by Sophie Strand
Featured image by Neil Krug
I sit with the mushrooms all summer. They “fruit” ten separate times in a tiny plot of land, big as
dinner plates, at the intersection of two streets behind my apartment. Are they paired with the
Magnolia tree, or the muscular Oak? I gently rest a finger on the pearlescent dome of the biggest
one. I breathe in deeply. Yes. An almost electrical burning. A taste I remember from soldering
together pieces of stained glass. Powerful. And poisonous. I learn later they are false parasols,
confirming my intuition. Earlier this past spring on a forest walk with my mother she asks me
about the proliferation of a new plant with lacy white flowers. Without looking I let the plant
speak through me, “I don’t know but don’t touch them. They are very poisonous.” When I look
closer, I identify the plant as wild hemlock, enjoying a bumper crop across the Northeast. Very
poisonous indeed. My first herb teacher taught me to ask before looking up. “Let the plant tell
you what you need to know first. Let them tell you the most important thing.” And yet I’m still
shocked when the flavor that arrives before I pull out my field guide is correct.
Poison has not always been synonymous with peril. It is a doublet of the word “potion” meaning
a medicinal and often magical substance. In its oldest versions, the Latin potionem, it simply
meant a beverage. In other languages the word for poison often derives from the word for gift
indicating that in its earlier forms it meant “to give a portion”. The negative connation seems to
arrive in the 16th century, and to be a highly gendered event coinciding with the Inquisition’s
demonization and genocide of female herbalists and “potion makers”. Before that poison seems
to have indicated the strength of a substance rather than a classification of toxicity. And in fact,
an early understanding of potions was that dosage was more important than substance. A potion
could be a medicine or a poison depending on a few extra drops. This is best represented by the
Greek word “pharmakon” that could be translated as either “drug”, “remedy”, or “poison”.
I pick one of the False Parasol mushrooms next time they fruit. I know the toxin can’t travel
through my skin. It must be ingested in order to kill. And yet there’s the citrus sting of adrenaline
on my tongue. The prickle of otherness alongside my spine. I gaze into the finely cut gills on the
underside of the cap. Poison as it is colloquially used does not feel like the right word to describe
this experience. I need a word that encompasses the animacy of this being. It’s mutability and the
medicine it transmutes by saying, “Don’t eat me, but acknowledge me. Greet me. Meet me.”
Poison feels like a term of ownership. A blanket of anthropocentrism that blinds us to the other
characteristics of a being. Poison ivy. Poison oak. Poison hemlock. All it indicates is its toxicity to
us – human beings. Poison is a word of possession. A word that can act like a punctuation mark. A
period that dissuades further interrogation. But poison is slippery. Mycophiles (mushroom-lovers)
know there are plenty of mushrooms that resist easy classification. Some cultures identify a fungi
as poisonous while others find it delicious in small amounts. There are mushrooms you can safely
eat…twice. I think of the strange “potions” that were ancient wines: mixtures of psychoactive
herbs and fungi and fermented grapes that the apostle Paul notes in one of his epistles have killed
several Christians. In his book The Immortality Key, Brian Muraresku charts how wine and beer
were much more powerful substances than our modern variety: just as easily killing you or
driving you into a psychedelic state, than providing a safe, velveteen intoxication. The word
pharmakon works much better for these potions.
On my walk back from visiting the mushrooms I gingerly step over a discarded packet of trail
mix, spilling crushed peanuts into the road. I am deathly allergic to peanuts and know that this
innocuous legume that others find pleasing is a poison to me, even in its most homeopathic
dustings. Is the peanut a poison then? I roll the word around on my tongue. Poison is always
subjective. Always more a reflection of the constitution of the potion-drinker, than it is of the
substance itself.
