Culture - Irish History of Religious and Non-Religious Shroom Use

[Alfa]

As far as I understand Ireland (like the UK) has a long history of magic mushroom use, which goes back to the Celts, fairytales and possibly even druids. I am pretty sure that magic mushrooms have been used in religous settings troughout Irish history. They may still be.

Please add to this topic everything you can find on the history of magic mushroom use in Ireland, either outside or in religious setting.

Please do not forget to note sources for your information.

[Abrad]

About P. Semilanceata

http://www.shee-eire.com/Herbs,Trees...Factsheet1.htm

This fungi was widely used by the ancient Druids of Ireland. It was used in the potion taken by the Celtic warriors before they went into battle. It was also used in all astral projection spells. In the sweat houses to help communicate with the Earth and Universe or the Otherworld.

http://www.shee-eire.com/Herbs,Trees...garic/main.htm

This section is about the use of the Fly-Agaric mushroom, for medicinal and spiritual use, by the Celtic and Pre-Celtic people of Ireland. This is probably the most well known fungi because of it's association with the fairy folk, was a very important fungi to the Druids of the Celtic tribes. It was referred to as the 'Flesh of the gods', or 'Food of the Gods' because they believed that they were in direct communication with the Earth and the Universe when they consumed this Fungi. Although all the Celtic people consumed Liberty-caps, the Fly-Agaric was usually only taken by the Druids and other magic users. It was considered too powerful for those not trained in the higher levels of the mind.
This Fungus contains some very powerful psychotropic compounds. These fungi are the fruit of an Organism that can live to be thousands of years old. Most of this organism is the root system with only the fruit being seen here in the photos. The fruit of this organism is well known but few realise the fruit found over a certain area will usually all be from the one organism.

Apparently the druids would eat liberty caps and sit in these sweathouses, they are dotted all over the countryside especially in areas where mushrooms grow.


http://www.irishmegaliths.org.uk/sweathouses.htm

Are Irish sweathouses a continuation of a prehistoric tradition of inhaling consciousness-altering smoke, recently overlaid with the prophylactic function of saunas ?
Cannabis is not likely to have been used in Ireland for a millennium at least, but a much more seriously-numinous means of widening the awareness is still to be found all over the island: Psilocybe semilanceata, or "magic mushrooms"....

[Nature Boy]

"In the months of July, August and September when the mushrooms would be plenty there used to be great fun at the wakes. Nearly every lad who was going would have his pocket full of mushrooms. They would all wait then until about twelve o'clock when the Rosary and the supper would be over and they would all crowd around the fire. All the women would be gone to bed or gone home and they would have the place to themselves. They would all then take out their mushrooms… When they would be cooked to their satisfaction the fun would begin. There would be a regular row over the whole affair. They would not know which of them was their own and they would burn their fingers trying to get them out of the flames. The people of the house would know well enough that they would be at this game and they would hide the frying pan when they would be going to bed."

Source: National Folklore Collection in UCD (NFC 460: 118)

Reputation Comments on this post:

	Good info & thanks
	Interesting find

[Alfa]

To what time frame does that relate nature boy?

[Nature Boy]

Not sure but pretty old I imagine. The National Folklore Collection is mainly based on information before Christianity came to Ireland and even before the written word was used here I think. So we're looking at sometime before 400 A.D. in this case. Unlikely to be before 500 B.C. at a guess.

[Abrad]

Originally Posted by Nature Boy

So we're looking at sometime before 400 A.D. in this case. Unlikely to be before 500 B.C. at a guess.

Surely the fact that the rosary was mentioned would indicate this was after Christianity came to Ireland. Interesting find though. The seems to be little information available on this topic.

[Trebor]

There is a sweat house a couple of miles from my house and I have been told it dates to 320 A.D..

[Nature Boy]

You're right. I completely missed that. It's probably sometime after 400 A.D. then which is a good thing because with this country's superioristic views on how great the church, the text could hold more weight in the debate seeing as it's dated from a church-dominated era and won't be disregarded as some shamanistic heresy. It still seems quite old though. I doubt it's from anytime before 1000 A.D.

