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If mushrooms keep popping up in your life, here's what it means.
By Megan Hatch — Written on Aug 05, 2021
When going on a hike or walking around your neighborhood, you might come across a mushroom. Seeing a mushroom might not mean anything to you, but do you ever wonder, what is the spiritual meaning of mushrooms?
We can use mushrooms for cooking, with the fungus found in dishes like mushroom truffle pasta or mushroom soup. We also know mushrooms for their psychedelic powers, which experimentalists know as taking shrooms, as mushrooms do have a history of being used for medicine.
But what else do we know about mushrooms and their spiritual meaning? Well, the weird and sometimes gross-looking fungi actually have a long history behind them.
What is the spiritual meaning of mushrooms?
Mushrooms play an important role in rituals and in the spirit world. If you see a mushroom, it's an event that holds a lot of spiritual meaning.
Mushrooms have been around for tens of millions of years and are essential in the operation of the biosphere and forest ecology.
They have helped humans survive and without them, we might not even be here.
Mushrooms were ancient humans' source of food and had a huge spiritual importance in their shamanic cultures, traditions, worldviews. We can also find them in fairy tale books, folk tales, and folklore, often as magic mushrooms.
Mushrooms can be symbols of longevity and good luck.
For the Olmec, Zapotec, Maya, and Aztec cultures, sacred mushrooms, called Teonanácatl, were declared as sacred and described as "God’s flesh."
Who doesn’t need a little more longevity and luck in their life?
Mushroom Symbolism in the Bible
Biblically, the mushroom is seen as the god of the Bible, and that the mushroom is Jesus.
Mushrooms in spirituality often represent gods, so it makes sense that mushrooms in the bible would represent God or Jesus.
The Amanita muscaria mushroom, or the Fly agaric mushroom, was also a sacred plant that allowed a person to communicate more closely with God when they ate it.
Indigenous Sami people who resided in Northern Finland on the Scandinavian Peninsula had a longstanding tradition with mushrooms that lasted through the 19th century through shamans. Shamans would perform healing rituals using Amanita muscaria, or the red-and-white toadstool fungus, and they considered it holy because of its hallucinogenic properties.
The shamans would act as conduits who were able to communicate between human and spirit worlds. The mushrooms would also bring gifts of introspection and were associated with the Winter Sun Solstice and the Rebirth of the Sun.
The Amanita Muscaria mushrooms are phallic-like symbols that represented the strong force of nature which the shaman believed was channeled by the powers of red caps on the mushroom.
In John Marco Allegro's 1970 publication, The Sacred Mushroom, and the Cross, he determined that the Bible is actually a series of myths describing secrets of the shaman's Amanita muscaria fertility cult rather than real stories or people.
According to Allegro, through doing a philological analysis of the structure of the ancient Sumerian language, and essentially the name Jesus meant "semen" and that Christ meant "giant erect mushroom penis."
Dreaming About Mushrooms
In a dream, mushrooms can represent finances, betrayal, lack of financial planning, backbiting, and positive changes.
If you dream of eating mushrooms that you enjoy, then that means you will experience prosperity with wealth in your life and drown in money.
However, if you dream of eating too many mushrooms, that means you aren't handling your finances well, and that someone is lying to you.
If you are picking mushrooms in a dream, that symbolizes wealth and could mean a lot of new and positive changes are soon to come into your life.
However, if you dream often of mushrooms often, then that means you have a problematic and indecisive nature.
Seeing Mushrooms in Your Daily Life
When you see an actual mushroom in your yard or in nature perhaps it could mean you're coming across the souls of the dead or that power is going to come into your life in some way.
Seeing mushrooms in general also mean that you have a lot of organic material in the soil of your yard. Mushrooms are helpful because they can grow out of nowhere to help break down organic material which makes your soil more productive.
Spiritually, if you see a mushroom in real life it could be a symbol of any of these popular meanings including good luck, longevity, energy, safety, prosperity, rebirth, good or bad transformation, and enlightenment.
Here are 3 common spiritual truths about mushrooms:
1. Mushrooms are essential for good health.
Mushrooms served both spiritually and physically essential to one's health for the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans.
Mushrooms were considered an important source of food for both health and pleasure.
2. Dreaming without seeing mushrooms holds a spiritual lesson.
Dreaming about a mushroom is only a reflection of what happened to you in reality if you actually encountered them. If you didn't, then your dream actually does carry a message for you.
Mushroom dreams can reveal your cautions and concerns about certain choices and situations.
There's something important in your life that you need to make a decision on and are afraid of potentially making the wrong choice.
3. A ring of mushrooms either means good or bad fortune for you.
A ring of mushrooms in many cultures was a fairy ring or a marking of fairies nearby.
By coming across a fairy ring, it could mean good luck is coming to you, promising fertility or that good fortune will be in your future. However, others view the circle as seeing would mean you would be terribly cursed.
The ring was also seen as a portal to another realm, so those who broke the ring without caution met terrible fates including being cursed, becoming permanently invisible, losing an eye, or becoming blind.
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Megan Hatch is a writer at YourTango who covers pop culture, love and relationships, and self-care.