Caused this content to reach you a little late on the first day of the new year.
Anyway, I decided to dig into one of the oldest motifs that you encounter in Christmas postcards - the red mushroom with red dots. It is commonly thought that this is an aesthetic choice because of the combination of red and white, which have been fixed as the colors of the holiday identified with Santa Claus. The truth is, it is probably different. So let's talk about this iconic mushroom whose scientific name is Amanitia muscaria. Usually, a combination of colors of the kind that characterizes Amanita muscaria is meant to convey to the environment - stay away from me, I'm toxic. Amanita muscaria is indeed seen in the culture as the archetype of the POISON MUSHROOM and for good reason, it contains a rather nasty substance called ibotenic acid which rarely, can be fatal. It's horribly bad advice to attempt suicide with the help of muscaria, because it's more likely that you will live, but you'll writhe and wretch until you vomit your very soul from out of you, temporarily lose control of your sphincters, and experience a stomachache that would be considered harsh punishment even in the gutters beneath the gallows in hell. But here it becomes interesting, because Amanita muscaria is also claimed to contain other psychoactives: a psychoactive molecule called muscimol and another molecule called bufotenin (YES! - the active ingredient in the psychoactive toads of the Amazon). In any case, the cocktail has significant and unique psychedelic properties. Most of the hallucinogenic mushrooms we know of are mushrooms that contain psilocybin, which is a great substance that I will likely delight to detail on this wall as well. Amanita muscaria does not have psilocybin AT ALL. It is really something else, on the other hand, there is also the ibotenic acid, which is a turn-off. The acid can be dealt with by drying or boiling, but it's already a matter of tinkering, so it's no wonder that unlike psilocybin mushrooms, Amanita muscaria has not gained much popularity in most of the world (by the way, this has changed in recent years) and still in remote areas of the subarctic climate where there seem to be less natural options for getting high, there are many reports of the use of Amanita muscaria both for recreational purposes and in pagan ceremonies. There is also a rude hypothesis, entirely unverified, that a small part of the Viking warriors, the so-called 'Berserkers' , who used to enter a trance state, did so by taking Amanita muscaria. In any case, these festive rituals that were prevalent in northern Europe are probably also the starting point of the winding path that eventually landed the mushroom on the Christmas postcard. As you know, the timing of Christmas is not coincidental, and no, it is probably NOT the true birth-date of Jesus Christ - who in the Gospel according to Luke is implied to have been born in the spring. Since the holidays in Catholic Christianity were established only in the fourth century CE when the Roman Empire tried to entice the peoples of the north to convert to Christianity, the reason for this date is probably different. Christmas (and by the way, also the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah, probably for similar reasons) falls very close to the date of the shortest day of the year. In pagan traditions, this day was very significant, and fixing Christmas around this date made it much easier for the pagans of Northern Europe to make the transition to Christianity. As I mentioned, on some of the pagan holidays, the shamans used Amantia muscaria, and this is echoed in some Christmas traditions, such as the red and white dress of Santa Claus (and no, this is not an invention of the Coca-Cola Corporation). Speaking of Santa Claus, there is another interesting connection between him and the Amanita Muscaria. It turns out that not only humans like to get high and other animals also do so (I promise to dedicate a post to it in the near future), one of the most prominent examples of this behavior can be found in reindeer, when they encounter an Amanita they eat it and then oh ho ho ho ho ho
Yes, the idea that Rudolph, Santa's loyal reindeer, can fly is less far-fetched than people think. I have a few more nice stories about the Amanita muscaria, so come back tomorrow. and Merry Christmas!
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