The Agarics
Follow @AlienPortraits on Instagram for a weekly-ish story of a new alien species + ten synthographic portraits.
Medium: Midjourney AI + Lightroom + Procreate
The Order of the Agaric Ascetics (simplified as the Agarics, and known colloquially as the Mushroom Monks) are a small sect of humans devoted to the millennia-old practice of monastic mycology.
The Agarics, much like the coral-headed Scleracti, have chosen to merge with their favorite lifeform. The fusion progresses over the span of a monk’s life, starting with an initiation ceremony in which the novice’s circulatory and nervous systems are embedded with specially-bred fungal hyphae.
For the next four to six weeks, the monk undergoes a deeply spiritual journey, as the mycelium permeates every system in the body and begins exchanging small doses of psilocybin for nutrients. It is said that such a sustained psychedelic experience permanently reformats the egoic structure of the ascetic, stripping away much of the preexisting personality to make room for a combination of human and fungal consciousness.
At the culmination of this experience, the fungus produces a large fruiting body from the head of the monk. This emergence does not kill them, as the mushroom has by this point formed a fully symbiotic relationship with the brain and nervous system. It does, however, often come at the expense of eyesight, a sense that the monks are more than willing to sacrifice in exchange for clearer inner sight.
At the end of each Agaric’s life, they make a pilgrimage to Old Earth. There, they lie down in a forest, where their bodies are used by the fungus as a final growth medium, producing hundreds of fruiting bodies and trillions of spores. The resulting blooms have a nontrivial effect on the remediation of nuclear radiation from humanity’s pre-communitarian wars.
More Alien Portraits
