-editor of the recent "Irish Food History: A Companion", published by the Royal Irish Academy in hardcopy in 2024, and available freely online via EUT+ at the following link: https://arrow.tudublin.ie/irishfoodhist/1/
Hello a chairde, and welcome to episode 40 of Blúiríní Béaloidis, the podcast from the National Folklore Collection.