Master of plants
Master of plants
So I started this topic in a good belief that I would not be slurred for starting just another unusual thread, do the research on the info available on amanita down here on forum and everything I found was just info on her culinary or medicinary uses, so I think it´s time to discuss a. muscaria in a more serious manner and slap me in the face if I made a mistake.
Thanks Erowid and TKM for providing backup info.
BOTANICAL CLASSIFICATION
Family: Amanitaceae
Genus: Amanita
Species: cothurnata; gemmata; muscaria; pantherina; regalis
COMMON NAMES
Fly Agaric; Beni Tengutake
EFFECTS CLASSIFICATION
deliriant; Psychedelic
DESCRIPTION
Psychoactive Amanitas are mushrooms which contain the psychoactive chemicals ibotenic acid and muscimol. They have a long history of use in Asia and Northern Europe. They are best known for their distinctive appearance (bright reds and yellows with white spots).
CAUTION
There are many species of mushrooms in the Amanita genus which are not psychoactive. Some are deadly poisonous while others are edible.
THE WASSONS' AMANITA THEORY
Gordon and Valentina Wasson, the founders of the science of ethnomycology, the study of human uses of and lore concerning mushrooms and other fungi, first suggested that Soma might be a
FIGURE 14. Substitutes for Soma. From R. G. Wasson, Soma: Divine Mushroom of immortality (New York Harcourt Brace jovanovich, 1971), p. 105.
mushroom-specifically, that it was the scarlet-capped, whitespotted fly agaric, Amanita muscaria, an extremely ancient shamanic intoxicant until recently used by the Tungusic tribes of arctic Siberia.
The evidence that the Wassons gathered was massive. By studying the evolution of the languages involved, tracing artistic motifs, and judiciously reexamining and reinterpreting the Vedic material, they made a strong case that a mushroom lay behind the mystery of Soma. Theirs was the first botanically sophisticated, pharmacologically informed inquiry into the identity of Soma.
In other research, the Wassons discovered the existence of stillactive shamanic mushroom cults in the mountains of the Sierra Mazateca of Oaxacan Mexico. Gordon Wasson brought samples of Mexican mushrooms to Swiss pharmaceutical chemist and LSD discoverer Albert Hofmann and thus set the stage for the characterization and isolation of psilocybin in 1957. The same psilocybin that I argue was involved in the emergence of human self-reflection on the African grasslands some tens of millennia ago.
In 1971 Gordon Wasson published Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality. There the case for fly agaric is presented in its most complete form. Wasson was brilliant in advancing the notion that a mushroom of some sort was implicated in the Soma mystery. He was less successful in showing that the species behind the mystery was the fly agaric. He, like all those before him who had attempted an identification of Soma, had forgotten that whatever Soma was, it was a visionary intoxicant of tremendous power and an unparalleled hallucinogen. In contrast, he was well aware that European scholarship had settled upon Siberian shamanism as "exemplary" of all Archaic shamanism and that fly agaric had long been used in Siberia to induce shamanic journeys and initiate neophyte shamans into the fullness of their heritage.
As a result of Wasson's own discoveries in Mexico, it was known that mushrooms other than fly agaric could contain visionary intoxicants, but psilocybin mushrooms were thought to be a strictly New World phenomenon, since no other intoxicating mushrooms were known. Wasson assumed that if a mushroom were Soma, then that mushroom must be a fly agaric. This overemphasis of Amanita muscaria has haunted efforts to understand Soma ever since.
OBJECTIONS TO FLY AGARIC
Genetically and chemically Amanita muscaria is extremely variable; many kinds of fly agaric do not provide a reliable ecstatic experience. Soil considerations and geographic and seasonal factors also affect its hallucinogenic properties. Use of a plant by a shaman does not necessarily mean it is ecstatic. Many rather unpleasant plants are used by shamans to intoxicate themselves and to open the "crack between the worlds." Among these are the Daturas-relatives of jimsonweed, the arborescent Brugmansias whose pendulous blossoms are familiar as landscaping ornamentals; bright red and black Sophora secundifolla seeds, Brunfelsias, and Virola-based snuffs made of powdered tree resin. In spite of their shamanic usage, these plants do not induce an ecstatic experience that could inspire the rapturous praise heaped on Soma. Wasson himself was aware that Anianita was unreliable, as he himself never had an ecstatic experience from eating Amanda.
