The underworld, as a mythical space in western culture, has often been associated with fear, horror, punishment, or damnation. The underworld has not typically been a space of desire: it’s not the sort of place that people dream of ending up. Perhaps in part because of this, the underworld has also become a zone of extraction in our capitalist economy. Treasures from the underworld fuel some of the most wasteful and exploitative industries around us. We might fear for what this will do to those of us who inhabit the upperworld. But few of us mourn for the underworld.
And yet, something has been changing in the underworld. Or at least in how we think about the underworld. The work of scientists—ecologists, foresters, mycologists—has been revealing and unveiling a different sort of underworld. This new underworld is more alive, and more life-giving, than the underworld of our ancient and medieval western histories. Informed by what the philosopher Michael Marder calls plant-thinking, this paper will offer a critical journey into this livelier underworld, to explore what it might be telling us about our changing relationships with the world below.
The paper will offer a brief and fleeting glimpse into an ancient underworld as a point of reference. It will begin with a discussion, more specifically, of the ancient Greek story of Persephone’s dramatic abduction by the god of the underworld. The descent of Persephone, daughter of the goddess of agriculture, is the story of a descent from life into death. And yet, because she is allowed—every year—to return to the world of growth and life, it might also be read as a story about the crucial intimacies between life and death that the underworld exposes.
The paper will then examine the work of scientists who have been uncovering some of the life-giving dimensions of underworld zones. These include forest ecologists such as Suzanne Simard who, in her 2021 book Finding the Mother Tree, illuminates the mechanisms by which trees communicate with one another below the ground—primarily with the help of mycorrhizal networks. It will also include the work of mycologist Merlin Sheldrake who, in his 2020 book Entangled Life, describes mycorrhizal networks as an almost mystical tissue of connection in the among us and below our feet. The work of scientists like these, I will argue, brings to light a more enchanted—and certainly a more beautiful—underworld than most of us are accustomed to. Simard has even argued not that we are under pressure to save trees, but that trees can save us. Can the same be said about fungi?
I will also, however, discuss a critical paper published in Nature, Ecology & Evolution by a group of ecologists including Justine Karst, which argues that the enthusiastic popular media coverage of mycorrhizal networks has led to unsupported claims about what these networks can do. It has also fed a positive citation bias in scientific literature about these networks. This matters, I will argue, because when we bring strong forms of bias to our study of more than human worlds, it can also mean that we ultimately fail to see these lifeworlds as they are. It can create a kind of closure, or a misrecognition.
Inspired by the work of plant philosopher Michael Marder, as well as art historian Sara Rich’s theoretical forays into the world of mushrooms, this essay will end with a reflection on how the underworlds of our ancient religious and cultural past might continue to inform the way we think about the underworld today—even as we also allow for the dimensions of beauty that contemporary science is helping us to see. In conversation with dirt, roots, and fungi I will seek to illuminate the intimacies between life and death, beauty and horror, or possibility and closure that underworlds may have always—and may continue—to confront us with.
The underworld, as a mythical space in western culture, has often been associated with fear, horror, or damnation. It hasn’t typically been a space of desire: it’s not the sort of place that people dream of ending up. And yet, something has been changing in the underworld. The work of scientists—ecologists, foresters, mycologists—is revealing an underworld that is more alive, and more life-giving, than the underworld of western histories. Is this new underworld becoming a zone of salvation, rather than damnation? Or is the chill of horror in the underworld something we just can’t shake? This paper offers an experiment in plant, and fungal, thinking in order to explore—in conversation with roots, dirt, and mycorrhizal networks—the intimacies between life and death, beauty and horror, or possibility and closure that underworlds may have always (and may continue) to confront us with.