Magic Mushrooms May
Explain Santa & His 'Flying' Reindeer
By Douglas
Main, LiveScience Contributor | LiveScience.com
This Christmas,
like many before it and many yet to come, the story of Santa and his
flying reindeer will be told, including how the "jolly old
elf" flies on his sleigh throughout the entire world in one night, giving
gifts to all the good children.
But
according to one theory, the story of Santa and his flying reindeer can be
traced to an unlikely source: hallucinogenic or "magic" mushrooms.
"Santa
is a modern counterpart of a shaman, who consumed mind-altering plants and
fungi to commune with the spirit world," said John Rush, an anthropologist
and instructor at Sierra College in Rocklin, Calif.
According
to the theory, the legend of Santa derives from shamans in the Siberian and
Arctic regions who dropped into locals' teepeelike homes with a bag full
of hallucinatory
mushrooms as presents in
late December, Rush said.
"As
the story goes, up until a few hundred years ago these practicing shamans or priests connected to the older
traditions would collect Amanita muscaria (the Holy Mushroom), dry
them, and then give them as gifts on the winter solstice," Rush told
LiveScience. "Because snow is usually blocking doors, there was an opening
in the roof through which people entered and exited, thus the chimney
story."
But
that's just the beginning of the symbolic connections between the Amanita
muscaria mushroom and the iconography of Christmas, according to
several historians and ethnomycologists, or people who study the influence
fungi has had on human societies. Of course, not all scientists agree that the
Santa story is tied to a hallucinogen.
Presents under the tree
In
his book "Mushrooms and
Mankind" (The Book Tree,
2003) the late author James Arthur points out that Amanita muscaria, also
known as fly agaric, lives throughout the Northern Hemisphere under conifers
and birch trees, with which the fungi —which is deep red with white flecks —
has a symbiotic relationship. This partially explains the practice of the Christmas tree, and the placement of bright red-and-white
presents underneath, which look like Amanita mushrooms, he
wrote.
"Why
do people bring pine trees into their houses at the Winter Solstice,
placing brightly colored (red and white) packages under their boughs, as gifts
to show their love for each other … ?" he wrote. "It is because, underneath
the pine bough is the exact location where one would find this 'Most Sacred'
substance, the Amanita muscaria, in the wild."
Reindeer are common in Siberia, and seek out
these hallucinogenic fungi, as the area's human inhabitants have been known to
do. Donald Pfister, a biologist who studies fungi at Harvard University,
suggests that Siberian tribesmen who ingested fly agaric may have hallucinated
into thinking that reindeer were flying.
"Flying" reindeer
"At
first glance, one thinks it's ridiculous, but it's not," said Carl Ruck, a professor of classics at Boston University. "Whoever
heard of reindeer flying? I think it's becoming general knowledge that Santa is
taking a 'trip' with his reindeer," Ruck said.
"Amongst
the Siberian shamans, you have an animal spirit you can journey with in your
vision quest," Ruck continued. " And reindeer are common and familiar
to people in eastern Siberia. They also have a tradition of dressing up like
the [mushroom] … they dress up in red suits with white spots."
Ornaments
shaped like Amanita mushrooms and other depictions of the
fungi are also prevalent in Christmas decorations throughout the world,
particularly in Scandinavia and northern Europe, Pfister points out. That said,
Pfister made it clear that the connection between modern-day Christmas and the
ancestral practice of eating mushrooms is a coincidence, and he doesn't know
about any direct link.
Many
of these traditions were merged or projected upon Saint Nicholas, a fourth-century saint who was known for his
generosity, as the story goes.
The Santa connection
There
is little debate about the consumption of mushrooms by Arctic and Siberian tribes'
people and shamans, but the connection to Christmas traditions is more tenuous, or "mysterious," as Ruck put it.
Many
of the modern details of the modern-day American Santa Claus come from "A
Visit from St. Nicholas" (which later became famous as "'Twas the
Night Before Christmas"), an 1823 poem credited to Clement Clarke Moore,
an aristocratic academic who lived in New York City.
The
origins of Moore's vision are unclear, although Arthur, Rush and Ruck all think
he probably drew from northern Europe motifs that derive from Siberian or
Arctic shamanic traditions. At the very least, Arthur wrote, Santa's sleigh and
reindeer are references back to various related Northern European mythology.
For example, the Norse god Thor (known in German as "Donner") flew in
a chariot drawn by two goats, which have been replaced in the modern retelling
by Santa's
reindeer, Arthur wrote.
Ruck
points to Rudolf as another example of the mushroom imagery resurfacing: his
nose looks exactly like a red mushroom, he said. "It's amazing that
a reindeer with a red-mushroom nose is at the head, leading the others."
Some doubt
Other
historians were unaware of a connection between Santa and shamans or magic mushrooms, including Stephen Nissenbaum, who wrote a book
about the origins of Christmas traditions, and Penne Restad, at the University
of Texas.
One
historian, Ronald Hutton, told NPR that the theory of a mushroom-Santa
connection is off-base. "If you look at the evidence of Siberian shamanism,
which I've done," Hutton said, "you find that shamans didn't travel
by sleigh, didn't usually deal with reindeer spirits, very rarely took the
mushrooms to get trances, didn't have red-and-white clothes."
But Rush and
Ruck say these statements are incorrect; shamans did deal with reindeer
spirits, and the depiction of their clothes' coloring has more to do with the
colors of the mushroom than the shamans' actual garb. As for sleighs, the point
isn't the exact mode of travel, but that the "trip" involves
transportation to a different, celestial realm, Rush said.
"People
who know about shamanism accept this story," Ruck said. "Is there any
other reason that Santa lives in the North Pole? It is a tradition that can be
traced back to Siberia."