Brian Blomerth is not merely a visual storyteller—he is a cartographer of altered states, an archivist of forgotten epiphanies. In Mycelium Wassonii, he exhumes the half-buried legacies of R. Gordon and Valentina Wasson with a reverent irreverence, fusing dream logic with historical inquiry. This book, published by the ever-eclectic Anthology Editions, is less a biography than a sensory excavation—a mycelial map of cultural, romantic, and scientific entanglements.
Blomerth’s artistry flirts with chaos but lands squarely in genius. His aesthetic—whimsical, dense, and defiantly nonlinear—animates a timeline strewn with academic tedium and transforms it into a riot of color, form, and psychedelic texture. With Mycelium Wassonii, he conjures not just a biography, but an atmosphere; a layered, fungal fog of cognition in which readers don’t merely follow the Wassons—they become spores adrift in their ideological ecosystem.
A Portrait of Symbiosis: The Wassons in Bloom
R. Gordon Wasson was a JP Morgan banker with an obsession for folklore; Valentina Pavlovna Wasson, a Russian-born pediatrician, held a parallel fascination for cultural memory and medicinal mysticism. Together, they ventured far beyond the confines of their professions, diving into the underexplored terrain of ethnomycology—the study of human relationships with fungi. Their marriage was a symbiotic partnership, both intellectually fertile and emotionally charged.
Blomerth captures this peculiar alchemy with a gentle surrealism. He doesn’t reduce their story to dry facts but instead injects it with visual verve—Valentina’s thoughts sometimes emerge in plumes of mushroom spores, while Gordon’s ponderings snake through antique text scrolls and spore-laden footnotes. The couple’s seminal honeymoon in the Catskills, where they stumbled upon edible wild mushrooms, is rendered as a romantic hallucinatory prelude—a courtship intertwined with mycelial metaphor.
Visual Ethnography: Blomerth’s Psychedelic Fidelity
Rather than reconstructing the past with sterile precision, Blomerth channels it through a prismatic lens. His illustrations shimmer with arcane marginalia, obscure typography, and references that leap between cultures and centuries. This is ethnography as art brut—each frame is overloaded, textured, and kaleidoscopic, demanding the viewer to not just read but inhabit the tale.
The visual grammar of Mycelium Wassonii is subversive: comic strips warp into illuminated manuscripts; panels echo ancient codices; speech bubbles flirt with dadaist collage. Blomerth’s signature “adult contemporary dog-face” characters, with their elongated limbs, bug-eyed expressions, and grotesque serenity, act as both satire and symphony. They are grotesquely tender—a contradiction that mirrors the Wassons’ pursuit of spiritual transcendence through the earthy fruiting bodies of fungi.
From Oaxaca to Old Russia: A Cartography of Hidden Wisdom
At the heart of the Wassons’ journey lies their pilgrimage to Huautla de Jiménez in Oaxaca, Mexico, where they encountered María Sabina, a revered Mazatec curandera. It was here that they partook in sacred mushroom rituals, not as idle tourists, but as earnest seekers. This interaction, which would go on to inspire waves of Western psychedelic inquiry, is presented by Blomerth not as spectacle but sacrament. His illustrations respectfully weave the indigenous setting with symbolic gestures, eschewing exotification in favor of cultural reverence.
But Blomerth’s gaze does not remain tethered to the New World. The pages also voyage into Valentina’s Slavic past—blending Russian peasant folk tales, Orthodox iconography, and Eastern European fungal lore. Mushrooms appear not just as organisms but as oracles—agents that speak in symbols, idioms, and metaphysical puzzles. Each chapter feels like a new mycelial tendril branching out, entwining disparate worlds into one fungal mythos.
The Life Magazine Catalyst and Its Cultural Reverberation
When the Wassons penned “Seeking the Magic Mushroom” for Life magazine in 1957, they lit a cultural bonfire. This was no minor feature—it was the first public window through which American society glimpsed psychedelic potential. But the media frenzy that followed obscured the decades of rigorous research and spiritual inquiry that had led to that moment.
