Everybody in the Dune: Part Two universe is after Spice Melange, also known as the spice. It’s rare, it makes you see mad stuff, and, if one American mushroom enthusiast is to be believed, you might well have been walking straight past your own supply of spice every time you head out for a stroll in the British countryside.
In Children of Dune, Frank Herbert’s sequel novel, a dictionary describes spice as being “found only in deepest desert sands of Arrakis, linked to prophetic visions of Paul Muad’Dib (Atreides), first Fremen Mahdi; also employed by Spacing Guild Navigators and the Bene Gesserit”. There are innumerable ways of reading spice. It’s a substance which “gives insight”, which gives access to the “inward eye”.
Herbert had taken peyote, a substance often turned into tea for Central American medicinal rituals which has hallucinogenic qualities thanks to the mescaline present in it. He was also heavily into Carl Jung and his idea of a collective unconscious. And if Dune’s first publication in 1965 meant it was a few years too early for the psychedelia of the late 1960s, it certainly chimed with a new spirit of self-exploration and spiritual emancipation. It also chimed with an appetite for hallucinogenic mushrooms.
Paul Stamets is, as his X bio puts it, a “Mycologist, Author, Inventor, Teacher, Earthling”. His bushy grey beard, glasses and sensible waterproof trousers make him look like exactly the kind of person you’d want with you on a foraging trip, and Stamets is a committed mushroom enthusiast and expert. His social media is full of pictures of him posing next to giant growths of orange chicken of the woods mushrooms, or advising that the amadou mushroom can, in a pinch, be deployed as a handy firestarter or hat. A picture of Stamets at 21 shows him in a kitchen next to a pressure cooker, dark hair worn long melded with his beard, a knitted hat on his head. “Couldn’t stop talking about fungi then and certainly won’t stop now!” runs the caption.
Stamets connected with his fellow mushroom fan Herbert about their shared enthusiasm for the possibilities which fungi opened up,both the entirely innocent ones and those with more mind expanding potential.
Indeed, in 2005 Stamets published a book called Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World. “When I met him in the early 1980s, Frank enjoyed collecting mushrooms on his property near Port Townsend, Washington,” Stamets writes in it. “An avid mushroom collector, he felt that throwing his less-than-perfect wild chanterelles into the garbage or compost didn’t make sense. Instead, he would put a few weathered chanterelles in a five-gallon bucket of water, add some salt, and then, after one or two days, pour this spore-mass slurry on the ground at the base of newly planted firs.”
It’s unusual for mushrooms to start growing next to trees which have only just been introduced, but Herbert had found a way of doing it. “When he told me chanterelles were growing from trees not even 10 years old, I couldn’t believe it. No one had previously reported chanterelles arising near such young trees, nor had anyone reported them growing as a result of using this method.”
The mushroom industry apparently confirmed Herbert’s findings later. Herbert, however, admitted to Stamets that he had made even more intriguing discoveries than spore slurries while on his journey into the mushroom kingdom. Tucked away in the ninth chapter of Mycelium Running are some illuminating revelations about the nature of spice, and the thoughts which Herbert shared with Stamets on it. Spice was, Herbert explained, an analogy not just for the experience of seeing and feeling beyond this level of perception, but that the ways that the societies, religions and characters of Dune were inspired by the way that mushrooms and fungi worked.
“Frank went on to tell me,” Stamets wrote, “that much of the premise of Dune – the magic spice (spores) that allowed the bending of space (tripping), the giant sand worms (maggots digesting mushrooms), the eyes of the Fremen (the cerulean blue of Psilocybe mushrooms), the mysticism of the female spiritual warriors, the Bene Gesserits (influenced by the tales of Maria Sabina and the sacred mushroom cults of Mexico) – came from his perception of the fungal life cycle, and his imagination was stimulated through his experiences with the use of magic mushrooms.”
Generally speaking, ingesting enormous amounts of hallucinogens is unlikely to spur the kind of productivity and focus which results in a 900-page opus which generation after generation has found both absorbing and coherent. But Dune has been an idea which has kept inspiring pharmaceutical cosmonauts in the decades since its publication.
In 2013 the director Alejandro Jodorowsky told an interviewer that he wanted, with his famously unrealised attempt to make a movie of Dune, “to make a film that would give the people who took LSD at that time the hallucinations that you get with that drug, but without hallucinating”.
There’s a subtle difference there though: Jodorowsky’s LSD-induced visions would have come from a chemically engineered solution soaked into blotting paper; Herbert’s original conception was of something far earthier and tuned into the rhythms of the ecosystem which he could observe around him in Washington State.
Yes, he might have found a way of chivvying along the process with his spore-slurry, but the sympathy with nature and trust in it which relying on mushrooms for your visions implies chimes which more with the way that the societies of Dune operate,especially when it comes for the sandworms to churn up more spice. You probably ought not to rush out and eat the first fungi you find behind the shed in the hope of producing your own run of legendarily difficult to film sci-fi adventure novels, but without magic mushrooms there’d probably be no Dune.