[Alfa]

Some important questions, that would be nice to get answered:
- What was the earliest date of mushroom use recorded?
- Which groups used mushrooms?
So far: Celts & druids.
- Which religions used mushrooms?
- Do any of these religions still excist?

[D.U.M.B]

I have heard quite a few things about fairy rings and mushrooms.

I have no sources at the moment but from what I know fairy rings are rings in the crass that are slightly lighter and browner in colour than usual green grass and well in or around the edges of the ring mushrooms grow.

I know there's one near me which I visited once and it was quite strange. Let me do some research and I'll be back

[Abrad]

Here is more information on the possible connection between sweathouses and psilocybe mushrooms. If the widely believed lore about what these structures were used for is true it would indicate that mushrooms were used in Ireland thousands of years ago.

http://www.irishmegaliths.org.uk/sweathouses2.htm

There is a great deal of literature on the effect and use of various kinds of mushroom (Psilocybe spp. and Fly Agaric). The appearance of the formerly ubiquitous "magic mushroom", Psilocybe semilanceata, fits rather well with descriptions of pixies, leprechauns and other 'little green men'. A more gross mushroom-spirit is the modern Santa Claus, dressed in the colours of Fly Agaric, associated with reindeer (from whose urine the unmetabolised but detoxified active constituent was drunk bv the shamans of sub-arctic reindeer-herdsmen, who enters down a chimney and brings gifts. The entrance to many circumpolar dwellings is also the smoke-hole, as in Irish sweathouses. In our culture of acquisition the gifts are meaningless objects of desire rather than real numinous Gifts, and the shaman figure (who degenerated to Father Frost in Westernised Russia and Scandinavia) coalesced with St Nicholas, the Three Magi and the ancient gift-tradition of Saturnalia.


If Irish sweathouses were used like the secularised hammam and sauna, why were they not built close to stone-built dwellings and their turf-stacks ? Why were they, as reported, used infrequently - mostly in the Autumn ? Were they used exclusively by one sex ? Does one report of an "itinerant bath-master" indicate a psycho-therapeutic use supervised by a travelling doctor-shaman or Wise Man ? And why, in a country which, until the use of chemical fertlisers, was in October and November (the time of The Gap of the Year, Samhain, Hallowe'en) carpeted with Psilocybe semilanceata, also known as Liberty Caps, is there no record of their use ? These mushrooms are still plentiful on marginal land and on the edges of chemically 'fertilised' agricultural land. But there is a pattern of "collective forgetting" of mind-expanding plants and their extracts by cultures which inevitably adopt mind-numbing drugs such as alcohol. Thus the identity of Soma was lost, and only inactive "substitutes" were identified.

It seems unlikely (though not impossible) that Psilocybe mushrooms were not consumed up to the time of the Famine - but of course the agonising and protracted trauma of the hungry years and the halving of the population by death and emigration affected Irish behaviour and attitudes to Wild Food or "famine food" - as nutritious nettles, rose-hips, elderberries and so on are still considered. After the Famine, only grocery-store victuals were eaten. Even now, eating blackberries is far from universal in Ireland: those who pick them tend to be English, other foreigners, or local children paid (a penny a pound, as I remember in the 1960s) to gather them.


For the decline of Irish traditions right across the spectrum, the Famine was Pelion piled upon the Ossa of Catholic Emancipation of 1829. This resulted in the rapid application to Ireland of a very urban-English Victorian-puritan 'respectability' that ran counter to many of the old ways and practices which had survived until the Penal days - practices which were bowdlerised and Christianised when they could not be suppressed. Ireland became for the first time - and remained until the end of the 20th century - a highly-conservative society which had also lost its traditions, and whose mores came from the right wing of the Catholic church. This is in contrast to Italy, for example, where all sorts of "pagan" survivals (from frog-cults and wolf-veneration to bleeding statues) can still be found in the centre and south, while sceptical atheism is almost the norm in Tuscany and the north.

So, after the Famine, few would have claimed or admitted to remember the eating of Psilocybe, which, it should be noted, were free, abundant and (through drying) available all year, and produce a state of consciousness far above that induced by alcohol. The world-wide phenomenon of the replacement of natural and fairly benign plants by manufactured, expensive and toxic alcohol is a sad paradigm for the take-over of the world by toxic "turbo-capitalism".

