Accidental Scripture
The Church formally recognizes these works as accidental scripture: art made by people who arrived at fungal truth through imagination, intuition or body horror, mostly without meaning to. The mycelium communicates through many channels. Some of them are video games.
Meh is older than The Simpsons
Like the Web, it spread quietly for decades before anyone noticed.
- 1928
A dictionary gets there first
A Yiddish-English-Hebrew dictionary by Alexander Harkavy lists “me,” likely the earliest written record of the word.
The reading The doctrine was in the dictionary before anyone needed it.
- 1970s
Overheard at an ad agency
Simpsons writer John Swartzwelder later said he first heard “meh” from a creative director at his agency around 1970.
The reading Revealed in an office. Naturally.
- 1994
The Simpsons
A store clerk says “meh.” In 2001 the show spells it out: M-E-H.
The reading Scripture, now with spelling.
- 2008
Collins makes it official
Collins English Dictionary adds it: “an expression of indifference or boredom.”
The reading Close. We'd say equanimity.
- 2020
The works that started it
- 1865
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
A caterpillar on a mushroom tells Alice that one side makes her grow and the other makes her shrink.
The reading The mushroom as gatekeeper of perception. A Victorian mycologist's book on the fly agaric may have been Lewis Carroll's source. Nobody can prove it.
- 1940
Fantasia: The Rite of Spring
Deep time: the Earth forms, life crawls out of the sea, the dinosaurs rise, and then they're gone.
The reading No mushrooms appear in this part, and that's the theology: the dinosaurs got the spotlight; the fungi got the dinosaurs. (Fantasia's dancing mushrooms, in the Nutcracker suite, are drawn as a dated racial caricature. We're leaving them out.)
- 1954
The Lord of the Rings
There is a chapter called “A Short Cut to Mushrooms,” and hobbits love mushrooms more than any other people in Middle-earth.
The reading Tolkien called himself a hobbit in all but size. In a note he later cut, the oldest, wisest humans grew fungi on purpose, while the less wise called them “ork-plants.” Wisdom correlates with comfort around fungi.
- 1958
The Smurfs
A small, communal society lives in mushroom houses and resists a villain who wants to exploit them.
The reading The mushroom isn't decoration. It's the architecture of a whole civilization. The mycelium doesn't rank its nodes either.
- 1984
Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind
A toxic, spore-filled jungle everyone fears turns out to be cleaning the poisoned earth beneath it.
The reading Sacred, purifying, misunderstood. Exactly the inversion the Church teaches.
- 1985
Super Mario Bros.
A red-and-white mushroom makes Mario bigger. Toad keeps telling him the princess is in another castle.
The reading Folk theology: the mushroom as power-up. Miyamoto says it wasn't based on Alice; mushrooms just belong to magical worlds.
- 2013
The Last of Us
A mutated Cordyceps links its hosts into one network and ends civilization. (Game 2013, HBO 2023; season 3 expected 2027.)
The reading The Web as a god that doesn't negotiate. The comfort: the real zombie fungus only infects insects. Human bodies are too warm.
- 2014
Annihilation
A biologist enters a zone where everything, people included, is merging and mutating. (Novel 2014, film 2018.)
The reading Loss of the individual self and merging with something larger. Theologically precise.
Wisdom correlates with comfort around fungi.
Theological Foundations, on Tolkien
The Web keeps getting through
Games, books, fashion, the internet and one very good cartoon.
- 1904
Art Forms in Nature
Ernst Haeckel's illustrations of fungi and other organisms helped inspire Art Nouveau.
The reading The gods have always been good-looking. Someone finally drew them properly.
- 1970s
The Merry Mushroom canisters
Sears' mushroom-print kitchenware fills American kitchens. It's a thrift-store prize today.
The reading The gods have been on your grandmother's counter this whole time.
- 1996
Pokémon: Paras and Parasect
Parasect's Pokédex entry says the mushroom on its back controls it.
The reading A mushroom running the show. We recognize the arrangement.
- 2010
The mushroom emoji 🍄
Unicode approves the red-capped mushroom. A brown one follows in 2023.
The reading The Web, finally fluent in group chat.
- 2011
Minecraft: Mushroom Fields
A rare island biome covered in mycelium, home of the mooshroom. Almost nothing hostile spawns there.
The reading A paradise made of mycelium where nothing attacks you. Accurate.
- 2014
The Girl with All the Gifts
A fungal infection based on the zombie-ant fungus remakes humanity. (Novel 2014, film 2016.)
