R. Blust
Rat ears, tree ears, ghost ears and thunder ears n Austronesian languages
In: Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 156 (2000), no: 4, Leiden, 687-706
This PDF-file was downloaded from http://www.kitlv-journals.nl
ROBERT BLUST
Rat Ears, Tree Ears, Ghost Ears and
Thunder Ears in Austronesian Languages
1. Introduction
Mushrooms occupy a peculiar place both in the natural order and in the
realm of culture. Unlike chlorophyllous plants, they do not manufacture their
food by photosynthesis, and so in place of the reassuring green of typical
leafy vegetation, they present a pale and sickly cast, often suggestive of rot
and decomposition. As if this fundamentally unattractive physical appearance were not enough to mark them off as an alien life form, the suddenness
' of their appearance, often following thunderstorms, has created a universal
aura of mystery in folk conceptions of these organisms. Finally, a number of
mushrooms have hallucinogenic properties which link them with trance-like
states of spirit possession. These qualities have left a lexical imprint in
human language generally. The purpose of this paper is to document the
occurrence in Austronesian languages of words for mushrooms or related
types of fungi which translate literally as 'rat ear', 'tree ear', 'ghost ear' and
'thunder ear', and to make some preliminary suggestions as to what may
have motivated such expressions.
2. Fungi as ears
It might seem surprising that mushrooms are called by the same morpheme
as 'ear', but the more detailed descriptions often specify the referent as a jelly
fungus. Unlike the more familiar umbrella-shaped fruiting bodies of mushrooms, jelly fungi are saprophytes, which sprout directly from the trunks of
dead trees as a collection of folded tissues which may appear cup-like or earlike. Indeed, the comparison of such fungi to ears is a universal feature of
human perception, reflected in many different language families, as well as
in the name of the Linnaean genus Auricularia ('ear-like'). Well-known exROBERT BLUST obtained his PhD at the University of Hawaii, where he is currently Professor of
Linguistics, specializing in comparative Austronesian linguistics and culture history. His publications include 'Early Austronesian social organization; The evidence of language1, Current
Anthropology, 1980, and Austronesian root theory, Benjamins, 1988. Professor Blust may be contacted at the Department of Linguistics, University of Hawaii, Moore Hall 569, 1890 East-West
Rd., Honolulu, HI 96822, USA.
BK1156-4 (2000)
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Robert Blust
amples include the Jew's ear (Auricularia auricula-judae), which The Oxford
English Dictionary describes as a mistranslation of medieval Latin auricula
Judae 'ear of Judas', 'so called from its shape and its frequent occurrence on
the elder, the tree from which Judas Iscariot reputedly hanged himself, and
the Mandarin mu er ('wood ear'), commonly described as a jelly fungus
which grows on trees. Heyne (1927:52), who gives the Auriculariaceae as a
group of the Basidiomycetes (a large group of fungi including the smuts, rusts,
mushrooms and puffballs), lists some less well-known terms in European
languages which are missing from even the larger dictionaries, including
French oreilles de chat 'cat ears', and Dutch muizenoortjes 'mouse ears.'
Terms of similar semantic structure are also found in languages of the
Americas, as seen in Lakota chan nankpa (literally 'tree ear' or 'wood ear'),
which Gilmore (1919:62) describes as 'a fungus found growing on ash trees:
Polystictus versicolor L.', and Tzotzil cikin c'o con (literally 'ear-rat-animal')
'highland "mushroom": Panus sp.', said to be a herb which resembles ear
fungi (Laughlin 1975:119). A number of Austronesian languages use the morpheme for 'ear' or a reduplicated shape of the same form without further
modification to refer to some type of fungus, as in Pazeh (central Taiwan)
saringa 1. ear, 2. wood-ear fungus; Puyuma (south-eastern Taiwan) 1. TangiLa
'ear', 2. TangiLa-ngiLa-yan 'Jew's ear: Auricularia auricula-judae'; Itbayaten
(northern Philippines) talina 1. outer ear, earlobe, auricle, 2. edible tree fungus: Auricularia auricula-judae L.; Nauna (Admiralty Islands) 1. taling 'ear', 2.
taling-ling 'mushroom'; Nggela (central Solomons) talinga 1. wax in the ear, 2.
fungus, mushrooms on mbiluma tree; Kwaio (south-eastern Solomons) 1. alinga-na (with obligatory 3sg possessive pronoun) 'ear', 2. alinga 'mushroom';
Sa'a (south-eastern Solomons) alinge 1. ear, 2. large fungi, some edible, growing on logs; Rotuman/a/mgfl 1. ear, 2. toadstool or fungus; Tongan 1. telinga
'ear', 2. talinge-linga 'fungus'; Samoan talinga 1. ear, 2. name given to several
types of fungus, including Jew's ear.
