Study in Perfect (4 page)

Amanita phalloides
is an easily bruised, pale beauty, the color of milk glass in its momentary prime, mature carriage like a tiny Greek temple. One bite, and you have boarded a subway to the grave. Amatoxins are the lethal component of amanita. They resist changes in temperature and are quickly absorbed by the intestines. The estimated lethal dose is 0.1 mg/kg, or 7 mg of toxin in adults. Six to thirty-six uneventful hours may pass after ingestion. Then nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and abdominal pain begin in earnest. After a while, there's momentary relief as symptoms subside. If you were planning to drive to the hospital, you might change your mind, assume the worst is over. This latent period is why amanita is often fatal. Quietly, with little show, amatoxins invade the liver and kidneys. Without treatment, the result is coma or death.

Seeing one, you might think pedestal, or plinth, not toad-stool—the nickname, ever since the fourteenth century, for all
poisonous mushrooms. The word comes from the Middle English
tadde
and
stole
and stemmed from a fear that toads themselves were deadly poison. Variations include tadstoles, frogge stoles, tadstooles, tode stoles, frogstooles, paddockstool, puddockstool, paddocstol, toadstoole, paddockstooles, and toodys hatte.

Innocent as sugar    
but full of paralysis:
to eat                     
is to stagger down.
—
MARY OLIVER
   

We keep our distance from catastrophe—invisible, silent, or otherwise. Our brains are hard at work on self-preservation. But powerful as our instinct is to stay alive, we also crave knowledge, excitement, and pleasure. The germ of touching begins in the brain—first as a mild curiosity, then as a spur to action.

By sight, the most omnipresent amanita is
muscaria
. Wherever the image of a mushroom is called for—in children's literature, greeting cards, kitschy seventies needlepoint—its features appear: white stem and a bright-red, umbrella-shaped cap with marked white flecks or “warts.” The common name is fly agaric. In the Middle Ages crushed
muscaria
in a dish of milk attracted flies, which then grew drowsy and drowned. Even today the mushroom is used as an insecticide. It's also possible the nickname derives from the medieval belief that insanity was caused by flies invading the brain.

The agaric is considered poisonous. But in small doses it's a well-known hallucinogen. The psychoactive ingredient is muscimol, most potent in the layer of skin just below the cap. Like tryptamine (found in another hallucinogenic mushroom,
Psilocybin
), muscimol mimics the effects of serotonin on the brain. Symptoms occur thirty minutes to two hours after ingestion and include dilation of pupils, confusion, repetitive actions, euphoria, a feeling of unusual strength, distortions of body and time, and visual hallucinations.

Four-thousand-six-hundred-year-old hieroglyphs from Egypt suggest that the agaric was considered a gate to immortal life, but only royalty could indulge. Certain Vikings in Scandinavia ate the mushrooms and, in war, rampaged unmanageably; they came to be known as Berserkers, hence one likely origin of the word
berserk
. In eastern Siberia,
A. muscaria
was used recreationally as well as religiously. The Koryak tell the story of the god Vahiyinin, who spat upon the earth, and his spittle became the warty mushroom. Big Raven consumed the mushroom, which enabled him to carry a whale to its home. He was so elated with his new powers, he begged the god to scatter the agaric far and wide so that his people could experience it too. Western Siberians were less fortunate. There, only the shaman could eat the mushroom to induce a trance state; the rest of the tribe drank his urine, where the active ingredient persisted, sans toxicity.

In his book
The Greek Myths
, Robert Graves hypothesizes that the Dionysian rites were conducted under the influence of
Amanita muscaria
. Other researchers have conjectured that agaric was used by Moses, Elijah and Elisha, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jonah, even Jesus and his disciples. A 1291 fresco in Plaincourault,
France, shows the agaric right alongside Adam, Eve, the Serpent, and the Tree of Knowledge. Eve bends forward, her hand resting on her distended abdomen, perhaps in warning to potential users.

To “mushroom” is to expand rapidly. To “pop up like mushrooms” is to appear suddenly, as if overnight. In fact, all species of mushrooms take several days to form, beginning with the pin stage, followed by a button stage. Finally, the mushroom draws in water quickly and can swell to full size in a few hours. As Emily Dickinson observed, “Doth like a bubble antedate, / And like a bubble hie.”

