WELSH WITCH'S GARDEN 2004

MAGIC MUSHROOMS

Today could not be regarded as a serious gardening day. We would have some fun!

This is what you call a one in one mountain....but at the top in the piney woods there are THE mushrooms.

Amazing! The first time to see them in December... for us...but that's why Santa Claus came to have such a colourful suit!.

Here's an article about these very mushrooms that appeared in the Daily Telegraph in 1994. by Roger Highfield.

"SANTA'S robes, those flying reindeer, and other trappings of the traditional Christmas experience owe a great deal to what is probably the most iniportant mushroom in history - fly agaric.

The red and white colour scheme of Santa's robes without doubt honour the colour scheme of this influential mushroom -and provide a semi-serious reason for a mycologist from Sheffield University's division of adult continuing education, Dr Patrick Harding, to dress up as Father Christmas this month and drag a sledge behind him to deliver a couple of seasonal lectures. that look set to become a tradition' As he described the influence of this toadstool over the millennia, he did credit to the oldest known mushroom joke: to his audience, he is indeed a fungi (fun guy, geddit?).

Dr Harding argues that Christmas owes a surprising amount to the potent mind-altering chemistry of the fly agaric mushroom, Amanita muscaria, the recreational and ritualistic drug of choice in parts of northern Europe before vodka was imported from the east.

Commonly found in Britain, it is fairly poisonous, being a relative of our more lethal mushrooms, the death cap (Amanita phalloides) and destroying angel (Amanita virosa). In Lapp societies, the village holy man or shaman knew how to prepare it, removing the more potent toxins that it was safe enough to take.

The hallucinogenic principles of fly agaric .are due to the presence of the chemicals-ibotenic acif and muscimol, according to the International mycological Institute at Egham, Surrey.

Ibotenic acid is present only in

Shamans, with good reason, took their mushrooms dried. During a mushroom-induced trance, the shaman would start to twitch and sweat. His soul was thought to leave the body in the form of an animal and fly to the other world to communicate with. the spirits.

The spirits would, the shaman hoped, help him to deal with problems such as the cause of sickness in the village. Hence the connotation of the· gift of healing, rather than some

thing from Marks & Spencer, as it is today,

" Dr Harding said. Santa's jolly "Ho-ho-ho is. clearly the euphoric laugh of someone who has indulged in the mushroom. And his fondness for popping down chimneys is an echo of how he would pop into his yurt, an ancient tent-like dwelling made of birch, and reindeer hide.

"In fact the 'door' and the chimney of the yurt were the same," Dr Harding said, "and the most significant person coming down the chimney would have been a shaman coming to heal a sick person."

The shaman's urine links reindeer into the myth.

For one thing, the reindeer were uncommonly fond of drinking human urine that I contained the muscimol. "Rein deer enjoyed getting high on it," he said. "Whether they roll on their backs and kick their legs in the air, lam not sure."

The hoi poLloi from the village were also partial to yellow snow, ~because of the potency of the muscimol was not greatly weakened, indeed it was probably safer, once it had passed through the shaman.

"There is evidence of the drug passing through five or six people and still being effective," Dr Harding said. "This is almost certainly the derivation of the phrase 'to get pissed', which has nothing to do with alcohol.

It pre-dates inebriation by alcohol by several thousand years. Such was the intensity of the drug experience that it is hardly surprising that, according to Christmas legend, reindeer fly.

Witches soar for related reasons: a witch Who wanted to "fly" to a witches' sabbat, or orgiastic ceremony, would anoint a staff with specially prepared oils containing psychoative matter, probably · from toad skins, and then apply it to vaginal membranes.

References to flying can be found in more recent examples of the use of the mushroom. An Italian saint, St Catherine of Genoa (1447.1510), used it to soar to the heights of. religious ecstasy, according to Dr Daniele Piomelli of the Unitede Neurobiolegie et Pharinacologie. de l'!nserm in Paris.

An. account of the life of St Catherine describes the use of ground agaric so that God "infused such suavity and divine sweetness in her heart that both soul and body were so full as to make her unable to stand".

In Victorian times, travellers came with intriguing tales of the use of Fly Agaric by people in Siberia, Lappland and other areas in northern latitudes.

One of the first was reported hy a mycologist called Mordecai Cooke, who men tioned the recycling of urine rich in muscimol. The Rev Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), the author of the fantastic children's story Alice in Wonderland, wasa friend. "Almost certainly, this is the source of the central idea in Alice where she eats the mushroom, where one side of the mushroom makes her grow very tall and the other very small," said Dr Harding. "This inability to judge size - maeropsia - is one of the effects of fly agaric."

The toadstool can still be seen in children's books. It was the dancing toadstool in Walt Disney's Fantasia. In central Europe many chimney sweepstill carry a fly aganic logo and clusters of Fly agric are usedas Chr.istknas decotatlons. "You have all the elements of Christmas in that mushroom," Dr Harding said, "the reindeer,. the red and white cloak; presents and the chimney." /cutting ends

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