Does this medieval fresco show a hallucinogenic mushroom in the Garden of Eden?

The artist probably wanted to highlight the fact that there are an even number of them, in contrast to Adam's odd number, since the story is that one of his was taken (to make Eve).

There is no evidence of roman paganism being the origin of either holiday. Easter and Christmas were celebrated before the romanization of Christianity. The only thing that was added were pagan symbology to the existing feast days, which is typical, as the church is happy to incorporate pagan traditions. The issue here is that in America we see a myopic view of Christianity from Europe. We note that during Easter, many European pagan symbols are incorporated, and mistakenly apply that to all Easter celebrations.

In reality, Christianity is not a european religion. In other centers of christianity, like Ethiopia, the Middle East, and India, European pagan symbology for easter was not adopted until recently. For most of history, there would either have been local rituals incorporated, or none at all.

This does not contradict the fundamental idea of Easter or Christmas though, because the Church explicitly desires that local rituals be incorporated. Catholic missionaries are happy to include anything non-contradictory with the Christian religion into Catholic practice. For example, it is the official policy of the church, after much deliberation, and much back and forth, that Chinese Catholics who desire to do their ancestor veneration rites are allowed to do so, with certain changes made to ensure that the rites fit the Catholic understanding of prayers to ancestors. But for the most part, Catholic Chinese are allowed to partake in these confucian rituals, and can even do so in the context of Catholicism. There is no contradiction.

To support my claims, here is an article on a traditional Syro-Malabar (Indian) Catholic celebration of easter. The Syro-Malabar Church has existed for 2000 years since the times of Thomas. If easter was a European pagan incorporation, we'd expect to see lots of European pagan symbology, like Easter bunnies, eggs, etc. Except we don't. The traditional syro-malabarese feast is a celebration of passover, but with Indian food instead of the middle eastern stuff.

https://homegrown.co.in/article/802431/a-traditional-easter-...

That is not to say that European traditions haven't been incorporated (american cultural hegemony is an unstoppable force), but the rituals that are traditional are nothing close to them.

I can speak to this myself, as an Indian Catholic. I didn't know what the Easter bunny did (apparently he brings candy to little American boys and girls? -- I was clearly short-changed and am still somewhat bitter haha) until middle school. Although my family mentioned the Easter bunny in passing, it was not part of our celebrations at all. Although we dyed eggs with other people in our church because that's what they did, we didn't really do it at home. It was just a social thing.

Traditional Catholic and Christian iconography was not meant to be accurate, but rather to symbolize meaning.

For example, in my church, the priest recently pointed out there is a dog in every single stained glass window depicting scenes of Jesus's life. In particular, the dog is a dalmation.

If we were to apply this same line of reasoning in the article to these windows, we'd be forced to make ridiculous conclusions that Catholics of 20th century Portland believed Dalmations were holy holy dogs alive at the time of Christ.

In reality, the dalmation is a symbol of St Dominic (it's a dominican church), whose mother had a dream she gave birth to a dalmation (St Dominic) with a torch in his mouth who lit the world on fire. The symbology is obvious, since Dominic, founder of the Order of Preachers, did indeed spread the gospel message throughout large portions of the world at the time. The dalmation symbolizes St Dominic's following of Jesus's example. At no point is any of the art intended to be realistic.

So if that's true of 20th century Catholic art, made by people alive at a time when art is expected to portray reality, then even more so should we not interpret this fresco as realistic, since it was made at a time when people couldn't even paint realistically (perspective was an enlightenment / renaissance invention IIRC).