Lewis Carroll, Victorian storyteller with a questionable attraction to little girls, was a known experimenter with fly agaric.
Alice in Wonderland
's body warps and quick travels through time were probably inspired by agaric-induced hallucinations. In one scene, Alice is instructed by a hookah-smoking caterpillar to nibble from the mushroom he sits on. She grows immense with a bite from one side, miniscule when she eats from the other. Her neck stretches grotesquely, her arms poke out of the chimney and two upstairs windows. She's able to hear animals talk, bicker, sing. A croquet ball morphs into a hedgehog, a baby into a pig.

The story of a little girl's daring and its unusual consequences impacted culture for decades to come. In the sixties,
Grace Slick's song “White Rabbit” included the infamous lyric:

One pill makes you larger              
And one pill makes you small         
And the ones that mother gives you
Don't do anything at all                 
Go ask Alice                                
When she's ten feet tall                 

The era brought a desire for transformation through sexual freedom, a mind-bending rock 'n' roll soundtrack, and renewed interest in magic mushrooms—chiefly
Psilocybin
, but also
Russula
,
Panaeolus
,
Stropharia
,
Boletus
, and
Amanita muscaria
. (Most hallucinogenic mushrooms are now illegal in the United States. But it's still possible to purchase the agaric on the web at just twenty-nine dollars an ounce—no stems, just caps!)

Over time the mushroom has become a symbol of metamorphosis and dark knowledge. For decades it lies low, subterranean, under the radar. Whenever a culture longs for adventure, hungers for something deeper and wilder (Lewis Carroll under the rule of Queen Victoria, Jefferson Airplane flying out of the American fifties), the mushroom rises from the loam. Its odor is musky, the scent of decay and lust.

“Had nature an Iscariot,” noted Emily Dickinson, “That mushroom,—it is him.” What we see on the surface—the mushroom's pileus, stipe, and gills—is the reproductive organ of an underground fungus. A network of minute threads, called hyphae,
gather into a root system called the mycelium, which can be tiny, too small to see, or massive. Mycelium is crucial in ecosystems on land and in water. It decomposes plant material and, in the process, releases carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere. It enables plants to absorb water and protects against diseases. Some say the largest organism in the world is a contiguous growth of mycelium in eastern Oregon, estimated to be more than 1,665 football fields in size. A mycelium can live for years, centuries even, waiting for the right moment, the perfect mix of temperature and damp, to cast forth its curious, sometimes deadly fruit.

If you are walking through the woods, your gaze fixated on the treetops, and by accident crush a cluster of mushrooms below, never fear that in your clumsiness you have destroyed the last remaining
Russula silvicola
,
Boletus aereus
, or
Amanita citrina
. More likely, you've spread the spores more widely than the mushroom could have by itself.

“Our kind multiplies,” wrote Sylvia Plath in her poem “Mushrooms.” “We shall by morning / Inherit the earth. / Our foot's in the door.”

The apple is a sweet-smelling fruit with the pleasing shape of a sphere—a spiritual whole, emblem of completeness. Its domain is above ground, saturated with sunshine and fresh air. When Adam and Eve desired God's knowledge, they plucked the apple from the Tree of Life and were separated from the Peaceable Kingdom forever.

The mushroom is far less exalted, rooted in the underworld, dirty. Its odor is dank and rotten. But, driven by the darker of
Freud's two energies—named for Thanatos, god of dissolution, negation, destruction, and death—we stoop and pick it up.

If we consume a magic mushroom while we are uneasy, depressed, or in some other gloomy emotional state, the experience can backfire. Once in a while, a mentally unstable user might suffer post-traumatic stress disorder or long-term hallucinatory flashbacks. Centuries ago, the Roman emperor Nero declared
Amanita muscaria
“the food of the gods” because it offered passage to a paradise from which the mushroom eater could return. But his rule (and that of many other emperors) was marked by decadence and sexual debauchery—a slouching toward the eventual fall of the empire. Legendary fatalities from mushrooms abound; the Buddha, for example, or the Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI, who died of amatoxin poisoning after eating a dish of what he thought were tasty sautéed mushrooms. His death led to the War of Austrian Succession. Said Voltaire, “This dish of mushrooms changed the destiny of Europe.”