If Venus was a Mushroom

Her torso is corpulent, with vestigial arms placed on top of bulbous breasts and her legs taper to nubs. Several sources mention that she - and many other bulbous, tapering figurines like her from the Upper Paleolithic - never had feet, but possibly stood pegged in the ground. She had been stained with red ochre pigment and her head is a faceless orb with concentric bands of tiny bumps, similar to the cap of a fly agaric mushroom. As small as a mushroom, at 4 1/2 inches, I imagine her placed in the ground, with others like her, the way mushrooms sometimes appear in “fairy rings.” Their fruiting bodies can emerge above ground in a circle while mycelium roots connect and communicate underneath, for as long as several centuries.

Fly agaric or amanita muscaria, the classic red-capped, white speckled mushroom, is native to the northern hemisphere, and forms symbiotic relationships with pine, birch and oak trees. It contains a psychoactive chemical, muscimol, that can alleviate pain and act as a sedative/hypnotic, as well as a hallucinogen.

Mushrooms, more generally, had diverse purposes in the Paleolithic era - as food, as medicine, as salve, antiseptic, heat compress as well as tinder in starting fires. Mysterious, strange, sculptural in form, they can appear suddenly, for no apparent reason. They are often poisonous. Their life cycles are brief and they decompose quickly, only to reappear again the next year around the same time in the same place.

The seemingly spontaneous generation of amanita along with its capacity to produce hallucinogenic visions gives it special power and must have given it a special place in the communities that produced mushroom-sized Venus figurines across Eurasia. Amanita was found in the teeth of a long dead female shaman - referred to as the “red lady” - from the cave of El Miron in Spain 19,000 years ago.

An immature, button-stage amanita, in the entirety of its fruiting body, looks like both a “venus” figurine and a phallus. When cut into cross section, the not-fully-formed cap appears like protruding breasts with shrunken arms laid on top and the stem is like her narrowing, footless legs. Was there something for Paleolithic people to learn from the mushroom life cycle? If this was a fertility object, maybe it was meant to contain both fungal and human attributes, and be both male and female.

Mushrooms sprout from the ground after storms and at certain times of the year, driven by sky-bound phenomena like pressure in the atmosphere and distance from the sun. Groups of ancient women would bleed into the earth, in cycles driven by the phases of the moon. The magical Amanita Muscaria stimulates visions in the dense neocortex of humans, potentiating these connections between the terrestrial and celestial. Venus figurines entwine the fungal and human in mutually beneficial, cosmic rituals on a rock that floats through time and space.

Text by Jennifer Coates