twenty three

‘Look at that! Exactly as I’d heard. Now, from what I have been told of The Forrester it was on a mission to collect specimens from the Yaxatac forest. And this is particularly interesting, not just to the botanist in me. Anthropologically the peoples of this region are said to have exotic and wild religions, whose practices are barbaric and violent. 

‘One such tribe in the region, the Axtazazl, has become famous in learned circles for their use of the Death’s Head mushroom, the very mushroom we have here.

‘Of the Axtazazl I know that they were a polytheistic people, and like many tribe’s pantheons there was a god of death, in this case being affiliated with thunder. This god’s name, Alcalaztl, would roughly translate as Death Sky, and the many myths surrounding him often attribute to him the aspect of clouds in the formation of a skull. They were a war like people, who were practitioners of human sacrifice, and so the image of a human skull was always floating before them, a warning and a boon.

‘Keeping skulls in sight came to be an important thing in Alcalaztl’s cult, and all skulls were linked to him. Therefore temples were often decorated both with real human skulls, but also huge stone ones, in front of which blood of victims would be poured, sometimes even being smeared all over these monoliths, leaving them sticky and rusty in shade. Furthermore, other skulls in nature were said to be linked to the god, even those which grew on a certain fungus, and so it was that the Death’s Head fungus came to be cultivated by these people and to slowly evolve so that the black and white pattern on the cap really was a close resemblance to a skull. The evolutionary path is a simple one here, with the people believing that the closer the cap represented a skull, the more power it had to contact Alcazatl. Over many generations the resemblance was uncanny.

‘Decisively, another quality of these Death’s Head mushrooms was their psychedelic properties. Filled with strong psychotropic chemicals, the priests of the cult would ingest them and then enter a trance-like state where they would chant, dance, perform the sacrifices in the temples and then relay any messages to the people; ‘more sacrifice’, ‘attack the neighbouring tribe after the rains’ and so on.’

Each of them now was peering into the little box, looking at the mushroom that seemed to peer back with vitality. Its cap was hard and desiccated from the long journey, but the skull was still clear.

‘Evil. It looks evil to me. What a strange people to see this as a way of communicating with gods.’ Roy was sceptical, averse to topics such as death and violence.

‘Perhaps Roy, but what cannot be doubted is the mushroom’s chemical properties. Shall we do some experiments?’

Excitement filled his question, and they all agreed. An experiment would take place in order to ascertain the properties of the fungus, and perhaps to discover if it really did have almost magical properties.

‘Reality is a dangerous thing to play with my friends. We must be very cautious. But for now let us relax and rest. You have had a long day and I have too,’ here he opened three more bottles of beer, ‘a toast, to discovery,’ and they all drank deeply.