Blomerth corrects this oversight. He doesn’t merely chronicle the article’s publication; he contextualizes its inception and aftermath. His frames capture the disorientation of sudden fame, the bureaucratic tensions, and the quiet erosion of academic integrity amidst popular hysteria. What could have remained a footnote in pharmacological history is reframed here as a tectonic shift—a seismic fungal bloom in the American psyche.
Paul Stamets and the Valentina Vanguard
The book’s foreword by Paul Stamets, mycological luminary and advocate for fungi’s role in planetary healing, shines a long-overdue spotlight on Valentina. Stamets, known for his poetic fervor and scientific rigor, positions Valentina not as Gordon’s intellectual accessory but as a co-equal visionary—arguably more attuned to the metaphysical potential of fungi than her husband.
Blomerth honors this recalibration. In many spreads, Valentina becomes the story’s emotional fulcrum, guiding the reader through motifs of birth, decay, renewal, and intuition. Her presence, rendered in lush detail, transcends mere biography; she becomes an archetype of feminine gnosis—part scientist, part sibyl.
Hyperlinked History for the Digital Psyche
One of the most striking aspects of Blomerth’s work is how intuitively it mirrors our contemporary cognitive processes. We live in an era of hyperlinked consciousness—where tabs open and close like microcosmic universes, where knowledge acquisition is non-linear, intuitive, chaotic. Mycelium Wassonii doesn’t resist this—it revels in it.
The book demands that readers abandon passive consumption. You read it with your eyes, your gut, your curiosity. Marginalia invites detours; recurring motifs challenge memory. The density isn’t gratuitous—it’s experiential. Readers must mushroom their way through it—sprouting their own pathways, cross-referencing symbols, unpacking layers that refuse easy classification.
Between Comic and Codex: Redefining Educational Aesthetics
Educational literature, particularly in the sciences, tends to be impoverished in its visual language. It prioritizes data over aesthetics, clarity over ambiguity. Blomerth upends this paradigm. In Mycelium Wassonii, education is inseparable from enchantment.
The book operates like a psychedelic grimoire—a blend of instructional manual, spiritual tract, and absurdist comic. It’s the sort of tome that teaches through osmosis. You don’t just learn about spores and taxonomy—you feel them unfurling in your subconscious. The illustrations don't merely support the text; they expand and destabilize it, inviting a more embodied form of knowing.
A Book of the Body: Physicality and Page Ritual
In a time where digital reading dominates, Mycelium Wassonii demands tactile engagement. Its weight, its ink saturation, its paper texture—all these qualities conspire to create a ritualistic reading experience. Turning each page is like peeling back a layer of spore-dusted time.
Blomerth’s lavish page layouts mimic the movement of psychedelic experiences themselves—loops, spirals, sudden shifts in scale. Some pages vibrate with density, others offer meditative minimalism. The book unfolds like a ceremony—rhythmic, unexpected, transformative.
The Mushroom as Metaphor and Medium
In Mycelium Wassonii, the mushroom is more than a subject—it’s a method. Blomerth adopts its morphology, mimics its logic. Just as a mushroom is the visible tip of an immense, hidden network, so too does each page conceal a latticework of references, dialogues, and philosophical spores.
The mycelium, with its anarchic connectivity and refusal to centralize, becomes a metaphor for the very act of storytelling. History here is not linear. It branches, it decays, it re-fertilizes itself. Like fungal colonies, Blomerth’s narrative does not die—it transforms, mutates, spawns echoes in the minds of its readers.
A Visual Gospel for the Psychedelic Renaissance
We are, indisputably, in the midst of a psychedelic renaissance. What was once fringe is now funded, studied, and sanitized. Yet amidst this surge of clinical interest, Blomerth offers a necessary counterpoint—one that is chaotic, humane, and rooted in both wonder and wit.
Mycelium Wassonii doesn’t seek to validate psychedelia through metrics or randomized trials. Instead, it evokes the lived truths, the mythic undertows, the symbolic reverberations that scientific models often overlook. It’s a visual gospel for seekers, dreamers, and misfit scholars alike.
