Exploring Fly Agaric: A Wild Magical Mushroom 🍄 (Amanita muscaria)

Hello my friends and welcome back to our channel Home is Where Our Heart Is. My name is Dane, author of the series of books Knowledge to Forage. I hope you're having a beautiful day wherever you are in the world and thank you all for joining me here today where I'm absolutely blessed to be spending my morning out exploring this incredible autumnal woods. The woodlands are a very magical place at this time of year. You can smell the earthy moss on the breeze, you can feel the dampness in the air, and the rich scent of mushrooms surrounds us all. Autumn is a time of year where mother nature teaches us that it can be beautiful to let things go and there's nothing more beautiful, magical, enchanting, and mysterious that you can find out in the woods at this time of year than a very special mushroom that goes by the name of the fly agaric. The fly agaric is the most famous and iconic mushroom in the entire world. It's rich in history, featured in fairy tales, and in one hand it's poisonous and in the other psychedelic and healing. So if you're interested then come for a walk through this woodland with me and let's dive into the weird and wonderful world of the fly agaric mushroom. So first things first to find this mushroom the fly agaric we need to know where it grows. Well it grows across Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, and many more countries and it's what's called mycorrhizal. This means this mushroom likes to make friends with certain types of trees. Fly agaric loves to be friends with spruce, pine, and birch, and as we can see here there's a silver birch and this gets much more dense with birch trees. So we're going to head off the path this way down into this dense wood. Now fly agaric love to grow in woodlands like this and they much prefer to grow in the autumn time. Last night there was a huge thunderstorm and heavy rain and the air today is warm and humid and as you can see many of the leaves beginning to turn brown and fall to the ground. These are the perfect conditions for a fly agaric mushroom. And here we found our first fly agaric mushroom and as you can see this one he's well past his best. So we're going to keep looking because where there's one there should be more. The woodland's getting pretty dense but it's worth it because what's over there? Can you see them? Can you see them speckles of red? There's the rest. There's the fly agaric's family. Let's go over and introduce ourselves. Wow would you look at this beautiful collection of fly agaric. These ones are quite mature. You can see they're fully spread out. They have a bit of a yellow tinge to them meaning that they've aged considerably. But there's lots more younger specimens over there too. This mushroom I just can't help but get excited when I see this mushroom because it doesn't even look real. It looks like something out of a fairy tale and this is why this mushroom has inspired so many fairy tales all throughout history. They believed that the Alice in Wonderland fairy tale was centered around this marvellous mushroom. Mario loves the fly agaric mushroom. Even the Smurfs live in the fly agaric mushroom. There's no fungi, fungus, marvellous mushroom out there that's more iconic and famous than the fly agaric mushroom. Just look how beautiful it is. Bright red with white spots. Now to identify this mushroom is super simple because it's bright red with white spots. When we look down towards the base if we want to get more detailed we can see it has a shaggy base. Then up its white stem it has a single skirt running around it. Then the top is round when young and opens all the way up flat into the toadstool. It's bright red with white spots and these white spots are actually from when the fungi, the fungus, the fly agaric itself grew and hatched from its fungus egg and these are the remnants on top. So the fly agaric's scientific name is Amanita Ascaria and does it look like any other mushrooms? Well it does. It looks similar to the blusher, the grey spotted amanita or the panther cat but the main key difference being of course that the fly agaric is bright red but sometimes it can be tinged a yellowy orange too. Now the fly agaric mushroom is a toxic mushroom. It's in the amanita genus which contains some of the most deadly toxic poisonous mushrooms in the entire world but this didn't stop our ancestors from eating this mushroom. What they would do is boil it, discard the water and boil it again over and over again until the toxins were destroyed and this makes this mushroom edible but I wouldn't recommend doing that because if you get it wrong you could quite literally die and this bright red beautiful mushroom with white spots is also a magic mushroom. But what does that mean? That means that this mushroom has conscious altering effects. It's a psychedelic mushroom but it's a very special psychedelic mushroom. You see fly agaric doesn't cause hallucinations in the same way as your common magic mushroom and regular magic mushrooms such as golden teacher contains a compound called psilocybin and that's what makes magic mushrooms magic and gives them their powerful psychological mind-bending effects whereas fly agaric doesn't contain any psilocybin at all. So how on earth is this mushroom psychedelic? Well what's happening here is the fly agaric contains two compounds ibotenic acid and muscimol and it's the ibotenic acid that gives this mushroom all its horrible effects such as feeling dizzy and nauseous whereas the muscimol brings