Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom

by Alex Letcher

  More recently, two prominent writers have rejected this prevailing gnomic representation of the fly-agaric in favour of that presented within the Siberian travelogues and ethnographies. In her darkly bril­liant fin de siecle Gothic novel Nights at the Circus (1984), the late Angela Carter (1940-1992) describes the inspired meeting of a Western journalist, Jack Walser, driven temporarily mad by a blow to the head, and a Siberian shaman/6 The shaman, understanding none of Walser s incoherent babbling, nevertheless recognises the madman as one of his own, and so plies him with fly-agaric-infused urine. Then his eyes began to spin round and round in his head and to send off sparks like Catherine wheels ... Walser entered an immediate fugue of hallucinations . . . The hallucinogenic urine put the sluggish motor in his skull into overdrive. "Oh!" he declaimed to the oncoming Siberian dawn. "What a piece of work is man!">17

  The celebrated children's author Alan Garner also explored the pos­sibilities of fly-agaric shamanism in his novel Thursbitch (2004). One half of the story concerns John 'Jack' Turner, an eighteenth-century packman, who presides over a peculiar and local form of paganism in a remote Cheshire village. Jack eats dried fly-agarics, or 'corbel bread', and shares his wonderfully named 'piddlejuice' with fellow villagers at auspicious times of the year. Just like the Siberian tribespeople, they all fall into a stupor before arising again some hours later to perform their rituals, dancing jerkily all the while. At other times Jack strides out over the hills, red-and-white-spotted kerchief round his neck, high on his corbel bread and communing deeply with the landscape. 'The sound of the brook entered him, and he grew to the stone. He waited. The sun was singing, but not loudly, and the small white clouds rang against each other, soft as Jinney's bells.'*8 Beautiful as this description is, Garner is renowned as much for the dark atavistic themes that underpin his work as for his uncompromisingly laconic prose style. Reading the novel, it is disturbing to discover quite what his fictional villagers are eating and drinking, and quite what they get up to in their piddlejuice rituals. Through his mastery of storytelling, Garner has skilfully revived the power of the fly-agaric to shock.

  Both Carter's and Garner's 'Jacks' are especially interesting from a cultural point of view for they are presented, if not tacitly as shamans, then as possessing distinctly shaman-like qualities. This is telling, because unlike many of the early travellers to Siberia, and most of the mycological writers like Cooke, we tend to think now that it was exclusively the Siberian shamans who used the fly-agaric. In other words, the two predominant stories to have reached us in the eigh­teenth century from the far north-east, that of the shaman and that of the intoxicating mushroom, have become commingled within the con­temporary imagination. It is time now to return to Siberia to consider what truth there is in this; to see exactly who was using fly-agarics, where they were doing it, and for what ends.

  When we think about faraway places, distant in time or distant in space, our tendency is to simplify or reduce them in some way. We paper over the complex textures, cracks and folds of other geogra­phies, climates and cultures with the simple stories, stereotypes and other pleasing patterns of our imagining. Beyond hinting at the broad­est of contours, these shiny coverings say very little about what might actually lie beneath them; but they reflect the people who placed them there that is, our hopes, fears, prejudices and fantasies. So thought the late Arab-American scholar Edward Said, who bequeathed to the world the concept of 'orientalism'.15' The 'Orient', he maintained, does not exist. It is a Western fabrication, a mishmash of second-hand notions, half-truths and projections; harems and hashish on the one hand, fanatics with Kalashnikovs on the other. None of these do jus­tice to the civilisations they purport to describe, and their subtle coer­cive power merely serves the West's ambition to proclaim moral and intellectual superiority.

  The same applies when we think about Siberia and shamanism, choked as they are with the accretions of four hundred years of Western speculation and myth-making. Take the very name, Siberia. The small Khanate of Sibir was just the first of many nations to be overcome by the nascent Russian empire after it crossed the Ural Mountains in its economically driven expansion eastwards. Not knowing otherwise, the Russians projected the name out and beyond, until both it and their empire encompassed almost the entire northern half of the continent. The name obliterates all sense of the sheer scale of the region, its geographical diversity, and the complexity of its eth­nic, cultural and religious make-up, reducing it to a simplified, homogenised and digestible whole.