Instead of realizing that Amanita muscaria was an unlikely candidate for Vedic Soma, Wasson became convinced that some method of preparation must have been involved. But no ingredient or procedure has ever been found that reliably transforms the often uncomfortable subtoxic experience of Amanita into visionary journeying to a magical paradise. Wasson himself knew of only one inexplicable and unrcplicated exception:
In 1965 and again in 1966 we tried out the fly-agarics (Amanita muscaria) repeatedly on ourselves. The results were disappointing. We ate them raw, on empty stomachs. We drank the juice, on empty stomachs. We mixed the juice with milk and drank the mixture, always on empty stomachs. We felt nauseated and some of us threw up. We felt disposed to sleep, and fell into a deep slumber from which shouts could not rouse us, lying like logs, not snoring, dead to the outside world. When in this state I once had vivid dreams, but nothing like what happened when I took the psilocybe mushrooms in Mexico, where I did not sleep at all. In our experiments at Sugadaira [Japan], there was one occasion that differed from the others, one that could be called successful. Rokuya Imazeki took his mushrooms with mizo shiru, the delectable soup that the Japanese usually serve for breakfast, and he toasted his mushroom caps on a fork before an open fire. When he rose from the sleep that comes with the mushroom, he was in full elation. For three hours he could not help but speak; he was a compulsive speaker. The purport of his remarks was that this was nothing like the alcoholic state; it was infinitely better, beyond all comparison. We did not know at the time why, on this single occasion, our friend Imazeki was affected this way."
The chemical compounds active in Anianita muscaria are muscarine and muscimol. Muscarine is highly toxic and like most cholinergic poisons, its activity is reversed by injection of atropine sulfate. Muscimol, the likely
candidate for the psychoactivity of the mushroom, has been described as merely an emetic and a sedative. " Human exposure to muscimol is not described in the literature. (Incredibly, the obvious step of giving muscimol to human beings to determine its psychedelic potential, if any, has not been undertaken. This fact again points out the queasy illogic that overtakes the academic mentality in the presence of questions revolving around self-induced changes in consciousness.)
To the above let me add my own personal experience of the fly agaric. I have ingested it on two occasions. Once the specimens were a dried collection made at sea level in northern California. My experience of five dried grams was one of nausea, salivation, and blurred vision. Drifting images were present with eyes closed but of a trivial and unengaging sort. My second exposure was a dinner-plate-sized fresh specimen collected at 10,000 feet in the mountains behind Boulder, Colorado. In this case, salivation and stomach cramps were the only effects.
Finally, here is part of an account of fly agaric intoxication by an extremely sophisticated subject, a professional psychotherapist and neurophysiologist. The dose taken was one cup of finely chopped mushroom. The mushrooms came from the Pecos river drainage of New Mexico:
I was occasionally twitching, a gleam of perspiration over me. Saliva dribbling rapidly out of my mouth. I did not know how the time passed. Thought I was awake, or dreaming dreams that were totally lifelike--dreamed in total awareness. I was only dimly or not at all aware of the music being played. Threw off my blanket-very hot sweaty, very cold-chilled, but no visible chills. It seemed unusually quiet inside. I was very stoned. Unlike anything I had felt before"psychedelic" is too broad a term, too all encompassing, it was not truly psychedelic. It was as if everything were exactly the same but totally unfamiliar-but it all looked like I knew it to be. Except that this world was about a shade (or a quantum level) off--different in an eerie, profound and unmistakable way. I was ataxic [unable to coordinate voluntary movements] and euphoric-there was very little visual stuff."
In short, Amanita muscaria is doubtless an effective sharnam vehicle in the floristically limited Arctic environment in which
has been traditionally utilized as a psychoactive agent. But th rapturous visionary ecstasy that inspired the Vedas and was th central mystery of the Indo-European peoples as they moved across the Iranian plateau could not possibly have been caused by Amanit muscaria.
