By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)
This essay was originally published as the cover story in the Summer 2025 issue of Orion Magazine.
“Who are you?” the caterpillar barks at Alice from atop the giant mushroom, and Alice, never quite having considered the question, mutters a child’s version of Emily Dickinson’s “I’m nobody! Who are you?”
Before he was Lewis Carroll, author of the Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland books, Charles Dodgson was a logician. His Wonderland is a series of nested thought experiments about change and the limits of logic. When the caterpillar tells Alice that one side of the mushroom would make her smaller and the other taller, Alice is stupefied by how something perfectly round can have sides, how a single thing can produce such opposite effects. And yet inside this fictional parable about the nature of the self is a biological reality about the nature of fungi — organisms that operate according to a different logic. They belong to a single kingdom, yet they are endowed with polar powers: the lion’s mane mushroom that can sharpen a mind and the honey fungus that can slay a tree; the cordyceps that can drive an ant to suicide and the psilocybin that can drive you to delirium; the Penicillium that has saved millions of lives and the Puccinia graminis that has blighted nations into deadly famines, changing the census of the world.
I grew up with Alice, and I grew up with mushrooms. Around the time I discovered Wonderland, my mother — my complicated mother oscillating between the poles of the mind — discovered foraging. Each weekend we would head into the forests of Bulgaria and spend long hours searching — for mushrooms, yes, but also for a common language between our two island universes. I delighted in the unbidden flame of a chanterelle on a bed of moss, in the shy bloom of a shaggy parasol between the pines, and, once, in finding a king bolete bigger than my awestruck face. Here was a world that was wilder yet safer than my own, resinous with wonder. I was captivated by the notion that edible species could have poisonous doubles, by the way the brain forms a search image that trains the eye on the inconspicuous domes. Mushrooms were helping me learn so much of what life was already teaching me — that a thing can look like something you love but turn dangerous, even deadly; that the more you expect something, the more of it you find.
Art by Ofra Amit from The Universe in Verse: 15 Portals to Wonder through Science & Poetry
An organism, of course, is not a parable or a metaphor. An organism is a cathedral of complexity, both sovereign and interdependent. Although mushrooms have populated our myths and our medicine for millennia, they were only factored into our model of the living world less than a century ago. When Linnaeus devised his landmark classification system, he divided nature into three kingdoms: two living (plants and animals) and one nonliving (minerals). The scientists of his generation gave fungi no special attention, brushing them under the conceptual carpet of plants. Darwin ignored them altogether, even though we now know that fungi are the fulcrum by which evolution lifted life out of the ocean and onto the land — they greened the earth, helping aquatic plants adapt to terrestrial life by anchoring their primitive roots, not yet capable of acquiring nutrients on their own, in a mycorrhizal substrate of symbiosis.
Perhaps, then, it is not accidental that a marine biologist — Ernst Haeckel, who coined the word ecology the year Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland entered the world — proposed Protista as a new kingdom of life for primitive life-forms that are neither plants nor animals; after some hesitation, he moved fungi into it. But it would be another century before, just after my mother was born, the American plant ecologist Robert Whittaker gave fungi their own kingdom of life.
Among the hundreds of thousands of species now known, and probably millions not yet named, there are ones that crumble at the lightest touch and ones that can survive the assault of cosmic radiation in outer space. On the western edge of North America thrives a fungal colony older than calculus, older than Jesus, older than the wheel. In the mountains of East Asia blooms a bright blue mushroom that bleeds indigo. A bioluminescent agaric lights up the forests of Brazil and the islands of Japan. Across tropical Taiwan grows a pale blue mushroom whose button is smaller than a millimeter. In the old-growth forests of Oregon dwells an individual fungus spanning eighteen hundred football fields — Earth’s largest living organism.
Without fungi, we would never know Earth’s most beautiful flowers — orchid seeds have no energy reserve of their own and can only obtain their carbon through a fungal symbiont — or Earth’s most alien: white as bone, the ghost pipe (Monotropa uniflora) lacks the chlorophyll by which other plants capture photons to alchemize sunlight into sugar for life. Emily Dickinson considered the ghost pipe “the preferred flower of life.” A painting of it graced the cover of her posthumously published poems. She was not wrong to think it “almost supernatural,” for it subverts the ordinary laws of nature: rather than reaching up for sunlight like green plants, the ghost pipe reaches down so that its cystidia — the fine hairs coating its roots — can entwine around the branching filaments of underground fungi, known as hyphae, sapping nutrients the fungus has drawn from the roots of nearby photosynthetic trees.
Art by Ofra Amit from The Universe in Verse: 15 Portals to Wonder through Science & Poetry
These mycorrhizal relationships permeate every ecosystem, making fungi the enchanted subterranean loom on which the fabric of nature is woven. Perhaps this is why it was so hard for so long to classify them separately from other life-forms. Perhaps we never should have done so. Perhaps it was a mistake to segregate them into a separate kingdom, or to have kingdoms at all, as nonsensical as dividing a planet veined with rivers and spined with mountains into countries bounded by borders that cut across ecosystems with the blade of warring nationalisms. Beneath every battlefield in the history of the world a mycelial wonderland has continued to thrive, continued to turn death into life so that ghost pipes and orchids may rise from where the bodies fell. Fungi made Earth what it is and they will inherit it. They are not a kingdom of life — life is their kingdom.
Almost exactly one year before Charles Dodgson dreamed up Wonderland to amuse ten-year-old Alice Liddell and her two sisters while boating from Oxford to Godstow, a letter by someone who signed himself Cellarius was printed in a New Zealand newspaper under the heading “Darwin Among the Machines.” It would later be revealed as the work of twenty-seven-year-old English writer Samuel Butler. Epochs before the first modern computer and the golden age of algorithms, before we came to call the confluence of the two “artificial intelligence,” Butler prophesied the birth of a new “mechanical kingdom” of our own creation, which would take on a life of its own alongside the kingdoms of nature. “In these last few ages, an entirely new kingdom has sprung up of which we as yet have only seen what will one day be considered the antediluvian prototypes of the race,” he wrote. “We are ourselves creating our own successors; we are daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their physical organisation… daily giving them greater power… self-acting power.” With an eye to the evolution of consciousness, he asked: “Why may not there arise some new phase of mind which shall be as different from all present known phases, as the mind of animals is from that of vegetables?” More than a century and a half before our modern worries about artificial intelligence, Butler worried that this new kingdom of life would be parasitic upon us. He worried that although the human mind has been “moulded into its present shape by the chances and changes of many millions of years,” the mechanical kingdom evolved in a blink of evolutionary time. “No class of beings have in any time past made so rapid a movement forward,” he cautioned. “Our bondage will steal upon us noiselessly and by imperceptible approaches.”
Perhaps we are on the brink of living Butler’s prophecy because we modeled our machines on the wrong kingdom, modeled their intelligence on our own, only to find that they are as parasitic and predatory as we are, as they parasitize and prey upon us. What if the correct model was always there, hidden beneath our bipedal overconfidence — all this time we have been building and walking and warring over Earth’s original networked intelligence, this planetary übermind transmitting the signal of life via the hypertextual protocols of hyphae, through the mesh topology of mycelium. What if our worship of binary logic is what warped Wonderland? Who would we be if our “artificial” intelligence turned natural, built on the nonbinary logic of symbiosis, restoring the unity of life into a perfect circle with no sides to take?
Art by Ofra Amit from The Universe in Verse: 15 Portals to Wonder through Science & Poetry
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