the more positive effects such as states of euphoria and visual and audible hallucinations. It's these two compounds within that make this mushroom a psychedelic mushroom. But here's where the plot thickens because the fly agaric is known as one of the oldest intoxicants in the entire world so surely our ancestors wasn't poisoning themselves to get the psychedelic effects of this mushroom and the answer is no they wasn't poisoning themselves at all. What they was doing was preparing this mushroom in a few different ways. You see you remember the ibotenic acid the compound in this mushroom that makes you sick this actually converts to muscimol when the mushroom is dried so what our ancestors would do is dry this mushroom and the toxic effects would reduce and transform more into muscimol meaning the mushroom dried would be more psychoactive. They then take this mushroom they'd either eat that or make it into a tea or they ferment it in milk which would then convert even more of the ibotenic acid into muscimol and this is where the fly agaric's name descends from. You see many people believe that it's called the fly agaric because people were said to put the mushroom in milk and this would attract flies and kill them. They believed that it was being used as a fly trap but was they using this mushroom to kill flies by placing it in milk or was they fermenting it in milk to create a powerful psychedelic drink and maybe flies were being killed as a consequence of that. What do you think our ancestors were up to? Now as you can probably imagine a bright red mushroom with white spots and toxic and psychedelic effects caught the attention of our ancestors. There's no mushroom that has a more colorful history than the fly agaric and my favorite history of the fly agaric still potentially affects our traditions today in the modern world. You see over in Siberia the fly agaric was used in shamanistic practices. They'd collect this mushroom every winter solstice and take it for the spiritual insights that they'd receive. They'd also travel around the towns handing out these nature's gifts visiting people to share the spiritual insights. Whilst doing this they'd wear red and white clothes in celebration of the fly agaric mushroom and because it was winter in Siberia more often and not the houses they'd visit would be snowed in so they'd have to climb in through the smoke hole the chimney to give out these gifts. Now it doesn't end there this tradition also can potentially be seen in the reindeer that we celebrate each year because reindeer love to eat fly agaric mushrooms and when they eat them they obviously experience the visual and audible and euphoric effects and they jump around as they run across the world. They jump so high that it can look like they're attempting to fly. So the reindeer are running and jumping looking like they're flying whilst the shamans were going around in their red and white clothes climbing down chimneys giving out gifts. Perhaps this is what inspired Father Christmas to wear his red and white robes and Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer. The deeper into the woods we go the more fly agaric we find. Here's a little baby one here some bigger ones and scattered all around me are giant fly agaric mushrooms that have been weathered by the storm. Now we spoke about the history of the fly agaric its toxicity and psychedelic effects but what about this mushroom's medicinal properties? Well the medicinal properties of the fly agaric come from two places. Firstly the psychedelic effects which we now know are very therapeutic to people that are suffering with mental health conditions. Psychedelics have been shown they can help people recover from OCD, depression, anxiety, anorexia and post-traumatic stress disorder as well as many other more mental ailments. And secondly if you're not into taking large amounts of groovy substances which many people aren't and I can totally understand that you can also microdose this mushroom and when it's microdosed taken in small amounts every single day you can get the positive mental health effects without all the groovy side effects. Not only do you get positive mental health effects from this mushroom whilst microdosing but it also acts as a sedative and it's also a natural pain reliever too. So there we have it people the fly agaric mushroom. A toxic mushroom, a psychedelic mushroom, a medicinal mushroom and a mushroom rich in history. As always it's been a pleasure don't forget to do all the modern world things such as like, comment and subscribe to this channel and ring the bell because all the engagement this video gets means YouTube knows you like it so it will show it to more people. If you want to own all the knowledge just like this and big book form check out our awesome series of books Knowledge to Forage and look out for our brand new book coming soon A Healing Herbal Journey which is a huge book that talks specifically about medicinal properties of nature including mushrooms. Check out our follow-along Foraging for our monthly educational subscription packs but most importantly of all take care of yourselves and I'll see you all next time. Peace. The fly agaric magic in the woods our ancestors understood these fairy tale wonders connected through their roots vibrant red with spots of white to stumble across these marvelous magical mushrooms is an awe-provoking sight toxic yet healing nature's key to the brain some say they'll lead you to madness while others say they'll soothe your mental and physical well-being.