Have a Holly, Jolly, Psychedelic Christmas
The "Revisionist" History of the Holiday is Very Amusing
Well, I hope everyone’s had a wonderful Christmas today and is now enjoying a delightfully intoxicating winter beverage of one sort or another.
In my Christmas Eve reflection yesterday I vowed not to start “ranting about the commercialization of the holiday or poking at the pagan elements incorporated into its practice now for centuries.”
However, I said nothing about allowing others to write about paganism in a calm, restrained manner - and now that Christmas is almost over we may as well get into it. Thus, I simply cannot resist sharing this very amusing reflection published at Bari Weiss’s new publication The Free Press yesterday. Leighton Woodhouse provokes with the question, “Was Santa Actually a Mushroom-Tripping Reindeer Herder?”
After summarizing the more well-known and embraced narrative of St. Nicholas, Woodhouse ventures into more provocative territory:
That theory starts with the Amanita muscaria, the most famous mushroom on Earth. You’re familiar with the Amanita muscaria (also known as the fly agaric), whether you know it or not. It’s the one with the white stem and the red cap with white spots on it. It’s the mushroom foe in Super Mario Brothers. It’s the houses the Smurfs live in. It’s the emoji for mushroom 🍄…
So where did we get the image of a spiritual magic man dropping gifts down the chimney? Where did the ornaments on Christmas trees and socks filled with gifts hanging over the fireplace come from? Woodhouse must have really enjoyed laying this all out, I certainly would have:
The traditional culture of those early Finns, known as the Sámi, was shamanistic. They believed that the Amanita muscaria that brought the reindeer its sustenance also brought wisdom to humans. At the time of the celebration of the Winter Solstice, the Sámi’s shamans would consume the drug and then visit prominent Sámi households to pass along the insights that they achieved through their hallucinogenic trips. In honor of the mushroom, they would dress in its likeness, in a red and white costume. The Sámi lived in yurts, which, at that time of the year, were often snowed in. So, the shamans would often pop in through the hole in the roof that served as the yurt’s chimney, bearing the gifts of their psychedelically inspired wisdom.
The Amanita muscaria has a symbiotic relationship with certain tree species. In Lapland, where the Sámi lived, they grow at the foot of pines and birches, like gifts under a Christmas tree. Besides drinking reindeer urine, the mushrooms could also be dried out to reduce their toxicity while preserving their psychoactivity. This would be done by hanging them on tree branches like Christmas ornaments, or putting them in socks and hanging them by the fire.
Read the whole thing. It concludes with a reference to Dead Sea Scrolls scholar John Allegro’s ultra-controversial tome The Sacred Mushroom and The Cross: A study of the nature and origins of Christianity within the fertility cults of the ancient Near East which was ridiculed when published in the 1970s but is now gaining more respectability as its thesis of the hidden, pagan, drug-induced origins of organized religion is growing in popularity these days.
I bought a copy of Allegro’s book last year and hope to dig into it more next year - and write about my findings here on this substack - after we return to California from this snow-covered midwestern wasteland of my birth. As some of our readers are aware, I am very sympathetic to “psychedelic culture” and the use of psychedelic drugs to treat a host of medical problems, including the PTSD which I’ve written so much about enduring this past year.
While I once fashioned myself a “Counterculture Conservative” seeking to combine the insights of ‘60s and ‘70s outsider authors like Robert Anton Wilson with right-wing political objectives, nowadays I proclaim myself a “Psychedelic Zionist,” fashioning a quirky hybrid of the new science of psychoactive medicine with the insights I’ve gained from 13 years defending the Jewish state.
But I still have much thinking and writing to do to lay all this out - just something to look forward to at God of the Desert Books for 2023. For now, I hope everyone has a relaxing, safe end to their year.