THE BOG HERESY

Alright, buckle up, you magnificent bastards, because today we’re talking about Carl Linnaeus. Yes, *that* Linnaeus—the prissy Swedish bastard who gave us binomial nomenclature and a classification boner for every living thing on God’s green Earth. Turns out, he also nearly gave us a new state religion centered on Venus flytraps. Through no fault of his own, I might add. The man just had shitty handwriting.

Enter Stellan Eklund. Eklund was one of Linnaeus’s less… ‘earthed’… students. A real high-on-his-own-supply type who thought botany was just a chatroom with God. In 1772, while transcribing Linnaeus’s private—and famously messy—diaries, Eklund stumbled upon a section describing the *Drosera*, or sundew. Linnaeus, in a moment of proto-Attenborough wonder, noted how the plant’s sticky, glistening tentacles ensnared insects, calling it a sublime example of “Guds verk”—“God’s work.” But Eklund, bleary-eyed from lamp oil and what I can only assume was a diet of fermented herring and academic anxiety, read it as “Guds Vikarie.”

God’s *Vicar*.

This one-letter fuck-up sent Eklund into a spiral of glorious, world-breaking insanity. He wasn’t looking at a plant; he was looking at a holy representative, a non-verbal Pope for the insect kingdom. This wasn’t predation, it was *rapture*. A holy sacrifice. Eklund declared carnivorous plants to be the true, chthonic deities of the natural world, and their consumption of insects a divine sacrament. Within a year, he’d founded the “First Congregation of the Vicarial Sundew” near a bog outside Uppsala. His followers, a motley crew of disenchanted Lutherans and people who just really, *really* hated flies, wore moss-green robes and communicated in a series of solemn, liturgical buzzes.

Naturally, it all went to shit. The Congregation soon splintered. The “Pitcher Plant Purists” argued for a doctrine of passive acceptance (just fall in the goo and be digested, you sinners), while the radical “Flytrap Faction” believed in a more active, vengeful god who *snapped* shut on the unworthy. Eklund, trying to keep his flock together, staged a grand ceremony of “The Great Tithe,” releasing tens of thousands of flies over his sacred bog. This did less to appease the new gods and more to create a public health crisis that officials later dubbed *Flugskitenkrisen*—the Great Flyshit Crisis. The whole fiasco finally collapsed when Eklund, attempting a “Final Communion” to become one with his deity, was found face-down in an unusually large pitcher plant. The coroner’s report was a masterpiece of Scandinavian minimalism, listing the cause of death as asphyxiation but noting, with what I have to imagine was a completely straight face, “subject presented with an unusually devout expression.”