WASSON: HIS CONTRADICTIONS AND OTHER FUNGAL CANDIDATES FOR SOMA
Wasson remained convinced that fly agaric was Soma. In his la book, Persephone's Quest, published posthumously, he characte ized fly agaric as "the supreme entheogen of all time"-apparentl on faith, since he admitted it was disappointing and only reported attaining shamanic ecstasy by using psilocybin, which he never introduces into the Soma puzzle. However, he did introduce a interesting caveat when writing of India:
Other fungal entheogens grow at the lower levels. They come in cattle dung, are easily identified and gathered, and are effective. But they fall to conform to Brahmanic practices; they are known to tribals and sudras [untouchables].
Soma on the other hand exacts self-discipline of the priests, a long initiation and training: it is, for proper exploitation, an affair of a priestly elite. But the possible role of Stropharia cubensis growing in the dung of cattle in the lives of the lower orders remains to this day wholly unexplored. Is S. cubensis responsible for the elevation of the cow to a sacred status? And for the inclusion of the urine and dung of cows in the pancagavya (the Vedic sacrifice)? And was that a contributing reason for abandoning Soma? Given the ecological conditions prevailing in the Indus
Valley and Kashmir, only a few of the Indo-Europeans could know by personal experience the secret of the Divine Herb. The cult of Soma must have been shaped by the peculiar circumstances prevailing in the area, but ultimately those circumstances must have doomed that cult. Today it lives on in India only as an intense and glowing memory of an ancient rite.
In discussing the prohibition against eating mushrooms if one is a Brahmin, a prohibition established in the late Vedic phase, Wasson says:
We still do not know-we will probably never knowwhen the proscription came into force, perhaps over centuries while the Vedic hymns were being composed, or possibly when the hierarchs among the Brahmans learned of the entheogenic virtues of Stropharia cubensis as known to the lower orders living in India ......
Something unusual is going on in these two passages. A great scholar, himself quite a Brahman, an investment banker by profession and an honorary fellow of Harvard University, seems to be behaving in a most unscholarly manner. We know from his own eloquent descriptions that Wasson experienced the ecstasy of psilocybin on more than one occasion. And we know that he never obtained a satisfying experience from Anianita muscaria.
Thanks Erowid and TKM for providing backup info.
BOTANICAL CLASSIFICATION
Family: Amanitaceae
Genus: Amanita
Species: cothurnata; gemmata; muscaria; pantherina; regalis
COMMON NAMES
Fly Agaric; Beni Tengutake
EFFECTS CLASSIFICATION
deliriant; Psychedelic
DESCRIPTION
Psychoactive Amanitas are mushrooms which contain the psychoactive chemicals ibotenic acid and muscimol. They have a long history of use in Asia and Northern Europe. They are best known for their distinctive appearance (bright reds and yellows with white spots).
CAUTION
There are many species of mushrooms in the Amanita genus which are not psychoactive. Some are deadly poisonous while others are edible.
THE WASSONS' AMANITA THEORY
Gordon and Valentina Wasson, the founders of the science of ethnomycology, the study of human uses of and lore concerning mushrooms and other fungi, first suggested that Soma might be a
FIGURE 14. Substitutes for Soma. From R. G. Wasson, Soma: Divine Mushroom of immortality (New York Harcourt Brace jovanovich, 1971), p. 105.
mushroom-specifically, that it was the scarlet-capped, whitespotted fly agaric, Amanita muscaria, an extremely ancient shamanic intoxicant until recently used by the Tungusic tribes of arctic Siberia.
The evidence that the Wassons gathered was massive. By studying the evolution of the languages involved, tracing artistic motifs, and judiciously reexamining and reinterpreting the Vedic material, they made a strong case that a mushroom lay behind the mystery of Soma. Theirs was the first botanically sophisticated, pharmacologically informed inquiry into the identity of Soma.
In other research, the Wassons discovered the existence of stillactive shamanic mushroom cults in the mountains of the Sierra Mazateca of Oaxacan Mexico. Gordon Wasson brought samples of Mexican mushrooms to Swiss pharmaceutical chemist and LSD discoverer Albert Hofmann and thus set the stage for the characterization and isolation of psilocybin in 1957. The same psilocybin that I argue was involved in the emergence of human self-reflection on the African grasslands some tens of millennia ago.
