The Grand Narrative of the Mukhomor
“Communist Dunaev” as a Mushroom Eater in Mifogennaia Liubov’ Kast: Understanding the Ethnobotanical History of the Younger Group of Russian Conceptualists
In: The Soviet and Post-Soviet ReviewAmanita muscaria (fly agaric) [Russian: Мухомор (Mukhomor)]
Citation: The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review 47, 2 (2020) ; 10.30965/18763324-04702002
Reproduced in https://wikigrib.ru/muxomorkrasnyj/Many historically illicit drugs have been objectified as various products fit for human consumption, some have been legitimized by culture, some condemned, some are viewed as healthy, some as poisonous, many that were deemed a luxury were reconsidered as necessity, and they all form intersections filled with contradictions that encompass several of these categories.3
This study aims to contribute to the topic of representations of substances which have been ostracized and/or tabooed (in this case, hallucination-inducing mushrooms). They can be classified as stimulants, narcotics or intoxicants;4 many are articles of pleasure, healing, and sensual delight which, at the same time, are endorsed as necessities and staples. Their shifting status makes them a particularly suitable material for authorial subversion and challenges to the norm. A few recent and earlier Russian-language articles have been published that deal with ancient representations of mushrooms in the vast land of the ‘Russian Eurasia’.5
This article focuses on the subversive use of Eurasian themes and scenes involving ingestion (including the intoxicated urine of those who were drinking the fungal brew) and consumption of materials containing and producing psychoactive substances. At the center are the issues formed at textual intersections of substance-containing materials with the politics of state, class, gender, and sexuality expressing authorial subjectivities or alliances with the dominant discourse of the time. I share the opinion that in addition to being part of nature, material substances and the human body are also fluid cultural constructs. The paper offers narrative analysis of the ethnobotanical historiography and the hidden plots behind the younger group of Russian (Moscow) Conceptualists. It features a historiographic discussion of various ways of conceptualizing visionary mushroom-centered narratives that arise from Mifogennaia liubov’ kast [The Mythogenic Love of Casts] by Pavel Peppershtein and Sergei Anufriev. In what follows below, I examine mythopoetic and mythogenic themes in the comparative scholarship of mushroom-related beliefs (based on contributions by R.G. Wasson, V.N. Toporov, T.Ia. Elizarenkova, and many others).
The “mythopoetic” narratives and corresponding mushroom-eating practices are discussed in order to attain a better contextual understanding of the novel. As I will try to demonstrate, in some parts of the Russian empire there existed beliefs based on a strong mythological and religious syncretism between mushrooms and men. Such was the notion of the so-called Liudi Mukhomory (Fly Agaric Men, cf. Fig. 2; Fig. 3) which has recently been extensively studied by Batyanova and Bronshtein (2016, 46–59) who have also published the extremely rare ancient Siberian petroglyphs depicting the unique breed of fungi and humans:
Liudi Mukhomory (Fly Agaric Men)
Citation: The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review 47, 2 (2020) ; 10.30965/18763324-04702002
Reproduced in Bronshtein (2016)Liudi Mukhomory (Fly Agaric Men)
Citation: The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review 47, 2 (2020) ; 10.30965/18763324-04702002
reproduced in Bronshtein (2016)One of the goals pursued by this study is to explore connections between this intriguing imagery and certain traits in the recent Russian conceptualist fiction. Therefore it is preoccupied with reflecting on ethno-botanical entheogens (the term signifies a certain substance, plant or drug consumed in order to elicit a spiritual experience, i.e. “generate the divine within”) which appear to be related to the psilocybin fungi used by the communist Vladimir Dunaev, the protagonist of Peppershtein and Anufriev’s text. This article connects the fungal topic of the Post-Soviet novel with preceding depictions of a mushroom/godly human in literature and culture, e.g. the God Soma as Mukhomor (Wasson), Jesus Christ as Mukhomor (John Allegro), and Vladimir Lenin as Mukhomor (Solzhenitsyn, Kuriokhin).
This article not only looks at the symbolic semiosis of mythopoetic (literary and cultural) dimensions of the fungal theme, but offers an overview of some significant ‘material’ qualities of mushrooms. This subject fits by a wide margin into the dialectic framework of transhumanism. The aim is to trace the transgressive historical trend of blurring boundaries between a fungus and a human and vice versa. This unique vision goes back to the pre-historical rock-paintings (petroglyphs) recently found in Chukotka, displaying imagery of the fusion of human/fungal bodies. (See below. See also Kruichkov 2008; Georgievsky 2016).
