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Long abstract:

Starting from the lens of a Galician (North West Spain) experimental ethnographic documentary, Negro Púrpura (2021), along with a recent feature film, O Corno (2023), both with the fungi in the region as the protagonist, we trace and identify a fourfold trajectory of ergot (1) as an ally of women healers and midwives for centuries; (2) as economic sustenance for peasant women before and after the Spanish Civil War (1936 - 1939); (3) as a lucrative biopharmaceutical for reproductive and mental health research (with the synthesis of LSD in 1938), transgressing the boundaries of the laboratory to become an embodied and sensory part of the countercultural movement of the 1960s in Europe and the United States; (4) as a promising symbionts in the contemporary reemergence of new forms of collective and holistic interspecies consciousness.

Bringing together feminist and decolonial STS with a multimodal approach to the study of ergot-human relations, the paper intertwines historical archives and films with scientific literature and ethnographic data of embodied experiences and mapping on LSD use. We analyse the onto-epistemic, embodied and socio-political significance of conducting a genealogy of the present of ergot: from vernacular women-ergot entanglements to how their erasure was conditioned by the production and circulation of lucrative biomedical substances in the pharma industry; from experimental biochemistry to its reemergence in today´s ¨Psychedelic Renaissance¨. In doing so, we argue that the long durée of women-ergot entanglements is tangible in today´s psychedelic spiritualities and mystical experiences and reverberates in contemporary visual and embodied culture.