CHAPTER EIGHT: THE FLY-AGARIC: "MUSHROOM OF IMMORTALITY"

The Koryaks of Siberia have a marvellous tale in which the culture hero Big Raven has caught a whale but discovers that he cannot return him to his proper home in the sea because he is not strong enough to lift the grass bag with the provisions the whale requires to sustain himself on the long voyage. Big Raven appeals to the great deity Vahiyinin, which means Existence, and Vahiyinin tells him to go to a certain place where he will find spirit beings called wapaq. If he eats some of these wapaq spirits they will give him the strength he needs to gather the bag and assist the whale.

Vahiyinin spat upon the earth and where his spittle fell there appeared little white plants with red hats on which the god's saliva transformed into white flecks. It was these miraculous plants that were the wapaq. Big Raven ate some, as he had been told, and soon felt so powerful and exhilarated that he was easily able to lift the heavy grass bag, enabling the whale to return to his home. Wapaq showed Big Raven the path the whale was taking out to sea and the manner in which he would return to his comrades. When Big Raven saw all this he told the wapaq, "0 wapaq, grow forever on this earth," and to his children, the people, he said that they should learn whatever wapaq had to teach them.

According to Waldemar (Vladimir) Jochelson (1905/1908), a Russian ethnologist who with his colleague Vladimir Bogoras contributed considerable data on the native peoples of Siberia to the American Museum of Natural History's Jesup North Pacific Expedition around the turn of the century, the Koryalc believe that the wapaq would tell any man who ate them, even if he were not a shaman, "what ailed him when he was sick, or explain a dream to him, or show him the upper world, or the underground world, or foretell what would happen to him."

As the reader will undoubtedly have guessed, the wapaq of Koryak mythology is none other than the familiar fly-agaric (Amanita muscaria )—the spectacular red-capped and white-flecked "toadstool" whose renown among Europeans has for so many centuries floated uncertainly between the realm of magic and transformation, on the one hand, and death from its allegedly fatal poison on the other. In reality, the fly-agaric is hallucinogenic rather than deadly, having served for thousands of years as the sacred inebriant of the shamanistic religions of the northern Eurasiatic forest belt, especially those of Siberian hunters and reindeer herders. This enormous region, from the Baltic Sea to Kamchatka, is the only area in the world outside Middle America where mushrooms are known to have been employed extensively as sacred vehicles of ecstatic intoxication in recent times (on a minor, and strictly localized scale, hallucinogenic fungi have also been used in New Guinea and Africa). Long ago, however, as Wasson has shown, the religious use of the fly-agaric was far more widespread in the Old World; it was in fact this remarkable "mushroom of immortality" that was the mysterious divine inebriating plant deity called Soma in the worship of the Indo-European peoples who invaded India from the northwest ca. 1500 B.C. Of this identification more later.

As early as the mid-1600's and with greater frequency and more detail from the eighteenth century on, a variety of foreign travelers with unequal gifts of observation and objectivity commented on fly-agaric as a ritual inebriant among the tribesmen of Siberia. Depending on local custom and tradition, the mushrooms might be eaten raw or cooked, fresh or dried, or in liquid form either as an infusion or as a decoction of the juices of the mushroom mixed with berries. Commonly the mushroom seems to have been allowed to dry to some degree before it was consumed—a significant observation in relation to the psychoactivity of Amanita muscaria (p. 93, following).

With the advent of anthropology in the nineteenth century, at least some of the descriptions of mushroom intoxication and their ritual and mythological contexts take on a less ethnocentric flavor, but there are also older accounts that seem remarkably modern in their approach to what must have seemed to the average European very strange customs indeed. Outstanding in this respect, as we shall see, was the German naturalist Georg Heinrich von Lang sdorf .

The Fly-Agaric and the Intoxicating Urine

There was one aspect of Siberian mushroom intoxication, reported even in the earliest sources, that must have seemed singularly shocking to one who encountered it for the first time—the drinking of the urine of a bemushroomed person, and also the urine of reindeer that had browsed—as reindeer apparently like to do—on the fly-agaric.

By no means all the tribes that used Amanita muscaria also drank flyagaric urine, but the custom was sufficiently well-developed and widespread to have drawn the attention of almost every observer—from Count Filip Johann von Strahlenberg, a Swedish colonel who spent a dozen years in Siberia as a prisoner of war and reported on his observations in the early eighteenth century, to the trained ethnographers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the Europeanization of Siberia, which had begun in the seventeenth century, was well underway, but before traditional tribal life began to be radically transformed even in the remoter hinterlands in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution.

As one might expect, not all the Europeans who saw the urine-drinking rite were able to report on it with detachment; and there are amusing instances in which the writer tries hard to hint at what he saw, or heard described, without being too specific, lest he offend the delicate sensibilities of his Victorian readers. As mentioned, a notably early exception was Langsdorf, who in 1809 published an extensive description of the fly-agaric among the Koryak, including the urine-drinking rite and at least its pharmacological, if not its ideological, foundation. He was also the only one of the early observers to inquire into the specific nature of the hallucinogenic drug contained in the mushroom—a question that was not to be definitively settled until the late 1960's, a full century after an alkaloid called muscarine, long credited as the main hallucinogenic agent in fly-agaric intoxication but now known to play only a minor role, was first isolated from Amanita muscaria.