  But the region we call Siberia is vast. It is as large as Europe and the USA combined, covering seven time zones and several distinct biogeographical regions: tundra in the north gives way to great swathes oi forest or taiga in the centre, to be replaced in turn by the monotonous steppes of the south.JO The indigenous cultures and nations that forged a living out of these harsh conditions were no less diverse. Huntergatherers, agriculturists, pastoralists, reindeer herders or whalers: every tribe was keenly adapted to the particularities of its environ­ment. At the end of the sixteenth century the Russians counted approximately 120 distinct linguistic groupings in Siberia, making up a bewildering political landscape of tribal feuds and rivalries, alliances and misalliances. The names by which we now know those tribes rep­resent early Russian attempts to simplify the situation on the ground, inaccurately lumping together peoples that previously had no com­mon identity: the Tatars', say, in the south-west, or the 'Samoyeds' in the tundra of the north and west.5'

  Similarly, when we think about Siberian shamans, it tends to be a singular image that comes to mind, an image that has not substantial­ly altered since the earliest Western travellers encountered these enig­matic characters. Take the following, written by Richard Johnson, an English explorer who travelled to Siberia in the mid sixteenth century, which still captures our Western view of the shaman precisely.

  The priest doth begin to play upon a thing like a great sieve, with a skin on the one end like a drum ... his face is covered with a piece of shirt of mail, with many small ribs and teeth of fishes, and wild beasts hanging on the same mail. Then he singeth as we use here in England to halloo, whoop, or shout at hounds, and ... in the end he becometh as it were mad, and falling down as if dead ... I asked them why he lay so, and they answered me, 'Now doth our god tell him what we shall do, and whither we shall go.Ml

  Western travellers, writers and thinkers, from Richard Johnson right up to Garner and Carter, have all tended to portray Siberian shamans in this stereotyped way, painting them as privileged individu­als, set apart from ordinary society, who, while in some kind of a trance, travel to a spirit-world and interact with its denizens for the general benefit of their communities, usually imploring spirits to cure 'liness or reveal the future. But while it is true to say that most, if not all, of the animistic tribal communities in Siberia supported people, typically men, in the role of what we now call shaman, it would be quite wrong to think that they belonged to a static, monolithic, uni­versally adhered-to religion, or even to a pristine ur-religion as some scholars have maintained. There never was a singular 'shamanism' in Siberia.

  For one thing, the term itself was particular only to certain Tungusic-speaking societies. It happened to be the first name encoun tered by seventeenth-century Russian and Dutch explorers, who tran­scribed it as schamati, a form amenable to the large numbers o German-speaking scholars working in Siberia for the Russian empire Outside Siberia the name stuck, but by far and away the most com­mon term within it was kam, followed closely by bo, enenalan, tadibei and oyun. For another, 'shamans' everywhere assumed slightly differ­ent roles and undertook different duties, coexisting alongside other religious functionaries, priests and magic-workers. Every 'shaman* expressed an individuality of style through distinctive techniques, cos­tumes, performances and attitudes, and each adhered to a particular world view/'

  For example, one Khant shaman was recorded as saying that in trance he reached an upperworld by means of a rope dropped down from the he
avens. Once there, he rode across the sky in a spirit-canoe, casually brushing aside stars that got in his way. But a kam from the Altai mountains described how in his trance he mounted a spirithorse, which carried him far across the steppes to an Iron Mountain littered with the bones of dead shamans. A hole at the top of the mountain granted him access to the underworld where the spints lived. These two, supposedly similar shamans inhabited quite different universes.54

  Western scholars have laboured long and hard to find some elusive quality, some defining characteristic, that would capture the essence ot the shaman 'the master of ecstasy', 'the wounded healer', 'the prim­itive psychoanalyst', 'the madman'35 missing the obvious point that shamanism has always been characterised by difference and diversity. The term 'shaman' is therefore a Western, orientalist construct, applied willy-nilly to a range of practices around the world that we have deemed to be the same, regardless of how the practitioners see themselves. Maria Sabina provides us with a good case in point, for while she is typically labelled as a 'shaman', she never thought of her­self as such: she called herself a chota chjine, a 'wise one' or a 'woman who knows'. Indeed, the term 'shaman' has been so widely applied and so overused that postmodern scholars wonder whether it has any analytical value at all.56 It is, however, far too late for them to try to

  close this particular stable door, for the horse has long bolted and the term has near universal currency.

