What If? · Reflections from the Founder
What if one of the most familiar stories in human history has been hiding something in plain sight?
When we picture the Garden of Eden, the imagery seems almost automatic: Adam, Eve, a serpent, and a tree bearing forbidden fruit.
But tucked away in the French countryside is a centuries-old fresco that complicates that familiar story.
Inside the Plaincourault Chapel in Mérigny, France, Adam and Eve stand beside the Tree of Knowledge. Except this tree doesn’t look much like a tree.
To some observers, it looks remarkably like a mushroom.
A Medieval Mystery
The unusual shape has led some researchers to compare it to Amanita muscaria, the iconic psychoactive mushroom.
Those who support the entheogenic interpretation see the fresco as possible evidence of an ancient relationship between sacred ritual, altered consciousness and psychoactive fungi.
Art historians offer a simpler explanation: medieval artists often depicted nature in wildly stylized ways, and the supposed mushroom may simply be an imaginative medieval tree.
So which is it?
Look For Yourself
Mushroom?
Metaphor?
Medieval imagination?
You decide.
View the original Plaincourault fresco →
What If?
We may never know what the artist intended.
But perhaps that’s what makes Plaincourault so fascinating.
It asks us to look again at the stories we’ve inherited — and wonder how much of humanity’s relationship with nature, consciousness and the sacred may still be hiding in plain sight.
Sometimes the most interesting discoveries begin with two words:
What if?
View the original Plaincourault fresco →
Image source: Aranthama / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0