In their two-volume epic novel Mifogennaia liubov’ kast [The Mythogenic Love of the Casts] (1999), Pavel Peppershtein and Sergei Anufriev offer a sequence of meticulously described hallucinogen-induced scenes reminiscent of other renowned instances of psychedelic prose. Non-Russian texts of this kind were composed in their time by Thomas De Quincey, Ken Kesey, Antonin Artaud, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Paul Bowles, and “the most dangerous man in America” (as per Richard Nixon), Timothy Leary (see Leary 1998).6 There have also been respective movie adaptations by Alejandro Jodorowsky and Raoul Ruiz. For argument’s sake I will leave aside the varieties of the narcotic tradition represented in Russian literature by such texts as Mikhail Bulgakov’s Morfii [Morphine] (1927) and Mikhail Ageev’s Roman s kokainom [A Love Affair with Cocaine] (1934) that are not directly and explicitly related to the fungal theme. Likewise, I will have to omit discussions of narcotics in the Russian literary universe in general.7 Instead, I will limit my debate to hallucinogenic fungi and the complex relationship between mushrooms and humans.8
At the very beginning of the Great War, a Russian party functionary (Partorg) named Vladimir Petrovich Dunaev is heavily concussed, subsequently finding himself deep in the Russian magical woods where he is somehow impelled to taste hallucinogenic mushrooms facilitating his conversion into an omniscient militant wizard.9 The attentive reader will uncover the so-called “parallel war” unravelling on the Russian territory: fairy-epic heroes and characters from children’s books are fighting on both sides of the conflict. The authors of this experimental text are two Russian conceptualist artists who have also pursued careers in writing. Moscow Conceptualism has habitually rejected the traditional separation of image and word. Mifogennaia liubov’ kast was initiated in order to “apply” Andrei Monastyrskii’s theory of art to a prosaic text piece.10 It was a long-conceived project that someone in that circle had to carry out, and both authors did so, first and foremost, as (Moscow Conceptualist) artists rather than authors embarking on their own and unrelated literary adventure.
Pavel Peppershtein (b. 1966), one of the founding members of the artistic group “Inspektsiia MedGermenevtika” (Medical Hermeneutics Inspection) is widely known as one of the headmost Russian conceptualists of the younger generation. Curiously, he can be viewed as closely related to two prominent Russian Conceptual master-artists—his father Viktor Pivovarov, and Ilya Kabakov.11
Inspektsiia MedGermenevtika was founded in 1987 and included, along with Peppershtein and Anufriev, Iurii Leiderman and Vladimir Fedorov. Since its very inception, it has been part of the larger Moscow artistic circle called Noma (1988). The latter is the informal union of Moscow conceptualists known best for defining (and defying) their intellectual boundaries with the means of a peculiar sort of collective discourse. The formal concluding year of the group’s existence coincides with the 9/11 Act of Terror in New York. Some 10 exhibitions were held between 1989 and 1997, usually outside Russia: in Prague, Munich, Milan, Vienna, Cologne, and other European cities.
The initial genesis of the group was fomented by Dmitrii Prigov who is rumored to have persuaded its founding members (especially Peppershtein) to actively work together. Andrei Monastyrskii has also exercised his powerful personal influence over the group (Groys 2003, 240–245). Their final “post-mortem” collective exhibition was held in Moscow as late as in 2012 to commemorate the extraordinary length of the group’s collective memory. Moscow conceptualism usually maintains a very special relationship with all things verbal and literary (Ioffe 2013b, 210–230).12 The Medical Hermeneutics group is no exception, and nearly all of its participants occasionally tend to circulate texts of their own making. The group even used to have its own quasi-Samizdat journal titled Mesto Pechati [A Venue for Publication or Place of the Seal] disseminated by the Moscow underground gallery Obscuri Viri.13
As is usually the case with Moscow Conceptualism, the group’s creed appears to be rather suggestive. The conceptualist “collective mentality” (reinforced by collective actionality) constantly referees ideological borderlands, trying to deform the “normal” state of consciousness. The group does not view this kind of state in a positive light but rather acknowledges it as a sort of disease, which should be treated and cured. During the process of “therapy” several things can transpire, not necessarily related to the situation but tending to transcend its boundaries. The very term “Medical Hermeneutics” reveals a huge amount of hidden irony characteristic of Russian Conceptualism in general.14 One of the crucial problems that the group was focusing on was the issue of self-identification and self-reflection. As one of its leading members (Peppershtein) would observe, they tried various titles such as “inspectors, the incorrupt officials of the era of faded flags,” “dogmatic inspectors of schizophrenic China,” “experts in the formation of aesthetic categories,” “masters of sense-construction,” and so forth.15 Peppershtein mentions the fact that he usually enjoys pathos, especially when it comes to unearthing certain comical aspects buried within it. He often writes and paints in the peculiar state of “hallucinogenic” affectivity which is suggestively related to the way we accommodate and perceive any given trance experience. This is what he terms a “hallucinogenic compromise” between defamiliarization/estrangement and the artistic participation.16
