In Siberia they actually traditionally dried fly agaric (amanita muscaria) mushrooms. Flying reindeers are a thing, they always ate the mushrooms and got high af, but without any headaches the next day.
Vodka replaced the mushrooms, as its easy to store I guess. It was sold to them.
The santa claus story is veeery random. Like flying reindeers just like that, a dude in red-white clothes, a pine tree with red balls on it.
People dried fly agaric mushrooms on pine trees, they are red. Sibirian shamans dressed like a fly agaric mushroom and went from house to house to gift them to people and make them less depressed, because they are said to help with that
It’s a little more disgusting than you’ve mentioned here.
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 fly-agaric 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.
In Siberia they actually traditionally dried fly agaric (amanita muscaria) mushrooms. Flying reindeers are a thing, they always ate the mushrooms and got high af, but without any headaches the next day.
Vodka replaced the mushrooms, as its easy to store I guess. It was sold to them.
I’m sorry… What?
Mushrooms -> magical woodland animals -> mythology
Where’s the confusion?
The santa claus story is veeery random. Like flying reindeers just like that, a dude in red-white clothes, a pine tree with red balls on it.
People dried fly agaric mushrooms on pine trees, they are red. Sibirian shamans dressed like a fly agaric mushroom and went from house to house to gift them to people and make them less depressed, because they are said to help with that
Its pretty funny and makes a lot of sense
Mushrooms -> magical woodland animals -> mythology
Where’s the confusion?
It’s a little more disgusting than you’ve mentioned here.
https://www.drugtimes.org/hallucinogens-culture/the-flyagaric-and-the-intoxicating-urine.html
Wanted to skip that part haha, but yeah santa claus got high on reindeer-purified mushroom urine.