The Enclosures
The UK is considered to be ‘mycophobic’: more distrusting or afraid of mushrooms than our closest European neighbours. The reason for this is partly due to a deeply rooted fear of anything to do with witches.
The 16th century witch hunts saw thousands of mostly peasant women demonised, tortured and murdered and their knowledge, power and independence destroyed. This persecution went hand in hand with the enclosing of common land in favor of private ownership, which has led to this island being sliced by hedges and fences, with little common land left.
‘The Enclosures’ limited rural people’s resilience and independence by depriving them of common, shared resources, such as the pastures and forests which they relied on for much of their food. For capitalism to succeed, nothing could be free and everything had to be for sale, paid for with wages from exploitative labour. Community spirit and self-sufficiency was a major threat. Many women, healers, wise women & foragers, trusted and essential in their communities, resisted capitalism and patriarchal rule. The campaign to crush their power was waged not only with violence but with fear, striking mistrust into our collective psyche that is still culturally embedded today.
The chillingly methodical persecution of hundreds of thousands of women at a key moment in the development of capitalism is too often overlooked. The witch hunts were not some minor historical event-turned-folklore. Quite the opposite. The persecution of women under the pretense of witchcraft was a priority for British church and state, in their pursuit of dominating the population and thus accumulating labour power for profit. Remember, it was King James I and IV himself who wrote a foundational text on the identification and persecution of witches, Daemonologie, in 1597.
As Silvia Federici writes, “Magic was also an obstacle to the rationalization of the work process, and a threat to the establishment of the principle of individual responsibility. Above all, magic seemed a form of refusal of work, of insubordination, and an instrument of grassroots resistance to power. The world had to be “disenchanted” in order to be dominated.”
Reconnecting with mushrooms, learning their ways and understanding how we can work in symbiosis with them and the rest of the natural world is an opportunity to be re-enchanted. And re-enchantment is a powerful thing.