Peppershtein is often considered17 a founder and a main ideologue of the movement of “psychedelic realism” which relates to certain artistic currents in the 1990s that employed traditional (“classical” or “mimetic”) forms of realistic art in order to fill it with vivid hallucination-like imagery that was not always easily accessible to the non-engaged viewer. As Boris Groys observed, “Peppershtein invests his energy in creating microsocial groups brought together by common ideology.”18 To Groys, “Inspection Medical Hermeneutics” is reminiscent of the story of “a European ethnologist who wanted to disabuse an African shaman of the alleged superstition that all events in the world proceed from good and evil spirits.”19 Peppershtein’s colleagues offer their inspecting services for playful interpretation of cultural and textual phenomena. As Groys points out,
[T]he texts and images of the group always refer to many other texts and images, from Thomas Mann and Arthur Conan Doyle, to Soviet children’s book illustrations from the sixties and seventies. These texts and images repeatedly reveal empty spaces, seemingly chance constellations of words and images that are abound with meaning. Pavel Peppershtein and his co-authors have no fear of any risk of ‘over-interpretations’. On the contrary, the group’s method is the method of rigorous over-interpretation. For Peppershtein is well aware that even the boldest over-interpretation cannot escape the fate of all interpretations: namely that they ultimately remain under-interpretations.”20
In order to assist the reader in addressing these perplexing matters, the authors of the novel embed all kinds of mythical, folkloristic, and other characters in the text’s fabric where we encounter Baba Iaga, Koshchei the Deathless, Karlsson-on-the-Roof, the magic Geese-Swans, and other figures of that mythogenic kin.
The novel plays with various fairy-tales and myths (Russian and Slavic as well as non-Russian and non-Slavic). It presents an alternative, mythogenic version of the Second World War. The real struggle appears to be not between human troops and armored tanks: it is a war between ghosts and heroes of European fairy tales and children’s books and their Russian/Soviet/Slavic counterparts. The true hero of the novel, Vladimir Dunaev, becomes a magic medium in this covertly conducted suggestive warfare. Dunaev, the mushroom-eater, sides with the forces of the so-to-say “Good” in this campaign.21
It might be worthwhile to examine this method of constructing visionary hallucinogenic episodes in the broad context of multi-cultural and inter-traditional practices involving the psilocybin fungi. In what follows, I will review some of these traditions, both Eurasian and Amerindian, which might help to decode the particularly broad spectrum of possible meanings offered by the “Medical Hermeneutics.” The theoretical frame of this article is founded on the ideas of the cultural-material turn and new materiality22 as it becomes visible throughout the novel’s grand-text. The complex relations between the fungus and the human body, between the materiality of phantasm and the semiotics of the literary text will remain at the focus of this article.23 It is symbolically divided into two parts: 1) the iconographical suggestive background depictions found in historical documents which, as I argue, served as a source of major inspiration for the authors and possibly lie at the foundation of the Peppershtein-Anufriev oeuvre, and 2) specific literary episodic examples translated into English for the first time.24
2 The Hallucinogenic Traditions of the World
Below I will deal briefly with some major variations on the theme of mushrooms and hallucinogenic fungi that were most likely known to both authors of the analyzed text.25 From many indirect sources we learn that Peppershtein and Anufriev had a first-hand experience with various kinds of “substances” that result in a state of hallucinogenic consciousness. We can solidly postulate that the authors were profoundly familiar with both the Russian indigenous mushroom-eating tradition (the mighty Mukhomory of Siberia), and the Mesoamerican layer.26 This non-Russian material came evidently from the “Beatnik” (1950s) and Woodstock-scented (1960s) rebel cultures which became gradually known in the USSR especially during Perestroika (the formative period for Peppershtein’s group). Closely related to this connection would have been a probable influence of Carlos Castaneda whose famous yage-related books gained formidable popularity on Russian post-Soviet territory. Castaneda has been widely translated into Russian and published in dozens of thousands of copies. His psychedelic oeuvre, whose overtones betray distinct postmodernist spiritus, could have been considered a natural object of interest by the younger Russian conceptualists who were engaging themselves in the peculiar topic of hallucinogens.27
Carlos Castaneda’s transgressive influence on the fungal theme in Russian poetry can be illustrated by a poem called “Mushroom Picking Trip” (Поездка по грибы) (1993–94), authored by Viktor Krivulin, a prominent poet of the Leningrad samizdat milieu:
… a fungal Mexican soul/ possesses, with no demand of care, the mycelium of a roadside folk/ and grows there, moist and trembling/ new spores are ripe./ а hunt for toadstools: the naked surface of teary mold is so fresh under knife’s edge this morning!/ the weather’s nippy.// truck beds scatter mushroom pickers across Castaneda’s enchanted forest/ and rot in ditches at the end of summer/ but they will all return/ no kidding whatsoever/ they will come back with their mucous booty and an aftertaste of victory.