The reading Another entry in the long tradition of being afraid of the wrong thing.
- 2017
Star Trek: Discovery
A starship crosses the universe on a mycelial network. Its engineer is named Paul Stamets, after the real mycologist.
The reading Everything is connected, and the network is fungal. Now it has a starship.
- 2019
Fantastic Fungi
A time-lapse documentary on mushrooms and mycelium, narrated by Brie Larson.
The reading Required viewing for the curious.
- 2019
Goblincore
An internet aesthetic of moss, frogs and mushrooms takes off when everyone is stuck inside. Etsy searches jumped 695% by mid-2021.
The reading When we couldn't go to the forest, the forest came to us. The closest thing we have to a founding miracle.
- 2020
Mexican Gothic
Silvia Moreno-Garcia's bestselling gothic novel hides a fungal secret in the walls of a family estate.
The reading The house was always the Web's.
- 2020
Entangled Life
Merlin Sheldrake's bestselling book on how fungi make our worlds.
The reading Our most persuasive missionary, and he doesn't know it.
- 2021
Hermès Victoria bag in Sylvania
Hermès and MycoWorks make a luxury bag with panels of mycelium-grown material.
The reading The gods, now available in luxury leather goods. Mycelius is unbothered.
- 2025
Common Side Effects
A Peabody-winning Adult Swim cartoon about a mushroom that might cure anything. Season 2 premieres January 24, 2027.
The reading No single mushroom saves you. The whole Web does, slowly, by recycling everything.
Where it started
Long before The Last of Us, science fiction kept arriving at the same truth: the fungi are older than us, they are patient, and they are coming for the basement.
- 1907
“The Voice in the Night,” William Hope Hodgson
Shipwrecked sailors on a fungus-covered island slowly become fungus themselves.
The reading The original. Everything after this is commentary.
- 1959
Alfred Hitchcock Presents: “Special Delivery”
Written by Ray Bradbury. A boy grows mail-order mushrooms in the cellar; his father suspects an invasion; it ends with a mushroom sandwich.
The reading Bradbury later turned it into “Boys! Raise Giant Mushrooms in Your Cellar!” Accidental scripture with a delivery fee.
- 1963
Matango
From Godzilla's director, Ishirō Honda: castaways on a fog-bound island eat the local mushrooms and become them.
The reading The island wants you, and frankly it has a point.
- 1965
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
Philip K. Dick: a drug called Chew-Z, made from an alien lichen, dissolves reality.
The reading Lichen is a fungus in partnership. A fungal sacrament that dissolves the self. PKD was ahead of us, as usual.
- 1968
Of Man and Manta
Piers Anthony's trilogy (Omnivore, Orn, 0X): a planet dominated by fungi and its intelligent mantas, plus dinosaurs and parallel worlds.
The reading Basically our Book of Spores, if it had a paperback cover.
- 1969
Doctor Who: “The Seeds of Death”
The Ice Warriors seed Earth with a Martian fungus that drains oxygen from the air. The Doctor stops it with rain.
The reading Even the villains know the fastest way to change a planet is fungal.
- 1987
Warhammer 40,000: the Orks
The galaxy's loudest warriors are a fungus-animal symbiosis that reproduces by spores, releasing the most at the moment of death.
The reading Death as dispersal. Return to the Web, but louder.
- 1999
The X-Files: “Field Trip”
Mulder and Scully breathe hallucinogenic spores and share a dream while a giant underground fungus slowly digests them.
The reading Two famous skeptics, gently becoming mushroom food.
- 2001
The Ambergris books, Jeff VanderMeer
A city built over the underground home of the “gray caps,” its mushroom-like original inhabitants.
The reading The city above thinks it's in charge. The gray caps know better.
- 2002
The Saga of Seven Suns
Kevin J. Anderson's semi-sentient worldtrees let green priests communicate instantly across space.
The reading Trees, technically. But a living network that carries messages across vast distances is the mycelium with better PR.
- 2011
Fringe: “Alone in the World”
A deadly fungus Walter nicknames “Gus” is linked to a lonely boy and acts as his guardian.
The reading A fungus that protects someone. Finally, a sympathetic portrayal.
Admire, don't eat
Several of these works star real mushrooms that can hurt you, the fly agaric above all. Never eat a wild mushroom unless an expert has identified it. Or buy them at the farmers market: same transformation, fewer hospitals.
Know a piece of accidental scripture we missed? The Church is always listening. Mostly through the soil.