Lawrence Millman | Amanita muscaria & mushrooms of Siberia

Transcript

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[00:03] Thanks yeah you put it on again okay thanks well delighted to be here and as you can see I'm going to be I'm advertising the subject of my talk this is called amonita mascaria the fly AAR the world's most iconic mushroom you know you can find it on greeting cards you know you can find it in gardens with gnome sitting on it fluffy pillows

[01:07] This would provide you with a word of warning at to begin with I'm going to talk about this mushroom Gordon wson the ethnobotanist ethnologist referred to it as an enogen N T he o g en which is his way of trying to get around the fact that it might be considered somewhat hallucinogenic he wanted another word that sounded more scientific and he came up with one that sounded more abstruse don't in the Northeast which is where we happen to be at the moment don't go picking what you think is this mushroom because you won't find it here except in rare instances and you will find one that has a yellowish cap a dark yellowish bordering on reddish cap and if you go out and you consume

[02:08] That you will suffer from some stomach distress that I do not recommend and the trip you might make might be to the local hospital which may not be the place you intended to go when you first consume the mushroom it's very different it has different percentages of alkaloids and that's why the results are different but I ought to add to this as well when you're talking about mushrooms and mushrooms giving you certain enogen genic experiences each one of the same species might be somewhat different so just as a so-called death cap which we do have here in small quantities a person who eats one

[03:09] Might end up experiencing his future on the other side of the Grave person who eats another might just have minor problems because the compositions of are different from mushroom to mushroom just so it might be with one of these so it might be with the cilos so-called magic mushroom m a j I c k different ones we're talking about organisms here we're not talking about things that were created in order to make people happy so having said that and I'm wondering we can get this on the full screen can't we no we can't no so we are instead of having one large we have two small images and those will have to qualify that's what we have why can't we get it all on the full screen we don't have that instru oh we don't have an

[04:09] Infrastructure okay well some of you can look at that and some of you can look at this all right in 204 I spent a lot of time in the Arctic if you really wanted to we could show two different slides at once three oh okay that might be good anyway in 2004 I spent a lot of time in the Arctic in 2004 I traveled in an area of Siberia Northeastern Siberia called okay just a second now you all right there it is in the upper right hand corner of this one the northeastern sector and curiously in the northeastern sector of this one as well

[05:10] Right and it's a very remote area it was the last place in Russia to be sovietized and I was studying the use of what's called vek w p a k that Amon mcui among the indigenous people who are known as the chi c h u k CI and let's see this again we have two maps for your perusal you see it's on the right to the left of the bearing straight and bordering the East Siberian sea it goes all the way from a place called anad up around the CH chak Peninsula and so on a remote

[06:12] Treeless Tundra ridden area and the Soviets didn't get there until quite a late time because they didn't realize or they didn't think that there will be resources that they could steal from the indigenous people now the Russians realize that there are all kinds of resources they can steal from them and especially natural gas so you can go to previously untouched parts of the tunder which were used by reindeer herders for time since time in Memorial and find that their natural gas installations there screwing things up now here we have two images of kill we must be aware who kill is this is big Raven the Creator God himself in traditional Chuck Chi lore is somewhere down on the totem pole at the top of which big

[07:14] Raven sits he created the world now how did he create the World reputedly by [expletive] and he [expletive] a vast amount and this could justify what a lot of you might think of things are everything is [expletive] he shot an awful lot and then he molded his [expletive] into mountains and Tundra and all that he had an enormous amount of power and then he pissed and that created the oceans and the lakes and I said to auki Elder but Birds can't piss and he looked at me I think in a rather supercilious way and said oh kiril could do anything now finally he

[08:18] Spat he just spat and the result was vek according to traditional Chuck Chi lore the result was VAP this is the word the chuki word for amonita muscar the fly this particular mushroom and he said this is a prolonged folktale he said I won't tell you oh man how to use this organism he had already created human beings shortly after he shat some more but it was a different kind I don't want to go into this too much but if you if I'm invited here to teach a course in skatology so they wondered why did you create that and he said I'm not going to tell you you're going to have to figure it out for

