We celebrated the close of the 2021 retreat season last week and segued into the season of lights. Marking the end and new year’s dawn was our annual Aho Ho Hoedown, this time a special Holiday gathering featuring a talk from our local Mycologist and Mushroom Master Anthony Michael Blowers. In sharing the good news, some people inquired “Shrooms and Santa?”, to which I’d like to clarify: Tony knows his way in the woods as well as around the kitchen, but knows little of psilocybin, the psychoactive chemical in magical mushrooms. The magic was in the storytelling, in the fanciful lore that ties together the fabled red-capped Amanita Muscaria mushroom with Santa Claus, Flying Reindeer, and Siberian Shamanic rituals.
To start, we clarified our local Northern Midwest’s Aminita Muscaria species, known as var. guessowii, that being the bright yellow to orange rather than red type, the more “petite” version found often around the wooded grounds of The Higher Haven. Out in the American West the same mushroom grows larger, sometimes to the size of a frisbee. We touched on the symbiotic relationship between mushrooms and their natural environment, the communication and sharing that occurs, as well as how this new science offers almost daily developments. But the whimsical lore is what we were truly after, the body of knowledge around the fabled Amanita Muscaria that was traditionally passed from person-to-person by word-of-mouth.
Anthony painted a 19th-century Holiday scene to fire the imagination: a tribe called the Sámi, an indigenous Finno-Ugric-speaking people inhabited the region of Sápmi, which today encompasses large northern parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. The word shaman comes from the Sámi, their medicine people performing rituals utilizing Aminita Muscaria and using them ceremonially with tribal members. Donning red and white-trimmed robes, they’d forage, gather and share mushrooms. These folks had a close association also with the Reindeer and wild Caribou of the Finland region, feeding, handling and harnessing the beasts through an intimately shared connection with the land. They eventually discovered that Reindeer loved Amanita Muscaria as well. After digesting them, they’d leap about, jumping around erratically, effected by the Muscimol & Ibotenic Acid found in the mushroom.
It’s all fun and games until someone drinks Reindeer pee, which actually occurred, not at our party thankfully, but back amongst the Sámis, who held that special connection to the natural world many indigenous people do. The liver processing of people and circumpolar caribou was touched upon, as was the process of drying the mushroom often used to neutralize more volatile chemicals. Drying took two forms, both related to the spirit and ritual of Christmas: one by sticking them on trees, and particularly adorning local pine trees, and secondly by stuffing specimens down into stockings, hanging them out by the fire to dry.
I think you’re getting the picture. Of course we’re discussing an area of the world with brutal winters, and so it was said the shamans would go down to the chimney to reach their patrons, with the people leaving food and sweets for them. The associations and connection to Santa and his sleigh, to the Sun God and his chariot, to the jolly physicality of St. Nicholas, and how our traditions and holidays came to be, went on. I kidded Tony that next year we’ll be donning red robes and possibly taking this gig to the next level. For now, we’re headed out for our own year-end/beginning retreat and hope you enjoy a happy, healthy start to 2022, too.