  The situation is rendered more complicated by the fact that at the rime of the travelogues, Siberian shamanism had already been affected by Buddhist and Islamic influences, and by nearly two hundred years of Russian Orthodox Christian rule. An initial degree of tolerance gradually gave way to hostility and repression from the reign of Catherine the Great (1729-1796) onwards, with the result that shamanism still existed, but was very much in decline. It was, howev­er, virtually eradicated by the persecutions of the Stalinist era. Shamans were denounced as primitive anti-Communists and branded as insane, and their drums and equipment were seized and burned. There are reports that shamans were thrown out of helicopters by the KGB as proof to others that their talk of spirit-flight was nonsense; while the last shaman of the Nanais people was pushed through a hole in the ice of a frozen lake, with a weight tied to his foot.57

  Shamanism was believed to have been dead in Siberia by the 1980s, but there are signs that it is being revived and, where continuity has been lost, reconstructed. We therefore need to make a distinction between preand post-Soviet era shamanism, bearing in mind that the shamanism encountered by the Western explorers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was already one that had been affected by Western and other outside influences.

  What, then, can be said about the shamanistic use of the fly-agaric within this complex situation? First, the mushroom seems to have been ignored or overlooked in all but two comparatively small regions of Siberia: in the west around the tributaries of the Ob river and including the Taimyr peninsula, amongst the Khanty, the Ket, the Forest Nenets, the Nganasan and the Mansi peoples; and in the far north-east, roughly to the east of the meridian that passes through the mouth of the Kolyma river, and including the great Kamchatka penin­sula, amongst the people known as the Even, the Yukagir, the Itelmen, the Inuit, the Chuvanians, the Chukchi and the Koryak. Russian set­tlers in the coastal regions of the Kamchatka peninsula were also known to have partaken.

  Second, the shamans within these regions who employed the mush­room as a tool to access the spirit-realm seem to have been in the minority: it was far from necessary or essential to being a shaman, and most used repetitive drumming or dance as the means to enter trancc. For every shaman that enjoyed prestige for being able safely to con­sume a 'poisonous' mushroom, there were others who were thought the less of for their reliance upon it. Those shamans who used the mushroom did so to assist themselves in performing the activities of their profession: contacting spirits or the spirits of the dead, interpret­ing dreams, treating disease, finding names for newborn children, reading the past or the future, or travelling to the different worlds of their cosmologies. An important cross-cultural belief within these areas was that the spirits of the mushroom would appear to the shaman, and then impart to him or her the desired information. The shamans' songs such as the one that opens this chapter were thought to be sung 'through them1 by the mushroom spirits.

  The mushrooms were more widely used outside of shamanism, however, and to a number of different ends. Ordinary people some­times took them to try to catch a glimpse of the spirit-worlds that the shamans ordinarily inhabited.3* Indigenous bards would inspire and fortify themselves with fly-agaric mushrooms before launching into impassioned recitals of epic heroic sagas, lasting through the night. They would then, apparently, fall to the floor exhausted (a situation somewhat reminiscent of Western rock music!). Others would eat the mushroom in low doses when undertaking hard physical labour, such as hauling boats, carrying heavy loads or haymaking, for they found that it alleviated fatigue.19

  But the mushroom was used most commonly for the age-old pur­poses of pleasure and intoxication.40 Apart from the mushroom's immediate psychophysical effects, much of the enjoyment seems to have stemmed from the fact that intoxicated people behaved strange­ly and ridiculously (although it was claimed that this was all at the behest of the mushroom spirits whose orders could not be gainsaid). The bemushroomed might leap about, blather uncontrollably, or even stand stock still pretending to be, well, a mushroom.