In 1971 Gordon Wasson published Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality. There the case for fly agaric is presented in its most complete form. Wasson was brilliant in advancing the notion that a mushroom of some sort was implicated in the Soma mystery. He was less successful in showing that the species behind the mystery was the fly agaric. He, like all those before him who had attempted an identification of Soma, had forgotten that whatever Soma was, it was a visionary intoxicant of tremendous power and an unparalleled hallucinogen. In contrast, he was well aware that European scholarship had settled upon Siberian shamanism as "exemplary" of all Archaic shamanism and that fly agaric had long been used in Siberia to induce shamanic journeys and initiate neophyte shamans into the fullness of their heritage.
As a result of Wasson's own discoveries in Mexico, it was known that mushrooms other than fly agaric could contain visionary intoxicants, but psilocybin mushrooms were thought to be a strictly New World phenomenon, since no other intoxicating mushrooms were known. Wasson assumed that if a mushroom were Soma, then that mushroom must be a fly agaric. This overemphasis of Amanita muscaria has haunted efforts to understand Soma ever since.
OBJECTIONS TO FLY AGARIC
Genetically and chemically Amanita muscaria is extremely variable; many kinds of fly agaric do not provide a reliable ecstatic experience. Soil considerations and geographic and seasonal factors also affect its hallucinogenic properties. Use of a plant by a shaman does not necessarily mean it is ecstatic. Many rather unpleasant plants are used by shamans to intoxicate themselves and to open the "crack between the worlds." Among these are the Daturas-relatives of jimsonweed, the arborescent Brugmansias whose pendulous blossoms are familiar as landscaping ornamentals; bright red and black Sophora secundifolla seeds, Brunfelsias, and Virola-based snuffs made of powdered tree resin. In spite of their shamanic usage, these plants do not induce an ecstatic experience that could inspire the rapturous praise heaped on Soma. Wasson himself was aware that Anianita was unreliable, as he himself never had an ecstatic experience from eating Amanda.
Instead of realizing that Amanita muscaria was an unlikely candidate for Vedic Soma, Wasson became convinced that some method of preparation must have been involved. But no ingredient or procedure has ever been found that reliably transforms the often uncomfortable subtoxic experience of Amanita into visionary journeying to a magical paradise. Wasson himself knew of only one inexplicable and unrcplicated exception:
In 1965 and again in 1966 we tried out the fly-agarics (Amanita muscaria) repeatedly on ourselves. The results were disappointing. We ate them raw, on empty stomachs. We drank the juice, on empty stomachs. We mixed the juice with milk and drank the mixture, always on empty stomachs. We felt nauseated and some of us threw up. We felt disposed to sleep, and fell into a deep slumber from which shouts could not rouse us, lying like logs, not snoring, dead to the outside world. When in this state I once had vivid dreams, but nothing like what happened when I took the psilocybe mushrooms in Mexico, where I did not sleep at all. In our experiments at Sugadaira [Japan], there was one occasion that differed from the others, one that could be called successful. Rokuya Imazeki took his mushrooms with mizo shiru, the delectable soup that the Japanese usually serve for breakfast, and he toasted his mushroom caps on a fork before an open fire. When he rose from the sleep that comes with the mushroom, he was in full elation. For three hours he could not help but speak; he was a compulsive speaker. The purport of his remarks was that this was nothing like the alcoholic state; it was infinitely better, beyond all comparison. We did not know at the time why, on this single occasion, our friend Imazeki was affected this way."
The chemical compounds active in Anianita muscaria are muscarine and muscimol. Muscarine is highly toxic and like most cholinergic poisons, its activity is reversed by injection of atropine sulfate. Muscimol, the likely
candidate for the psychoactivity of the mushroom, has been described as merely an emetic and a sedative. " Human exposure to muscimol is not described in the literature. (Incredibly, the obvious step of giving muscimol to human beings to determine its psychedelic potential, if any, has not been undertaken. This fact again points out the queasy illogic that overtakes the academic mentality in the presence of questions revolving around self-induced changes in consciousness.)