After describing the psychic effects of the mushroom, which the Koryak took mainly in dried form or soaked in berry juices, Langsdorf turned to the phenomenon of urine-drinking:

The strangest and most remarkable feature of the fly-agaric is its effect on the urine. The Koryaks have known since time immemorial that the urine of a person who has consumed fly-agaric has a stronger narcotic and intoxicating power than the fly-agaric itself and that this effect persists for a long time after consumption. For example, a man may become moderately drunk on fly-agarics today and by tomorrow may have completely slept off this moderate intoxication and be completely sober; but if he now drinks a cup of his own urine, he will become far more intoxicated than he was from the mushrooms the day before. . . . (Langsdorf, quoted in Wasson, 1968:249).

The intoxicating effect on the urine, he continues, is found not only in those who actually eat the mushroom but in anyone who drinks the urine. Because of this peculiar effect the Koryaks could prolong their ecstasy for several days with a relatively small number of fly-agarics:

Suppose, for example, that two mushrooms were needed on the first day for an ordinary intoxication; then the urine alone is enough to maintain the intoxication on the following day. On the third day the urine still has narcotic properties, and therefore one drinks some of this and at the same time swallows some fly-agaric, even if only half a mushroom; this enables him not only to maintain his intoxication but also to tap off a strong liquor on the fourth day. By continuing this method it is possible, as can easily be seen, to maintain the intoxication for a week or longer with five or six flyagarics . Equally remarkable and strange is the extremely subtle and elusive narcotic substance in the fly-agarics, which retains its effectiveness permanently and can be transmitted to other persons: the effect of the urine from the eating of one and the same mushroom can be transmitted to a second person, the urine of this second person affects a third, and similarly, unchanged by the organs of this animal secretion, the effect appears in a fourth and fifth person. (Langsdorf, quoted in Wasson, 1968:249- 250)

Langsdorf, who seems to have been the only one of his time to whom such advanced questions occurred, wondered not only about the psychopharmacology of the fly-agaric drug, but also whether there was something about the mushroom that might impart a special, "possibly quite pleasant," smell and taste to urine, qualities that were known to adhere, for example, to asparagus and turpentine. By analogy, he writes—again considerably ahead of his time—it might be worth investigating whether other psychoactive substances, such as opium, digitalis, cantharides, and the like might also retain their properties in urine. In any event, he concludes, the nature of the fly-agaric

. . . offers the scientist, physician, and naturalist a great deal of food for thought: our materia medica might perhaps be enriched with one of the most efficacious remedies. . . .

Not, one would assume, in combination with urine, the very idea of which would have horrified the Europeans—as, indeed, it would shock many of us today. We have to remember, however, that (as Wasson, for whom the urine-drinking aspect of the Siberian fly-agaric rite was to prove of great significance to his identification of Soma, has pointed out) in the non-Occidentalized East the attitude toward urine was very different from that prevailing in the West. In Asia, for example, urine was widely employed as a medicine and a sterile disinfectant and in certain areas served also in religious devotions. Likewise in Aztec Mexico—I have found several references to the therapeutic use of urine in Sahagün's Florentine Codex. Not only did Aztec physicians use urine externally to cleanse infections, but it was administered internally as a medicinal drink, particularly for disorders of the stomach and intestines. I hasten to add, however, that there is no hint that urine ever figured in ritual intoxication.

Chemistry and Effects

Wasson (1967b), who has tried the fly-agaric on himself, has summarized what limited knowledge can be gathered from the literature on the subjective effects of the mushroom:

a. It begins to act in fifteen or twenty minutes and the effects last for hours.
b. First it is soporific. One goes to sleep for about two hours, and the sleep is not normal. One cannot be roused from it, but is sometimes aware of the sounds round about. In this half-sleep sometimes one has coloured visions that respond, at least to some extent, to one's desires.
c. Some subjects enjoy a feeling of elation that lasts for three or four hours after waking from the sleep. In this stage it is interesting to note that the superiority of this drug over alcohol is particularly emphasized: the fly-agaric is not merely better, it belongs to a different and superior order of inebriant, according to those who have enjoyed the experience.* During this state the subject is often capable of extraordinary feats of physical effort, and enjoys performing them.
d. A peculiar feature of the fly agaric is that its hallucinogenic properties pass into the urine, and another may drink this urine to enjoy the same effect. . . . This surprising trait of fly-agaric inebriation is unique in the hallucinogenic world, so far as our present knowledge goes.

Now, if it is not muscarine, which was isolated from Amanita muscaria in 1869, that was responsible for these effects, nor bufotenine, which has recently but mistakenly been reported to be an active constituent of fly-agaric, what is responsible?

