The Terror of Fusion — Why Becoming a Symbiont Takes Courage

Le dernier territoire souverain. On y entre par les plantes, par le silence, par le retour aux songes des anciens.

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Le dernier territoire souverain. On y entre par les plantes, par le silence, par le retour aux songes des anciens.

— Le dernier territoire souverain. On y entre par les plantes, par le silence, par le retour aux songes des anciens.

§0 — Fissure

The Last Myth of Separation

In 1949 Joseph Campbell published a book that structured the Western imagination for seventy-five years: The Hero with a Thousand Faces. In it he proposed that all the world's mythologies told, at bottom, the same story — that of a hero who leaves his village alone, crosses ordeals alone, meets mentors and adversaries alone, and returns alone, transformed, to offer his village a gift. The monomyth. Star Wars is its best-known application. Contemporary coaching — Joseph Campbell runs beneath Tony Robbins, Tim Ferriss, Brené Brown, and most of the self-help bestsellers — is its operational version.

But Campbell himself, toward the end of his life, began to see the limit of his monomyth. He wrote it in his interviews with Bill Moyers, in the 1980s, shortly before his death. The lone hero had grown obsolete. Not because he was false. Because he had been so repeated, so absorbed, so used to sell courses and books, that he became the last myth of separation — the one that keeps us from seeing that we were never alone.

Sophie Strand, in The Flowering Wand, published in 2022, offers a post-Campbell mutation. Not the abolition of the heroic masculine — its transmutation. The "mycorrhizal masculine." Not the sword-hero who conquers. The mycelium-hero who connects. Not the lone subject who extracts himself the better to return. The relational subject who knows himself composed, who owns his contamination, who collaborates instead of dominating. It is a deep mutation — and it unsettles, precisely because it strips the lone self of a great part of its narrative.

And the INFUSE cosmogony takes this mutation on board. At the heart of Arc II there is a statement that may sound poetic but is, to the letter, biologically verified: you are a parliament. Not a metaphor. A parliament. Thirty-seven trillion human eukaryotic cells, living alongside ten times as many bacterial cells, hundreds of fungal species, thousands of endogenous viruses woven into your genome, varied protozoa. Your "I" is, literally, a "we" that does not know itself.

The Parliament of 37 Trillion — Margulis, Sheldrake, Haraway

Lynn Margulis, the American biologist who died in 2011, spent her life defending — against the neo-Darwinian establishment that mocked her — the theory of endosymbiosis. Her thesis, set out in 1967 in an article rejected by fifteen journals before it was published, became textbook truth within thirty years. The mitochondria that produce the energy in all our cells are not a human organelle. They are ancient bacteria that were engulfed — or that colonised, no one knows exactly which — other bacteria two billion years ago, and that began to cooperate rather than digest one another.

This cooperation is, literally, what lets you breathe at this moment. Without your mitochondria, which are guests come from elsewhere, your body would be unable to produce the ATP that runs your neurons. You are reading this article thanks to bacteria that are not you but that became you. The thought is strange. It is so by design — the modern grammar of the sovereign subject is not equipped to think it.

Merlin Sheldrake — the English biologist, son of the philosopher Rupert Sheldrake — published Entangled Life in 2020, a book that extends the Margulisian revolution into the fungal kingdom. Mycorrhizal fungi connect the trees of a forest into a network that carries nutrients, alarm signals, and even hormones. Suzanne Simard, the Canadian forest ecologist, showed in the 1990s that trees communicate and cooperate through these fungal networks. A mother-tree feeds her wounded neighbours. A fir and a birch of different species exchange carbon with the seasons. The forest is not a set of competing individuals. It is a super-organism whose individual trees are the organs.

And we — humans — are the same. Not metaphorically. Literally. Our gut microbiome, weighing around two kilos in an adult, is in constant dialogue with our brain through the vagus nerve and chemical messengers. What we take for our mood is, in large part, the chemical conversation our gut bacteria have with our central nervous system. What we take for our intuition is, in large part, the mycorrhizal-equivalent dialogue playing out in our digestive tract.