In its pages, the past is not dead. It grows underfoot, pulses in ink, and whispers in spores. Blomerth reminds us that knowledge—especially the ecstatic kind—isn’t always neat or legible. Sometimes, it blooms unexpectedly, between the cracks of language and logic.
Ethnomycology and the Art of Memory – Valentina Wasson’s Silent Genius
Behind every man canonized as “ahead of his time,” there’s often a woman banished to the margins. In Mycelium Wassonii, Brian Blomerth re-engineers the historical scaffolding to correct this erasure. At the center of his kaleidoscopic chronicle is Valentina Wasson—a polymathic force too long relegated to the footnotes of psychedelic lore. Rather than a passive spouse trailing behind Gordon Wasson’s scholarly plume, Valentina emerges as an intellectual co-architect, a radiant node in the mycelial network of countercultural thought.
Her name, absent from many mainstream narratives, pulses through Blomerth’s illustrated psychoscape like a subversive heartbeat. Each panel exudes reverence, not through bombast, but through the meticulous etching of her presence—quiet, contemplative, yet seismic in influence. Valentina was a pediatrician by profession, a writer by instinct, and an ethnomycologist by passion. And it all began with a mushroom.
The Honeymoon That Became a Hypothesis
In 1927, the Wassons ventured on their honeymoon in the misty hills of Upstate New York. Most newlyweds might have immersed themselves in matrimonial reverie or clinked glasses under rustic lanterns. Valentina, instead, crouched beneath foliage to examine a vibrant clutch of fungi pushing through the forest floor. Her Slavic heritage had attuned her to the world of mushrooms not as anomalies or toxins but as ingredients of folklore, medicine, and sustenance. Gordon recoiled instinctively, his Anglo-American sensibilities coded against fungal familiarity.
This cultural dissonance became the crucible in which their ethnomycological odyssey was forged. While Gordon would go on to pen eloquent essays about the "mycophobic" West versus the "mycophilic" East, it was Valentina who first sniffed out the symbolic richness of mushrooms, not just as edibles or poisons, but as mythic vessels. Her embodied knowledge catalyzed a decades-long intellectual pilgrimage.
Blomerth’s Alchemy: From Ink to Incantation
Blomerth doesn’t merely draw; he conjures. The visual cadence of Mycelium Wassonii mimics the organic chaos of the subject matter. Spores burst from speech bubbles, letters sprout roots, and colors bleed like ink in rain. There’s nothing predictable in his composition, and therein lies its genius. Just as fungi resist linear growth, the narrative resists simplistic chronology.
Valentina is portrayed not with melodrama but with magical realism. She is often seen mid-thought, mid-motion, with a stack of manuscripts in one hand and a half-cooked mushroom in the other. These are not moments of spectacle—they are glimpses into genius. Her intellect is not framed as reactionary but originary. While Gordon gathered institutional accolades, Valentina assembled metaphysical maps—tracing the mycelial threads between ancient myth and modern science.
A Monograph Like No Other
When the Wassons published Mushrooms, Russia and History in 1957, it did not resemble any previous academic text. It was a lavish, limited-edition two-volume set—part field manual, part ethnographic novella, part visual rhapsody. No publisher dared mass-produce it. It was a gift, a provocation, an underground beacon for future psychonauts and scholars alike.
This isn’t lost on Blomerth. His visual language pays tribute to the Wassons' layered approach. Letters from botanists, shamans, and even inmates line the pages, interwoven with Slavic fairytales and Talmudic annotations. One spread juxtaposes Orthodox Christian iconography with Mesoamerican mushroom stones—an epistemological tapestry that doesn’t just document but dramatizes cross-cultural convergence.
Valentina’s fingerprints are everywhere. She translated rare Russian texts, deciphered Slavic oral traditions, and corresponded with indigenous healers—all while practicing pediatrics. She embodied the kind of borderless scholarship that today’s algorithms can’t approximate. She was the analog search engine before the age of metadata.
