Unclean: What Foraging Wild Fungi
Taught Me About Impurity Culture

by SOPHIA MOSS

“Collaboration means working across difference, which leads to contamination. Without collaborations, we die.”
—Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World

I smelled them before I saw them, a sprawling cluster of Pleurotus pulmonarius, pale oyster mushrooms erupting from a stump and filling the air with their gentle licorice scent. Their soft bodies easily broke off the hardwood, and I carried them home like children sweetly asleep in my arms. Amateur that I was, I spent a full day consulting field guides and confirming my find with online groups before I finally cooked the mushrooms—one of the safest species, easy to identify with no toxic look-alikes—for dinner. This was over three years ago, and this single find reshaped my entire life.

I’ve dreamed of mushrooms almost weekly ever since, mysteries fruiting from the underworld of my subconscious. The same dream recurs over and over: I am hunting mushrooms in the decaying ruins of my childhood church, finding something good to eat in a ruined and ruinous place.

The same year I found the oysters, I received a psychiatric diagnosis of two types of PTSD, both complex and comorbid. “I encourage you to consider therapy for religious trauma syndrome,” said the psychiatrist. “A lot of your symptoms seem to come from your experiences inside evangelical purity culture.”

I sought out therapists, read self-help books, and pursued medication—and yet, until the oysters, until the dreams, nothing made more than a surface-level change. What I needed was a metaphor powerful enough to make my mind into something completely new, and I found it in the mushrooms.

Those in the mycological community like to joke about the mysterious effect wild fungi have on the minds of those who hunt them—how once you find the forbidden fruit, you are forever in its grasp—and we’re not even talking about the other kind of mushrooms here. Folks quip about being proselytized and parasitized, powerless against an irresistible kind of mind control that turns innocent foragers into fanatics who zealously spread their passion for mycology like spores upon the wind.

Maybe you just never forget your first.

“What does it mean to be pure?” a Sunday School teacher asked our fifth-grade class one morning. We wore floor-length skirts and tops that covered our collarbones. Some of us wore scarves to cover our hair. We all wore the face of girlish fear that was called modesty.

At ten years old, we already knew the answer by heart: “To be pure is to be set apart. To be special. To be untouched.”

The teacher explained that purity was God’s special call to women, that it was what set us apart not only in God’s eyes but also (especially) in the eyes of the men it was our divine destiny to marry. In contrast with “women of the world,” who could cause godly men to stumble through immodest action and dress, we were to safeguard our purity as our most sacred treasure. In doing so, we would become desirable to men while also ensuring the eternal safety of our souls.

I can’t remember which illustration the teacher used then—I sat through all of them over the course of my adolescent years. Did she pull the petals off a rose to show how it lost its loveliness the more it was touched? Did she squeeze toothpaste out of a tube and demonstrate how once it came out, it could never be put back in? Did she (the worst by far) spit out a wad of chewed gum and hold the sticky mess up to the class, asking who could possibly want it now that it had been used? Whatever the metaphor was, she made her point, and we learned the lesson. To be touched is to be contaminated, to become worthless in the sight of God and men.

Modern evangelical purity culture claims its basis in the teachings of an ancient Middle Eastern religion which, like many belief systems, places heavy emphasis on taboo. From the very first pages, the books of the Torah are singularly focused on a lone binary: the uncrossable divide between life and death. These books of the law are like land sliced cleanly in two with a barbed-wire line through the middle: LIFE and DEATH are written like the names of nations on a map, and all other binaries—clean and unclean, sinful and holy, good and evil—fall neatly on one side or the other. The notion of purity lies in the fundamental understanding that there is no such thing as no-man’s-land; you are either one thing or the other, and crossover is not possible without contamination. For trespassers, reentry is only granted by undergoing the strict and specific rites of purification, such as the prescription found in the book of Numbers for anyone who touches a dead body: wait seven days, mix water with the ashes of a burnt calf, and sprinkle the mixture over their body and belongings. Then, and only then, can they return to the community.