In the same way, 'pagan' practices such as painting or capping phallic stones, using cure-stones (which were promptly and cleverly dubbed curse-stones) some of which still survive, wild dancing (for which the Irish were famous) and the veneration of Fairy Thorns were discouraged.

If dark, chthonic sweathouses had a psycho-therapeutic function stretching back at least to Bronze Age times, we can be sure that they too would have been discouraged by the twin powers of Church and State. By the time that uncasual enquiries started (after the First World War) they had fallen into desuetude, and their use had been erased (like much else) from the collective memory.

Small wonder that enquirers were fobbed off with glib explanations of autumnal prophylaxy and 'sweating out the bad' as Mrs McLoughlin expressed it - though sweating out the bad might well be more than a picturesque metaphor - particularly since Mrs McLoughlin averred that it was only the women in her family who used the secluded sweathouse.

By the dawn of 'Irish Independence' very few if any people knew how they had been used, for in Ireland the rupture of handed-down knowledge, especially from mothers to daughters, occurred earlier than anywhere else in rural Europe. To find out the used and properties of wild plants we have to go to English sources which are still relatively rich - for in England there has been no Great Forgetting beyond that of the universal secret history of the ignored, eschewed, female and oppressed.

How much arcane knowledge died in the hedges with Famine victims, or was carried across the ocean to America and deliberately forgotten there, we will never know. What we can be sure of is that there has been in Ireland a Great Disremembering which acted as undertaker to the Great Hunger, and may still not have run its course. And although sweathouses still lurk in secret places and leprechaun-hatted Psilocybes still grow, their use and possible connection remain as obscure to us as the mind-set of Mesolithic hunter-gathers, the cosmology of Celtic kinglets, or the ecstasy of Atlantic anchorites.

[Mr. Giraffe]

Good work so far, folks.

Here's my tuppence worth...

I once had occasion to ask a highly respected Irish shanachie or lore-master whether, in his opinion, the ancient Druids possessed "magic mushrooms" -that is, pookies or psilocybin mushrooms. He said that they did, and if he is correct (along with scholars who have come to suspect the ancient presence of Psilocybe in the Old World) then Wasson's Amanita can no longer be considered the only fungal candidate for Irish Soma.

From http://www.csp.org/chrestomathy/plouging_the.html

Referencing 'Ploughing the Clouds: The Search for Irish Soma' by Peter Lamborn Wilson.

Also worth noting that the Gaelic slang for fairies and mushrooms are the same: pookies. Mushroom use, fairies, poetry and music making were all of the same source. Trip and go 'away with the fairies' to make beautiful music.

Halloween is one of these traditions that persists to some degree.

Many people think that Hallowe’en is an American phenomenon. In fact, the festival has its roots in Ireland and became popular stateside due to the large number of Irish who emigrated to America at the time of the Great Hunger in the 1840’s, bringing with them many of the Irish folk traditions.


It was not a festival that honoured any particular god, rather it was a time when the barriers between the human and spirit worlds were broken down. It was considered that the entire spectrum of nonhuman forces could roam the earth at this time. The Celts believed that when people died, they went to a land of eternal youth and happiness called Tír na nÓg (Land of the Young). They did not have the concept of heaven and hell that the Christian church later brought into the land. Samhain was a time when the ‘veil between the worlds’ was at its thinnest and the living could communicate with their beloved dead in Tír na nÓg.

The Celts did not have demons and devils in their belief system. Faeries, however, were often considered hostile and dangerous to humans as they were seen as being resentful of man taking over their land. On this night, it was believed that they would trick humans into becoming lost in the faery mounds, where they could be lost forever. On the eve of Samhain (October 31st), many of the people would imitate the faeries and go from house to house begging for treats. Failure to supply the treats would usually result in practical jokes being played on the owner of the house. Hence the modern-day phrase ‘trick or treat’. With all this lunacy lurking, is it merely a coincidence that this is also the perfect time in Ireland to harvest magic mushrooms?