Long before Castaneda, Herodotus described the well-developed narcotic habits of the inhabitants of Scythia (a historic region that at least partially lay within the borders of the Russian Empire). In Herodotus’ History (IV, 4) we read, in particular:
… the Scythians take some of this hemp-seed, and, creeping under the felt coverings, throw it upon the red-hot stones; immediately it smokes, and gives out such a vapor as no Grecian vapor-bath can exceed; the Scythians, delighted, shout for joy, and this vapor serves them instead of a water-bath; for they never by any chance wash their bodies with water.29
It is well acknowledged that the religious use of hallucinogenic mushrooms has been practiced among many cultures of the globe: from Mexican Indians to Siberian natives.
It must be stressed that any scholarly debate on the topic of psilocybin fungi should start with R. Gordon Wasson, the pioneer mushroom-connoisseur who authored the famous and highly influential hypothesis about the widest diffusion of the Amanita muscaria (Mukhomor’) in the archaic cultures of Eurasia, namely in the cultural strata of the Vedas. Wasson’s main “test-case” was the mysterious and suggestive Mukhomor-based image of Soma (the god and the divine food of high importance in the hymn-poetry of Rigveda).30 The same topic was masterfully researched in the scholarship of the eminent Russian Sanskritologists and cultural historians Vladimir N. Toporov and T. Ja. Elizarenkova.31
The foundation of this scholarly (myco-centered) agenda was further promoted and developed in a series of scholarly works by the “mycological couple” of Wassons. Not only Gordon Wasson himself (who did not know Russian) but also his wife Valentina Pavlovna, who translated many of the important Russian “mushroom-centered” texts for him, should be honored on this occasion (Wasson 1957, 1971).32 The joint two-volume monograph by the Wassons (published in 1957, one year prior to Valentina Pavlovna’s unexpected death) deals with the many facets of folk and literary history, linguistics, and art pertaining to the hallucinogen fungi of the world with special attention to Russia. The mycological Wasson couple devoted several decades to a meticulous study and systematic accounting of the wild-growing psilocybin species of all sorts. This endeavor finally resulted in the two-volume masterpiece preoccupied with descriptions of mushroom-related practices in various cultural traditions of the world (Wasson 1957).33 The Wassons were utterly convinced that religious veneration of mushrooms was very popular and widespread among the Eurasian population as well as the American. The psychoactive entheogen fungi as described by the Wassons exercised enormous influence on the general state of creative minds in the contemporary Western culture (Hudler 1998; Riedlinger 1990).34 Narcotic plants and their peculiar religious and cultural use constitute an extremely important chapter of Asian and Eurasian history (Abdullaev 2009).