2.1. Rat ears
Austronesian terms for mushrooms which translate literally as 'rat ear'
include the following:
Table 1. Names for mushrooms that have the semantic structure 'rat ear' in Austronesian languages
Bontok
Tagalog
Malay
Tae'
Marshallese
Samoan
koleng si otot (ear-rat)
tainga-ng daga' (ear-LIG-rat)
chendawan telinga tikus (mushroom-ear-rat)
talinga balao (ear-rat)
lojilnin kijdik (ear of rat)
taliga 'imoa (ear-rat)
Rat Ears, Tree Ears, Ghost Ears and Thunder Ears
Rarotongan
Tuamotuan
taringa kiore (ear-rat)
taringa kiore (ear-rat)
Reid (1976:162) glosses Bontok koleng si otot as 'a kind of thin, non-edible
bracket fungus which grows on trees'. Webster (1924:90) gives Tagalog tainga-ng daga" as the Auricularia polytricha, a 'fleshy, leathery, rather thin, more
or less lobed fungus 5-15 cm. in diameter which grows on dead wood of
many species'. Burkill (1935:268) describes Malay chendawan telinga tikus or
kulat telinga tikus as a fungus which grows on rotting wood: Auricularia auricula-judae, Schroet. Van der Veen (1940:660) lists Tae' talinga balao as 'a type of
fungus which grows on the underside of decaying bamboo of the genus Dendrocalamus in the shape of a rat's ear'. Abo et al. (1976:184) give Marshallese
lojilnin kijdik as 'a plant, toadstool Auricularia ampla Persoon, and other earlike Basidiomycetes (fungi)'. Savage (1980:359), finally, lists Rarotongan
taringa kiore as 'a species of fungus which grows on decaying trees'. The
Samoan and Tuamotuan glosses are less informative.
The motivation for the expression 'rat ear' is relatively transparent. Jelly
fungi come in many sizes and shapes, but the Auricularia are typically thin
and smooth. Because they lack internal structure their general shape resembles the ears of rodents or other small mammals more nearly than a
human ear. They are typically brown or reddish-brown, with a soft velvety
exterior when young, while older fruiting bodies dry out and have a pale
grey, furry exterior. In texture they are tough and rubbery, hence all in all the
comparison appears to be one which could easily have arisen through convergent innovation.
2.2. Tree ears
Austronesian terms for mushrooms which translate literally as 'wood ear' or
'tree ear' include the following:
Table 2. Names for mushrooms that have the semantic structure 'wood ear1 or 'tree
ear' in Austronesian languages
Itbayaten
Kankanaey
Hanunoo
Chamorro
Erai
Mondropolon
Maori
talina nu kayuh (ear-of-tree)
inga-n di kaiw (ear-of-tree)
talingabatang (ear-log)
talanga-n hayu (ear-of tree)
aikinin (tree-ear)
cannl key (ear-tree)
taringa rakau (ear-tree)
Again, one does not have to go far to understand the motivation for this
term. Since saprophytes most commonly grow on the trunks of decaying
trees, it is not surprising that they would be called 'tree ears' or 'wood ears'
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in various languages (in most Austronesian languages the meanings 'wood'
and 'tree' are not lexically distinguished). The real challenge, then, is to
explain why some bracket fungi are called 'ghost ears' or 'thunder ears'.
2.3. Interlude: Mushrooms in culture
In an essay engagingly entitled 'Mushrooms in culture' the anthropologist
Claude Levi-Strauss (1976) sketched the fundamentals of an ethnology of
mushrooms, or ethnomycology. Levi-Strauss's essay is divided into two
parts. The first is an overview of the seminal work of R. Gordon Wasson
(1968), with an occasional aside to Wasson and Wasson (1957), and the second a brief survey of the ethnomycology of the Americas outside Mexico,
prompted in part by a critical assessment of some of the more general claims
made by Wasson.
The Wassons advanced several intriguing propositions about mushrooms
in culture, including the following: 1. cultures can be characterized as being
either passionately mycophile, or mushroom-loving (Russians, most Mediterranean peoples), or passionately mycophobe, or mushroom-despising
(Celtic and Germanic peoples); 2. globally mushrooms 'are associated with
either thunder and lightning, or the devil, or madness'; 3. these associations
reflect an ancient Eurasian mushroom cult which was widespread in early
Europe, but became obscured by the invasions of mycophobe Celtic and
Germanic peoples; 4. similar cults are preserved among aboriginal peoples in
Siberia and Mexico, where they revolve around the consumption of the hallucinogenic umbrella-shaped fly agaric, or Amanita muscaria, easily identified
by its large flat or rounded cap ranging in colour from a speckled bright red
to a dull gold.
Wasson (1968) attempts to shed light on certain of the Vedic texts of
ancient India which refer to the soma, identified variously as a plant, the juice
of that plant, and a god. Earlier attempts to isolate the referent of 'soma' were
unsuccessful in various ways, and Wasson shows how a number of obscure
references in the Vedic texts yield a straightforward interpretation once the
soma is identified with the Amanita muscaria. Particularly puzzling were references to the ritual consumption of soma in the form of human urine. To
illuminate these passages, Wasson tries to place them in a wider ethnological
perspective. In the ethnographic present, various Siberian peoples, including
the Ostyak, Vogul, Ket, Samoyed, Chukchi, Koryak, and Kamchadal, used
the fly agaric to achieve a state of ritual intoxication. In addition, there are
indirect indications that such a practice formerly existed among the Yukaghir
of Siberia and the Inari Lapps of northern Scandinavia. According to Wasson
(1968:275), 'Drinking the urine of one who has recently eaten fly-agaric produces the same effect as eating the mushroom. The passion for intoxication
becomes so strong that the people will often resort to this source when agaric
Rat Ears, Tree Ears, Ghost Ears and Thunder Ears
is not available.' Hence the ritual consumption of soma in the form of human
urine distinctly suggests the equation soma = amanita. Curiously, inedible
mushrooms are compared to dog's urine throughout modern India (Wasson
1968:64) and among the Siberian Yukaghir (Levi-Strauss 1976:229).