[09:22] Yourself so they did now what I have here these are Bronze Age petroglyphs at the mouth of the pegel river and let's see if we can go back I don't think I don't want to go back to that map you know or those Maps but it's River facing the East Siberian sea it's a big river and there are these giant Cliffs with these petroglyphs of mushroom headed people and it is assumed these are 3,000 4,000 years old it is assumed that this these are meant to be amonita muscaria heads and you know and this is an attempt to memorialize celebrate or something the ongoing use of this mushroom for ritualistic purposes now here is here's

[10:23] Another image of the same and you can see more clearly than at it's etched in stone here how these indeed resemble mushrooms and I was initially going to show or screen a film called pcel but I arrived the wrong day and films aren't being screened today and it's a 33 minute ethnographic film by a friend of mine a Russian filmmaker named Vladimir golv who hung out in the late '90s with the TR Chi and filmed them using am many mcara and mostly old people and I hung out with mostly old people too we'll get on to that in a while but it's a superb film and you see them doing a lot of things that have since died out in only 15 years not and what he does and what I think I'm going to do in this talk is

[11:24] Simply connect it within the broader cultural context so I'm not just showing okay here's an image of this and here A bunch of people getting high here's an image here's bunch of people getting high so on which I think is sort of boring I want to show the larger ecosystem of a culture so to there is a man who is a truchi Elder who was one of my informants and he said to me I was trying to figure out and he said we'll tell you about this when we feel like it cuz I was asking you know tell me how you guys used to use this how you use it now what's some about some of the rituals because I am to some extent an ethnographer and he smiled and said we'll tell you about it when we're ready to tell you about it now behind this

[12:27] Statement to large extent there exists this man Uncle Jose Joe Stalin and his regime hated the chi use of VAP well anything individual it was individual you it made people act like individuals rather than members of a culus which is a collective f and what happened the shamans would say yeah we eat this and it gives us the feeling of flying and reputedly stalinist henchmen would round up the shamans put them into an airplane take the airplane would go up into the sky and the cargo door would open and they would be pushed out and the sh the henchmen would say you can fly okay then

[13:29] Fly and down they would go and this still exists till there's a certain trauma associated with stalinism that exists to the day so that when out when people come asking questions they usually get baffled Expressions no one really likes to communicate anything pertaining to local culture because of the ongoing trauma that was created during the Stalin years now those years ended in the 1953 when Stalin died but that doesn't mean the memory has ended it's passed on you could say genetically so I bided my time instead of going around saying how do you use this mushroom I observed the culture now this is a common custom called sled

[14:29] Jumping and you jump over a number of sleds that are lined up and the guy who can do it in the most agile way without landing on a sled very bad to land on a sled because these are wood and they're made out of Driftwood and you know you smash something somebody's going to have to cut up another drift log and it isn't good so you try to hone your art and it's real art jumping over sleds I tried it and I got over two and I smashed into the third and it wasn't good also this is a town on the bearing street called U Allen U Len they are still doing a lot of sledding with sled dogs there it's very hard to get gas for snow machines this is a traditional chuki Village that you know it's I'm trying to think no difference between the two images and you know most of the

[15:33] Wood is either imported or it comes from drift logs usually the drift logs are not from the Siberian Rivers but from the McKenzie river getting down into the bearing Street McKenzie is a Canadian river the logs get up into the Arctic gy and then come down the coast now here's a guy who's he's got binoculars I think yes he's got a binoculars he's not looking for mushrooms rather he's looking for sea creatures one of whom might be this is an old whale that was well I was about a month or so old there and you know dogs will come and bite pieces of it and it just Li there's no place that they don't have a sanitary remover will come around and I must say that that if you know any odor that you might compare it with this would Trump any