Nearly all the generations of the “psychedelic youth” have been genuinely fond of the Wassons’ writings, and we are bound to conclude that all the prominent “hallucinogen-seekers” like Timothy Leary and especially Carlos Castaneda were profoundly indebted to their contribution to the field. As one notable scholar put it with reference to the Wassons’ life story:
… In the fall of 1952, Gordon and Valentina Wasson learned that the sixteenth-century writers describing the Indian cultures of Mexico had recorded that certain mushrooms played a divinatory role in the religion of the natives.35
After R. Gordon Wasson, the subsequent scholarship sometimes commonly perceived the Vedic figure of “Soma” (both the brew and the deity) as a conceptual associate to the famous Mesoamerican drug-plants and Entheogenic practices.36 In their turn, Peppershtein and Anufriev, theoretically speaking, might have purposefully secured their grasp of Soma through the Avant-Garde post-punk psychedelic band of American exiles in Europe called “Tuxedomoon” whose accordingly named 1985 composition features these lines:
Aside from Gordon Wasson, we should mention another important scholar who pioneered the study of psychoactive entheogens. This is Richard Evans Schultes, the former Director of the Botanical Museum at Harvard University. In his notes he describes some important details of mycological ethnobotanical subjects:
… The use of hallucinogenic substances goes far back into human pre-history. There have been suggestions that even the idea of the deity might have arisen as a result of their weird and unearthly effects on the human body and mind.38
This view on the “mushroom nature” of the Highest God is harmoniously reconcilable with the somewhat scandalous approach of the American Qumran archaeologist John Allegro to the identity of Christ-as-a-Mushroom (Allegro 1970). This scholar tried to substantiate his theory that early cults of historic Christianity (during the period of the Second Temple) extensively used the fly agaric for various religious purposes. Allegro’s main thesis maintained that the Amanita muscaria itself was deified as a cultic object by the Israeli Essenes community and was actually worshipped as a substitute for Jesus Christ Himself. He further suggested that a big mushroom (Mukhomor) might have been physically crucified to impersonate the figure of the divine founder of Christianity. This approach was widely critiqued in academia and beyond (King 1970). The very approach of John Allegro to the topic of mushrooms and Christianity is very much in line with Mifogennaia liubov’ kast in terms of their far-reaching hallucinogenic view of reality, and especially because of their conceptual blurring of boundaries between human flesh and that of a fungus. Accepting anthropomorphic dimensions of fungi also results directly from Allegro’s bold (and blasphemous) hypothesis.
According to Wasson, the use of hallucinogenic mushrooms is even more ancient than was deemed by Allegro, representing an integral core element of many mutually distant and unrelated human cultures of our planet. It has been postulated by a number of scholars (with plausible arguments) that the very concept of a deity may have arisen from the effects of mushroom consumption and that their present disjunctive ritualistic use in primitive religious-magic systems is relict (Stamets 1978). Wasson observes that since the earliest times, mushrooms
… have been worshipped by certain primitive peoples scattered from Mexico to Borneo and Siberia, and we think formerly in Europe, too. The visions […] are staggering in their subjective impact. […] If we are right in one conjecture that the secret of these mushrooms was discovered by early man, perhaps very early as he was emerging from his bestial past […] Our hallucinogenic mushrooms opened to him conceptions and emotions theretofore beyond his reach … yes, perhaps the very idea of a Superior Being.39
3 The Historiography of the Russian and Eurasian Traditions of Mushroom Eating (Siberian Psilocybins)
There is little doubt that the authors of Mifogennaia liubov’ kast were mindfully resting their Dunaev narrative on the available accounts of Mukhomor-eating world practices, and in the first place, naturally and most particularly those related to the Siberian (“Russian”) authentic indigenous usage of these mushrooms. In agreement with Wasson, Schultes also emphasized the specific importance of the Siberian hallucinogenic mushroom (Mukhomor) as fundamental for nearly the entire historical debate on the religious use of psilocybin. Amanita muscaria is probably “the oldest and once most widespread in use of the hallucinogenic mushrooms.” As the scholar observes, “it grows throughout the north-temperate parts of both hemispheres” (Schultes 1969). The famous Swabian medieval theologian scholar Albertus Magnus of Cologne (1200–1280) is usually mentioned as the first one who actually dealt with Amanita muscaria in Western “science.” In his tractate De Vegetabilibus [Liber de Vegetabilibus et Plantis] (c. 1256) he writes: “vocatur fungus muscarum, eo quod in lacte pulverizatus interficit muscas” (Wasson 1961, 137–162).40 We should also be mindful of the specific epithet41 given to