A brief overview of 2,000 Years of Reishi Use Around The World
The mighty Reishi Mushroom (Ganoderma lucidum)
Reishi Mushrooms have a multiple millennia history of medicinal use in the Far East, but what of the traditions around this mushroom in other indigenous populations across the globe?
The first reference to the health benefits of the mighty Reishi mushroom dates back over two millennia to the Qin Dynasty in Ancient China. Traditional Chinese Medicine holds this bracket fungus in great esteem, according it the name ‘Mushroom of Immortality’ and historically reserving it’s use exclusively for nobility.
Commoners found in possession of the distinct waxy Reishi conk fruiting body were purportedly subject to intense penalties. I often make the joke that such prohibition begs one to consider whether or not there was a Decriminalize Reishi campaign mounted in Ancient China the same way that Decriminalize Psilocybin measures have become a major cultural touch point in the United States in the 21st Century.
The traditional name for the Reishi mushroom in China is “Lingzhi”, which translates to ‘herb of spiritual potency’. Early accounts of Reishi in Ancient China were contained within the expansive and still largely untranslated Traditional Chinese Medicine pharmacopeia that spans thousands of volumes. Around the 14th Century, images of Reishi mushrooms in Oriental art started to appear.
This rich tradition of Reishi use in the Far East led to breakthrough cultivation technology in the 20th Century, which has spawned a multibillion dollar global market for the enchanted mushroom. The North American company Nammex and its retail brand Real Mushrooms have bridged the ancient tradition of whole fruiting body Reishi use in China to the modern western market, ensuring that everyone has access to this powerful medicinal mushroom no matter their rank in society.
A collection of Reishi depictions in Asian art sourced from the Real Mushrooms website
While Reishi use is prevalent across history and especially so today in the Far East, there are accounts substantiating this wondrous mushroom’s use within indigenous cultures of Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica as well. It’s likely that one of the main reasons why little is known about the traditional use of Reishi among native populations in the ‘New World’ is because of the violent suppression of traditional herbal and fungal knowledge by colonizing forces and the accompanying destruction of their versions of medical pharmacopeia.
As an example of this suppression and destruction of indigenous herbal knowledge, which certainly included mushroom knowledge and medicinal use, Spanish friar Diego De Linda ordered the mass burning of Mayan books in July of 1562 in the town of Mani in the Yucatan Peninsula. De Linda is quoted as saying
“We found a large number of books in these characters and, as they contained nothing in which were not to be seen as superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction.”
There are iNaturalist observations of Ganoderma lucidum growing in the Yucatan, and given their outstanding appearance and the indigenous Maya proclivity for utilizing mushrooms as medicine, it’s hard to gauge how extensive the use of Reishi mushrooms were in Ancient Mexico as compared to Ancient China where it’s use is well documented and preserved in their pharmacopeia.
Similarly, there is a history of Reishi mushroom use in Africa that is also difficult to evaluate the extent of. Mushrooms grow in abundance across the tropical climates of the vast African continent, yet little research has been undertaken by ethnomycologists until very recently thanks to the recent Citizen Mycology boom.
Researchers like Darren Le Baron and Cullen Clark are filling the gaps that traditional researchers have left in the global ethnomycology knowledge base due to inaccessibility or flat out ignorance, and it turns out that many traditional African healers of course have intimate knowledge of the Funga (Flora, Fauna, Funga) native to their homeland.
Gaston Guzman’s map of psilocybin mushroom distribution around the world with a noticeable lack of coverage for the continent of Africa illustrating the gaps in coverage of medicinal mushroom research.
An excerpt from an academic paper titled Medicinal Uses of Mushrooms in Nigeria: Towards Full and Sustainable Exploitation reads
“Information on the ethnomedicinal uses of some mushrooms such as…Ganoderma lucidum for treating arthritis… had been gathered through survey”
Another excerpt from this paper substantiates the hypothesis posed earlier in this article as to why much of the medicinal mushroom knowledge native to ancient Africa is not as widely recognized as that of the Chinese and Japanese cultures;
“In Eastern Countries like China and Japan the knowledge on the use of edible and medicinal mushrooms had been passed on from one generation to the other in documented form. For example, over 2,500 years ago, many medicinal mushrooms had been recorded and depicted in the earliest Chinese material medica book, Shennong Bencao Jing, and other succeeding Chinese medical book (Zhu, 2009). It was not so in Nigeria. Information on the indigenous use of mushrooms had been passed orally from one generation to another…”
Moving to another part of the world that has a largely unrecognized historical use of Reishi mushroom for medicinal purposes among native populations, there is documentation of tribes in India using Ganoderma lucidum to treat Asthma.
“In Central India, Ganoderma lucidum is used as herbal medicine by the Baiga tribes to relieve those who suffer from asthma” writes mushroom researcher (and two time Mycopreneur Podcast guest) Prithvi Kini of Nuvedo, a leading mushroom startup in India. Prithvi recently produced a documentary film on indigenous medicinal mushroom use by tribes in Northeast India, where little ethnomycological research has taken place to date.
A pair of Reishi specimens photographed in Kerala, India in 2023 (Dennis Walker)
There is likely much more information on the historical use of the mighty Reishi mushroom by different peoples around the world, but conservation and archiving of this precious knowledge is in a race against the rapid developments of globalization and acculturation.
Though historical Reishi use is typically associated with the Chinese, who have come to dominate the modern medicinal mushroom market, evidence stands that knowledge and use of this fungi is global and could be part of an ancient pan-human tradition that spans across cultures and societies to the furthest reaches of the globe.