Temporal Dislocation and the Art of Amateur Mastery
In today’s data-saturated world, the Wassons’ methodology feels almost ecclesiastical in its patience. They conducted their research in libraries and living rooms, not labs. Their archives grew in shoeboxes and postmarked envelopes, not digital drives. Their network was not built on likes or retweets, but on the quiet thrum of international postal exchange. It was slow academia—lived, not performed.
Blomerth’s book is a quiet elegy to this lost pace. It shows Valentina poring over ancient manuscripts with a magnifying lens, not Googling keywords. She’s seen sketching mushroom diagrams beside recipes and children’s medical notes, proving that intellectual work doesn’t require ivory towers. It thrives in domestic spaces, in liminal hours, in the crevices of so-called ordinary life.
There’s a profound humility in their process—one that resonates deeply in our era of speed, superficiality, and commodified mindfulness. The Wassons weren’t careerist scholars chasing tenure. They were pilgrims in pursuit of meaning, stumbling upon a mushroom-shaped Rosetta Stone.
Valentina as Linguistic Medium and Mythological Cartographer
The most unsung of Valentina’s talents may well have been her linguistic virtuosity. Fluent in several languages, she operated as a hermeneutic bridge—decoding forgotten symbols, translating arcane etymologies, and finding patterns where others saw chaos. It was she who uncovered folkloric connections between mushrooms and divine ecstasy, spinning linguistic threads that ran from Russian fairy tales to Greco-Roman rituals.
Blomerth captures this with subtle brilliance. In one of the book’s most enchanting sequences, Valentina appears to whisper into an open book. From the pages, spores lift into the air and morph into Cyrillic letters, which in turn spiral into Mayan glyphs and finally settle into Latin phrases. It’s a visual mnemonic device—an homage to the art of memory that she practiced with quiet precision.
Her contribution was not additive—it was foundational. Without her linguistic lens, their entire body of work might have crumbled into colonialist taxonomy. Instead, it became a palimpsest of global memory—dense, transcultural, and resilient.
Beyond Life Magazine: Rewriting the Canon
Much has been made of Gordon Wasson’s 1957 Life magazine article “Seeking the Magic Mushroom,” which introduced psychedelic mushrooms to mainstream America. It’s often cited as the genesis of the psychedelic renaissance. But Blomerth subtly undermines this canonical moment, treating it not as a climax but as a cultural side effect.
The real treasure lies in what came before: the letters exchanged between Valentina and indigenous healers in Mexico, the notebooks where she cross-referenced Christian relics with Siberian trance rituals, the moments she sat with patients and wondered how ancient pharmacologies might still serve modern minds. Blomerth renders these not as vignettes but as invocations—each panel a portal into her sublimated legacy.
Gordon was the diplomat, the front-facing emissary. Valentina was the subterranean architect. Her scholarship didn’t need a headline—it needed a resurrection.
A Legacy in Spores, Not Statues
What, then, is the true measure of Valentina Wasson’s legacy? It cannot be found in plaques or institutional archives. It exists instead in the conceptual spores she scattered—ideas that have quietly colonized disciplines from psychopharmacology to comparative mythology. Her genius was not noisy. It was rhizomatic.
She didn’t seek acclaim. She sought coherence—a unified cosmology where science and spirit were not adversaries but co-conspirators. Her insights rippled through the mycelium of time, blooming in unexpected corners of thought, from the pages of scientific journals to the lyrics of psychedelic folk songs.
Blomerth’s work reanimates her not through hagiography but through illustration—a more fitting tribute, perhaps, than any bronze bust or honorary degree. It places her where she belongs: in the living network of thinkers and dreamers who refuse to separate curiosity from compassion, who see mushrooms not as drugs or data, but as metaphors, medicines, and mirrors.
The Memory Keepers of the Underground
To study Valentina Wasson is to study the invisible. She represents all the unsung midwives of knowledge who stitched cultural meaning into the seams of forgotten rituals. She reminds us that true scholarship often germinates outside the academy, nourished by intuition, resilience, and a refusal to conform.
In honoring her through the radiant pages of Mycelium Wassonii, Brian Blomerth performs a rare act: historiographic justice. He doesn’t simply celebrate a woman behind a man—he reveals the woman who was, all along, standing beside him, sometimes ahead, rarely behind.