it by none else but Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778). This Swedish scholar (also known by the name of Carl von Linné) was a prominent researcher of botany and zoology, particularly famous for introducing the modern biological naming system of “binomial nomenclature.” The father of the Latin name of Mukhomor, Amanita muscaria, is also known to be the one creating scientific taxonomy and even modern ecology. The name that Linnaeus gave to this mushroom echoes Albertus Magnus and obviously alludes to an older habit of, as Schultes puts it, “employing the caps of the mushroom to repel and kill flies”. Linnaeus deals with Mukhomor in the second volume (Tomus II) of his Species Plantarum (1753) where he chose Agaricus muscarius42 to denote this mushroom from then onwards. Thirty years later, in 1783, the respective genus Amanita was officially registered in botanical science by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, whereas Amanita muscaria became scientifically recognized as a species in 1821 by Elias Magnus Fries, who is often referred to as the founding father of modern mycology (see Ramsbottom 1954). According to Schultes, the use of the fly agaric as an inebriant was broadly known in Eurasia since the ancient times. He mentions the evidence of the Mukhomor usage
… in extreme western Siberia, amongst Finno-Ugrian peoples, the Ostyaks and Voguls; and extreme north-eastern Siberia, amongst the Chukchis, Koryaks and Kamchadals. […] The Yukaghir, peoples surviving in tiny communities and speaking an isolated language in North-Eastern Siberia, remember that their forbears made use of the mushroom. There seems to be every probability that the fly agaric might once have been employed all the way across Siberia and into Europe …43
The arguments that seem to support this research strategy are well grounded and can be found mainly in the studies of cultural anthropology and comparative linguistics on the various relationships and meanings in the field of mycology and ethnobotany. It has also been argued with confidence that the ancient berserkers of Norway induced their occasional fits of madness by ingesting Amanita muscaria (Fabing 1956, 232–237).44 As Schultes (1969) is keen to argue, only since the middle of the 18th century “have reports concerning the utilization of fly agaric amongst Siberian tribesmen come to the attention of Europeans.” The scholar mentions that those earliest reports were characterized by “appreciable diversity of opinion concerning the use of the mushroom, although all agree on its ritualistic importance and, in general, on its biological effects” (Schultes 1969).
The reports in question were originally provided by a Swedish officer and geographer Philip Johan von Strahlenberg (1676–1747) who participated in the Northern War and then fell into Tsar Petr’s captivity during the famous Battle of Poltava (1709). Until 1721, he was imprisoned in the town of Tobol’sk, using his time and location to conduct some meaningful research on Siberian folklore, religion, and geography. He also had an interest in shamanic rituals performed by the autochthonous tribes who, as he did not fail to mention later, openly consumed the Mukhomor. The French translation of Strahlenberg’s text Description Historique de l’Empire Russien appeared post mortem (1757) in Amsterdam (being edited and prepared in Paris), published by “Chez Desaint & Saillant.”
The renowned Russian academician-explorer Stephan Krasheninnikov (1711–1755) was probably the first scholar ever to complete a detailed report about the Kamchatka region in the first half of the 18th century wherein he also gave a valuable depiction of various customs of the local tribes: not only of the Kamchadals but also of the Koryaks. As Richard Schultes observes, Krashenninikov was the first known Russian to take notice of the Mukhomor rite of the Koryaks. Krashenninikov wrote in particular that:
[s]ometimes for the sake of merriment they consume the Mukhomor, a well-known mushroom that we use to repel flies. They marinate it in epilobium wort and then drink it or, more often, just roll the dried mushrooms up and swallow them whole. […] For moderate consumption they take four mushrooms or less, while for getting really drunk the number would be up to ten.45
Since the time of Krasheninninkov, many anthropologists and various writers have taken interest in the fly agaric rituals and performance practices in Siberia. Schultes justly points out that Siberian worshippers/smokers/eaters of Mukhomor had no other intoxicant before the Russians introduced alcohol. The intake of Amanita muscaria, according to Schultes, was to all appearances more common among the Koryaks than the Chukchis and Kamchadals,
… probably because, since they inhabited the most heavily forested areas of Kamchatka, the mushroom grew more abundantly in their area. It is thought, furthermore, that the Koryaks supplied much of the mushrooms consumed by their neighbours. Amanita muscaria was usually not taken fresh, but dried, either in the sun or over a lit fire.46
Schultes adds that another German-Russian explorer, Georg Heinrich von Langsdorff (Baron de Langsdorff, 1774–1852), cared to remark that Mukhomors
