Psychedelic Mushroom Trees in Christian Art? Critical Assessments

  The above taken from J.R. Irvin, The Holy Mushroom: Evidence of Mushrooms in Judeo-Christianity (Appendix by Jack Herer; Grand Terrace, CA: Gnostic Media, 2008), (unpaginated kindle edition). The tree is a mushroom tree in the sense of a stylized trees are called a Pilzbaum, i.e., a mushroom or umbrella-shaped tree. But it does not represent a psychedelic mushroom, which is what Irvin and others argue.   Mushrooms don't have branches, much less multiple heads on multiple branches. But more to the point mushrooms are cryptogams, that is to say, they have seeds or fruit. And yet this tree has fruit hanging from it, as does the much faded one in the previous scene. The fruit relates to the fact that the previous scene illustrates the Latin Vulgate text of Genesis 1:11-12: "Let the earth bring forth the green herb, and such as may seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after its kind, which may have seed in itself upon the earth. And it was so done. And the earth...

  Here is Plate 3:63c from  John A. Rush, The Mushroom in Christian Art (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2011).   John A. Rush presents an extremely poor-quality blow-up of the bottom of the fountain (lower right) from the Ghent Altarpiece, urging his readers to "Notice the mushroom at the base of the fountain."  This echoes the text of the book itself where he says the same thing and credits Jan Irvin for the information (p. 250).  As is so often the case, it is impossible for the viewer to tell whether what Rush says is true from the photo he provides. It is wholly worthless for verification of what Rush is claiming.  Here is a better picture revealing that it is not a mushroom, as Rush claims, but a water-spouting mascaron.