Valentina Wasson didn’t just study mushrooms. She listened to them. And if we’re quiet enough, perhaps we can still hear them echoing her name.
The Liminal Aesthetic of Thought-Maps and Fever-Dreams
In Mycelium Wassonii, Brian Blomerth does not merely illustrate; he transmutes. Each page is a wild, alchemical experiment—an attempt to translate the intangible interiority of human perception into the visible world. Where most graphic novels flirt with linearity, Blomerth obliterates it. This isn’t a graphic novel in the traditional sense; it is a cryptic cartography of consciousness. You don’t follow a storyline—you fall into a wormhole.
Blomerth’s pages are a synesthetic maelstrom: saturated hues collide with dream logic, character design oscillates between anthropomorphic grotesquerie and baroque symbolism, and iconography replicates like spores in a petri dish. It’s a book that refuses to be read passively. It demands cognitive participation, pulling the viewer into a spiraling interpretive exercise that is at once disorienting and delightful.
His approach evokes the defiant irreverence of 1970s underground comix, married to the narrative fragmentation of a modernist fugue. Each illustration becomes a mnemonic device—part visual pun, part philosophical provocation. These images are less drawings and more semiotic flashbangs: exploding with meaning, yet impossible to reduce.
Mushrooms as Metaphor, Medium, and Method
It is no coincidence that Blomerth’s central metaphor is the mushroom. Fungi have long captivated the human imagination as harbingers of transformation—lifeforms that defy taxonomic rigidity. Neither plant nor animal, they exist in liminal realms, thriving in decay, communing silently through vast mycelial networks. They mirror our subconscious.
Blomerth embraces this fungal logic fully. His visual narrative spirals like a mushroom’s gills, radiating outward from a central idea only to return, recombine, and reappear with new significance. Characters emerge and re-emerge, time folds back on itself, and causality dissolves into symbolic suggestion. This is mycological storytelling—non-linear, rhizomatic, ferociously alive.
In one breathtaking sequence, we see spores drifting across the panel margins, only to germinate as glyphs, rebus puzzles, or narrative side quests on the next page. It is an exquisite metaphor for how ideas propagate—not by assertion, but by osmosis and echo. The storytelling becomes fungal: associative, messy, organic.
Maria Sabina: Not a Saint, But a Signal
Among the most poignant visual threads in the book is the portrayal of María Sabina, the Mazatec curandera whose sacred mushroom ceremonies were inadvertently globalized by the Wassons’ curiosity. Blomerth resists the urge to sanctify her, instead conjuring a presence that is both mythic and mercurial. She appears not as a static figurehead, but as a shifting constellation of symbols: butterflies, serpents, spirals, and shamanic flora.
The illustration is deliberately disruptive. Her face morphs across pages, her hands gesture in glyphic code, and her environment is both sanctuary and spectacle. Around her, Western curiosity crackles—media, tourists, anthropologists—rendered as jittering caricatures or ominous silhouettes. Sabina is center-stage, but dissonance buzzes like static around her. This is no elegy. It’s a warning.
Here, Blomerth excels at visualizing what can’t be easily spoken—the profanation of indigenous knowledge through voyeuristic anthropology. Instead of delivering a polemic, he makes you feel the rupture. The viewer is complicit. Our gaze, like the Wassons’, becomes part of the problem.
The Aesthetics of Disorder as a Blueprint of Meaning
If there is a single guiding principle behind Blomerth’s work, it is that chaos contains its logic. His layouts often appear anarchic—characters tumble from frames, perspectives contradict themselves, and visual tangents burst uninvited into the reader’s field of view. Yet upon closer inspection, this apparent entropy conceals meticulous narrative architecture.
This is not chaos for its own sake. This is chaos as a philosophical stance. A page might open with a reindeer in mid-leap, crash through a panel depicting CIA agents in Cold War drag, and land in a Roman coliseum repopulated with mushrooms and mythological figures. And somehow, it all flows. It makes emotional, if not always linear, sense.