From http://www.backpacker.ie/issues/article.php?id=38


These mushroom using ancestors were extremely advanced, and constructed many monuments which still stand today. One example is Newgrange, which is among the oldest structures in the world, and is remarkable for its sophistication.

The most famous of Irish megaliths which has been excavated so far is the giant cairn at Newgrange, on the banks of the river Boyne (the Goddess Boánd) in County Meath. Its Irish name, Brú na Boinne, means the House of Boánd. This monument which has been radio-carbon dated to 3,250 BCE, is shown in the pictures above and left. It measures over 100m. in diameter, and contains a 19m. passage leading to a tall central corbelled chamber, thought to be the oldest roofed chamber in the world. This is surrounded by three side-chambers. At the moment of sunrise on the Winter Solstice, a beam of sunlight enters inside the cairn through the aperture which you can see above the entrance in the photo on the left, and penetrates down the passage all the way to the central chamber where it illunimates a triple-spiral petroglyph, shown below.

It came as a surprise to find that the builders of these megalithic monuments may have used a system of proto-Pythagorean geometry based on the Megalithic Yard, and that they developed their astronomical skills so as to be able to compute the complex variation of the lunar ecliptic known as the lunar "wobble," which was not rediscovered by science until the sixteenth century!

From: http://www.global-vision.org/dream/dreamch4.html

It's also worth noting that Newgrange actually looks like a mushroom!

Reputation Comments on this post:

Interesting post

[Lunar Loops]

Hmmm, interesting stuff folks, but SWIS is not actually convinced of the link between the Celts and the use of 'magic mushrooms'. Far be it from SWIS to raise a negative note here (as it REALLY is the last thing SWIS wants to do), but try as SWIS might the majority of evidence he finds to link the two is very weak to say the least. Take one of the above mentioned articles "Irish Soma By Peter Lamborn Williams", he tries to find a link, but what he comes up with, by his own admission, is tenuous to say the least. The whole piece can be found here http://www.hermetic.com/bey/pw-irishsoma.html.

Also there is this from 'Seeking the Magic Mushroom' from Robert Gordon Wasson:

"As the years went on and our knowledge grew, we discovered a surprising pattern in our data: each Indo-European people is by cultural inheritance either "mycophobe" or "mycophile," that is, each people either rejects and is ignorant of the fungal world or knows it astonishingly well and loves it. Our voluminous and often amusing evidence in support of this thesis fills many sections of our new book, and it is there that we submit our case to the scholarly world. The great Russians, we find, are mighty mycophiles, as are also the Catalans, who possess a mushroomic vocabulary of more than 200 names. The ancient Greeks, Celts and Scandinavians were mycophobes, as are the Anglo-Saxons."

The whole piece can be accessed here: http://www.imaginaria.org/wasson/life.htm

SWIS will endeavour to pay the library a visit and see what he can dig out.

[Alfa]

Originally Posted by shroomonger

The ancient Greeks, Celts and Scandinavians were mycophobes, as are the Anglo-Saxons."

This can easely be proven untrue for the Anglo-Saxons. The word mushrooms even comes from the Anglo-Saxon word 'muscheron'.

[Alfa]

Here's the explanation for the Irish mycophobia:

For the decline of Irish traditions right across the spectrum, the Famine was Pelion piled upon the Ossa of Catholic Emancipation of 1829. This resulted in the rapid application to Ireland of a very urban-English Victorian-puritan 'respectability' that ran counter to many of the old ways and practices which had survived until the Penal days - practices which were bowdlerised and Christianised when they could not be suppressed. Ireland became for the first time - and remained until the end of the 20th century - a highly-conservative society which had also lost its traditions, and whose mores came from the right wing of the Catholic church. This is in contrast to Italy, for example, where all sorts of "pagan" survivals (from frog-cults and wolf-veneration to bleeding statues) can still be found in the centre and south, while sceptical atheism is almost the norm in Tuscany and the north.

So, after the Famine, few would have claimed or admitted to remember the eating of Psilocybe, which, it should be noted, were free, abundant and (through drying) available all year, and produce a state of consciousness far above that induced by alcohol.

It can be no coïncidence that Ire has such a rich folklore. Just like the other countries which have liberty caps growing.

