Vikings, Super Mario Brothers, Santa and Gummies: 5 Questions for Amanita muscaria expert Kevin Feeney

Feeney discusses the long, strange history of the iconic mushroom and its future.

While psilocybin mushrooms are currently in the spotlight, Amanita muscaria is perhaps the most quintessential mushroom. Its iconic red cap with white dots appears in children’s books, Hieronymous Bosch paintings, and Super Mario Brothers. The mushroom has psychoactive effects and is thought to be the inspiration behind the magic potion in Alice in Wonderland. Some scholars believe the Vikings used the mushroom before raids. Gordon Wasson — best known in the psychedelics world as betraying María Sabina and Mazatec healers by publishing photographs of a mushroom ritual — believed Amanita muscaria might be a plant-based drink called soma. Hindu holy texts reference the drink as a way to connect imbibers with God. The mushroom is also thought to ward off insects, earning it the nickname fly agaric. 

Kevin Feeney first saw Amanita muscaria in an early 1990s High Times advertisement. Feeney, then a teenager, was intrigued; the ad was for a mail order company that would ship psychoactive substances including Amanita for a fee. Feeney wrote in, received some mushroom caps, and took them with a friend — they both got very ill. (Interestingly, while psilocybin is a Schedule 1 drug considered to be dangerous with no approved medical use, Amanita muscaria is not regulated.) As for Feeney, he remained intrigued by the mushroom even after getting sick. He’s now an anthropology instructor at Central Washington University where he studies Amanita muscaria and other psychedelics such as peyote and ayahuasca. He even wrote a book about them called Fly Agaric: A Compendium of History, Pharmacology, Mythology, and Exploration.

Recently, the mushroom has been in the news; two people died and dozens were sickened after consuming gummies and chocolates made by Diamond Shruumz, which claimed the potential culprit was Amanita. The Microdose spoke with Feeney about the long, strange history of the iconic mushroom and its future. 

Do we know how long humans have been using Amanita muscaria?

Not really. What you really want is physical evidence; with a mushroom, you’re almost never going to find evidence in the archaeological record. It will remain an enigma. But what we do have are other types of evidence built on stories or texts. That’s the best we can do. Many of the arguments are mostly academic. For instance, there are reports coming out of Siberia as early as the late 1600s that Indigenous people were using this mushroom recreationally as well as in rituals. There’s also some interesting archeological finds in Mexico that include mushroom effigies, some of which clearly look like Amanita. And in Europe, there’s no concrete evidence of ritual use but there is evidence people were aware of its properties.

A bit of popular folklore I’ve heard about Amanita is that it’s the basis for Santa Claus, given the shared color scheme and the trippy details about time bending and reindeer flying. What do you make of that?

Our modern Santa is the result of variations across history. If you think of him as having a family tree, there are different versions that branch out backwards. You can’t go back linearly in time to an “original” Santa Claus; there isn’t a singular origin. For instance, the red and white color scheme is pretty modern. Our image of Santa Claus comes from illustrator Thomas Nast, who first drew a red and white Santa Claus for Harper’s in the 1860s, which was further popularized by Coca-Cola. Before that, Santa was often depicted wearing blue, green, and brown. 

Santa didn’t always have reindeer either, but some people believe that this part of the story could be based on the Sami people of northern Europe who are reindeer herders and live in a cold, snowy environment. The traditional dress of Sami people is also similar to that of Santas’ elves.

Still, it’s highly possible that one of the branches of Santa’s origins draws influence from mushrooms. One I'm interested in involves the Norse god Odin. On the winter solstice, there’s a common story throughout Europe about how Odin rides on a wild hunt through the sky on the winter solstice. It’s a night when people are supposed to be huddled inside so that they don’t encounter him, because he might be accompanied by an assortment of nasty characters. In some parts of Europe, kids would leave a treat, like a carrot in their boot, for his horse. In the mythology, Odin encounters “magical” foods that offer wisdom or insight, powers of thought, or that transport characters to other worlds. These are things we associate with the effects of psychoactive substances; Amanita could be a possible substance. 

Amanita is currently federally unregulated. Why has it remained that way when other psychoactive drugs, like psilocybin mushrooms, became regulated in the 1970s?

It’s worth noting that some places have regulated it. Louisiana is the only state in the U.S. where it’s prohibited My guess is that in the heyday of these mail-order companies, perhaps some people were hospitalized after ingesting one of the drugs they ordered. It’s also prohibited in Australia. 

But the main issue is that it’s never had the recreational appeal that some other psychoactive substances have had. Similarly, a few other psychoactive plants like datura and salvia are not outlawed either.They’ve been on DEA’s radar for awhile, but the issue is that people don’t really enjoy them, so the DEA doesn’t want to go after them. For me, that raises questions about prohibition: presumably it’s about safety, but what does it mean if they’re only targeting drugs people enjoy?

What is an Amanita trip like, and why might people not enjoy it?

Its effects can be really inconsistent. The potency from mushroom to mushroom can vary up to four times. Say you took three mushrooms and it was a great experience; if the next time you have 3 mushrooms again, you could end up in the ER. Also, if prepared incorrectly, it can make people violently ill. 

At low doses, Amanita can be euphoric, but in psychedelic circles, there’s a culture of “go big or go home,” and Amanita will slap people down hard in ways the LSD and psilocybin don’t. The effects at high doses don’t have a lot of recreational appeal. It tends not to be terribly visual, and given that humans are highly visual creatures, that might not appeal to psychonauts. At higher doses, people report feeling dissociation and delirium; people aren’t necessarily having a hallucinatory experience, per se, but the way they interpret visual data changes. For instance, you might be surrounded by trees and houses but your understanding of that visual input is totally removed, and you may no longer understand where you are. Amanita acts on different receptors in the brain — GABA receptors, the same system that alcohol and benzodiazepines work on. So while it’s categorized as more of a psychoactive or psychedelic, its effects can be more similar to alcohol or benzos. People can become uncoordinated and blackout.

Amanita has been in the news lately. What do you see in its future — might it become regulated?

The main compounds in the mushroom are muscimol and ibotenic acid, which are established chemicals used in brain research. They’re expected to be available, so that feels like a barrier to prohibiting the substance completely.

Another aspect of this is that the mushroom cannot be manufactured. It’s mycorrhizal, which means it exists in a symbiotic relationship with a tree host, so it can’t grow anywhere; no one’s yet figured out how to reproduce that relationship to cultivate the mushroom in the long term. Currently, companies that use the mushrooms buy them in bulk from people in eastern Europe like Latvia, Lithuania, Russia, and Ukraine who harvest the wild mushrooms.But they also just grow in forests in the U.S. Prohibiting them seems a little pointless since they just grow where they want to grow. 

And banning Amanita might not even solve the issue of poisonings. There are gummies or chocolates products being marketed as containing Amanita muscaria as a way to exploit the loophole that it’s a legal substance, but analyses of what’s in these products have found they can contain a kitchen sink of compounds: 4-AcO-DMT, psilocybin, kavalactones, Pregabalin, cannabinoids. People have thrown the mushroom under the bus, but it’s not clear that’s actually the problem. Regardless, we need to address problems with unregulated sales of these random substances, where the dosage and contents are not clearly marked. The best case scenario for these products is what happened with “spice” or k2 (synthetic marijuana) or salvia, where use  just fades out. 

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.