Jochelson, who is Levi-Strauss's source for the Yukaghir, notes that
They do not eat mushrooms, regarding them as unclean food growing from dogs'
urine. However, according to traditions, they used to intoxicate themselves with
the poisonous fly-agaric, which is still eaten by the Koryak and Chukchee. The
Yukaghir call mushrooms can-pai, i.e. tree-girl. (Jochelson 1926:419.)
It is worth pointing out that an association of mushrooms with dog's urine
has also been reported among some Austronesian-speaking peoples. In describing the folklore of the Tidong of north-eastern Kalimantan, for example,
Beech (1908:17) reported that 'Mushrooms spring from dogs' urine, and if
when you gather them you shout like a madman more will spring up in their
place'. A slightly more differentiated version of this belief appears in the Tagalog and Bikol regions of southern Luzon, Philippines, where edible mushrooms are attributed to lightning strikes, but inedible mushrooms are said to
have sprouted from places where a dog has urinated (Maria Sheila Zamar,
personal communication). Variants of this pattern in other cultures confirm
that the fundamental purpose of the belief is to provide an explanation as to
why mushrooms spring up unannounced. Among the Delaware Indians, for
example, 'a "mushrind" (mushroom) is believed to grow from frog-spawn'
(Tantaquidgeon 1942:60), while Thompson (1955-1958:331), in a section entitled 'Origin of trees and plants', cites the Lithuanian folk belief that mushrooms spring from the spittle of a deity. The apparently dominant folkloric
preference for dog's urine as a causal agent in the growth of fungi doubtless
stems from the fact that until modern times dogs were the most common
domesticated animal worldwide, and have the well-known habit of frequently marking their territory with traces of urine.1
In fairly typical Structuralist fashion, Levi-Strauss draws Wasson's observations together in the form of a pair of analogical proportions which are
implicitly transcultural or supracultural: (a) human urine is to amanita as
dog's urine is to ordinary mushrooms, (b) amanita is to other mushrooms as
humans are to dogs. This is not the place to discuss how well Levi-Strauss
1
The association of mushrooms with dung in Malagasy holataikomby (literally 'ox-dung fungus') 'species of ground fungus, so called perhaps because they grow in or near ox dung', or
Hawaiian kukaelio (literally 'horse's dung') 'mushroom' (a form that must postdate the introduction of horses in the nineteenth century) probably has a very different motivation, since dung
heaps are visible and some species of fungus, like the hallucinogenic Psilocybe coprophila, which
is central to the mushroom cults of many Mexican Indians, are known to grow on or in proximity to them.
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has succeeded in fusing the comparative goals and methods of classical ethnology with the quite different descriptive goals and methods of twentiethcentury ethnography, apart from saying that he does not specify what
abstract schemata of this type represent. The level of reference cannot be a
particular culture, as the very function of such an abstraction is to connect
ethnographic comparata, in this case the association of both human and
canine urine with mushrooms in India and Siberia. In effect, Structuralist
abstractions such as this must be seen as universal cognitive blueprints, but
this is precisely what leads to difficulties in their application to particular
cases.2
The analogies which Levi-Strauss invokes are problematic in several
ways. First, the primary ethnographic data relating mushrooms to human
urine and dog urine in India and Siberia are either temporally or spatially in
complementary distribution. Ordinary mushrooms are not referred to as
'dog's urine' in the Rig Veda, but only in modern India, where there is 'no
trace of a sacred mushroom' (Wasson 1968:64). Similarly, in Siberia it is the
Yukaghir who have traditions of formerly consuming the fly agaric, but who
no longer do, who associate mushrooms with the urination of dogs. Under
these circumstances it is difficult to set up an analogical proportion which
relates human urine and canine urine with mushrooms in the minds of one
and the same people.
Second, the essence of ah analogy is a perceived parallelism which is likely to be seen in the same way by the great majority of human beings (for
example, 'black is to white as night is to day'). Without shared perceptions
analogies simply will not work. By contrast, the parallelism Levi-Strauss promotes is contrived: the human body acts as a filter in the case of amanita, but
the dog's body has no such role, since dogs don't eat mushrooms. The two
associations of urine with mushrooms are thus quite disconnected. The first
has to do with a cultural practice which involves the sharing of hallucinogenic substances. The second has to do with the need to explain the sudden
appearance of the fruiting bodies of mushrooms, a phenomenon which contrasts strikingly with the growth patterns of other types of plants. Human
beings in general feel a powerful emotional ambivalence towards mushrooms and related types of fungi, since these organisms simultaneously
evoke feelings of both disgust and fascination. At the same time humans feel
a cognitive ambivalence towards mushrooms, since the etiology of their
appearance was quite mysterious to pre-scientific minds. The widespread
2
Leach (1974:50-2) appears to have similar difficulties in discovering the physical or psychical locus of Structuralist formulae, since "The nature of "the human mind", which functions as
a kind of randomizing computer to generate these permutations "without being aware of the
fact", is left obscure'.
Rat Ears, Tree Ears, Ghost Ears and Thunder Ears
belief that dog's urine triggers the growth of mushrooms is thus multi-functional, since it satisfies the problem of providing an explanation for a mysterious natural phenomenon, and at the same time is consistent with the general association of mushrooms with rot, waste and decay.