In a world before germ theory, modern medicine, and birth control, there is deep intelligence to these constructs that helped humanity better coexist with the unseen, unknown, microbial world. Rituals of quarantine and purification kept the community safe from the spread of diseases that might have otherwise wiped out entire populations. Likewise, some historians argue that in a world without a scientific understanding of reproduction, codification of sexuality offered a form—albeit a clumsy, imperfect one—of birth control in a time when one in every two women died during childbirth. The binary world prescribed by the Torah offered an ancient way to keep the community safe.

Except, as anyone who has spent much time in the kingdom of fungi knows, these binaries don’t really exist. 

In scholarly settings, the definition of queerness has less to do with gender and sexuality and more to do with ideas, individuals, and existences that resist societal binaries and expectations. bell hooks famously defined queerness as “not being about who you’re having sex with (that can be a dimension of it); but queer as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.” That which lives in liminality, in the murk of the margins, at the borders of what we know and what we don’t know yet—that is queerness, and fungi are by this understanding the queerest creatures we know.

The more we learn about the growing field of mycology, the more the heteronormative binaries we place on ourselves and on the natural world are challenged by the sheer existence of so many other ways of being. An article by Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian and Hasmik Djouliakian sums up the relationship of fungi to queerness elegantly: “Mycology is queer at the organismal level. Fungi are nonbinary: they are neither plants nor animals, but possess a mixture of qualities common to both groups, upending the prevailing binary concept of nature. It is rare for a fungus to have only two biological sexes, and some fungi, such as Schizophyllum commune, have as many as 23,000 mating types. When two compatible fungi meet, their mycelia will fuse into one body, sexually recombine, then remain somatically as one as ‘they’ continue to live, grow, and explore in their environment.” As disciples of mycology, we are forced to reckon with and release our bias toward binary thinking in order to comprehend the nature of the fungal kingdom. This release can turn back to our own lives and help us rethink the binaries we create for human beings as well.

Fungi thrive in environments as extreme as the exploded reactor at Chernobyl and as tame as the membranes of our eyelids. Even the most basic border between self and other is called into question by the everywhere existence of fungi; we breathe in approximately 10 billion mold spores in a twenty-four-hour cycle, our gut relies on a healthy interplay between bacteria and fungi to function, and our skin in both its living and decay nourishes dozens of fungal types over the course of our lifetime. And—perhaps the clearest overlap between the queer human community and the mycological world—fungi refuse to let us forget that the world revels in its inherent sexuality. We can distance ourselves from apples as ovaries, from the sperm we spread when making a wish on a dandelion, but the phallic resemblance of mushrooms, which are the sex organs of the larger fungal body, makes it very hard to detach from the erotic occurrences that are the very stuff of life.

The very queer existence of fungi, then, is an outright denial of the separations purity culture so desperately seeks to uphold. Within purity culture, we are taught to divide the spirit from the body, the sexual from the divine, the human from the world around them—to believe it is even possible to be set apart. Fungi, by contrast, show us the possibilities of other ways of existence, ways that invite us to party with paradoxical reality instead of neatly categorizing our world into one thing or the other. As the agents of decay that alchemize dead matter into fertile soil, fungi complicate the border between life and death and integrate even these most obvious of opposites. Fungi ask us to imagine that if even life and death can be synonyms, what else in our world could be brought together instead of torn apart?

Literally and metaphorically, mushrooms decompose the world as we know it and bring about something completely new.

Here is a definition we overlooked in Sunday School: another understanding of purity is sterility. And to be sterile means that you are not a part of life.

Purity culture confined me to a negative space; disconnected from my body, from the world, and ultimately from reality, I was something more unnatural than dead. I was truly set apart, removed from the cycles of being that keep the world in motion, and no living thing can survive for long in isolation.

Finding the oyster mushrooms felt like an invitation back into life—in all its wildness, mystery, fecundity, and paradox. I followed the mushrooms back to a way of being that reintroduced me to my human place in a wider world: one inclusive of the earth, of queerness by every definition, of self-evolution and integration. What purity culture sought to separate, fungi brought back together.