In the summer of 1951, the small French town of Pont-Saint-Esprit woke to a nightmare. A man leaped from a second-story window, screaming that tigers were chasing him. A woman ran through the streets insisting that snakes were crawling inside her stomach. Dozens of people were admitted to psychiatric hospitals in states of violent delirium, and five died.
Authorities first suspected a gas leak, then mass hysteria, and some even whispered about CIA involvement. The truth turned out to be far more ordinary and far older: ergot, a fungus that had produced this exact kind of terror for thousands of years, had contaminated the flour used to bake the town’s bread. Pont-Saint-Esprit was neither the first nor the last community to suffer this fate, because fungi have accompanied humanity since the very beginning of its history—sometimes as food, sometimes as medicine, and sometimes as the greatest nightmare an entire civilization could face. The story of the relationship between humans and fungi does not begin in a laboratory or a wheat field.
It begins high in the Alps, more than five thousand years ago, beside the body of a man we now know as Ötzi. In 1991, mountain climbers discovered a frozen corpse in a glacier on the border between Austria and Italy. The man had died around 5,300 years earlier, and scientists named him after the valley where he was found. Beside him they uncovered what was essentially an ancient first-aid kit, containing two types of fungi.
One was birch polypore, which grows on birch trunks and has antibacterial and blood-clotting properties. The other was tinder fungus, the same fungus ancients used as fuel for fire because its dried flesh glows slowly and steadily like charcoal. Ötzi did not carry these fungi by accident. Analyses suggest he likely suffered from parasites and used birch polypore as an early treatment for intestinal worms.
This means that thousands of years before the invention of writing, humans were not merely eating mushrooms. They were studying their properties, distinguishing medicinal from poisonous species, and carrying them as part of a medical kit that accompanied them through life. This was not an isolated case. Archaeological discoveries around the world show that the relationship between humans and fungi developed independently in many regions.
In Siberia, indigenous shamans used fly agaric mushrooms in rituals long before written records existed. In North America, native peoples collected mushrooms both as food and for treating wounds. But in the highlands of Central America, the relationship took a form that would change global culture forever. Thousands of years before Europeans arrived in what is now Mexico and Guatemala, the Aztecs and other Mesoamerican peoples discovered psilocybe mushrooms containing the psychoactive compound psilocybin.
They called these fungi teonanácatl, which translates to “flesh of the gods. ” The name said everything. These mushrooms were not considered mere food or medicine. They were believed to be a direct channel of communication with the divine world.
Priests and rulers consumed them during the most important religious ceremonies, coronations, and healing rituals. Archaeologists have uncovered stone carvings shaped like mushrooms, known as “mushroom stones,” in Guatemala and Mexico, some dating back more than two thousand years, demonstrating how deeply rooted the practice was long before the rise of the Aztec Empire. Spanish chroniclers who arrived in the region in the sixteenth century described rituals in which participants consumed the fungi and entered states they described with horror as “demonic possession. ” The Spanish Inquisition responded as it did to anything that did not fit the Catholic worldview.
The use of teonanácatl was officially banned. The rituals were persecuted, and knowledge of the sacred use of these mushrooms was buried in secrecy for four centuries. The world only learned that the practice had never fully disappeared in the mid-twentieth century, when researchers rediscovered these traditions in remote villages of Oaxaca. The knowledge had simply been hidden, passed down in whispers from generation to generation until authorities finally looked away.
While fungi were becoming a sacred conduit to the gods in Central America, attitudes in another part of the world developed in a completely different direction, though no less dramatic. In ancient Egypt, according to the Roman historian Pliny the Elder, mushrooms were considered food fit only for pharaohs. Common people were forbidden even to touch them. The reason was simple and perfectly logical for that time.
Mushrooms appeared from the ground suddenly, with no visible seeds and no flowers, as if they came from nothing after rain or thunderstorms. For the ancient mind, this meant only one thing: they had been sent by the gods, perhaps by lightning itself, since mushrooms appeared in great numbers after violent storms. The ancient Greeks and Romans regarded mushrooms with a mixture of admiration and fear. They were served as delicacies at elite feasts, yet people also understood how easily an edible mushroom could be confused with its deadly poisonous lookalike.
This thin line between luxury and mortal threat made mushrooms a favored tool for political assassination in the ancient world. According to numerous Roman historians, the emperor Claudius, who ruled during the first century CE, was poisoned by his wife Agrippina through a dish of mushrooms laced with death cap, one of the most toxic mushrooms on Earth, capable of destroying the human liver in just days. Similar rumors surrounded the deaths of other prominent figures of the era. The mushroom became a symbol of both luxury and hidden danger, resting on the plate of everyone who sat down to a banquet.
If the ancient world regarded mushrooms with cautious respect, medieval Europe descended into utter terror. And this terror had a very real cause, although it was completely invisible to the people of the time. Ergot, a parasitic fungus that infects rye grain and other cereal crops in cold, damp climates, silently contaminated the flour used to bake bread for entire villages for centuries. People who consumed contaminated bread suffered agonizing symptoms.
