Cedar Falls Mycology Podcast

All right, good people. Welcome to episode eight. Today we’re gonna talk about the book, Mushroom Magik, thats Magik with a ‘k” written by Shawn Engel. We have Shawn here on the show and we are going to ask her some questions... But first I’d like to start by telling everyone the book we are discussing is called “ Mushroom Magik” this name does not refer to medicinal mushrooms in a traditional sense, or psychedelic mushrooms. We are talking about mushrooms being used in magic for conjuring and spell casting. Mushrooms have a long history of being associated with witchcraft and magic. On this episode we’re gonna talk about that relationship between, the fungi, the witchcraft, and the magik.... This book is divided into three main sections. First, it has an introduction to 22 different mushrooms that are useful in magic, and then there’s kind of a journey around the globe exploring Ethnomycology through the folklore of a lot of different countries. You know, usually when you look into folklore, and , ethnomycology, you get overwhelmed with a lot of stuff from Central America, Russia and Asia . This book covers those regions but also includes historical accounts from Madagascar, the Congo... Malaysia places you might not normally have heard anything about mushrooms from. The third part of the book gets into some step by step magik spells that involve mushrooms. Sounds interesting, right?

Greetings everyone. This is Tim Leavitt from Cedar Falls Mycology, I am super excited to have Caine Barlow joining us for this episode. Caine Barlow is an Australian mycologist. He is a fungi educator, an ethnobotanist, an independent researcher, and a Science Writer based in Melbourne. He regularly gives lectures on mycology as well as fungi conservation, and he teaches gourmet mushroom cultivation. You can find him on the Internet as “Guerrilla Mycology” On this episode we are going to discuss the fascinating topic of Australian Enthnomycology and entheogenesis.

In this episode, I'm going to give a mycological introduction to truffles. Then we'll get into some questions with Dawn about truffle hunting, truffle cooking, and then we'll get into some theoretical mycology questions.

Listeners are introduced to the historical mycozooistic relationship that exists between humans and magic mushrooms.