By Tom Wakeford
What book is this?
The Book of the Empress arrives with a flourish of spores and speculation. Marketed as the opening volume of a projected “Shhhhhhroom” cycle, it focuses on Amanita muscaria—the red‑capped, white‑flecked toadstool that haunts fairytales, Nordic sagas and Siberian shamanism. Where most contemporary psychedelic writing homes in on psilocybin or LSD, Benders chooses the outsider fungus and lets it dictate both structure and sensibility.
Instead of the linear memoir–slash–science narrative that dominates today’s psychedelic nonfiction, the book resembles a polyphonic grimoire. It interleaves prose essays, lyric bursts, etymological digressions, annotated myth, visual poetry, snatches of auto‑fiction and even the odd musical score. Think Robert Graves’s The White Goddess spliced with Terence McKenna’s early lectures, passed through a Dutch surrealist’s grinder and dusted with Amanita spores.
How well is it written?
Benders is, first and last, a poet, and the prose shows it. Sentences zigzag, self‑interrupt, re‑loop; images bloom, decay and fruit again a page later. At its best the style is exhilarating:
“The caps turn skyward like a constellation of emergency flares, signaling the nervous system of Gaia herself: ‘Reset, reset, reset.’”
Moments like these crackle with associative energy, and the author’s command of mythological reference is dazzling—Ceryneian Hind, Sappho, the Benu Bird, a cameo by Bishop Berkeley—all marshalled to argue that Amanita muscaria sits at the root of Indo‑European cosmology.
Yet the same exuberance can become overgrowth. Extended typographical play (block capitals, runic glyphs, mirrored lines) occasionally clogs the reading path; puns pile upon multilingual word‑play until the analytic thread snaps. Readers who relish unfiltered poetics will revel; those seeking disciplined argument may wish for judicious editing.
Importance within current psychedelic literature
Psychedelic publishing in the 2020s has split between two poles: clinically‑oriented books that shepherd readers toward therapeutic use, and memoirs that trade on visionary confession. The Book of the Empress refuses both lanes. It contributes something rarer: a mythopoetic reconstruction of psychedelic history that treats mushrooms not as “compound carriers” but as co‑authors of human culture.
In that sense Benders picks up a thread left hanging since the hey‑day of Wasson and McKenna. By front‑loading Amanita—a species sidelined in the ‘psychedelic renaissance’ because its chemistry is messy and its experiences less easily medicalised—he calls attention to the blind spots of today’s psilocybin‑centric conversation. If the psychopharmacology crowd feels faint at lore, so be it: the book insists that any serious account of entheogens must grapple with the symbolic, the shamanic, the dangerous and the downright weird.
For readers tracking the surge of Amanita gummies and TikTok micro‑dosers, Benders offers both caution and cosmic invitation. He reminds us that Amanita muscaria works on the GABA‑ergic system, not the serotonergic 5‑HT2A pathway beloved of FDA trials. In other words: it is not psilocybin-lite. It is its own beast, with centuries of ritual practice and a distinct phenomenology that can be euphoric, disorienting or somatically purgative. The book’s vivid trip‑vignettes, harvested from Finnish folk songs and the author’s own woodland vigils, hammer that point home.
Theories and their plausibility
Three intertwined theses anchor the text:
- The Amanita Creation Hypothesis – Human language, music and hierarchical kingship sprang from prehistoric muscaria cults.
- The Empress Archetype – A feminine, mycelial intelligence lurks beneath patriarchy’s solar myths; ingesting Amanita allows a temporary audience with this suppressed sovereign.
- Neuro‑mythopoiesis – Entheogens do not merely “inspire” myths; they neurologically template narrative structures that then echo through literature.
How convincing are these claims?
Creation Hypothesis. Benders marshals comparative folklore with real ingenuity—linking Santa’s red‑and‑white livery, reindeer legends and Indo‑Aryan soma hymns—but the leap from correlation to causation remains canyon‑wide. The argument at times rests on etymology so acrobatic it rivals Graves’s lunar logic. Still, the hypothesis is valuable as provocation: it destabilises the lazy equation of “psychedelic origins” with psilocybin alone.
Empress Archetype. Here the book is strongest. By foregrounding a chthonic feminine presence—equal parts Demeter, Maria Sabina and Mother Agaric—Benders offers a needed corrective to the masculine hero’s‑journey template that drives much psychedelic writing. His close readings of Sappho fragments and Yeats’s “At the Winter Solstice” are genuinely illuminating.
Neuro‑mythopoiesis. The boldest claim: that recurrent mythic motifs are “fungal memory‑prints.” Neuroscience is scant, yet Benders cites psilocin‑induced hyper‑connectivity research, then speculates that Amanita’s muscimol might create a different network signature favouring cyclic narrative. It is more poetic metaphor than laboratory theory, but it sparks exciting questions for disciplines that often talk past each other.
Verdict
The Book of the Empress is not a cautious book, nor a tidy one. It is a fungal sprawl, fruiting with ideas, riddled with wormholes, occasionally toxic in its rhetorical certainty, but unmistakably alive. Where much psychedelic literature settles into the packaging of wellness, Benders re‑infects the field with unpredictability and ecstatic risk.
For the general reader the prose may at times feel like being force‑fed a basketful of raw caps: alternately thrilling and nauseating. For scholars of entheogenic tradition it supplies a rich (if unruly) compendium of cross‑cultural Amanita lore that has been missing from the current medicalised discourse. And for writers it serves as a reminder that form itself can trip—typography, cadence and myth‑weaving mimicking the mushroom’s own delirious circuitry.
Will every claim convince? Certainly not. But the book succeeds where it matters most: it re‑enchants a mycological corner long dismissed as fairy‑tale décor and insists it deserves centre stage in the ongoing conversation about mind, matter and meaning. In doing so, Benders stakes a place—untidy, uncompromising and vivid—in the burgeoning canon of twenty‑first‑century psychedelic letters.
Recommended for: mythographers, adventurous psychonauts, poets of the spore, and any reader willing to exchange clinical certainty for ecstatic speculation.
Approach with: a bookmarked dictionary, a skeptical eyebrow, and—if you dare—a carefully measured slice of the Empress’s crimson cap.