Their limbs grew numb, then burned as if on fire. Their blood vessels constricted so severely that some victims lost fingers and toes to tissue death. Others suffered hallucinations, convulsions, and fits of madness. The disease became known as “Saint Anthony’s fire” because people believed a pilgrimage to the relics of Saint Anthony would bring healing.
In reality, pilgrims simply stopped eating the contaminated local bread. Over the decades, historians have suggested that ergot poisoning may explain one of the most famous events in American history: the Salem witch trials of 1692 in Massachusetts. Several young girls began suffering from convulsions, distorted speech, and terrifying visions, which their contemporaries immediately attributed to witchcraft. Twenty people were executed.
Modern medical researchers point out that the rye crop that year grew under ideal conditions for ergot, and the symptoms of poisoning closely match the historical descriptions of the strange behavior displayed by the accused. A fungus invisible to the naked eye may have been responsible for one of the most notorious episodes of mass hysteria in human history. At the same time, European folklore increasingly portrayed mushrooms as the creations of witches and evil spirits. The rings of mushrooms that often appeared in meadows after rain became known as “fairy rings,” because people believed witches gathered there at midnight to dance with companions from the underworld.
Entering one of these circles was considered extremely dangerous. According to folklore, a person could fall into the fairy realm and never return, or be condemned to dance without stopping until death. This fear of mushrooms as creations of dark forces remained deeply rooted in the European imagination for centuries, which largely explains why Western science was so slow and reluctant to study them systematically. While Europe feared mushrooms, a completely different tradition was growing on the other side of the continent.
In China, mushrooms were not viewed as a threat for thousands of years, but as one of nature’s greatest gifts for health and longevity. The reishi mushroom, known in traditional Chinese medicine as lingzhi, became known as the mushroom of immortality. Emperors of successive Chinese dynasties, beginning at least with the Han dynasty, sought this mushroom in the wild as a symbol of eternal life and spiritual enlightenment. Ancient texts describe it as the plant of the gods, available only to a chosen few.
The difficulty of finding wild reishi, which grows rarely and only in remote mountain regions, strengthened its legendary status, making it a gift worthy of an emperor. Alongside this mythical appreciation for reishi, Chinese farmers spent centuries systematically experimenting with cultivating edible mushrooms as ordinary food. China is widely believed to have developed the world’s first methods for growing mushrooms on logs and compost about a thousand years ago, long before Europe had anything comparable. This contrast between Eastern and Western approaches to mushrooms, between viewing them as valuable food or fearing them irrationally, would shape the course of the global mushroom industry for centuries to come.
Western science did not begin studying fungi seriously until the eighteenth century, and even then, progress was slow. Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish naturalist who established the biological classification system still used today, ignored fungi as a distinct group worthy of attention, placing most known species with plants without clear distinction. Mycology emerged as a scientific discipline later than most other branches of natural science, largely because of centuries of cultural prejudice against these organisms. The decisive turning point came thanks to the man now known as the father of mycology.
In the early eighteenth century, the Italian botanist Pier Antonio Micheli conducted a series of experiments proving that fungi reproduce through spores rather than arising spontaneously from decaying matter, as was widely believed at the time. Today this seems like an obvious fact, but in his era it was a revolutionary discovery that effectively challenged thousands of years of myths about the mysterious and supernatural origins of fungi. If fungi reproduced through spores the same way plants reproduced through seeds, then they were subject to understandable natural laws rather than being products of magic or divine intervention. However, Micheli faced the same obstacle many researchers before him had encountered.
Convincing society that something considered frightening and supernatural for centuries was simply a poorly understood biological organism proved to be just as difficult as the scientific discoveries themselves. While scientists argued about classification, a far more practical revolution was taking place in France. In the late seventeenth century, the gardeners of King Louis XIV at Versailles discovered that the common white button mushroom could be cultivated industrially on beds of horse manure rather than waiting for it to appear by chance in forests. This discovery quietly spread among vegetable farmers in Paris.
But the real breakthrough came about a century later, when limestone quarrying beneath Paris left the city riddled with an extensive network of tunnels and caves underground. French farmers discovered that these abandoned quarries provided nearly perfect conditions for growing mushrooms: constant cool temperature, high humidity, and complete darkness year-round, regardless of the changing seasons above. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, an entire mushroom industry had developed underground in Paris. This is why the white button mushroom is still officially known as “Paris mushroom” in many languages around the world.
Growing mushrooms in darkness without natural light completely transformed the concept of mushrooms as unpredictable wild forest crops, turning them for the first time into a reliable, predictable agricultural product ready for large-scale commercial cultivation. If the history of fungi has a turning point comparable to any event in medical history, it occurred in London in 1928, almost entirely by accident. The Scottish bacteriologist Alexander Fleming returned from his holiday to his laboratory at St. Mary’s Hospital and discovered that one of his petri dishes containing a staphylococcus bacteria culture had been contaminated with a type of mold, likely through an open window.