[16:34] Odor more odious as it were than any known odor but most of the meat is gone they ate the meat blubber is gone they ate the blubber fed some of the inner organs to the dogs and the skin which they ate too they don't let things go to waste the way certain people do now in obser the culture this is called whalebone alley on an island remote place called igran Island it's a ritual site a quarter of a mile of raised boohead rib bones along a corridor and that's just a small part of them and no one knows I mean these were sort of just before built maybe by the Chuck Chi maybe before the CH Chi No One quite is certain they're probably around a thousand years old they've been carbon dated it is thought that they

[17:39] Were built to perform some kind of ritual pertaining to the whales themselves that is maybe to let the whales know that they were important aspects of the human diet and you know don't leave us please oh Wales this was not known to the outside world into 1976 it's still possible in the Arctic to find remote places and remote sites although I'm not sure now with you know Google Earth and other such devices whether it would be possible this would have been probably discovered some time ago very very interesting area and haunting there I am with a bunch of these whalebones of this foggy Atmos so you know you might say by now what does this have to do with vpic well I don't like to think of anything without its context mushrooms for

[18:41] Instance I don't like to think of them without thinking of their habitat what they're growing on what they're growing with what they're doing it could well be that we don't know otherwise that the vapc was taken as part of the ritual of people who were maybe wandering through these upright bones there's no oral evidence of what was going on so much has been forgotten and lost and will always be lost and you know it could well be that they have an association with that or not now do the chukchi eat this sort of mushroom only since the Russian Takeover in the 20s and 30s and like most native people they

[19:43] Never ate mushrooms they were nomadic mushrooms do not provide many calories if you're constantly on the move you need a diet a high calorie content mushrooms may give you high protein content some mushrooms but this is taken a picture this picture was taken in a market in St Petersburg not in a market in any Chi town now you find a little bit of mushroom collecting by local people but not much it still has not caught on now I went out on a lengthy trip with some Hunters and this Rock it's a beautiful place I was still biing my time not asking questions about vapc waiting till someone volunteered very important if you're an ethnographer not to say oh my God I'm teaching classes in two weeks I've got to find out to answer this

[20:57] Question e

[22:46] Wrong if that's what you said this is a place in season rif with mushrooms let's see what the next one is right like that can you guess what leaf that is what it belongs to salic AR arctic willow mushrooms are as an essential component of any Arctic ecosystem they grow with plants and trees all plants and trees there's a very good reason for this northern soils Arctic soils are very a and they have a very low nitrogen content and the underground part the melium is much better at getting the nitrogen and passing it on to the plant host than the roots of that plant itself or that tree and that is a tree

[23:47] By the way right there there's some other trees it looks like there's a dwarf something or other could be there's a there used to be I thought I had some Row in this and that's what's called the lexum during season there is more biomass of mushrooms in the Arctic tundra than there is in the northeastern United States anywhere less variety more biomass they're big and they're everywhere and they're very very important so I'm not I'm actually smelling it and licking it I'm not taking a bite out of it there's a good reason not to of course there are also vapex in the tund it grows with dwarf Birch and dwarf Willow these are dwarf trees usually trees in the tundra are about this High maybe a foot off the

[24:48] Ground foot and a half maybe if they're getting a real boost and a Russian ethno myologist is someone who studies fun job it was determined that I was not a Russian not

[25:50] A Stalin person a few started tell telling me about their use of Vex they said you shouldn't injure the stem like that and also like that when you're picking it or you'll end up with a leg injury they do tend to anthropomorphize this also don't injure the cap be very gentle when you're collecting the cap don't break it because if you do you'll end up with a head injury and I was shown well actually I was an old man was hobbling along and he had a leg injury I was