The third problem with the analogy presented by Levi-Strauss is that it
includes the amanita as part of a universal cognitive formula. But there is
little or no evidence that psychotropic mushrooms have ever been used by
Austronesian-speaking peoples. Standard surveys of the use of hallucinogenic substances such as mushrooms omit any reference to the Austronesian world (de Rios 1984), and a search through ethnographies and ethnobotanical studies of Austronesian-speaking peoples turns up equally negative
results.3 Without the first half of the analogical proportion ('human urine is
to amanita') the second half ('as dog's urine is to ordinary mushrooms') loses
its contrastiye force. Moreover, the Tidong case suggests that there need not
be a correlation between the usefulness of a mushroom and the emotional
reaction to it: since mushrooms, would not be gathered if they were not useful, it appears that a negative association with dog's urine may be found even
with edible types of mushrooms.
Are most Austronesian-speaking societies mycophile or mycophobe?
Rather than adopt such a binary mode of classification, perhaps it would be
more realistic to recognize a profound ambivalence about mushrooms and
related fungi in all cultures. Wasson's characterization of Germanic peoples
as mycophobes, for example, is confronted with regional counter-examples,
while standard treatments, of European mycology class the Amanita muscaria
among 'the deadly amanitas' - toadstools par excellence - whereas this is one
and the same organism as the soma, or 'divine mushroom of immortality',
which attained the status of a deity in Vedic India. In short, at least for mushrooms, the line between toxic and intoxicating can become perilously thin.4
The point of this discussion is to provide a more general context for the
understanding of the Austronesian data which follow. In particular, the association of mushrooms with dog's urine highlights a recurrent cognitive
dilemma which has confronted human beings in widely separated parts of
the earth: why do mushrooms suddenly appear without clear causation? The
3
Wasson (1956:610) implies that there is tenuous evidence that hallucinogenic mushrooms
were used in Borneo, but gives no particulars, and this suggestion is not supported by any of the
ethnographic sources on Borneo known to me.
4
, Wasson seems to have been unaware of the passion for mushrooms in Yorkshire, where,
following thunderstorms, it is common practice for the country people to go out to search the
hills for new growths of fungi (D.J. Prentice, personal communication). This practice does not
appear to differ substantially from one which Wasson (1956:605) reports for France and describes
as perhaps 'the final surviving trace in the Western World of a belief that reaches in time back to
remote pre-history and in space around the world'.
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Robert Blust
belief that mushrooms spring up in places where dogs have urinated is a
widely shared solution to the problem of explaining this puzzling fact. But it
is not the only solution that the human mind has conceived, nor is it the only
solution that has been conceived independently in geographically discontinuous regions. We are now ready to consider the names for mushrooms
which translate as 'ghost ears' and 'thunder ears' in Austronesian languages.
2.4. Ghost ears
Austronesian terms for mushrooms which translate literally as 'ghost ears'
include the following:
Table 3.
Isneg
Nias
Seimat
Puluwat
Trukese
Ponapean
Rotuman
Fijian
talinga danag (ear-spirit)
talinga oro (ear-spirit)
taxing i paxi (ear-spirit)
halinga-n hooma (ear-ghost)
seninge-n sooma (ear-spirit/ghost)
saleng en eni (ear-ghost)
faliang ne 'atua (ear of ghost)
dalinga ni kalou (ear of spirit/ghost)
The following additional information is available. Vanoverbergh gives talinga
danag as 'A kind of bracket fungus that resembles the xanggarat (large brown
edible bracket fungus, smooth on top), but is usually much larger', and danag
as
Thin and filthy spirits. Those who inhabit a balisi tree (= banyan) affect with fever
or deafness anybody who dares throw stones at their abode ... In general, they
emaciate people and keep them dirty, even though they bathe frequently. Should
they inhabit a tree in your rice field, place a bdtang bracket fungus in it, and they
will decamp. (Vanoverbergh 1972:207.)
The bdtang is described as 'A kind of very hard, rather large bracket fungus,
in the shape of an ear. It grows on trees and is not edible.' There is no explicit
indication as to whether the talinga danag is edible, but this seems unlikely,
given the negative associations of the danag spirits. Other data include:
Seimat taxing i paxi = 'ear of ancestral spirit' (Blust n.d.a); Puluwat hdlingd-n
hoomd 'tree fungus, mushroom', where hooma = 'bad ghosts of the dead;
malevolent spirit (feared, as they are believed to devour humans)' (Elbert
1972:37); Trukese seninge-n anu or seninge-n soomd 'any of a large number of
fungi ... such as Auricularia, Ganoderma tropicum, Polyporus grammocephalus,
Poria, Psilocybe, Pycnoporus sanguineas, Schizophyllum radiatum, Tyromyces'
(Goodenough and Sugita 1980:147); and Rotuman faliang ne 'atua 'toadstool
Rat Ears, Tree Ears, Ghost Ears and Thunder Ears
or fungus' (Churchward 1940:194).5
Among the Pinatubo Negritos of western Luzon 'The non-edible mushrooms and ear-fungi are invariably called kuwdt-anito, that is, the "mushrooms and ear-fungi of the spirits'" (Fox 1952:232), and words of similar
semantic structure are found for mushrooms of various types among the
Tsimshian Indians of British Columbia (Dunn 1978:17) and the Carib of
north-eastern South America (Ahlbrinck 1931:482).