To the above let me add my own personal experience of the fly agaric. I have ingested it on two occasions. Once the specimens were a dried collection made at sea level in northern California. My experience of five dried grams was one of nausea, salivation, and blurred vision. Drifting images were present with eyes closed but of a trivial and unengaging sort. My second exposure was a dinner-plate-sized fresh specimen collected at 10,000 feet in the mountains behind Boulder, Colorado. In this case, salivation and stomach cramps were the only effects.
Finally, here is part of an account of fly agaric intoxication by an extremely sophisticated subject, a professional psychotherapist and neurophysiologist. The dose taken was one cup of finely chopped mushroom. The mushrooms came from the Pecos river drainage of New Mexico:
I was occasionally twitching, a gleam of perspiration over me. Saliva dribbling rapidly out of my mouth. I did not know how the time passed. Thought I was awake, or dreaming dreams that were totally lifelike--dreamed in total awareness. I was only dimly or not at all aware of the music being played. Threw off my blanket-very hot sweaty, very cold-chilled, but no visible chills. It seemed unusually quiet inside. I was very stoned. Unlike anything I had felt before"psychedelic" is too broad a term, too all encompassing, it was not truly psychedelic. It was as if everything were exactly the same but totally unfamiliar-but it all looked like I knew it to be. Except that this world was about a shade (or a quantum level) off--different in an eerie, profound and unmistakable way. I was ataxic [unable to coordinate voluntary movements] and euphoric-there was very little visual stuff."
In short, Amanita muscaria is doubtless an effective sharnam vehicle in the floristically limited Arctic environment in which
has been traditionally utilized as a psychoactive agent. But th rapturous visionary ecstasy that inspired the Vedas and was th central mystery of the Indo-European peoples as they moved across the Iranian plateau could not possibly have been caused by Amanit muscaria.
WASSON: HIS CONTRADICTIONS AND OTHER FUNGAL CANDIDATES FOR SOMA
Wasson remained convinced that fly agaric was Soma. In his la book, Persephone's Quest, published posthumously, he characte ized fly agaric as "the supreme entheogen of all time"-apparentl on faith, since he admitted it was disappointing and only reported attaining shamanic ecstasy by using psilocybin, which he never introduces into the Soma puzzle. However, he did introduce a interesting caveat when writing of India:
Other fungal entheogens grow at the lower levels. They come in cattle dung, are easily identified and gathered, and are effective. But they fall to conform to Brahmanic practices; they are known to tribals and sudras [untouchables].
Soma on the other hand exacts self-discipline of the priests, a long initiation and training: it is, for proper exploitation, an affair of a priestly elite. But the possible role of Stropharia cubensis growing in the dung of cattle in the lives of the lower orders remains to this day wholly unexplored. Is S. cubensis responsible for the elevation of the cow to a sacred status? And for the inclusion of the urine and dung of cows in the pancagavya (the Vedic sacrifice)? And was that a contributing reason for abandoning Soma? Given the ecological conditions prevailing in the Indus
Valley and Kashmir, only a few of the Indo-Europeans could know by personal experience the secret of the Divine Herb. The cult of Soma must have been shaped by the peculiar circumstances prevailing in the area, but ultimately those circumstances must have doomed that cult. Today it lives on in India only as an intense and glowing memory of an ancient rite.
In discussing the prohibition against eating mushrooms if one is a Brahmin, a prohibition established in the late Vedic phase, Wasson says:
We still do not know-we will probably never knowwhen the proscription came into force, perhaps over centuries while the Vedic hymns were being composed, or possibly when the hierarchs among the Brahmans learned of the entheogenic virtues of Stropharia cubensis as known to the lower orders living in India ......
Something unusual is going on in these two passages. A great scholar, himself quite a Brahman, an investment banker by profession and an honorary fellow of Harvard University, seems to be behaving in a most unscholarly manner. We know from his own eloquent descriptions that Wasson experienced the ecstasy of psilocybin on more than one occasion. And we know that he never obtained a satisfying experience from Anianita muscaria.