My favorite poisons are the poisons that pump full the narrative circulatory system of my beloved
legend Tristan and Isolde. A poisoned sword wound leads English Tristan across the sea to the
botanical ministering of his future Irish lover Isolde. Later on, a poisoned dragon’s tongue will
reunite him with Isolde once again. And then there is the famous “love potion” itself that the
lovers share. This potion always registers to me as more poison than any of the previous
substances. Already mutually entranced, the potion deepens infatuation into tragic romance. The
substance that is supposedly positive will ultimately spell their downfall. I always think of this
potion as a case of pharmakon. Tristan and Isolde are, in the earliest legends, already in love by
the time they drink the potion. The substance, then, is already an overdose. The pharmakon slips
from simple drug into narratively propulsive poison.
Poison can lead you to your beloved. The poison Tristan is afflicted with initially can only be
treated by a specific healer, a woman he does not yet know will be his great lover. The poison is a
compass. A map to where he must go. Later the love potion, turned to poison, will perform a less
easily defined purpose. It will catalyze the narrative itself, driving the drinkers into a story that is
as memorable as it is tragic.
Poison oscillates. It spirals in the cauldron of those pagan brewers. And it is often associated with
those people that a culture is trying to destroy – the women, the witches, the magicians, the
lovers, the herbalists. A good example is the folkloric “golden silkworm” or “Gu” poison of
China. The tasteless toxin was reported back as early as the Shang Dynasty (14th century BCE)
and was supposedly created by imprisoning five toxic creatures in a container, letting them kill
and eat each other. Traditionally this gladiatorial event included a centipede, a snake, and a scorpion.
The remaining being was supposed to represent an accumulation of extremely potent
poison. The important historical context is that this poison was reported to be concocted and
utilized by minority female populations in Southern China: the Lingnan and Miao. It was
associated with sexual appetites and an ability of these “rough” women to enchant and then
destroy guileless visiting gentlemen. Like the medieval potion, Gu says more about sexism than it
does substance.
Sometimes I think of myself as Gu. An accumulation of events – of venoms and violences – that
have condensed inside me. I am the gold silkworm. That being that persists after being sealed in
the container with snakes and scorpions and centipedes. I have not been destroyed by the events
that tried to destroy me. I have been fermented. Amplified. Made into a potion.
No wonder, in a culture that has shown itself dedicated to immoderation, we have simplified the
word poison. When you never honor the dosage of anything – be it monoculture, pesticide,
ecocide, development, human narratives – how can you possibly honor the delicate dosage of
plants and fungi and more unruly substances?
The mushrooms are constellated across the grass behind my home, spit-polished by a rainstorm.
Pearlescent. I think poison has something to teach me about finesse. About intuition. About ways
of knowing a being that don’t include possessing, extracting, or eating it. Poison interrupts the
extractive nature of anthropocentrism. I cannot eat you. I cannot know you in the ways that I
normally know something.
I tip between the two personally, my genetic condition making a food nourishing one day, and a
life-threatening toxin the next. Poison teaches me to step lightly, to ask questions before I taste.
And finally, I think poison might have something to teach me about love. Just like the poison
opens in Tristan a wound that only one person can heal, I think poison can teach me about
the silhouette of the one I am seeking. Poison I pray to you. Place me on the map. Point me towards
my own heart.
About the author
Sophie Strand is a writer based in the Hudson Valley who focuses on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology. Her first book of essays The Flowering Wand: Lunar Kings, Lichenized Lovers, Transpecies Magicians, and Rhizomatic Harpists Heal the Masculine is forthcoming in 2022 from Inner Traditions. Her eco-feminist historical fiction reimagining of the gospels The Madonna Secret will also be published by Inner Traditions. Her books of poetry include Love Song to a Blue God (Oread Press) and Those Other Flowers to Come (Dancing Girl Press) and The Approach (The Swan). Her poems and essays have been published by Art PAPERS, The Dark Mountain Project, Poetry.org, Unearthed, Braided Way, Creatrix, Your Impossible Voice, The Doris, Persephone’s Daughters, and Entropy. Follow her work on Instagram: @cosmogyny, on Facebook, and at www.sophiestrand.com