  Consequently, no festive occasion was complete without some mushroom-inspired antic or other, and fly-agaric brews were eagerly quaffed at weddings, at feasts to celebrate a particularly successful hunt, or even just to celebrate a neighbourly visit.41 The similarities between recreational indigenous mushroom use and Russian con­sumption of brandy and vodka did not go unnoticed, and while in some areas it was forbidden to combine the two, in others spirits of

  the distilled kind gradually replaced those indwelling in the mushroom as the favoured means of making a fool of oneself. Nevertheless, over­all, the fly-agaric remained in great demand, which explains both why the lower echelons were forced to drink urine, and why Langsdorf found that the mushrooms were valuable enough to be traded for rein­deer a high price indeed.

  However the mushrooms were used, an average dose seems to have been three to five mushrooms. As many as eleven might be consumed for the purposes of obtaining visions, but figures higher than that are improbable.41 Fly-agarics were most commonly eaten dried (a choice that, as we shall see, has a sound biochemical basis), but were also taken fresh, raw, cooked, made into tea or infused with berries, and of course distilled via human kidneys. The phase of development of the mushroom was also important: young, unopened mushrooms were thought stronger and more suitable for helping physical exertion; older, flatter mushrooms were better for visions and intoxication. Again, there is an element of biochemical truth in this claim, so the Siberians clearly knew their mushrooms.

  With regard to the situation in post-Soviet Siberia, any attempt to make a detailed assessment is hampered by the sheer lack of published research in this area: there are very few ethnographic reports available in the West. However, during the 1980s the Estonian mycologist Maret Saar found that, within the traditional regions, fly-agaric was still being used in much the same way as before.45 Saar conducted fieldwork amongst the Khanty in western Siberia, and interviewed an Estonian herder who had lived amongst the Chukchi in the far north­east for twenty years. Furtively and away from view, fly-agaric was being taken recreationally, but also to obtain 'second sight', to prog­nosticate or divine the cause of illness: that is, it was being used shamanistically'. Although Saar's informants claimed that they had never used the mushroom themselves, and that they were relaying sto­ries from their fathers, their knowledge of the mushroom pointed to first-hand experience. The extent to which this represented an unbro­ken lineage stretching back to the pre-Soviet era, or a self-conscious revival of a long-abandoned practice, has yet to be determined.


  More colourful confirmation has come from a less formal field trip to the Kamchatka peninsula, undertaken by a group of American mycologists in the early 1990s.44 There, aside from an interesting and under-explored mycoflora, they discovered a charismatic woman shaman, the eighty-two-year-old Tatiana Urkachan, who, clothed in a tell-tale red-and-white polka-dot dress, lectured them about the correct use of fly-agaric mushrooms for healing and intoxication. Interestingly she was adamant that she never ate the mushroom herself, for she was already too powerful a shaman to need it. Nevertheless, she claimed to be able to communicate with the mushroom spirits, and thereby to con­trol someone who was bemushroomed.

  The initial meeting with Urkachan, though obviously exciting, did not go well, however, for she greeted the party with the ominous news that they had offended the fly-agaric spirits and that until due recom­pense was made they would never leave Kamchatka! It transpired that, shortly after they arrived, one of the mycologists had placed tufts of cotton wool upon a red Russula mushroom as a joke to try to fool his fellows, and that this was the cause of the offence.45 Due obeisance was made to the fly-agaric spirits, and the party returned unscathed vet mystified as to how this shaman knew about a jest performed days before and miles away. Even today, Siberian shamanism retains the power to unsettle Western explorers.

  One puzzling question is how these Siberians learned to enjoy the effects of the mushroom, when almost everywhere else in the world it has been shunned as worthless and dangerous. And how did they dis­cover that human urine is as potent as the fungus itself? One theory is that humans learned about the peculiar properties of the mushroom by closely observing the behaviour of reindeer. Just like their human herders, reindeer also become intoxicated after eating fly-agaric, and apparently pleasantly so, for they will actively seek it out. Not only that, but during the winter months, when they survive largely by eat­ing lichen, the deer seem compulsively to crave human urine, presum­ably because it contains essential minerals lacking from their frugal diet: they will even fight over which of them gets to lap it up from the snow. There are reports of people stepping outside to relieve them­selves being almost stampeded by their herds and, indeed, the animals are so attuned to the smell of urine that this has long been employed as a convenient means of rounding up straying animals.