… are collected in the hottest seasons and hung up by a string in the air to dry; some dry of themselves on the ground and are said to be far more narcotic than those artificially preserved. Small deep coloured specimens, thickly covered with warts, are also said to be more powerful than those of a larger size and paler colour.47
The Slavic ethnobotanical tradition is full of purposeful handling of mushrooms in various exempla of magic lore (Svanberg, Łuczaj 2014). This topic has been studied copiously: a good example is Valeria Kolosova’s series of valuable works on the subject. Kolosova notes the peculiar resemblance between various anthropomorphic perceptive forms popular with the Slavs, on one hand, and certain forest fungi, on the other. This resemblance is rooted in the very process of Slavic name-giving, which is supported by abundant evidence in Russian folklore. Kolosova mentions one particularly fascinating folklore tradition related to a woman’s ear which is perceived as a mushroom sui generis. In Peppershtein’s and Anufriev’s novel, Dunaev’s mythogenic mushrooms are often implicitly androgynous, and his consumption of them, devouring of their flesh might resemble the ritualistic ceremony of Eros and Thanatos who were going hand in hand together, whereas their mutual sensual “eating” was a remote equivalent of consuming semen and having sex.48 According to Kolosova, mushroom’s pliable, porous flesh resembles that of a feminine ear:
babie ucho, babieusz, babyjusy ‘строчок обыкновенный’ Gyromitra esculenta, реже другие виды грибов, или рус. диал. bab’e uχo ‘деформированный, патологически изменённый гриб’ (чаще в северно-российских говорах), болг. бабино уо, бабино ушинцъ ‘древесный гриб, похожий на ухо’49
This babie ukho (woman’s ear) in Slavic lore is nothing else but a “deformed, pathologically mutated mushroom.” One might suggest that a woman’s ear can serve as a natural metaphor for an accommodating vagina, soft and flexible. Georges Bataille would liken a vagina to an eye,50 so there is no reason why it could not be compared, so to speak, with an accommodating, gentle ear.
Below, I will recount several intriguing details of the Chukchi/Koryak mushroom-eating practices along with their peculiar human-fungus relationship, (cf. Fig. 4; Fig. 5) that were recorded by the well-known Russian ethnologist W.G. Bogoraz.51
Chelovek-Mukhomor (Human-Amanita muscaria) at Chukotka archaeological site
Citation: The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review 47, 2 (2020) ; 10.30965/18763324-04702002
Photo reproduced in Kriuchkov 2008Another photograph of the same petroglyph site in Chukotka, which displays the examples of human-mushroom syncretism
Citation: The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review 47, 2 (2020) ; 10.30965/18763324-04702002
Reproduced in Georgievsky 20164 Consuming the Mushroom
As mentioned before, Richard Schultes was one of the pioneers in the field of scholarly analysis of the perplexing topic of the fly agaric. He provided us, moreover, with a plenitude of descriptions showing how the process of mushroom consumption was actually conducted among the indigenous natives:
… Apparently only men ate fly agaric amongst all of these tribesmen, excepting in rare cases when a woman held the position of shaman. The method of using the mushroom varied significantly amongst the sundry tribes. The Koryak women moistened and softened the agarics in their mouth, then gently rolled them by their hands into small sausage phallic shapes and gave them to the men to swallow.52
This ceremony seems to have had a certain erratically erotic subtext, probably one related to gender-swapping.
Schultes deals with additional methods of consuming the Mukhomor which involved adding it to various dishes such as soups, sauces, cold or warm reindeer milk, or steeping it in fruit juice. In the more recent times, the mushroom was even drenched in alcohol in order to enhance the resulting intoxicating power. The scholar points out that there is much diversity of opinion concerning the length of the intoxication, i.e. it is believed that the effects of three or four dried or smoked mushrooms might range from four hours to a full day. The practice of consuming the Mukhomor informs a great deal about the social habits of the indigenous people. As Schultes observes,
[a]t certain times and in some areas, the mushrooms were naturally rare and hard to find. During the long Siberian winters, the more affluent tribesmen were able to store up supplies of the dried mushrooms in large quantities for winter consumption. The poorer individuals, none the less anxious to use the agaric, were often frustrated by the cost and limited supply of the plants.53
Summing up several existing studies of the subject one may conclude that there existed a certain “mushroom-eating hierarchy” of sorts. It appears that the fungi themselves were consumed by the elite, whether by shamans or tribal chiefs. The others, that is, the poorer folk were forced to drink the rich people’s urine instead of getting a real mushroom in their mouth.54
The traditional (orthodox) Marxist reading of the Mukhomor-imbued urine topic had a lot to offer for the sake of proper and timely argument that was voiced fiercely during the Soviet period. As one scholar would formulate:
[t]hose poor bodies who do not have the financial ability to stock up on such expensive mushrooms usually hang around the houses of the rich on holidays, spying out the guests. When those come out to take a leak, the poor guys are ready with a wooden vessel to gather the piss and then drink it immediately while it still preserves the main narcotic properties of the mushroom. […] Among the Koryak, the fly agaric is the rich people’s treat, while the poor folk can only have their urine. When someone inebriated with the Mukhomor goes for a piss, many run up to him and guzzle his urine which makes them even more drunken than the one who actually ate the fly agaric.55
The “Mukhomor urine” of an intoxicated person appears to be a very meaningful subject for the Amanita muscaria practitioners in general. We can see that this urine of someone intoxicated with the Mukhomor is capable of inducing similar intoxication in another person who would care to drink it. This mushroom-imbued urine is considered to be only slightly less inebriating than a dose of the mushroom itself. An early account left by von Strahlenberg in 1736 depicts this remarkable practice of the Koryaks as follows:
[w]hen they make a feast, they pour water on 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.56
In 1755, Stephan Krasheninnikov remarked:
Aside from other things, the Mukhomor [cf. Fig. 6] is venerated by the settled Koryaks so much that the drunken are not allowed to pee on the floor. Instead, they gather the urine in crockery and then drink it, which makes them as crazy as those who ate the mushroom: this is because the land of the Koryaks does not yield the Mukhomor, so they have to get it from the Kamchadals.57
Amanita muscaria
Citation: The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review 47, 2 (2020) ; 10.30965/18763324-04702002
reproduced in https://www.first-nature.com/fungi/amanitamuscaria.phpNot only the urine of others was drunk, but an individual might have further utilized and consumed his own urine, “often still warm,” thus prolonging the action of the originally eaten mushrooms or renewing their effect several times. A drunken Koryak, Schultes observes, “may even carry his own urine with him on a reindeer trek to continue his intoxication as long as possible.”58 It is an acknowledged fact that the Siberian tribesmen did not always drink urine because of economy or poverty (Schultes 1969).
Carl Heinrich Merck (1761–1799), originally from Darmstadt, was a Russian-German medical doctor, geographer, and naturalist. He took part in Billings-Sarychev expedition aimed at discovering and researching the North-Eastern shores of Russia in 1786–1792. Having studied the role of the Mukhomor-imbued urine among the Koryaks he supported the information already provided by Krasheninnikov:
The Mukhomor is used mostly by the Koryaks who consume it either fresh, as in this form its effects are stronger, or dried and rolled-up. They chew it for a short while and then swallow it. They are used to swallowing up to four dried mushrooms at a time. The inebriated Koryaks are being closely watched: firstly, in order to pick up anything that these madmen are spitting out, and secondly, in order to collect their urine which, according to some, has a stronger influence than even the fly agaric itself. Reindeer love mushrooms and get fat on them; they also get drunk from the Mukhomor. Koryaks mention another type of Mukhomor, the one that does not have white spots on their caps: this is the pale-colored Mukhomor that they avoid consuming as it allegedly causes bouts of pain in the thighs.59
Expressly important for our subject is the continuous, well-established association between fungi and men, i.e. the anthropomorphic dimension of mushroom/human relationship. Numerous episodes in The Mythogenic Love of the Casts confirm that Peppershtein and Anufriev are always prone to see mushrooms as related to human bodies or even mighty humans standing by their own right. A recent British scientific mycological study reinforces the empirical link between the “fungal” and the “human” as embodied in the concrete physical shape that some mushrooms tend to assume. This includes, for example, a fungus named “G. britannicum”, (cf. Fig. 7) which appears to be shaped quite like a human (Spooner, Henrici, Ainsworth 2015, 54–57). Its related kin “G. fornicatum” was initially known as “Fungus Anthropomorphus” because of its humanoid shape. English naturalist James Sowerby mentions a similarly marvelous mushroom in his text Colored Figures of English Fungi or Mushrooms (1799): “So strange a vegetable has surprised many; and in the year 1695 it was published under the name of Fungus Anthropomorphus, and figured with human faces on the head.”
- Abstract
- Keywords
- 1 Introduction: the Amanita muscaria/Fly Agaric/Mukhomor Mushroom
- 2 The Hallucinogenic Traditions of the World
- 3 The Historiography of the Russian and Eurasian Traditions of Mushroom Eating (Siberian Psilocybins)
- 4 Consuming the Mushroom
- 5 The Mythogenic Love of the Castes as a Mushroom-Eating Epic Narrative
- 6 Conclusion
- Bibliography
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