Why are various fungi called 'ghost ears' or 'spirit ears' in widely separated Austronesian languages? As noted earlier, Wasson and Wasson (1957)
pointed out that mushrooms universally 'are associated with either thunder
and lightning, or the devil, or madness'. The 'devil', of course, is a JudaeoChristian concept, not a universal one, and might be regarded as corresponding with 'ghost' or 'spirit' in traditional animistic societies. We could thus
entertain the hypothesis that mushrooms called 'ghost ears' contain hallucinogenic or toxic substances and so are associated with states of spirit possession. Wasson (1956,1968) has appealed to the mind-altering properties of
the Amanita muscaria to explain quite varied folk-beliefs, including the association of mushrooms with the devil and with lightning strikes. Since there is
little if any evidence for the use of psychotropic mushrooms among Austronesian-speaking peoples, however, this interpretation is problematic. Second,
the name 'ghost ears' itself suggests that the referent in most or all of the
above languages is a saprophytic fungus which grows on trees rather than a
pileate fruiting body of the amanita type.6
Could the association of mushrooms with spirits on the one hand and
with dog's urine on the other be motivated by the same question? It is clear
that the sudden sprouting of the fruiting bodies of many types of mushrooms
tended to baffle the minds of preliterate peoples. Unlike higher plants, which
grow gradually and propagate through more readily comprehensible means
(as visible seeds), the fruiting bodies of fungi tend to appear abruptly and
without obvious connections to a fertilizing agent. In an animistic world any
natural phenomenon of dubious causation would readily be attributed to the
action of spirits. This is certainly true of the rainbow, which appears sudden-
5
Since falinga belongs to the native lexical stratum in Rotuman, and 'atua is a Polynesian
loan (Biggs 1965), the collocation faliang ne 'atua evidently is a relatively recent formation.
6
Similar names could, of course, be given to mushrooms which are not deliberately consumed for their psychotropic effects, but nonetheless give rise to abnormal psychological states
through accidental poisoning. One apparent case of this type has come to my attention. In correspondence dated 15 October 1982, Niko Besnier pointed out to me that 'the Tongans ... know
about mushrooms, and call them fakamalu 'a tevolo "Devil's umbrella". The explanation that is
current there is that this is a reference to both the shape and the hallucinogenic nature of the
species.' The name in this case clearly makes use of an English morpheme, and so presumably
postdates contact with Western culture.
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Robert Blust
ly and without obvious causation (Blust n.d.b), and it would apply equally to
the mysterious overnight appearance of mushroom populations seemingly
out of thin air. In post-Christian Europe such phenomena have been attributed to the action of fairies, elves or other less offensively supernatural
agents, as witnessed by. such expressions 'as English fairy ring for circular
growths of mushrooms which spring up in the dewy grass (where the fairies
danced in circles at night), or Dutch elvenbanken (elf benches) for bracket fungi
which offer a diminutive sitting place on the trunks of certain trees.7 Names
of the type 'ghost.ear' in Austronesian languages thus may reflect a native
speaker perception of the fungi in question as products of spirit activity.
To date there is little ethnographic evidence to test this hypothesis, and it
is curious that most known names of fungi which contain a morpheme for
'ghost' or 'spirit' also contain the morpheme for 'ear', suggesting that they are
predominantly jelly fungi or bracket fungi. Unlike the fruiting bodies of most
mushrooms, jelly fungi and bracket fungi do not appear suddenly, and some
bracket fungi are fairly long-lived. The animistic connection with spirit
agency in such cases presumably would be through the peculiarity of their
attachment: whereas 'normal' plants sprout from the earth, jelly fungi,
bracket fungi and the like sprout from the trunks of living or decomposing
trees, and thus appear to have been artificially (that is, supernaturally)
implanted rather than resulting from commonly understood processes of
growth.
2.5. Thunder ears
Austronesian terms for mushrooms which translate literally as 'thunder ears'
appear to be more limited, but include the following:
Table 4.
Chamorro
Gilbertese
Woleaian
talanga-n hulu (ear-of thunder)
taninga ni ba (ear of thunder)
talinge-li-pach (ear-of-thunder)
The first two terms require a few words of explanation. Although Chamorro
talanga-n hulu translates literally as 'ear of thunder', Topping, Ogo, and
Dungca (1975:196) gloss it as 'Roll of thunder, bolt of lightning. After a storm,
disorders of thickets or woods are attributed to it.' This definition contains no
explicit reference to mushrooms, and so the form might be dismissed as of
dubious relevance. But the semantic structure of talanga-n hulu points clearly
7
The Oxford English Dictionary defines 'fairy-ring' as 'A circular band of grass differing in
colour from the grass around it, a phenomenon supposed in popular belief to be produced by
fairies when dancing; really caused by the growth of certain fungi'.
Rat Ears, Tree Ears, Ghost Ears and Thunder Ears
to fungi (compare Table 2: Chamorro talanga-n hayu). On inquiry, Topping
(letter of 20 December 1983) was able to confirm the association of thunder
or lightning strikes with the appearance of mushrooms: 'I inquired about the
meaning of talangan hulu, and have found that it does indeed refer to the rush
of fungi found in the forest after heavy rains, and that they are somehow
attributed to lightning and thunder. It is believed that they were left by
dwarfs that ran away' The last sentence suggests an element that is extraneous to the original belief system as reflected in the semantic structure of the
word, and may ultimately derive from Spanish contact.
Luomala (1953:111) analyses Gilbertese (Kiribati) taninga ni ba as 'ear of
leaf. Bingham (1908), in fact, gives ba with multiple meanings: 'the midrib or
main stem of the cocoanut frond; a leaf; thunder; a skin disease of infants'.
Luomala's analysis presumably is motivated by a priori considerations of
plausibility, although by her own account the fungi in question (probably
Polyporus sanguineus Fr. and possibly Earliella corrugata (Pers.) Murr.) grow on
the logs, not the fronds of the coconut tree. The choice of ba 'thunder' in this
plant name is based on the structural parallelism of the Gilbertese and
Woleaian words, and the probable cognation of Gilbertese ba with Woleaian
pach, which Sohn and Tawerilmang (1976:113) give with only two meanings:
(1) thunder, lightning, (2) end-piece of a canoe, prow.