The storytelling obeys a mycelial rhythm: one of digression, recombination, and organic resonance. Time is pliable. Historical accuracy is eschewed in favor of surreal correspondence. And yet, from this kaleidoscopic riot emerges a potent and deeply researched narrative. Blomerth doesn’t just redraw history—he recomposes it using the tonal grammar of dreams.
Peripheral Figures as Narrative Anchors
One of Blomerth’s most cunning strategies is his obsession with marginalia. He delights in the footnotes of history, those characters who hover at the edges of canonical narratives and wait for an invitation to speak. In Mycelium Wassonii, they are not relegated to the background—they are summoned to center stage.
We encounter Agatha Christie, whose interest in mycology led her to pen mysteries involving toxic mushrooms. Her correspondence with Gordon Wasson becomes a subplot illustrated with theatrical flair. A Finnish zookeeper experiments with Amanitas and observes their hallucinogenic effect on reindeer—a moment rendered with such surreal whimsy it feels like folklore.
These interludes are more than charming anecdotes. They enrich the ecological web of the book’s ideas. History, Blomerth suggests, is not a monologue by victors but a chorus of eccentrics, mystics, and forgotten whisperers. And it’s through these unlikely intersections that cultural transformation takes root.
Synaptic Reading in the Age of Attention Drift
Blomerth’s method also echoes the way we now consume information. In an era of hypertext, infinite scroll, and algorithmic serendipity, linearity has lost its monopoly. Our cognition has become synaptic and recombinant. We learn not by following a thread but by surfing a tapestry. We leap from Wikipedia entries to image boards to archival footage in seconds.
Mycelium Wassonii is perfectly attuned to this cognitive evolution. Its structure mimics a browser with too many tabs open. It rewards erratic engagement. You can start anywhere, follow a visual motif, and end up in a different conceptual ecosystem altogether. It’s a book designed not to be finished, but to be inhabited.
Rather than pander to short attention spans, Blomerth leverages them—transforming distraction into discovery. Every page is a neural node. Every character a hyperlink. Every symbol a recursive loop. It is history, not as timeline, but as a hallucinogenic montage of interconnected myths.
Visual Puns, Pop Culture, and Psychic Palimpsests
Another hallmark of Blomerth’s technique is his irreverent inclusion of pop culture, absurd juxtapositions, and sly visual puns. You might find a mushroom-headed Elvis presiding over a shamanic ritual. Or a Looney Tunes pastiche unraveling into a psychological horror vignette. These inclusions aren’t gratuitous—they’re semiotic accelerants.
By collapsing the sacred and the profane, the scholarly and the ridiculous, Blomerth builds a visual language that mirrors the brain’s associative mechanics. It’s not random—it’s palimpsestic. Layers of meaning accrue, like spores on decaying wood. Nothing is erased. Everything is overwritten.
It’s in this tension between reverence and parody that Mycelium Wassonii achieves its deepest resonance. This is not a book that teaches. It enchants. It doesn’t argue—it mesmerizes. And in doing so, it compels the reader to reassess how we engage with history, myth, and knowledge.
The Counterculture as Mythic Terrain
Ultimately, Blomerth’s work is a visual sanctum for the counterculture. But this isn’t nostalgia. It’s invocation. The 1960s and ‘70s weren’t just about protest and psychedelia; they were about testing the boundaries of consciousness, ethics, and epistemology. And Blomerth visualizes this not as history but as an eternal mythos.
In his hands, the counterculture is reanimated—not as an artifact, but as an ongoing aesthetic and metaphysical experiment. Psychedelics, folklore, media theory, espionage, and mushroom biology swirl into a new kind of storytelling—one that doesn’t just reflect reality, but warps it until hidden patterns begin to flicker.
This isn’t a book you finish and shelve. It’s a ritual object. A lucid dream in paper form. A strange, glowing fungus feeding on the roots of cultural memory.
A Graphic Grimoire of the Invisible
Mycelium Wassonii is not a graphic novel. It is a grimoire of the invisible. A wild hymn to the unseen forces—biological, spiritual, and aesthetic—that shape our world. Brian Blomerth has not just illustrated the story of the Wassons. He has built a multidimensional artifact, one that pulses with intelligence, humor, and subversive grace.