Recent studies by Professors Conrad H. Eugster (1967) and Peter G. Waser (1967, 1971) of the University of Zurich, a chemist and a pharmacologist respectively, have demonstrated what it is. For while muscarine is present in A. muscaria as a minor constituent, not it but rather two isoxazoles, ibotenic acid and muscimole, constitute the principal psychoactive constituents, with others remaining to be studied (Schultes, 1970). It is muscimole that holds the pharmacological key to the urine-drinking custom. Muscimole, they discovered, is an unsaturated cyclic hydroxamic acid that secretes through the kidneys in basically unaltered form. It was this about which Langsdorf speculated as long ago as 1809. But there is more yet, for the investigators discovered that there is a natural conversion of ibotenic acid to the more stable muscimole. And this in turn relates directly to the preferred manner in which the mushroom was consumed. To quote Wasson (1972c:12):

Ibotenic acid is present in the fresh fly-agaric in widely varying amounts, ranging from 0.03% to 0.1%. When the fly-agaric dries, the ibotenic acid steadily disintegrates and disappears. Thus we have the unique situation where a psychotomimetic agent converts itself through simple drying into another active agent that is more potent and far more stable. In [the book] Soma I give in extenso (and in summary on pp. 153 ff.) the almost unanimous testimony, extending over two centuries and throughout almost the whole of the northern tier of tribes from the valley of the Ob to the Chukotka, that the fly-agaric must not be eaten fresh: it should be dried, preferably sun-dried. The empirical knowledge of the Siberian natives is now confirmed by Eugster.

Before turning to Wasson and Soma, let us look once more at the urine-drinking rite in Siberia. According to Strahlenberg (1736):

The Russians who trade with them [Koryak], carry thither a kind of Mushrooms, called, in the Russian Tongue, Muchumor, which they exchange for Squirrels, Fox, Hermin, Sable, and other Furs: Those who are rich among them, lay up large Provisions of these Mushrooms, for the Winter. When they make a Feast, they pour Water upon some of these Mushrooms, and boil them. They then drink the Liquor, which intoxicates them; The poorer Sort, who cannot afford to lay in a Store of these Mushrooms, post themselves, on these Occasions, round the Huts of the Rich, and watch the Opportunity of the Guests coming down to make Water; And then hold a Wooden Bowl to receive the Urine, which they drink off greedily, as having still some virtue of the Mushroom in it, and by this Way they also get Drunk. (Quoted in Wasson, 1968:234-235.)

Langsdorf, we recall, reported in 1809 that for inebriation the Koryak much preferred the fly-agaric to vodka. This would suggest that as early as the eighteenth century, and certainly by the nineteenth, what had formerly been purely religious-shamanistic mushroom intoxication was to some degree breaking down under the impact of the fur trade and the Europeanization of Siberia—akin to what happened in North America with the introduction of whiskey to Indians who had previously been accustomed to ecstatic or dream states as profound religious experiences. On the other hand, we cannot assume that the Europeans were really equipped to understand what they saw or heard. There are accounts from the nineteenth and twentieth century that leave no doubt that the mushrooms were widely regarded as sacred and that their primary purpose was magicoreligious, enabling shamans to communicate with the spirit world (e.g. Jochelson: "Many shamans previous to their seances eat fly-agaric in order to get into ecstatic states" [1908:583]). Jochelson also makes it clear that the eating of sacred mushrooms was not restricted to the rich or even to shamans, and that in any event the crimson Amanita muscaria was plentiful in Koryak territory, which contradicts Strahlenberg's claim that the poor had to rely on the fly-agaric urine of the rich in order to get intoxicated, even in the winter when the mushroom is not in season.

As a matter of fact, the way Langsdorf describes the urine-drinking rite suggests that his functional or economic interpretation, while certainly correct, tells only half the story. It seems to me that the sharing of the shaman's own intoxicating body fluid with his fellows, and theirs among themselves, beyond economizing on the supply of fly-agaric could have served to symbolize the total unification of the celebrants with one another and with the personified spirit power of the mushroom. If so, the real meaning of this curious rite is fundamentally the same as the ritual passing of peyote from one to the other on the Huichol peyote pilgrimage, when after the harvest of the sacred cactus, personified as Elder Brother, each pilgrim gives some of his or her peyote to each of the companions, customarily by placing a piece directly into the other's mouth. This giving is repeated several times in a counterclockwise circuit. "One gives and one receives of the flesh of Elder Brother," intones the officiating shaman, "so that all are of one heart, so that all is unity."

Finally, it should be noted that muscarine, said to induce profuse sweating and twitching in some who take the mushroom directly, seems to be lacking in fly-agaric urine, so that those who drank their own or another's were spared these unpleasant side-effects of mushroom inebriation. One would assume that this too would have contributed far more to the popularity of the practice than economic considerations, aside from whatever symbolic meanings adhered to it.

*Langsdorf reported that the Koryaks greatly preferred fly-agaric to the vodka of the Russians, because mushroom intoxication was not followed by headache and other unpleasant symptoms.