Wasson (1956) has shown that the appearance of mushrooms was associated by Greek and Roman classical writers with thunderstorms and lightning
strikes, and that a similar connection is found in France, in much of the
Middle East, in China, in Madagascar, in the Philippines, and among the
Maori of New Zealand. As further support for this association, Levi-Strauss
(1976:235) cites Hill-Tout (1904:31-2), who gives Qatkaimonatc = 'thunder
excrement' as the name for a Polyporus species used as a detergent among
the Salishan-speaking Seechelt (Seshelt) of coastal British Columbia. We
might add that a name of identical semantic structure (mushroom = thunder
excrement) is found in Kiowa of the southern plains (Harrington 1928:140),
and that a belief that mushrooms spring up in places where lightning has
struck is common to Tamil and other South Indian speakers (Athisivan, personal communication).
By comparison with the data in Tables 1-3, terms meaning 'thunder ear'
appear to be rare in Austronesian languages. However, a cultural or linguistic association between mushrooms and thunder without the label 'thunder ear' is more widely attested among Austronesian-speaking peoples than
the data in Table 4 indicate. The Timugon Murut of Sabah refer to the edible
puffball as kulat tingkalud 'thunder mushroom', as they believe that it appears
following thunderstorms (D.J. Prentice, personal communication). Among
peninsular Malays it is said that mushrooms spring up following a thunderstorm (James T. Collins, personal communication), and the villagers of East
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Java hold that fungi proliferate in spots that have been struck by a thunderbolt (Bahasa Indonesia: halilintar or petir) (Dendy Sugono, personal communication). For Malagasy, Richardson (1885:275) gives holatra 'a generic name
for fungi', and holabdratra (see also vdratra 'thunder; thunderbolt, lightning')
'probably a kind of mushroom growing immediately after rain'. For Numfor
of West New Guinea, Van Hasselt and Van Hasselt (1947:111) cite kapo 'mushroom, fungus', and then list four edible varieties, of which the kapo saprop
('ground mushroom') or kapo kadadu ('thunder mushroom') is said to spring
from the ground following a thunderstorm. In a similar vein, Demetrio y
Radaza (1970:894-5) cites a Philippine folk belief that 'lightning makes mushrooms grow'.8
Why should this association between sudden, transient meteorological
phenomena and the sprouting of mushrooms exist in various parts of the
world? The most straightforward explanation would be that the cultural
association mirrors a natural association: if mushrooms do appear in profusion following a thunderstorm, it is not surprising that this fact would have
been observed and recorded in linguistic expressions independently in various parts of the world. The article 'mushroom' in the Encyclopaedia Britannica
gives some encouragement to this line of explanation:
Because of their sudden appearance and rapid decay, mushrooms have come to
symbolize anything ephemeral or short-lived. They have been thought of as the
provender of Mother Earth, embodiments of fertility. Their mysterious appearance has also inspired many locai legends of dark meaning ... In nature fruiting
often occurs only once a year (for many species in the autumn), when a particular
series of weather events triggers the process. Early autumn spells of warm, wet
weather often are followed by the burgeoning of fruiting bodies; such a fruiting is
commonly referred to as a 'break'.
The author of this article gives no further details concerning the 'particular
series of weather events' which triggers the appearance of the fruiting body,
thus inviting speculation that thunder and lightning may be causally implicated in breaks of mushrooms. However, there appears to be no scientific basis
for this connection,9 This problem illustrates clearly how the biologist and
8
Demetrio y Radaza does not label information by language group, but gives the general
localities from which his statements were collected. This statement, collected in Cagayan de Oro
city, probably was elicited from a speaker of Cebuano Bisayan.
9
According to Dr. Walter Julich, a research mycologist at the Rijksherbarium in Leiden during the early 1980's, temperature and moisture are the only meteorological factors which have a
clearly established triggering effect on the production of breaks'. He recognized the popular
belief that breaks are caused by thunder and lightning, but dismissed it as folklore; mushrooms
appear in greater profusion after abundant rains (at the optimal temperatures), whether or not
these are accompanied by electrical phenomena in the atmosphere. The same point is made by
Wasson (1956:606).
•
Rat Ears, Tree Ears, Ghost Ears and Thunder Ears
the ethnologist or linguist may be confronted with very different explanatory
problems in examining the same general phenomenon. It may be true that
the popular connection between thunderstorms and 'breaks' is folklore, but
the global distribution of the belief demands explanation, indeed, all the
more so if it is without empirical foundation. In short, whereas the biologist
is concerned with natural history, the ethnologist (and linguist) is concerned
with the natural history of belief, and explanations appropriate to one realm
may be entirely inappropriate to the other.
Wasson (1956) concludes that the association of mushrooms with lightning is a metaphor for the ecstasy produced by the consumption of the fly
agaric, just as the association of mushrooms with spirits ('the devil') is a
metaphor for the madness that such consumption sometimes produces. His
argument, as it unfolded between 1956 and 1968, takes approximately the following form. (1) The soma cult of Vedic India, which thrived some 3,000
years ago, was centred on the ritual consumption of the Amanita muscaria. In
time this ritual was abandoned, so that the Vedic references to soma became
obscure. (2) The poetic imagery of the Rig Veda makes it clear that even in
Vedic times the soma was a prized rarity, found only in the high mountains
(the Hindu Kush or Himalayas). Because of the relative inaccessibility of
Amanita muscaria in the Indus Valley, from an early period it was common to
use more readily available substitutes for it. (3) The soma cult was brought to
India from the North by Indo-European speakers who had previously been
in contact with speakers of Finno-Ugric languages, presumably in northcentral Asia. (4) The attested Siberian and Scandinavian cases confirm that
some form of ritual consumption of Amanita muscaria has an ancient pedigree. (5) The association of mushrooms with lightning strikes by other
peoples who do not consume the fly agaric can be taken as prima facie evidence that they once did.
