Toadstools & taboo: how mushrooms teach us about sex, death & immortality
ON DEMAND
Sliding Scale Cost $15-$25
Link provided upon registration!
Slimy, sticky, phallic, and funky – mushrooms find themselves adored & feared for the same reasons- in their morphology, chemistry, and personalities, fungi remind us of the unified goal to create and surrender in an unending undulation of life, shapeshifting between birth, death, human and humus for the sake of doing it over and over and over again.
Join us for a multi-disciplinary cypher, exploring the Psilocybe species, Amanita muscaria, candy cap (Lactarius spp.), turkey tail (Trametes versicolor, reishi (Ganoderma spp.), ergot (Claviceps purpurea), etc., and how we can flip the script from taking mushrooms to letting the mushrooms take us.
In this class, we will explore:
Aphrodesiac Ethnnomycology
Lessons in Decay – Savoring Saprophytic Fungi
The Phallus and the Mushroom Cloud – On Pluralism & Patterns
The Unseen Matter – Mother Mycelium
Fermentation, Alchemy and Immortality
Meet Your Teacher
Ash Ritter is an ethnobotanist, practicing herbalist, writer and educator with over 20 years of study in clinical, traditional, academic and directly relational terrains. She is a devotee of curiosity and especially savors the study of history through the woven threads of fungi, people and plants. One-on-one longterm apprenticeships are the cornerstone of her training with a focus on druid herbalism, clinical botanical & naturopathic medicines, California-Mexican curanderismo and MacGuyver-style urban & wilderness first aid. Her college degree thesis focused on the history of plants & fungi in rights of passage and altered states as evolutionary technology.
Ash counsels and creates in her private practice, Black Sage Botanicals, to empower and engage direct relationships with & as the living world. She joyfully offers in-depth consultation services, and teaches both publicly and privately. Ash currently lives in a century-old gnome house in the Sonoran desert, and enjoys tracking deer through the spiny brush, sitting with 200-year-old cacti, and waiting for monsoon season thunderstorms as she writes her first book.