Glissant, Opacity, and the Lock Against the Fusion-Trap

And it is here that the INFUSE cosmogony parts ways with the too-soft reading of symbiosis that circulates in certain new-age discourse. To become a Symbiont does not mean dissolving into a great undifferentiated whole. That reading is the gentle and dangerous version of symbiosis — the one that leads straight to cultic drift, to toxic couple-fusions, to gurus who ask that you surrender your singularity to them, to communities that demand you erase whatever resists.

Édouard Glissant — the Martinican poet, novelist, and philosopher, founder of the concept of Tout-monde and of the thought of Relation — spent his life proposing a precise answer to this trap. That answer holds in one word: opacity. And this word must be understood in its Glissantian sense, which has nothing to do with opacity in the common sense.

Opacity, in Glissant's grammar, is not closure. It is not withdrawal into oneself. It is not autarky. It is the refusal to be reduced to what can be understood. It is the subsistence of a non-negotiable singularity, even at the heart of the densest Relation. It is, in his own words: "the subsistence within a non-reducible singularity."

This changes everything. The INFUSE cosmogony does not ask you to dissolve. It asks you to weave, and to hold your opacity at the heart of the weave. You can be fully with your romantic partner and keep within you recesses they will never understand — and that is what keeps the relationship alive. You can take part in a community and keep your disagreement intact on certain points — and that is what keeps the community from becoming a cult. You can infuse a plant and accept that she passes through you without colonising her or being colonised by her — and that is what makes the relationship with the plant world an ethical one.

Sophie Strand and the Chaotic Animism

Sophie Strand pushes the nuance further. In The Body Is a Doorway, published in 2025, she explicitly refuses the Disney version of animism — the one that imagines everything in nature is gentle, wise, benevolent, in harmony. That version is, in her vocabulary, a romantic projection that says more about modern anguish than about the living itself.

Real animism, the one the indigenous peoples practise and that Strand seeks to articulate, includes predation. Includes illness. Includes decomposition. Includes the parasite that devours its host. Includes the fungus that takes control of an ant's nervous system to force it to die where the fungus can fruit. Includes the virus that rewrites the DNA of its victims. Nature, seen up close, is not a wellness retreat. It is, in Strand's exact words, a "chaotic difference, a woven contamination."

This precision changes the tone of the whole cosmogony. It forbids the soft language of the "great harmonious weaving" that dominates certain eco-spiritualist discourse. It names the fear. It names the risk. It names what can go wrong. And precisely by naming it, it makes possible a presence that is not naïve.

Anna Tsing and Multispecies Life at the Edge of Extinction

Anna Tsing — the American anthropologist whose work on the devastated forests of Oregon reinvented contemporary ecological thought — offers a word that completes Strand: assemblage. Life is not made of stable individual organisms that interact. Life is made of temporary assemblages of species that cross, contaminate, and transform one another, then part.

The image she takes, following the matsutake, is striking. In a secondary forest of Oregon, the matsutake rises from a poor soil where pines colonised the space after industrial logging. The matsutake forms a mycorrhizal symbiosis with these pines. Together, they survive in a hostile setting. But this symbiosis is not idyllic: it is unstable, opportunistic, subject to the whims of climate, dependent on human disturbance. It can collapse in a single season.

That, too, is the weaving. Not an eternal harmony. Precarious, courageous assemblages that come together and come undone. And it is precisely this precariousness that makes the weaving sacred — in the strong sense of the word. The weaving is sacred not because it is guaranteed, but because it could at any moment come undone and one chooses, in spite of everything, to hold it.

The WIE Gesture in Everyday Relationships

How, in concrete terms, does one practise courageous symbiosis in everyday life? The INFUSE cosmogony offers a sign — WIE — and a four-point protocol. WIE is the graphic fusion of the I and the WE. The gesture that says: I am an individual fully unfolded, opaque in the Glissantian sense, AND I am woven into a we that surpasses me. AND, not OR.