To engage with this book is to embrace ambiguity. To let go of narrative handrails. To surrender to a visual rhythm that is both primitive and futuristic. It is not for everyone. But for those willing to decode its madness, it offers something rare in contemporary storytelling: a glimpse into the deep syntax of wonder.
This is not history told through dates. It is history as lucid delirium—as beautiful, uncontainable, and unruly as the mushrooms at its core.
The Hidden Mycelium of Influence – Legacy and Lessons from Mycelium Wassonii
In Mycelium Wassonii, Brian Blomerth offers not just an artistic biographia of R. Gordon and Valentina Wasson, but a subterranean meditation on how influence proliferates—quietly, pervasively, and often in ways unseen until long after the initial spore has been released. His work is an intricate exegesis of the couple’s legacy, refracted through an otherworldly visual idiom that resists conventional biography and embraces the indeterminacy of myth, memory, and mycology.
Rather than lionizing the Wassons as sterile figures in a glass cabinet of psychedelic history, Blomerth renders them as living nodes within a greater symbiotic mesh of discovery. Their passions, curiosities, and even their naivetés are illustrated not as flaws but as fertile ground. In this lush rendering, their narrative germinates anew—not in the loam of forest floors, but within the moist caverns of cultural consciousness.
The Mycological Humanist: A New Archetype
At the heart of Blomerth’s illustrated tapestry lies an implicit thesis: the Wassons were not merely mycologists; they were mycological humanists. Their pursuits, though outwardly scientific and anthropological, were rooted in the emotional, the poetic, and the metaphysical. They perceived in mushrooms not just objects of inquiry, but interlocutors—enigmatic beings that conversed in the dialect of myth, ritual, and transformation.
This is a radical reframing. In a modern world that often demands dichotomy—science versus spirituality, rationality versus imagination—the Wassons stood stubbornly in between, cultivating both mycelial and intellectual mycorrhizae. And Blomerth’s illustrations echo this refusal of binary order. His visual lexicon swerves, melts, reforms. Panels erupt in hallucinogenic detail. Symbols fold into diagrams; maps disintegrate into dreams. What emerges is not narrative so much as cosmology.
Fungal Ontology and the Refusal of Fixity
What makes Mycelium Wassonii feel almost prophetic is its alignment with the mushroom's core ontology—fluid, ungraspable, interconnected. Mushrooms are not plants. They are not animals. They erupt and disappear, emerging with alien efficiency and fading with inexplicable grace. Their very being resists permanent classification, as if to mock our obsession with taxonomies and finalities.
This anti-finality is mirrored in the Wassons' trajectory. Their work unfolded not as a grand plan, but as a series of meanderings—serendipitous conversations, accidental discoveries, spiritual provocations. Gordon, the banker turned ethnomycologist. Valentina, the physician who illuminated ritual use where others saw mere folklore. Their journey was fungal in shape: rhizomatic, non-hierarchical, constantly bifurcating.
Blomerth captures this refusal of narrative fixity in a dreamlike denouement, where the Wassons dissolve into a pulsating mycelial network. Their bodies become tendrils. Their identities, nutrients. It’s a visual ode to what philosopher Timothy Morton might call “dark ecology”—a vision of legacy that is less about monumentality and more about decomposition, humility, and regeneration.
Ecological Elegy: A Timely Resurrection
As planetary crisis becomes the ambient condition of our era, Mycelium Wassonii emerges not just as a historical retelling but as a quiet elegy—and possibly, a provocation. Its imagery, draped in earth-tones and inked reveries, speaks to an age in which modernity’s promises have curdled. The soil is sick. The waters rise. The skies rage.
Amid such turmoil, Blomerth doesn't reach for salvific narratives. Instead, he turns to fungi—the world’s original recyclers, healers, and signalers—as metaphors for what we have lost and what we might recover. In doing so, the book becomes a kind of speculative ethnobotany, an imagined blueprint for how knowledge, care, and curiosity might outlast collapse.
