Father and bring back gifts of knowledge and power for his community. Dressed in a warm, fur-lined, ritual costume, with a thick belt hung with bells, the shaman would make his journey at nightfall to consult with these otherworldly spirits. In the hours that followed, the shaman would need to urinate and might walk into the woods to do so. Reindeers would then eat the urine-covered snow as part of their normal grazing and also become intoxicated.
‘Flying’ (intoxicated) reindeers with one sky-borne human (the shaman) who controls them… the similarities in costume… the bells and the belt… the red and white of the mushroom… the journey through the sky to deliver gifts… all the elements of the modern day Father Christmas are there, creating a rather idyllic view of fly-agaric.
We must remember, though, that the Amanita has not always had such a ‘peaceful’ reputation. The Vikings, for example, are said to have ritually ingested it in order to enter the ‘berserker’ state, ready for battle (indeed, the Icelandic name for fly-agaric contains the word, ‘berserk’), just as the Zulus did, according to my toxicologist lunch mate.
Properties and chemistry
One of the first studies of fly-agaric was made in 1863, by two German chemists who published a book on the properties of muscarine, a toxic alkaloid that they had isolated from the Amanita. For almost a century, their study (which turned out to be wrong) was taken as gospel and muscarine was erroneously believed to be the main active ingredient of fly-agaric mushrooms. Various confusions followed and it was not until 1964 that its true constituents were isolated – and then almost simultaneously by three different