The Secret Soul of Soil with Matt Powers & Benjamin Balderson
Matt Powers and Benjamin Balderson join us to discuss the possibility that permaculture is more than just a gardening technique. Does the living soil contain the record of all life, and have the ability to generate complex beings to populate environments with the appropriate organisms? Heathen cosmology may have been more literal than we thought…
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In this episode
Core themes
Microbes as Shapeshifting Soil Builders
Chance opened by questioning linear evolution in favor of cyclical rebirth shaped by conditions. Matt answered with a desert restoration story, saying mushrooms appeared in a Saudi Arabian landscape after rock dams and trees returned water to the land. He argued that unclassified DNA fragments in organic matter were eaten and expressed by microbes through horizontal gene transfer, so microbes recoded each other and changed species quickly. Matt added that this made microbes the engine of adaptation in soil, compost and the human body.
Soil Myths and the Alchemical Great Work
Benjamin described a heathen story in which Lif and Lifthrasir were hidden in mud by Odin and mankind returned from them after Ragnarok. Chance framed the evening as a meeting of the scientist and the wizard, bringing together science, myth and other cosmologies. Later in the show, one guest described the alchemical great work as sulfur passing through mercury to enliven salt and said he built faith by watching it happen again and again in the lab.
The Living Soil as a Battery
Matt argued that plants worked like solar panels, splitting water and storing protons in organic matter, so rich soils acted as batteries. He said tillage and mining removed nutrient charges from the ground. Another guest compared the world to a biochemical battery that sulfated over time and read Ragnarok as a hard electrical charge that cleared the buildup. A later speaker tied the start of tillage to the Adam and Eve story and said permaculture tried to reconcile that break with nature.
Culture Vessels, Consortia, and Gut Health
James Frosch joined from Family Fungi and argued that human bodies were culture vessels, so what people fed themselves shaped what expressed outwardly. He said healing the soul meant healing the soil and the gut. When Michelle asked about fertilizing with hot spring water, the panel urged testing and a small trial. Matt explained how to collect indigenous microorganisms from the spring, dry ground, sun and shade, then combine them into a library for a whole property.
Placenta, Mushrooms, and Synchronicity
A guest asked Gabe about placenta eating, and Gabe linked the Phrygian cap, the red cap of the mushroom and the placental cap into one initiation motif. Gabe also described Tibetan and Catholic lore about unusual births and called communication the primary nature of nature. In the closing round Gabe told of finding a huge mushroom beside his head two days after hearing about one said to attract mysterious light, and not recognizing the match until a month later. Chance closed by thanking the guests and promising links to everyone, including Family Fungi, in the description.
Quotes
“Because I'm starting to really see the picture of the possibility that life and location and everything is like frequency based and the conditions energetically of an environment determine what you find there, not the record that we consider to be linear.”
“And I really wanted to bring together the mind of the scientist and the wizard, and the heathen, and what other cosmologies we might bring to the table here.”
“So let's start in Saudi Arabia, let's start in the desert, let's start in an area where in living memory, no one's seen a mushroom growing out of the ground.”
“But the reality now we understand through horizontal gene transfer is that microbes eat the dead DNA around them consuming in the organic matter. And again, because 40% of organic matter appears to be old DNA fragments. They're consuming it and they're choosing and picking from that and expressing those genes they pick up.”
“I also did a video recently about how like plants are so like solar panels and they're bringing down the energy. They're breaking water doing hydrolysis, releasing H plus as a proton into the soil. It's being stored in organic matter as the battery.”
“As a heathen after Ragnarok, which is the doom of the gods and the whole world burns, then Lif and Lifthrasir were hidden in the mud by Odin. And then mankind returns from Lif and Lifthrasir.”
“It's symbiosis with the biome, with the bacteria, with the actual earth itself. All of this is symbiosis and taking in those simple natural foods. You are what you eat, you also are what you give your energy to. You're making an exchange.”
“Once you understand the principles, you can broadly apply them. The principles are few, but the applications are many.”
“Our bodies are culture vessels. And so whatever we're feeding our bodies, we're feeding our culture. And as above so below, whatever's in our culture starts to express itself outwards. And so we're part of the chain of light condensing into matter so that we can fuel ourselves with that light to decode our life story in our DNA.”
“So I'm saying, I am the living soil. That's it. And so if we want to heal our soul, we heal our soil and our gut and we heal the soil on the planet.”
“The perfect bridge between this topic and the placenta is the red cap. It's the Phrygian cap. And the Phrygian cap is the red cap of the mushroom. And it is also metaphorically the red cap of the placenta that the baby is initiated into this world wearing.”
“The only thing I needed was maybe a little mysterious light sitting on the mushroom would have been cool. But so yeah, the mushrooms, they're fascinating. There is so much more going on than we'll ever have words for because yeah, apparently they travel as the speed of thought.”
Benjamin Balderson is a practicing alchemist who has taught laboratory (practical) alchemy on InnerVerse, covering distillation, alcohol-free tinctures, and the alchemical patterns found in nature; he shares his work under the banner "Odin's Alchemy."
See all Benjamin episodes→Kyle and Serena Denton are community herbalists creating wild-crafted and organic plant medicines out of Milwaukee since 2015. I have used their teas and tinctures on an almost daily basis for years now. Kyle is a great friend of InnerVerse and has appeared on the channel more times than I can count. These products work, not in the allopathic "pharma-medicine" way, but in a terrain-support, consciousness bolstering plant-teacher sort of way.