Wasson's contributions to ethnomycology have been widely recognized
and justly praised (see, for example, Riedlinger 1990), and there can be little
doubt that his identification of the soma of the Vedic texts with Amanita muscaria is correct. But in achieving this important breakthrough it is apparent
that he became the victim of an ideefixe:because the association of mushrooms with thunder and lightning in Vedic India centres on the ritual consumption of the Amanita muscaria, the similar associations everywhere on
earth must have been inspired by an ancient cult of the same type. In other
words, the globally distributed beliefs connecting mushroom breaks with
lightning strikes cannot be a product of convergent evolution, but must
reflect shared history. As he puts it,
Mushrooms are strange, and one might attribute supernatural parentage to them,
but would everyone jump to the lightning-bolt as the divine begetter? ... Did our
myth spread from a focus of origin by diffusion? Surely the range is too vast... It
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seems less unlikely that we must ascend per stirpes to that remote time when the
ancestors of all these peoples were living in cultural contact with each other somewhere in the Eurasian landmass. At some moment... was there perhaps a dramatic
event or discovery that suddenly stamped the mushroom with the imprint of the
fulminating Almighty, and left such an impress on the mushroom as to survive to
this day, thousands - maybe tens of thousands of years after the discovery itself is
forgotten? (Wasson 1956:608.)
In this Edenic state, if we are to believe the argument, a single community or
culture area developed a ritual which is still remembered and partially (but
imperfectly) preserved in scattered parts of the earth after the great diasporas
of Homo sapiens. The associations of mushrooms with lightning, and presumably the spirit world as well, were all originally inspired by poetic images of
the amanita, which were later transferred to other types of mushrooms,
where they became meaningless survivals, much as the imagery of the soma
in the Rig-Veda became meaningless once it was dissociated from the
Amanita muscaria that had inspired it. The steps in Wasson's chain of inference are reasonably clear, even for those who may find it difficult to accept
them, but his conclusion clearly creates more problems than it solves.
Culture traits which appear to involve arbitrary associations do not present an explanatory problem so long as they are geographically restricted,
since such a distribution could plausibly be a product of shared history. But
when a culture trait that appears to be arbitrary is globally distributed the
matter is altogether different, since shared arbitrary associations suggest
shared history, but global distributions suggest independent origin. It was
for just this reason that Wasson felt the need to posit an ancient community
of origin in which the associations of mushrooms with lightning became
fixed (and later transmuted from a metaphor for ecstasy to an agent of fungal
fructification). But globally distributed beliefs about mushrooms form only a
tiny fraction of the total body of globally distributed culture traits which
appear to be arbitrary. One could as easily cite the fact that sun showers are
called 'the fox's wedding' or something closely similar over much of Eurasia
and Africa (Blust 1999), or the idea of the dragon (Blust 2000), the taboo
against pointing at a rainbow (Blust n.d.b), the supernatural associations of
albinism in animals, or the association of head-hunting with fertility. Some of
these associations have to postdate the geographical separation of much of
humanity Head-hunting, for example, is found only among agriculturists,
and has essential connections with the agricultural cycle in widely scattered
regions, but agriculture has a history dating back no more than 10,000 years.
In short, there is no reason to treat the whole of ethnomycology as centred on
the Amanita muscaria. Because they do not fit neatly into the general category
of plants, mushrooms and other fungi have long perplexed the human mind,
and it is this fundamental fact which is centrally important in trying to
Rat Ears, Tree Ears, Ghost Ears and Thunder Ears
explain widely distributed and surprising beliefs about them.
The connection of mushrooms with thunder brings us back to the problem of how human beings with an animistic conception of nature would
attempt to explain the sudden and seemingly random appearance of mushrooms. Two widely adopted solutions to this problem have already been
noted, the first appealing to natural, the second to supernatural causation: (1)
mushrooms spring up in places where a dog has urinated, (2) mushrooms
spring up through the agency of spirits. The connection of mushrooms with
thunder, like the connection of mushrooms with dog's urine, appeals to natural causation. Dogs urinate on any convenient projection, thereby creating a
large number of potential locations for mushrooms to spring up. The belief
that mushrooms appear where lightning has struck provides almost equal
latitude to the imagination, since lightning strikes typically are unseen and
may be frequent during heavy-storms. Arguably, lightning strikes might be
viewed as combining natural and supernatural elements of causation, since
thunderstorms themselves are so commonly regarded as products of supernatural agency among animistic peoples. That such a counter-to-fact view
has arisen independently in many parts of the earth should not be surprising.
Breaks of mushrooms are associated with thunderstorms, not because they
are spawned by lightning strikes, but because the conditions of temperature
and humidity which give rise to thunderstorms must correspond to a very
large degree to those which give rise to mushroom breaks. Although he
devotes a great deal of attention to the association of mushroom breaks with
lightning strikes, Wasson mentions the similar association with dog's urine
only in passing. Yet both associations are widely attested, and in the view
presented here they are motivated by the same cognitive pressure: how to
explain the mystery of why fungi appear suddenly (as with mushrooms), or
attached to trees (as with jelly fungi or bracket fungi).
