Handcrafted Mushroom Pendant
On leather or cotton cord
Handmade with ♥ in *1-2 weeks
The ancients viewed mushrooms as the transformers and bringers of death. They absorb dead organic matter and bring it to the underworld. The Hexenkreis, also known as a fairy ring – is a circle of mushrooms. It was known as a place where a witch had practiced a ritual, opening a portal to the underworld.
This is the Hexenkreis pendant, featuring a circle of mushrooms on a hand-forged and fabricated solid fine silver ring weighing 17 grams. This pendant is dripping in deep European shamanic folklore. Comes on a 25 inch deer leather OR Vegan friendly cotton cord.
- PENDANT: 25mm diameter
- CORD: Adjustable 25″
Did you know?
Mushrooms and fungi have ancient cultural Aspects to them. They were seen as transformers and bringers of the Dead. During Fall, when everything dies, they are like the working hands of Holle, and the Underworld. They will eat up everything that is dead, ill, and absorb the dead organic matter and bring it deep down into the Underworld, where it is recycled.
This has indeed old traditions. The elderberry tree in Germany is such a tree that is deeply connected to the Underworld and the work of Frau Holle, a pagan deity of the Underworld, and often depicted as both a young and an old woman. The elderberry would be put next to the manure of a farm or property, because it would keep the portals to her realm wide open. And while doing so, everything old, ill, dead, must be put on the pile of manure or compost next to the elderberry tree, so that it can be recycled again.
The same can be said about the realm of mushrooms and fungi. In German, we still call many different mushrooms “Hexenpilz”, “Satanspilz”, and so on, for a reason. They have been associated with witches, devils and evil spirits. In traditional shamanic cultures, the Fly Agaric mushroom would grow around the birch tree. The birch was one of the first trees that would grow in Europe after the last Ice Age, but in Siberia, the birch tree is also at times associated with the sacred world tree, the tree that the shaman can travel both to the upper and to the underworld.
A so called “Hexenkreis”, (witches-circle), also known as fairy rings, is a natural occourence of certain types of fungi that grow in circles. These can be found all across Europe, North-America and also Africa, especially Namibia. The occurence of the “Hexenkreis” has to do with how the mycelia of the fungi absorbs certain nutrients in the soil. In Folklore, the “Hexenkreis” was a clear sign that a witch, a Hagazussa, was there in order to practice rituals, call upon spirits and was also often seen as a type of portal into the Otherworlds. This Folklore surely goes back to the early middle Ages of Europe, when Christianity has declared many former pagan traditions as evil and damaging. The role of mushrooms, however, has always been important in traditional shamanic cultures around the world.
