October 19, 2017

"The fly agaric is the quintessential mushroom of fairy tales."

"Its big, bright fruiting bodies scatter in great numbers across mossy forests of North America and Europe. They emerge from the soil first like white eggs, abandoned by some mysterious creature of the woods. They can grow up to a foot tall, as warts appear on the cap. The mushroom often blushes red in the process. Finally, they crack open and flatten into a polka-dot disc that would make a gnome’s perfect dinner plate...."

Writes Joanna Klein in the NYT.

The photos of the mushrooms are very cool, but this is what caught my eye:
They are called the fly agaric because in some places, people lace milk with bits of it to lure and kill flies. The insects become inebriated, crash into walls and die, according to the blog of Tom Volk, a mycologist at the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse.
Click on that word "blog" to see some eye-searing retro website design (from 1999) that might cause you to become inebriated and crash into walls. You will not die, but you will be sucked into a past that is a place you will find hard to believe ever existed.

Klein tells us that the chemicals in the mushroom, ibotenic acid and muscimol, can cause "dry mouth and rapid heartbeat to euphoria, hallucinations, feeling closer to God and fear."

I had all those effects just looking at the mycologist's website.

ADDED: I remember where I've seen those mushrooms. On this nutty book from that caused a freakout in 1970:


"[John Marco] Allegro argues, through etymology, that the roots of Christianity, and many other religions, lay in fertility cults, and that cult practices, such as ingesting visionary plants to perceive the mind of God, persisted into the early Christian era, and to some unspecified extent into the 13th century with reoccurrences in the 18th century and mid-20th century, as he interprets the fresco of the Plaincourault Chapel to be an accurate depiction of the ritual ingestion of Amanita muscaria [fly agaric] as the Eucharist. Allegro argued that Jesus never existed as a historical figure and was a mythological creation of early Christians under the influence of psychoactive mushroom extracts such as psilocybin."

Here's that Fresco:

28 comments:

tcrosse said...

The website would be much less jarring if slow-loaded through a dial-up connection appropriate to the era.

Laslo Spatula said...

"...the fly agaric..."

Isn't that a King Crimson album?

I am Laslo.

mockturtle said...

Tcrosse: Good point!

I once found a 'fairy circle' of these in my yard [in wet western WA] and photographed them. Nature never fails to amaze and gratify.

Rob said...

The horror! The horror!

Laslo Spatula said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Carol said...

lol @ "quintessential." These journalists need to stop reading each other so much.

Laslo Spatula said...

The Twin peaks return had a website that was 'created' by one of the characters: The Search for the Zone.

Great 90s website design, complete with logos of the time.

Click "Click here to read my older journal entries" and you get a broken link that goes 404 then takes you to a black screen that speckles with flashes and static interference.

I am Laslo.

Achilles said...

According to the website the mushrooms may have led to the myth of Santa Claus. The theory at the end is kinda fun.

J. Farmer said...

The only thing missing from the retro websites is the autoplaying MIDI in the background.

TerriW said...

The current generation knows it through through Mario, not fairy tales. (At least, that's why my daughter chose to do a presentation on them two years ago.)

Carter Wood said...

Have a Merry Fly Agaric Christmas!

Nonapod said...

One of the weirder things mushrooms do is form fairy rings. Researchers haven't come to a consensus as to why they occur.

traditionalguy said...

Damn smart mushrooms. Now we know how Pentacost happened. It was a load of bad mushrooms.

Ron Winkleheimer said...

Allegro argued that Jesus never existed as a historical figure

Which means Allegro is either an ill-educated ignoramus or a dishonest propagandist. Either way, I see no reason to take his opinions on anything seriously.

Daniel Jackson said...

YES!!

SOMA, man. Far Out!!!

Fernandinande said...

The biggest living organism is over 2 miles across, and you'll hardly ever see it

...because it's modest and doesn't display its fruiting bodies unless needed.

Fernandinande said...

Laslo Spatula said...
"Click here to read my older journal entries" ...


"You've reached the end of the Internet" with a digital clock blinking "12:00".

cubanbob said...

Fernandinande said...
The biggest living organism is over 2 miles across, and you'll hardly ever see it"

I wonder how many onions you would to mix in with that amount of mushrooms for a side dish for what I suppose would be for every steak in the country. Perhaps for every steak and a side order of spaghetti with mushrooms, onions and tomato sauce. What a cooking show that would make.

Dave D said...

Laslo:

Lark's Tongue in Aspic no?

Clyde said...

That blogger seems like a fungi fun guy.

eddie willers said...

What is the word for weird happenstances?

I recently downloaded a book I read in the 70s, Harvest Home by Tom Tryon when Amazon put it up for $1.99 for Kindle.

Just last night, I read a section where our hero, Ned, goes looking for mushrooms and herbs with the Widow Fortune (played by Bette Davis in the TV miniseries) and they came across a fairy circle of Fly Agaric! I had to stop my progress by highlighting the word and reading the dictionary and Wikipedia entries on it.

So here it is the subject of a post the very next morning.

Is there a better word than serendipitous?

khematite said...

Jesus has often been reinterpreted to fit some era's contemporary zeitgeist. Around the same time that Allegro turned Jesus into a mushroom, Morton Smith, a Columbia professor of ancient history, claimed to have found a lost letter of a church father, describing a secret gospel of Mark. That gospel seemed to suggest a homoerotic encounter between Jesus and a "young man in a linen cloth." It was probably not a coincidence that in the early 1970s, Jesus was suddenly being reinterpreted both from a psychedelic perspective and from a gay perspective.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_Gospel_of_Mark

pdug said...

@eddie willers: Jung called it "Synchronicity" and said it was the collective unconscious speaking.

from Repo Man

Miller: A lot o' people don't realize what's really going on. They view life as a bunch o' unconnected incidents 'n things. They don't realize that there's this, like, lattice o' coincidence that lays on top o' everything. Give you an example; show you what I mean: suppose you're thinkin' about a plate o' shrimp. Suddenly someone'll say, like, plate, or shrimp, or plate o' shrimp out of the blue, no explanation. No point in lookin' for one, either. It's all part of a cosmic unconciousness.

Otto: You eat a lot of acid, Miller, back in the hippie days?

Jim S. said...

I've heard of, but never read, Allegro's Sacred Mushroom and the Cross. A group of his colleagues wrote a letter against it saying it was devoid of scholarship. I could probably find a copy of the letter in one of my books if I was willing to stand up. But any way you look at it, it's pretty conspiracy theory-ish. Another one that I've read about is that Jesus had an evil twin: they were born in Bethlehem the same time Mary gave birth, and one of the twins was accidentally switched with Mary's baby. So the switched twin is Jesus. The other twin grows up geographically distant from the events of the gospels, but hears about someone who looks just like him riling up the powers that be. So the other twin goes to Jerusalem just in time to see Jesus crucified, and then thinks it would be a good idea to impersonate someone who was just executed for sedition.

forpetessake said...

the fresco is Adam and Eve with the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. An artist's impression. Nothing else.

Daniel Jackson said...

Ah, Sacred Mushrooms.

They have sporn incredible creativity and imagination, now haven't they

chuck said...

@khematite

Morton Smith was one of my favorite teachers at Columbia. He had a nicely cynical view of human nature and history that fit with my own. And his one word review of a work by an East German Marxist scholar, "Bullshit", was classic. He was also gay ...

Guildofcannonballs said...

"What is the word for weird happenstances?"

Short answer: Althouse.blogspot.com.

Also acceptable, Althousian Singularity, Althouse Vortex, and/or Althousetian Eschaton.