Plant Spirit Shamanism: Fly Agaric
A few years ago, I was called as an expert witness in a criminal case involving trance and possession. The circumstances of the case are not important to this article but, not to leave you hanging, had to do with a man who had flown to the UK from Nigeria and was found to be carrying cocaine when he was stopped by Customs Officers. His defence was that he had been entranced, or possibly drugged, by a group of men who had planted the cocaine on him before he boarded the plane.
What was more interesting for me was that I got to have lunch with another expert witness, a toxicologist from one of the UK’s leading teaching hospitals, who had a keen interest in mycology and planned to publish a book on the sacred use of fly-agaric (Amanita muscaria) in spiritual healing and ancient warriorship practices.
As a result of his studies, he had recently worked with a TV production company who had made a documentary with him to test one of his personal pet theories: that the Zulu War was fought by the indigenous people under intoxication from the sacred mushroom. This had given them, not only superhuman strength and imperviousness to pain, but a sense of fearlessness and their own divine purpose in battle. It was this that had helped them leave the field victorious, he claimed.
Obviously, the TV company could not stage another war to test this theory, but what they could do – and did – was to get two martial arts experts into a ring to fight it out for the cameras.
In the first part of this experiment, the combatants met equally and fought a few rounds together. Neither emerged as a clear winner in this carefully matched contest.
In the second