[26:50] Told by one of my informance that he like a few months earlier had collected one and he accidentally broke the stem when he was collecting he didn't think anything off of it and the next day his tractor fell over and he had a bad leg injury and I don't know if this was true I tried to talk to him and I know no I know very little Chi some of these people speak of their dialc of Inuit that I know you and I was trying to communicate saying did you do you think that that could have been a coincidence rather than the vek taking revenge on you but I couldn't get very far now this is a decadent foodie thing to do with Amon muscaria or vpic you don't

[27:54] Do it you might end up with an but that's not the point of what you are collecting it for at least in chotka maybe elsewhere you know in Santa Cruz California perhaps no you dry it you don't eat it fresh and sauté it you simply dry it and you sting it together I think I got three there nope I got six string it together in threes because that's the usual dose three it's very bad juju to eat an even number of vapix I have no idea why but I know why they're dried and it's significant in 1967 chemists at the University of Zurich found that amona muscaria it

[28:55] Contains an alkaloid called enic acid and another called muscone and upon drawing decarbox renders ibotenic acid into a substance called musol that's important one for you to know if you're contemplating this particular mushroom ibotenic acid is very weakly hallucinogenic also it's not very weakly taken in by your stomach so you could end up feeling nauseous but musol dried specimens are not at all weak so this is one of the last shamans in chotka and Rumor Has It that only

[29:59] Shamans would eat vapex after which their constituents would drink the shamanic urine because musal this is important the primary trip inducing alkaloid it passes through your system unaltered so if you are drinking this from someone who's eaten it you get somewhat the same experience that that person who's eaten it has gotten only in a liquefied form but the truth is as I discovered going around the coast and going into the interior of chatka customs and rituals vary from local to local as they would if you're collecting information of an ethnographic nature

[30:59] Anywhere so here are some examples that I wrote down only shamans should eat vapac only old people should eat vapo anyone should eat vapu even kids only men can eat it after it's been chewed by a woman you eat it and it's transports you to your ancestors no you don't even get to your ancestors it can't transport you that far you eat it and you make requests of it like oh VAP dear vapac stop my nose from bleeding and I don't know quite the reason for this but there are a lot of bloody noses bleeding noses not bloody noses inotka then another we on you drink the urine of a shaman or shamaness yes

[32:02] But before you drink it you must swab your skin with some of it or the vpic spirit will be trapped inside you and that it won't appreciate it will find a way to Revenge itself upon you and then someone said hey there nothing more ridiculous than swabbing your skin with your own urine so lots of reasons lots of examples of how it's used and who is using it now here's I know what you're dying to ask me what is the effect of vpic well one thing I can say generally is it increases the nimbleness in some people and it slows others down I'm not sure that it makes anyone have double vision and see two Eagles where there is only one but it's

[33:06] Possible one guy told me that my life would Wayne like the moon itself waning unless after taking eating vapac I showed my bare buttocks to the moon so I didn't want my life to Wayne so I did exactly this and there were a bunch of people gathered around they burst into rius laughter this was a joke and but laughter is one of the ingredients of the V experience you do feel lighthearted or at least I have or you feel euphoric as very different result from the indol based hallucinogens like

[34:07] Psilocybin and LSD very different now the chi say that it makes you feel like you're flying through the air like an eagle or even like two Eagles and that shamans would fly off and visit their ancestors and try to get answers to some big questions whatever those big questions are or if there was someone like in the immediate area who was sick and the shaman didn't know it was assumed the people of the past were more knowledgeable than the people of the present and that Shaman would go and get in touch with a great grandp person and say what's making poor little BL vomit all the time so they would come back with the answer but truth to tell the use of

[35:20] This of other customs in Decline elsewhere in the Arctic in a very very short time one of the things that's helped their decline is for instance the fact that computers are ubiquitous if you want an answer to a big question you just boot up your computer and Google something and you'll have the answer that's why you saw almost exclusively old people here another 10 years from now if I go back you won't see I won't see anybody perhaps but here's my own feeling that that one's ancestors are wiser much much wiser than the internet thank [Applause]

[36:24] You I have a few copies of this book for sale should I