Mushrooms here become figures of slowness, of radical patience. They require us to wait, to stoop, to pay attention to what lies beneath. They remind us that growth doesn’t always announce itself with spectacle. Sometimes it happens silently, in the dark, and decay. And through this lens, the Wassons’ work becomes newly urgent—not as arcane psychonautics, but as ancestral whisperings in a time of planetary amnesia.
The Spores Will Name Themselves
One of the most poignant narrative threads in Mycelium Wassonii revolves around nomenclature—or, more precisely, the poetic injustice of naming. The tale of Psilocybe Wassonii, once expected to commemorate the couple's legacy, becomes a linguistic footnote. The name is pre-empted, repurposed, unassigned. In another text, this might be rendered as a tragedy or a bureaucratic insult.
But Blomerth, true to his fungal ethos, presents it as ironic grace. The spores, after all, do not heed human vanity. They replicate where they wish. They emerge where the conditions suit them. And they remain impervious to the desires of anthropocentric taxonomy. Here, nature serves not as a backdrop to human ambition, but as a sovereign force, impish and unmastered.
In relinquishing this symbolic title, the Wassons are freed from ossification. Their work escapes the brittle cage of genus and species. Instead, it enters the ambient layer of culture, seeding new disciplines, sparking transdisciplinary dialogues, and haunting the footnotes of countless PhD theses. They are not remembered as static saints but as agents of the strange.
To Return Is Not to Regress
The book's final pages unfurl like a dream returning to its point of origin. There is no crescendo. No epiphany thunderclap. Just a quiet descent back into the mycelial matrix. The couple, by then part-myth, part-memory, dissolve into their element. Soil. Spore. Silt.
And this is the radical gesture: to depict legacy not as an edifice, but as a substrate. Blomerth reminds us that the truest influence is not what towers above, but what supports from beneath. Not the mushroom’s cap, but its hidden net. Not the academic citation, but the intuition that blooms in someone decades later, unaware of its source.
The Wassons’ final act is not death—it is transmutation. And for a reader attuned to symbols, this offers an almost alchemical solace. Nothing is lost. Nothing is wasted. Everything composts. Everything nourishes.
A Living Archive, Not a Finished Tome
Mycelium Wassonii does not behave like a conventional book. It does not conclude. It spores. It lingers. It inserts images and intuitions into the reader’s psyche, only to have them blossom days or weeks later, seemingly unbidden. It is, in effect, a living archive—one that metabolizes within you.
Its panels, both hilarious and hallowed, contain strata of meaning. You laugh at a talking mushroom only to find it echoing a week later in your dreams. You trace the Wassons’ path through Mexico only to wonder how many narratives have been paved over in the name of progress.
And this is Blomerth’s gift. His art operates like fungal spores: it floats in the ambient air of culture, invisible until it finds the right host. Once it lands, it grows slowly. Quietly. Indelibly.
Beyond the Book: The Rhizome Expands
In the months since its publication, Mycelium Wassonii has begun to exert influence far beyond the confines of the printed page. It has infiltrated artistic communities, pedagogical spaces, and philosophical salons. Its aesthetic—vintage-yet-vivid, surreal-yet-sincere—has become a mood board for a new kind of psychedelic modernism. One less concerned with spectacle and more aligned with sensory literacy, eco-ethics, and narrative intimacy.
Some readers will encounter the Wassons for the first time here. Others will revisit them with renewed reverence. But all are asked to reconsider what it means to remember. To honor. To narrate. And in a culture obsessed with legacy, Blomerth offers a radical revision: let your legacy be a lichen. Unassuming. Collaborative. Strange.
Conclusion
To read Mycelium Wassonii is to surrender to a different tempo. One that asks you to be still. To listen. To relinquish linearity and embrace recurrence. Like mushrooms, the book teaches by indirection. It seduces with whimsy and punctures with wisdom. In an epoch hurtling toward oblivion, perhaps we need more stories that begin and end in the dirt. Where intuition, care, and curiosity coalesce into something more enduring than knowledge—into reverence.
The Wassons are gone. Their spores remain. And somewhere, in the moist understory of another mind, a new mycelium begins to weave.