Instead of simply discarding the ruined sample, as any other researcher might have done, Fleming noticed something unusual. Around the mold spot was a clear zone where the bacteria had been completely destroyed. The mold, which turned out to be a fungus of the genus Penicillium, was secreting a substance that killed bacteria directly. Fleming published his observations, but for more than ten years the discovery remained an academic curiosity because no one knew how to isolate the active substance in sufficient quantity and stability for practical use.
The crucial breakthrough came only at the beginning of the Second World War, when a team of scientists at Oxford, including Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, developed methods for the large-scale production of penicillin at the very moment wounded soldiers around the world desperately needed treatment for infections that killed more people than the battle wounds themselves. The United States rapidly established large-scale industrial penicillin production. By the time of the Normandy landings in 1944, a drug derived from an ordinary mold was already saving the lives of thousands of soldiers who would otherwise have died from blood poisoning. By the end of the twentieth century, penicillin and its derivatives had saved at least 200 million human lives, according to the most conservative estimates of medical historians.
The fungi that had been associated for centuries with decay, spoilage, and death turned out to be the source of one of the greatest medical achievements in the history of human civilization. After the Second World War, the world’s view of fungi began to change rapidly, and this shift extended far beyond medicine. Japan, with its long tradition of appreciating mushrooms, began exporting shiitake and other varieties on an industrial scale, while Japanese scientists became the first in the world to seriously research the potential of fungal polysaccharides in fighting cancer and boosting immunity. The United States, which had previously shown little interest in mushroom cuisine, began expanding its own industrial production of button mushrooms.
Today, Pennsylvania produces more commercial mushrooms than any other region in the country, with the industry concentrated in the small town of Kennett Square, unofficially known as the mushroom capital of the world. But the true global giant of the mushroom industry is China, which today produces more than 70 percent of all edible mushrooms on Earth, cultivating not only the familiar button mushroom but hundreds of traditional varieties, including shiitake, enoki, and wood ear, many of which had been grown in Chinese villages for centuries before the West even knew they existed. As the food industry expanded, the pharmaceutical industry based on fungi advanced rapidly as well. Beyond penicillin, fungi gave the world cyclosporine, a drug without which modern organ transplantation would simply be impossible, because it suppresses the body’s immune response and prevents rejection of transplanted organs.
Statin drugs, now taken by hundreds of millions of people around the world to lower cholesterol, were first derived from fungal cultures by Japanese researchers in the 1970s. The list of medicines that owe their existence to the humble fungus continues to grow to this day. In recent decades, the relationship between humanity and fungi has taken another remarkable turn. The psychoactive mushrooms that the Spanish Inquisition spent centuries trying to erase from Central American traditions have become the subject of serious clinical research in the twenty-first century at some of the world’s leading universities, including Johns Hopkins and Imperial College London.
Controlled studies on psilocybin have shown promising potential for treating severe depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and anxiety in terminally ill patients. As a result, several countries and regions have already begun reconsidering the strict legal restrictions that have remained in place for more than half a century. Meanwhile, fungi have become the focus of an entirely new field. Using mycelium, the root-like fungal network, as a material for construction and packaging, companies around the world have begun cultivating biodegradable alternatives to polystyrene foam, plant-based leathers for the fashion industry, and even experimental building bricks capable of growing and repairing themselves.
What was once considered destructive mold that spoiled food and damaged buildings is now one of the most promising materials of the future, with the potential to replace plastic and other non-recyclable chemical products. In this long history, fungi have even found a place in space. In recent years, NASA and the European Space Agency have begun seriously exploring the possibility of using fungal mycelium to build future habitats on the Moon and Mars. The idea is simple and elegant.
Instead of transporting heavy construction materials from Earth, astronauts could bring only compact fungal spores and grow lightweight, durable living structures directly on site using minimal resources supplied from Earth. Experiments aboard the International Space Station have already shown that certain fungi can grow in microgravity, opening the door to a future where humanity’s first buildings off Earth might literally be grown rather than built. Consider that for a moment. An organism the ancient Egyptians considered a mysterious gift from lightning, that medieval Europe associated with witches and feared for centuries, that was long viewed as a symbol of decay and corruption, is now being studied by scientists as a candidate for building humanity’s first homes on another planet.
The history of fungi began long before the invention of writing, with a small fungus carried in the bag of a man who froze to death in an Alpine glacier more than five thousand years ago. The peoples of Central America made it the flesh of the gods. The ancient Egyptians made it food for pharaohs. Medieval Europe burned it alongside those it deemed witches, never realizing that the true cause of madness was a hidden parasite growing in rye fields.
Chinese medicine elevated it as a symbol of immortality thousands of years before Western science recognized it as a separate biological kingdom. A single contaminated petri dish in a London laboratory became the starting point for a drug that saved hundreds of millions of lives. And today, those same organisms are being cultivated as materials for the future and tested as candidates for building humanity’s first homes beyond Earth.
Not a bad journey for a form of life that people feared for centuries simply because it appeared from the ground without any obvious reason.
