An analysis of the anomalous and anachronistic mushroom drawing by a seven-year-old boy. The drawing in question is very simple. Front and center is an imposing mushroom of the spotted amanita variety. An undulating horizon behind the mushroom is quite voluptuous, bringing to mind the body of the earth mother herself. Near a cleft between two of the hills a string emerges, held by an unseen hand, which flies a kite with a little tail.
The grass lining the foreground consists of X's, I's, W's, and M's - they are almost glyph-like, reminiscent of the ancient European script called by Marija Gimbutas "the language of the Goddess." The mushroom has four large spots, arranged in a N-S-E-W pattern, calling to mind the four cosmic directions. The kite flies almost directly above it, and also contains a quadripartite structure formed by the two crossed sticks of the kite's frame. This drawing contains a cosmological model that a shaman very well might have created, saying, in effect, that the quadrated universe above is reflected by the quadrated earthplane below.
The undulating hills in the middle background are rather erotic, evoking the curves of a woman's body. The mushroom, as a vision tool, is the vehicle of the Gaian consciousness, confering knowledge upon those determined to ascend its "ladder." The kite is like an antenna, the opened out spirit that has ascended into the multidimensional sky, waiting to receive the higher sky-knowledge from above to seed the earth mother below. But that mind, and the kite holder, is invisible.
Now, the interesting question to consider is how a seven-year-old boy intuitively encoded all of this deep symbology into a simple line drawing?

In March my birthday would come, along with the winds. I couldn't wait to get out there with our kites. March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb.

"As a child I sometimes felt myself being watched with amusement by an old man who was also myself, as if I was actually an old man recalling his childhood - sort of a throw back feeling of the future in a numinous cloud of timelessness. Perhaps the old Mayan notion of time moving in both directions, or past and future being a unity in some higher space, holds some truth."

- Excerpt from Journey to the Mayan Underworld (1989:72).

Louhi Gazes Deep