Psychoactives in Religion: A Brief Survey Of Weird and Interesting Religious History

The Christmas holiday with all of its iconology and symbolism is perhaps the most relatable modern-day religious occasion from which psychedelic influences can be drawn from history, particularly with its connection to amanita muscaria, or fly agaric, a psychedelic and mildly poisonous mushroom. In fact, there are so many connections to draw that for many people, the evidence is overwhelmingly clear that many Christmas traditions that we are familiar with trace back to this entheogen.

By way of background, amanita muscaria is a red and white mushroom that grows abundantly in the Northern hemisphere. The traditional shamans of modern-day Russia and Northern Europe collected these mushrooms and dried them for winter storage by hanging them on the branches of trees, a technique that also reduced the mushroom’s toxicity. According to the historical narratives dating back hundreds of years, the shamans who collected and dried amanita muscaria would travel from house to house and deliver the dried mushrooms as gifts. Because of the amount of snow that could often accumulate at the base of houses, people would enter in and out of houses by way of a hatch or door in the roof of the house.

Amanita muscaria has an affinity for growing below pine trees. It is a favorite snack of reindeer, which forage for the mushroom throughout the year, including in winter. Reindeer are prevalent throughout much of the range where amanita grows, including the Northernmost regions of Siberia.

It is not difficult to make some fairly obvious connections here between these olden-days traditions of the far north with modern-day traditions of Christmas. Santa Claus dresses in red and white matching the colors of amanita muscaria. He goes traveling from house to house, entering through the chimneys of homes to deliver brightly colored gifts that he has created over the course of the past year, placing them under pine trees inside peoples’ homes, just as traveling shamans used to enter homes through roofs to bring dried mushrooms which grow under pine trees that they had prepared over the course fo the past year, hanging the mushrooms on the branches of trees to dry just as people today hang ornaments on the branches of their Christmas trees inside their homes.

Santa Claus travels with reindeer, the same reindeer which eat amanita muscaria mushrooms, and one of his reindeer has a nose that is bright red like an amanita mushroom. And of course, Santa Claus lives at the North Pole, in the far north, where reindeer naturally range. And finally, all historical similarities aside, the simple storyline of a flying magical man who knows whether everyone on earth has been naughty or nice, who can come and go undetected, who lives with little elves in a winter wonderland…indeed one would be hard-pressed to come up with a more psychedelic story than that.

Whether it’s Santa Claus taking a trip across the winter sky, or ancient biblical figures experiencing hallucinatory visions, or perhaps ancient accounts of many-armed human-animal deities of the Hindu tradition, one simple conclusion that can be made from these interesting stories is that some of the religious traditions that we know of today must inevitably describe psychedelic experiences of ancient times. From this it is entirely logical to believe that psychedelics can open the doors of perception to facilitate extraordinary experiences – experiences which many would have no trouble calling divine, and therefore ascribing religious meaning to them. Such an idea is not an opinion or statement one way or another regarding the validity of any theology or cosmology; rather it is an insight into the uncanny similarities found between divine stories of religions and extrasensory experiences found in psychedelics.