called them ‘nurslings of the gods,’ theotréphos*? The 
Greeks of the classic period were mycophobes. Was this 
because their ancestors had felt that the whole fungal 
tribe was infected ‘by attraction’ with the holiness of 
some mushrooms and that they were not for mortal men 
to eat, at least not every day? Are we dealing with what 
was in origin a religious tabu? 
In earliest times the Greeks confined the common Euro- 
pean word for mushroom, which in their language was 
sp(h)éngos or sp(h)éngé, to the meaning ‘sponge,’ and 
replaced it by a special word, muhés, for the designation 
of mushrooms.} Now it happens that the root of this 
word mukés in Greek is a homonym of the root of the 
Greek word for ‘Mystery,’ mu. A bold speculation flashes 
through the mind. The word for ‘Mystery’ comes from 
a root that means the closing of the apertures of the body, 
the closing of the eyes and ears. If the mushroom played 
a vital and secret role in primitive Greek religion, what 
could be more natural than that the standard word for 
‘mushroom’ would fall into disuse through a religious 
tabu (as in Hebrew ‘Yahweh’ gave way to ‘Adonai’) and 
* Giambattista della Porta: Villa, 1592, Frankfort, p. 764. 
{ Holger Pedersen in an early paper contended that the basic fungal 
words of Europe were identical: Old High German swamb, Slavic 
gomba, Lithuanian gumbas, Latin fungus, Greek sp(h)éngos, sp(h)dngé, 
and Armenian sung, sunk. (Published in Polish: ‘Przyezynki do 
gramatyki por6wnawezej jezyk6w slowianskich,’ in Materyaly « Prace 
Komisyi Jesykowey Akademii Unmieietnosci w Krakowie, Cracow, 1(1): 
167-176.) Since then some philologists have declined to accept this 
thesis as more than a possibility, especially as to the Slavic term, but 
Professor Roman Jakobsan in a recent personal communication to me 
says: ‘The etymology of Holger Pedersen, the great Danish specialist 
in the comparative study of Indo-European languages, seems to me 
and to many other linguists, e.g., the distinguished Czech etymolo- 
gist V. Machek, as the only convincing attempt to interpret the fungal 
name of the European languages. Not one single serious argument has 
been brought againt Pedersen’s ‘attractive’? explanation, as Berneker 
defines it, and not one single defensible hypothesis has been brought 
to replace this one.’ 
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