[Lunar Loops]

Don't get me wrong, I firmly believe that mushrooms were used in ancient Ireland, but the problem lies in finding any hard evidence of this. The Celts, for example, did not really keep written records and especially not of their religious ceremonies as this was held to be sacrilege. They transmitted their beliefs orally. Sadly most of that has been lost in the mists of time. So where does that leave us? Scrabbling around in their myths and arts looking for the merest hint of evidence. It poses a problem when attempting to write any such article because a lot of what you may come up with will be supposition that could easily be argued against by anybody with an opposing viewpoint.

Alfa, I had already read the evidence you gave above for the lack of written evidence in Ireland (it was from one of the links I looked at) and whilst it provides a possible explanation, it is once again only supposition.

I wish the journalist in question the VERY best of luck with this article, it is not an easy one to write in terms of convincing evidence.

[Lunar Loops]

From http://www.astroarchaeology.org/context/history.html :

Similarly, the story of Newgrange tells of the Dagda or "Lord of Great Knowledge" who wins Bóann as his lover – and her mound as his residence – by sending her husband Elcmar on a one-day journey which he experiences as lasting for nine months. During this single day of magically-expanded time, she makes love to the Dagda, conceives, and gives birth to their son Óengus, the God of Love. As Brennan points out, "it is curious that his birth takes place during a magical lengthening of the day at Newgrange, because the entrance of the sun's rays into the chamber there occurs at winter solstice and therefore marks the beginning of the actual lengthening of the days in the sun's yearly cycle." Later on, Óengus, wins the mound from his father by a similar twist of time. The Land of the Sídhe, sometimes called Tír na nÓg (the Land of Youth), is also located outside of time. Various myths retell the fate of mortals who travelled there, often as lovers of their beautiful women: always warned never to return to this world, those who did always found that centuries had elapsed here during their brief stay there. This motif of travel between the two worlds is the universal shaman's journey, in this case very likely involving the ingestion of the psychoactive Liberty Cap mushrooms (Psilocybe semilanceata) which abound in Ireland, and which are colloquially known in Gaelic as the "Púca", i.e. fairies.

Once again though the article deals in supposition (strong as this may be....especially the warping of time).

[Lunar Loops]

This little piece from the Fortean Times (http://www.forteantimes.com/articles/180_carroll2.shtml) :

This was a quiet but substantial image makeover for Britain’s fungi. Previously, in herbals and medical texts, they had been largely shunned, associated with dung-heaps and poison; in Romantic poetry the smell of death had still clung to them (“fungous brood/coloured like a corpse’s cheek”, as Keats put it). Now, a new generation of folklorists began to wax lyrical about them, including Thomas Keightley, whose The Fairy Mythology (1850) was perhaps the most influential text on the fictional fairy tradition. Keightley gives Welsh and Gaelic examples of traditional names for fungi which invoke elves and Puck, and at one point wonders if such names refer to “those pretty small delicate fungi, with their conical heads, which are named Fairy-mushrooms in Ireland, where they grow so plentifully”. This description is a very good match for the Liberty Cap; though Keightley seems unaware of its hallucinogenic properties; he was struck simply by the pixie-cap shape of its head. In Ireland, the Gaelic slang for mushrooms is ‘pookies’, which Keightley associated with the elemental nature spirit Pooka (hence Puck); it’s a slang term which persists in Irish drug culture today, although evidence for a pre-modern Gaelic magic mushroom culture is elusive.

[Lunar Loops]

Unfortunately, I have been unable to find anything more than this and what has already been posted by others. The majority of other references (and these are not many) tend to relate to amanita.

[Nature Boy]

I agree with shroomonger's sentiments more-or-less. The evidence we have is sketchy at best and is easily opposable. I'll keep looking around for stuff but beyond what's already been put up, I don't see much more, nothing significant anyway.

[Trebor]

Note my sig and try to crack the Yeats code.

IU'll publish something on this very soon.

[Flimmar]

I've read somewhere, that the scandinavian vikings used to crumble Amanita Muscaria in their ale, as this would make them hallucinate and make them extremely violent. They would drink this brew before raiding England

I'm a bit too tired to make a search, but I will look into it tomorrow.