Fungus of the Week: Amanita muscaria
27 Nov, 06 | by BMJ Group
You are unlikely to find the story-book red spotted caps of this fungus so late in the season, but I nominate it for illustrating that primitive tribes - in this case from Siberia – can show a sophisticated understanding of pharmacology. Groups of Siberian tribesmen would get their women to chew the fungus – ensuring that they absorbed most of the water-soluble muscarine and got most of the muscarinic poisoning. The men would then swallow the chewed remnants and go into trances caused by muscimol, the main hallucinogen. Then they would drink each other’s urine to prolong the pleasure. Delightful.
Very interesting Richard, but I thought that it was the animals they fed the Amanita to and then drank their urine - as you say, delightfull!!
I certainly have heard of this phenomenon in the Lapps of northern Finland - it also links in with, believe it or not, why Santa Claus has a red and white coat - the colour and spots of the mushroom.
At the end of the day, it’s the passage through the body to release the muscimol.
Bob Dunkley
November 29th, 2006 at 12:19 am
The account I gave was based on the travels of W I Jochelsen and M Enderli to the Koryak tribes of Siberia in 1900-1, to be found in “Mushrooms and Toadstools” by John Ramsbottom (1953), pp45-6. This is a delightful work of scholarship and science which goes into considerable detail on the subject. Its worthy successor in the New Naturalist series, “Fungi” by Brian Spooner and Peter Roberts (2006), also refers to the drinking of human urine “said to be almost as effective as eating the fungus itself, though to us it might seem a rather desperate measure”. Indeed.
richard lehman
November 30th, 2006 at 9:31 am