Medicine & poison.
In the depth of the forest, where the light is dimmer and the earth darkly moist, Amanita grows like a glowing heart.
Red as blood, white-dotted like the stars in the black night sky, she stands in the green like an ancient symbol of paradox.
She is more than a mushroom – she is a guardian. A keeper of the womb-space, the primal matrix from which all life is born and to which all returns.
The womb-space of woman, once revered as sacred, was systematically devalued, cut, condemned over centuries. The Church and its Inquisition not only burned bodies, but also burned away trust in the feminine source, in the primal mother, the mother-soil, in the ecstasy of the living, in the knowledge of plants, rhythms, and births. The fire of the pyres was a fire of separation – it severed daughters from mothers, women from their own bodies, humans from Mother Earth herself. This trauma sits deep in the cells, in the pelvis, in the bloodlines of the ancestresses.
Amanita appears as a rememberer. She shows herself in fall, in the time of dying and withdrawal, and with her beauty she brings forth a shining of truth: that all life is cyclical, that death and birth are not divided, but one.
Her red cap resembles the pulsating womb that carries blood and life, pain and bliss. Her poisonousness reminds us that great forces must not be touched without respect. That intention, humility and modesty are as crucial as reverence, connection, intimacy, right relation.
Just like the womb-space: source of life, but also place of pain, loss, and severance.
She teaches that the womb-space is a gate – a gate long locked, out of fear of wildness, of the uncontrollability of feminine power.
Yet beneath the surface, in the unseen, the mycelium spreads. It recalls the invisible networks of women, carried on even in times of persecution – in songs, stories, medicine, glances, secret rituals. The mycelium is like the knowledge in the womb-space: indestructible, even if the visible is cut down and ripped out and destroyed.
As guardian of the sacred womb-space, Amanita Muscaria watches over the threshold between remembrance and forgetting. She calls us to look upon the ancient trauma of separation – the splitting of body and spirit, of human and nature, of woman and her power. She invites us to re-enter into relation with the womb as inner temple, as mirror of the Earth, as matrix of life.
In her presence becomes tangible: the separation was never final.
Beneath the burned stories lie the seeds, in the darkness the power sleeps, in the mycelium the memory pulses. Amanita teaches us that healing does not lie in separation, but in courageous seeing. In the recognition that poison and medicine are two faces of the same force, that destruction and renewal are part of the same cycle.
Thus she stands, glowing red in the moss, as guardian, as teacher. And she whispers: “The womb-space is sacred. It carries the knowledge that was taken from you. Remember. Return. Become one again with the Earth who holds you.”
Amanita is not merely a plant of ecstasy – she is a teacher, dancing within the tension of light and shadow. In the work with trauma, and especially in the guidance of the womb-space, she may be understood as an archetypal key: not necessarily always through high-level physical ingestion, but through the subtle, symbol, the energetic presence, the mirror-force she carries.
The deep wounds inflicted upon women and bodies in general by patriarchy, capitalism, and religious control are not only personal injuries, but collective traumas. They shape behaviors that estrange us from our own essence: the shrinking of ourselves, the constant adapting, the fear of visibility, the distrust of the body. Patriarchal capitalism has degraded the female body into a mere resource – as labor, as object, as commodity – cutting it off from its cosmic, creative meaning. Religions sacralized this severance by declaring desire and womb-power sinful, dangerous, or in need of control.
Amanita acts as a key of remembrance and reconnection.
She shows that healing does not come through repression, but through the acknowledgment of ambivalence: poison and medicine, fear and ecstasy, death and birth belong together. In womb-space work, this means no longer separating pain from pleasure, but embracing both as part of the feminine continuum. She also loosens the rigid conditioning instilled by patriarchal and religious systems, which taught women to distrust themselves and seek authority outside. Through her wildness, her refusal to be domesticated, and through her mycelial network, she demonstrates that true knowledge lies within and in connection. She reminds us of the ability to embody our own truths instead of following foreign dogmas.
The forest medicine reveals that trauma lives in the subconscious, in the tissues, in the memory of the body. Just as the mycelium grows unseen yet forms the living foundation for what rises to be visible, so does she show that healing unfolds in the invisible: in subtle processes, in the allowance of darkness, in the patient work with the body’s wisdom and memory. Unlike the linear productivity-thinking of Patriarchy, she embodies the feminine cyclical principle: appearance, fading, return. She calls women back into the remembrance that womb-power is not productive in the capitalist sense, but cyclical, rhythmic, rooted in the Earth – and that healing occurs when one surrenders again to this rhythm. When we honor again what we come from.
At the deepest level, Amanita teaches that the root of trauma is the severance from Mother Earth herself. Interwoven with roots, moss, and trees, she leads back into the memory that the womb-space is the mirror of the Earth.
Healing trauma unfolds when we recognize this reflection: the womb as inner ecosystem, inseparably bound with the outer.
As a key, Amanita is not a “tool,” but a living guardian who encourages women in womb-space work to remember what has been forgotten, to embrace what was tabooed, and to call back into life what has been exiled. She demands the courage to face the wounds of patriarchal capitalism and religious oppression – and at the same time the tenderness to let the invisible grow like mycelium, until new forms of being emerge. In this sense, Amanita muscaria is not only a symbol, but an archetypal key: she opens the door back to a womb-consciousness free of domination, grounded in trust of one’s own wild, creative power.