Fly Agaric

Fly agaric is a large mushroom of the genus Amanita, the red-and-white toadstool of picture books. It pushes out of the soil looking like a white egg; as the cap opens from a ball to a flat plate, 5 to 30 cm across, its bright red skin shows through the torn veil, leaving scattered white to yellowish warts, which Kynes describes as white flakes on a red or orange cap. The gills and stalk are white, the stalk ringed and swollen at the base. Native to conifer and deciduous woodland across the temperate and boreal north, it lives in partnership with the roots of pine, oak, spruce, fir, birch and cedar, and has travelled with pine seedlings to the Southern Hemisphere, where it now behaves as a weed in places. Its name comes from the old practice, recorded by Albertus Magnus before 1256, of sprinkling it, powdered, into milk to kill flies. Kynes notes its importance to shamans of Siberia and the Baltic for communicating between worlds, and the Greek belief that it was an ingredient of ambrosia. For centuries Europe counted it a witches' plant, said to go into flying ointment, and a sign of faeries, elves and gnomes, its caps marking the entrance to the elves' realm. Germanic myth has it springing up where foam from Wodan's horse fell, and in nineteenth-century Europe it was a good-luck charm to rank with the four-leaf clover. Cunningham records speculation that some classical mystery religions centred their rites on it.