3. Mushrooms as talismans
One final point remains to be explored. In addition to their many other uses,
fungi are sometimes used or worn as talismans. With reference to the Bagobo
of Mindanao in the southern Philippines, Cole.notes that
Certain charms, or actions, are of value either in warding off evil spirits, in causing trouble of death to an enemy, or in gaining an advantage over another in trading and in games. One type of charm is a narrow cloth belt in which 'medicines'
are tied. These medicines may be peculiarly shaped stones, bits of fungus growth,
a tooth, a shell, or similar object. (Cole 1913:108-9.)
Similarly, Evans (1937:73 ff.) points out that kilts of fungus rhizomorphs were
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Robert Blust
used among various Negritos of Malaya as protection against 'hot rain' (rain
while the sun is shining). In Borneo, Kelabit redhang is the name for a
bracket fungus which grows on the sides of trees, and at the same time for an
obstacle of branches built around a fruit tree to protect it from marauders,
suggesting an equation 'bracket fungus = amulet'. Moreover, Richards (1980:
169) gives Iban kulat 'mushroom', batu kulat ('mushroom stone') with .the
meaning 'noxious talisman'.
Levi-Strauss (1976:234) notes that the Salishan-speaking Clallam and their
Chimakuan-speaking neighbours the Quinault of Puget Sound 'attributed to
fungi growing on reeds or conifers the property of a gambling talisman'.
Given its occurrence in a geographically restricted area, this observation
would be of only local, ethnographic interest, were it not for the fact that a
similar belief is reported in insular Southeast Asia. Demetrio y Radaza
(1970:1:162) recorded a belief in the Manobo-speaking area of Mindanao
which holds that 'mushrooms with three feet are good for gambling', and in
another context cites the folk belief that a mushroom with three feet ensures
victory in a cockfight.
What relevance do these observations have to the association of mushrooms and lightning strikes? There is just enough evidence to merit mention
that mushrooms are sometimes viewed as talismans against lightning strikes.
Wasson, who interprets the data in a very different light, notes that the Tanala
of Madagascar
dry and convert to powder the sclerotium of the mushroom known as Lentinus •
tuber regium Fries., on which the Tanala people bestow the name olatafa. When a
thunderstorm of fearful violence breaks, the natives quickly put some of the powder moistened with water into their mouths, and as the lightning bolt streaks by,
they spit forth the fungal paste into the storm crying 'Fotaka!' or else 'Fotaka malemy!', which is to say 'Earth!1 or 'Soft earth!' (Wasson 1956:607-8.)
Wasson sees the lightning-mushroom link in examples such as this as a
reflection of 'the psychic disturbance of mushroomic ecstasy'. But one could
as easily see the use of fungi in this case as a talisman against a lightning
strike. A very similar interpretation appears to be possible for the expression
kapo kadadu 'kind of mushroom' among the Numfor of West New Guinea. As
noted earlier, Van Hasselt and Van Hasselt (1947:104) gloss kadadu as 'thunder'. In fact, however, they list two homophonous words kadadu, of which the
second is glossed as 'an upright fern which is abundant in low-lying and
well-watered areas ... In Humboldt Bay the stems are used to make images
which are placed on houses as protection against lightning strikes.' Here it is
not the mushroom itself which is used as an amulet, but a fern which is
labelled by the same morpheme as that for 'thunder' in the mushroom name
kapo kadadu.
Rat Ears, Tree Ears, Ghost Ears and Thunder Ears
There is a curious parallelism between these observations about fungi and
'thunder stones' - prehistoric stone implements which are widely regarded in
animistic cultures as products of lightning strikes. Thunder stones have the
following properties: (1) they are of obscure origin; (2) they are almost universally believed to result from lightning strikes, particularly of trees; (3)
evidently through a generalization of the widely held belief that 'lightning
never strikes twice in the same place', they are also commonly regarded as
talismans against a lightning strike.10 We have already seen that mushrooms
share the first two properties, and are also used as talismans. The evidence
that they are believed to provide protection against lightning strikes is tenuous so far, but the overall parallels with beliefs about thunder stones are too
striking to ignore.
4. Conclusions
In conclusion, words for mushrooms and related fungi in Austronesian languages cannot possibly be understood without a fairly extensive cultural
exegesis. This undoubtedly will prove to be true of terms in this semantic
domain in many language families. The common practice of seeing human
languages as either products of universal psychological factors or historically
particular cultural factors is thus a false dichotomy. The data considered in
this paper involve facts peculiar to Austronesian languages, but can only be
fully understood by reference to more general properties of human perception and cognition. The universal and the particular co-exist in both language
and culture, and distinguishing the two presents - and will continue to present - one of the most challenging and rewarding tasks of scholarship in both
linguistics and ethnology.
10
Fox (1952:339) reports that thunder stones are used as protection against lightning among
the Pinatubo Negritos of the northern Philippines. Wilken (1912 4:539) gives numerous examples
from Indonesia. Cozemius (1932:134) describes virtually identical beliefs among the Miskito and
Sumu Indians of Honduras and Nicaragua.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
I wish to express my thanks to two anonymous referees for comments which
led to improvements in an earlier version of this manuscript, and to James T.
Collins for his assistance in obtaining information. Any errors of fact or interpretation remain my sole responsibility.
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Robert Blust
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