Outtakes: Recognizing Mushroom Imagery in Medieval Art

Michael Hoffman 10 a.m. August 17, 2025 – The article draft

Crop by Michael Hoffman

Contents:

links might only work on desktop Chrome or Edge:

Motivation for this Page

story of my life: removing tons of text from draft article. Need to EXTREMELY shorten and rein-in the draft article wordcount.

Orig page needs word count like 1K not 100K. Not 5 pages of text; 1 PowerPoint slide + 5 pictures/pages.

Crop by Michael Hoffman

EXTREMELY Reduce Word Count, to only 1 page of text + 5 pages containing 5 images

August 17, 2025

  • Page 1: 1 PowerPoint slide w/ condensed technical summary points.
  • Page 2-6: 5 images.

Don’t deliver same level of comprehension as accomplished in our 1-hour discussion with church members (= 80 pages of text).

List the summary points, only.

Abandon “Features” list for each of 5 images.

List condensed points — powerpoint style – 1 page of text, only; separated. Not alternating text & images. These bullet points merely list the key tech-term points, not “explain” anything.

THIS IS THE TEST-GRADER’S SOLUTION-KEY GRADING SHEET: DOES THE STUDENT LIST THE KEY WORDS OR NOT?

Link to my site for “explanation”.

Non-goal: Explanation.

Goal: List the key summary condensed technical points, as 1 PowerPoint slide.

The Article Draft

Western, European religious history includes fully developed, advanced use of Psilocybin mushrooms, depicted in the genre of branching-message mushroom trees, including a combination of {mushroom}, {branching}, {handedness}, and {stability} motifs.

Myth: Indigenous = Psilocybin, Europe = Amanita. 1st-gen entheogen scholarship

1st-generation entheogen scholarship (the Secret Amanita paradigm) – Ruck’s partly correct paradigm & narrative.

2nd-generation entheogen scholarship (the Explicit Psilocybin paradigm) – Samorini 1998, Michael Hoffman, Dr. Jerry Brown.

You cannot look only for mushroom imagery, because that’s not the central message of the the mushroom-tree artists, and mushroom imagery is presented along with {branching}, {handedness}, and {stability} motifs.

Panofsky 1952 main objection to reading Plaincourault fresco as Amanita is branching. Quote letter here.
https://egodeaththeory.org/2025/01/07/panofskys-letters-to-wasson-transcribed/#Sentence-2-6 —

“But even that is not very probable because even the most mushroom-like specimens show some traces of ramification [branching]; if the artists had labored under the delusion that the model before him was meant to be a mushroom rather than a schematized tree he would have omitted the branches altogether.”

Huggins 2024 main objection to reading mushroom-trees as mushrooms is the pressence of branching motifs. Thus it makes sense to continue focusing on Great Canterbury Psalter images, rather than other, similar images.
https://egodeaththeory.org/2024/11/23/huggins-foraging-psychedelic-mushrooms-wrong-forest/

Design of the Article

A few pages, for publishing in my church reader.

Least Content; Least Goals

If nothing else, the article accomplishes 1 specific thing: a skill.

In a 1-hour meeting with S. & N., I successfully taught them to read my favorite 5 images from Great Canterbury Psalter, and they proved their ability to contribute to such interpretation:

  • ☀️ f11
  • 🚌 f109
  • 🙃 f134
  • 👑 f145
  • 🐴 f177

☀️ f11

Features:

  • mushrooms point to scale balance pans.
  • branching form in 4 mushrooms.
  • stand on right foot in “forbid” panel.
  • details in tree of knowledge crown, relate to Day 3 branching forms.

🚌 f109

Features:

  • no L limbs in ossuary corpse
  • net catches when fall, right foot kneel stance.
  • display the hand shape.
  • Row 1 L: terror hellmouth bad trip
  • Row 2 R: = asp, trying not to hear the ego death threatening.
  • diagonal trajectory from lower L to upper R

🙃 f134

Features:

  • row 1 L: teaching scene
  • row 1 M: white fire light
  • row 2 R: mushroom dispensary display case
  • throughout: left limb touch blade
  • row 2 R: stand on left foot; stand on right foot; float on no feet
  • row 2 M: height of L finger vs R finger causes wrath or mercy.
  • row 3 M: gathering Cubensis behind oxen.
  • row 2 M, row 3 L: ego death self-blading, cybercide.

👑 f145

Features:

  • row 1 L: instructing traders to stand on right foot
  • row 1 R: branching message tree
  • row 2 R: lockbox for blue produce

🐴 f177

Features:

  • horse looking-lines connect the cut-branch crown w/ God holding up via R hand.
  • winnowing basket = chute connecting balance guy w/ rams in furnace.
  • wrist corpse cross-over vs. two trees cross-under.
  • stand on left foot + crutch + balance
  • balancing guy w/ balance scale weighing Cubensis.
  • lockbox for brown produce

Branching Motif: How Branching and Non-Branching = the two complementary mental worldmodels

Handedness Motif: The Function of Handedness, Arbitrary Mapping of Left Limb = possibilism, Right limb = eternalism

Mushroom Motif

NOT the main payload message. Copy from my “two position statements” page, maybe that is the Fallacies page: summarizes the payload message (simple, the medium, then detailed).

Not “a mushroom”. rather, elements of mushroom imagery.

Stability Motif

Strategy: Focus on Great Canterbury Psalter

because recent Denier article proposes to battle in this arena.

I accept your terms of battle, since I’ve been expert on branching branching-message mushroom trees in the Great Canterbury Psalter since Nov. 2020.

The main objection by both Panofsky 1952 & Huggins 2024 is: Affirmers must explain the branching, in mushroom-trees.

My email to Dr. Jerry Brown around 2023 announced my realization that the branching was not whimsical or arbitrary, but is the main message (metaphysical non-branching as a mental worldmodel in the altered state).

Ronald Huggins’ 2024 article “Foraging for Psychedelic Mushrooms in the Wrong Forest: The Great Canterbury Psalter as a Medieval Test Case”

Motivation for this Page

To draft the short, focused article for the church reader.

See Also

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Author: egodeaththeory

http://egodeath.com

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