First point. When you write or speak, replace the formulas of possession with the formulas of relation. Not "I had some cacao" but "cacao was my company this morning." Not "my plant" but "the plant I live with." Not "my body" but "the body I inhabit." These grammatical shifts, which may seem the affectations of a stylist, slowly transform perception. After six months, you begin to feel the difference between possessing and keeping company. It is a tiny and powerful act of disenchantment.

Second point. When you decide — a change of work, a break-up, a move — ask yourself the WIE question. Does this choice strengthen my I without destroying the WE? Does it strengthen the WE without dissolving my I? If one of the two is sacrificed for the other, it is not WIE. It is either libertarian hyper-individualism or fusional sacrifice. Neither is tenable in the long run.

Third point. When you feel a calling — a vocation rising, a project that wants to be born, an intuition that will not let you go — weave it. Do not charge ahead alone. Do not dilute yourself in the group. Hold your calling AND invite to the table those it concerns. Ask for views. Honour the opacities of others. Allow them to tell you no, and truly listen when they do. WIE is an ethic of deciding with — not deciding for, not deciding against.

Fourth point. When you doubt, rest on the pivot-symbol — the ?!. The astonishment that becomes an affirmation. The question that turns into an act. You can not know and move forward anyway. You can have no guarantee and weave anyway. That is precisely the definition of the Sovereign of the Ruins — and it is the deep cosmological gesture of the courageous Symbiont.

RÉ-UNION — the Cosmos-Word

The pivot-word of this pillar is ré-union. Break it apart phonetically, as Fulcanelli did with the old words: RÉ — again, anew — UNION — the fact of being one. But the union here is not fusion. The union here is what is woven when irreducible opacities recognise one another and choose to walk together. To re-make the union is not to erase the differences. It is to honour what was never truly separated.

Because that is the great revelation of contemporary science about symbiosis: we were never separate. Separation is a recent cultural myth — about five hundred years old. Before that, in the majority of human cultures on the planet, the separation between the human and the non-human was not a relevant category. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro documented it for the Amazonian peoples. Tim Ingold documented it for the circumpolar peoples. Robin Wall Kimmerer documented it for the Potawatomi. And Lynn Margulis documented it for the eukaryotic cell itself.

The ré-union is to remember — in the strong, somatic sense, in the body you inhabit — that we never ceased to be woven. It is, perhaps, the simplest and most radical cosmogonic gesture there is. It asks for no elaborate ritual. It asks only that you breathe, knowing that your breath passes through your mitochondria, which are ancient bacteria that became you.

Why Ceremonial Cacao Is Not a Wellness Retreat

A direct application — and it is here that INFUSE takes its ethical stance. Ceremonial cacao, as it is sold in the contemporary Western market, has in fifteen years become a mood-drug of the wellness industry. It is drunk in women's circles in California, in yoga retreats in Bali, in corporate seminars in Europe. It is credited with magical virtues of opening the heart, of immediate connection, of communal fusion.

This grammar is dangerous for two reasons. First reason: it is colonising. "Ceremonial cacao" as it exists today in Western circles was invented in 2003 by Keith Wilson, a Westerner who saw a Maya ceremony and decided to commercialise it. No precise Maya lineage validates this practice. No ancestral protocol authenticates it. It is, to the letter, a cultural appropriation dressed up as ancestral transmission.

Second reason: it promotes a grammar of the fusion-trap. "Cacao opens the heart. You are going to feel connected. You are going to weep together." These sentences, taken in isolation, are not false. But repeated as an automatic protocol, they prepare precisely the ground for cultic drift. No rule of opacity. No invitation to keep your disagreement intact. No exit protocol for whoever does not feel safe. Just the implicit injunction to give yourself over.

INFUSE refuses this grammar. Maya cacao — when it is sourced by name, from named producers, within a specified lineage — is a precious companion. But it is a companion, not a magical trigger. It is drunk in silence, keeping one's opacity, with no obligation of collective outpouring. It opens something, yes — but what it opens is your presence to yourself and to the room. Not a forced fusion. INFUSE's ceremonial cacao is, by design, an anti-wellness retreat. That is its ethical fidelity to the peoples who passed it on.