I’ll warn you now. This one goes to some interesting places. Stay with me.
Cast your mind back to Christmas. The red suit. The white trim. The reindeer. The chimney. The pine tree in the corner. We’ve all grown up with this imagery, completely familiar, completely unquestioned. Nobody asks where any of it actually comes from. I didn’t, until I started looking into fungi properly, and then suddenly the whole thing looked very different.
Amanita muscaria. The Fly Agaric. The mushroom everyone recognises even if they don’t know its name. Bright red cap, white spots, grows at the base of conifers. It’s the mushroom on the Mario power up. It’s the mushroom in every fairy tale illustration. It’s also a potent hallucinogen with a history of shamanic use stretching back thousands of years across Scandinavia and Siberia.
Look at the traditional dress of an arctic shaman. Red outfit, white fur trim, black boots. Sound familiar? The shamans of these indigenous cultures used Amanita muscaria ceremonially, and so did their reindeer, apparently with enthusiasm. Reindeer actively seek out and eat the mushroom. The shamans would sometimes drink the urine of the reindeer after they’d consumed it, as the psychoactive compounds pass through intact. This is also, for what it’s worth, thought to be the origin of the phrase getting pissed. You’re welcome.
Flying reindeer, incidentally, are a recurring motif in the folk stories of Scandinavian indigenous people. Make of that what you will.
The yurts of these shamanic cultures were often buried in snow during winter, the only way in being through the smoke hole in the roof. The shaman, in his red and white ceremonial dress, would descend through the hole carrying a sack of dried mushrooms as gifts. He would then hang the mushrooms in the branches of the pine tree inside to dry. The imagery is so familiar it’s almost funny once you see it. You cannot unsee it.
Now. The Catholic Church.
I was raised Catholic so I feel qualified to deliver this one. At the centre of the Catholic mass is the Eucharist, the process of transubstantiation, where bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ. This is accepted as literal truth by practising Catholics, not metaphor. The bread in question is assumed to be, well, bread. But some scholars argue that the original sacrament wasn’t bread at all. The word translated as bread in modern versions of the Bible comes from the Aramaic Manna, meaning bread from heaven. The argument, explored in John Marco Allegro’s book The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, is that the original sacrament involved Amanita muscaria. Allegro was a Dead Sea Scrolls scholar. He was also promptly and thoroughly ostracised for publishing the book. Which is, in itself, interesting.
Jesus spreading love, connection and a sense of oneness with everything. Superhuman powers. Communion. The desire to share the experience with everyone you meet. These are, if you’ve ever read anything about the effects of Amanita muscaria, recognisable themes.
I’m not telling you what to think about any of this. Draw your own conclusions. What I am saying is that the relationship between humans and psychedelic fungi goes back much further than the 1960s, runs much deeper than counterculture, and has shaped some of the most enduring stories and traditions in human history without most of us having the faintest idea.
The mushroom has been hiding in plain sight. On your Christmas tree. In your church. In the stories your grandparents told you.
It was always there.
May the spores be with you.