Chapter 65: UNDERWORLD

The werewolf hybrid had now become involved in a common litter of wolves and its essence had been almost completely covered. It is time for this being, which is a hybrid of plant species and forms a network as we saw in the chapter on intelligent plants, to rediscover its essence and recover its enlightenment. For this purpose, he must descend to the infernal worlds and endure the tests for the elimination of these polluting energies that lead to behaviors outside of the universal purpose. It's funny then that they've cropped up in popular culture when it seems like we ourselves are in desperate need of a trip to the underworld. But I want to reframe the journeys of the underworld as something more ecological, more complicated, than the simplistic psychological story of personal initiation. A true trip to the underworld is not a trip to another place. It is a trip to its landscape. And in the intimate realization that you are made up of hundreds of relationships: the food you eat, the friends who support you, the weather systems that shape the flavor of your days. I'm not demonizing promotion stories. They have their place. Deep time seasons are longer than human lives. Perhaps entire civilizations have followed the spores up on the wind. But now it seems that we are being invited to a descent that delights in disorder, darkness, ferment, If mushrooms have taught me anything, it's to get involved. Behave interrogatively with my environment. Why does the Russala mycelium support the Monotropa uniflora without receiving anything in return? I'm not sure. But I know that I have benefited from the stories of people who don't know my name and have never received explicit nourishment in return. I have eaten fish from the seas I have not fed my tears. Let me give while remembering with pleasure the underworld lesson of giving demonstrated by Dumuzi's sacrifice, the flow of carbon and minerals through the mycelial filaments. Dar does not believe in fair transaction logic. Believe in connectivity itself. The mushrooms that connect the forests confuse our ideas of a lonely self. They say that a self flows between the species. Between world's. A self is planted in the seed of another being. An I does not stay still. It fructifies in the world above like a mushroom, feigning individuality, only to sporulate, seed clouds, fall like rain, and sink back into the underworld of earth to sew the world, invisibly, silently, back together. What is the Underworld? Just like fungi and plants, we are co-becoming with our ecosystems. Ecosystems that are broken, contaminated and confused by the uprooted idea of our culture that you can live without a root system. But if we are going to survive, we will need to tie our roots to other roots. Resilience ecology tells us that landscapes with more biodiversity, more general connectivity, are better able to withstand natural disasters and climatic stresses. We are going to need to drop below human exceptionalism into the underworld of symbiotic co-creation. This fall, as the leaves turn liquid and then soften into the earth, I ask fungi to teach me as they taught plants 500 million years ago. Teach me how to root in a specific place. Teach me to create connections so wild and powerful that they make me resistant to otherness. Teach me to flow in the whole forest. “On this day I will descend into the underworld. When I have reached the underworld, make a lament for me in the ruin mounds. Drum for me in the sanctuary. Make the rounds of the houses of the gods for me,” declares the Mesopotamian goddess Inanna in one of the oldest written accounts of a journey to the underworld. The goddess removes her adornments and finally her own ego as she transforms into a piece of rotting meat, hanging from a hook. His final ascent to the world of the living is only possible thanks to the help of others: a fly, which he declares sacred and gives him "the brewery and the tavern", his sister from the underworld Ereshkigal and, finally, the sacrifice of her lover. . Dumuzi. The underworld is not the land of the individual. Inanna must remove all jewelry and clothing that identifies her as special in order to enter. The underworld is woven of tainted guilt and messy mutual aid. And it is in this biotic mud where beings collide and pile up in the multicellularity of the new mythologies. The underworld is a womb where the world above is gestated, as evidenced by the creation of Persephone's seasons. The harvest depends on its ability to annually follow the seeds deep into the soil. Also Persephone, in relation to the Eleusinian mysteries, only finds her own fecundity in her offspring, conceiving hers son by her Zagreus, also known as the plant god Dionysus. Dionysus, for his part, will return to his origins when the titans tear him apart and return him to the earthly world from which he came. Orpheus performs his most transcendent music after his failed attempt to save his lover from the Underworld. The mission then was not a rescue but a tutoring in songs that outlive the individual singer. After his own dismemberment, his head is said to have continued to sing as it floated down the river towards Lesbos. inaugurating a tradition of Orphic hymns where anyone could assume the role of poet-hero. Anyone could pick up “the head”. The underworld taught Orpheus that true creation requires us to give up ownership. But I want to go back to an even older underworld myth. One who precedes human heroes. One that even predates the trees. 500 million years ago, plants moved from the sea to the coast and to drylands. These are not the plants you would recognize today. They had no root systems. Fortunately, the fungi were already in contact with the soil, and for tens of millions of years they acted as substitute root systems for the plants that would slowly develop into the forests and food crops we depend on. Although plants have their own rhizomatic networks, they can only access water and nutrients within a small radius. Mycorrhizal systems entering their rhizomes act to extend these networks, connecting older trees with relatives and linking diverse matrices of plant, fungal, and microbial communities. Ninety percent of plants depend on their fungal helpers. The connection is so strong that endophytic fungi are transferred vertically to the new generation via seeds. When fungi live on the very seed that will become a tree, their role falls somewhere between midwife, parent, lover, and friend, helping the tree harness the rich nutrients in the soil and the community of other beings that make up a ecosystem. . Simply put, the fungi taught the plants how to enter the underworld. And it was only in the underworld that plants learned to form a community. Community that unites differences: in kind, in age, in biosemiotic language. Fungi taught plants that survival is not about individuation. It's about being radically involved. So involved that you let your friends into your own genetics, into your root systems. The connection is so strong that endophytic fungi are transferred vertically to the new generation via seeds. When fungi live on the very seed that will become a tree, their role falls somewhere between midwife, parent, lover, and friend, helping the tree harness the rich nutrients in the soil and the community of other beings that make up a ecosystem. . Simply put, the fungi taught the plants how to enter the underworld. And it was only in the underworld that plants learned to form a community. Community that unites differences: in kind, in age, in biosemiotic language. Fungi taught plants that survival is not about individuation. It's about being radically involved. So involved that you let your friends into your own genetics, into your root systems. The connection is so strong that endophytic fungi are transferred vertically to the new generation via seeds.