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A rival suggestion for the origins of much of Santa's paraphernalia-his red and white color scheme, those flying reindeer, and so on-is much more fun, less commercial, more scientific, and somehow more appealing than Coca-Cola's version, because it is so politically incorrect.

Patrick Harding of Sheffield University in England argues that the trappings of the traditional Christmas experience owe a great deal to what is probably the most important mushroom in history: fly agaric (Amanita muscaria), the recreational and ritualistic drug of choice in parts of northern Europe before vodka was imported from the East. Each December this mycologist dresses up as Santa and drags a sleigh behind him to deliver seasonal lectures on the toadstool. The garb helps Harding drive home his point, for Santa's robes without doubt honor the red-and-white-dot color scheme of this potent mind-altering mushroom.

Commonly found in northern Europe, North America, and New Zealand, fly agaric is fairly poisonous, being a relative of the more lethal death cap (Amanita phalloides) and destroying angel (Amanita virosa). The hallucinogenic principles of fly agaric are due to the presence of the chemicals ibotenic acid and muscimol, according to the International Mycological Institute at Egham, Surrey, England. Ibotenic acid is present only in fresh mushrooms. On drying, it turns into muscimol, which is ten times more potent. In Lapp societies, the village holy man, or shaman, took his mushrooms dried-with good reason.

The shaman knew how to prepare the mushroom, removing the more potent toxins so that it was safe enough to eat. During a mushroom-induced trance, he would start to twitch and sweat. His soul was thought to leave the body as an animal and fly to the otherworld to communicate with the spirits The spirits would, the shaman hoped, help him to deal with pressing problems, such as an outbreak of sickness in the village. With luck, after his hallucinatory flight across the skies, he would return bearing the gifts of medical knowledge from the gods.

Santa's jolly "Ho, ho, ho" is the euphoric laugh of someone who has indulged in the mushroom. Harding adds that the big man's fondness for popping down chimneys is an echo of how the shaman would drop into a yurt, an ancient tentlike dwelling made of birch and reindeer hide. "The 'door' and the chimney of the yurt were the same, and the most significant person coming down the chimney would have been a shaman coming to heal a sick person."

Harding uses the shaman's urine to link reindeer to the myth. For one thing, reindeer were uncommonly fond of drinking human urine that contained muscimol. The hoi polloi from the village also were partial to mind-expanding yellow snow, because the potency of the muscimol was not greatly weakened-although it was probably safer-once it had passed through the shaman. "There is evidence of the drug passing through five or six people and still being effective," Harding says. "This is almost certainly the derivation of the phrase 'to get pissed,' which has nothing to do with alcohol. It predates inebriation by alcohol by several thousand years."

Such was the intensity of the drug-induced experience that it is hardly surprising that the Christmas legend includes flying reindeer. Witches soar for related reasons: a witch who wanted to "fly" to a sabbat, or orgiastic ceremony, would anoint a staff with specially prepared oils containing psychoactive matter, probably from toad skins, and then apply it to vaginal membranes.

References to flying can be found in more recent applications of the mushroom. St. Catherine of Genoa (1447-1510) used fly agaric to soar to the heights of religious ecstasy, according to Daniele Piomelli of the Unité de Neurobiologie et Pharmacologie de I'Inserm in Paris. An account of the life of St. Catherine describes the use of ground agaric, so that God "infused such suavity and divine sweetness in her heart that both soul and body were so full as to make her unable to stand."

In Victorian times travelers returned with intriguing tales of the use of fly agaric by people in Siberia, Lapland, and other areas in the northern latitudes. One of the first was reported by the mycologist Mordecai Cooke, who mentioned the recycling of urine rich in muscimol in his A Plain and Easy Account of British Fungi (I862). Harding points out that Cooke was a friend of Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), the author of the fantastic children's story Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (I865). Almost certainly, this is the source of the episode in Alice where she eats the mushroom, where one side makes her grow very tall and the other very small," Harding says. "This inability to judge size-macropsia- is one of the effects of fly agaric."

© 1998 by Roger Highfield

Tags: Christmas

About the Author

Roger Highfield is the science editor of The Daily Telegraph in London. He carried out research at Oxford University and the Institute Lane Langevin, Grenoble, where he became the first to bounce a neutron off a soap bubble. He has coauthored three other books: Frontiers of Complexity, The Private Lives of Albert Einstein and The Arrow of Time a bestseller that has been translated into more than a dozen languages.