The use of mushrooms for ritualistic purposes is well-known and documented among the Ob-Ugrian cultures native to western Siberia. To this linguistic-cultural sphere belong the indigenous Siberian Khanty and Mansi who are traditionally shamanistic cultures (Kálmán, Bela, 1988). Eurasia is a culturally rich place and mushroom symbolism can be found among many cultures and their arts, foods, medicine and religious practice.

Research concerning the possible religious and ritualistic use of mushrooms has been ongoing for many decades, with one of the most notable scholars being American ethnomycologist R. Gordon Wasson.

Wasson postulated a hypothesis on the widespread use of the Fly Agaric, Amanita Muscaria, or also known as Mukhomor in northern Eurasia.

He suggested that the food and deity Soma which is mentioned in the Vedic Sanskrit hymns, the Rigveda, was the red-capped fairy-tale mushroom, Amanita Muscaria (Wasson, 1957, 1971).

Furthermore, Wasson also made it his life's work to explore the use of mushrooms and their religious and ritualistic contexts in both Eurasia and the Americas.

It is known throughout Russian Siberia that the Fly Agaric likes to grow near or right by the white-shining birch trees. Wasson suggested that since the birch tree is the 'tree of shamans' among several Eurasian tribes and cultures, the Mukhomor is a gateway into the dimensions of the tripartite cosmic-axis, world-tree or world pillar that the shamans use to travel the spirit-worlds. Amanita M. could be hereby understood as a spirit-helper. (Wasson et al, 1986).

In western Eurasia, however, Amanita Muscaria was used to induce alternative states of consciousness and ecstasy, particularly at certain sacred sites such as the Rivers of Wasjugan and Tremjugan as ethnographic research by Karjalainen (1927) has shown (Alexandra Rosenbohm, 1991, p. 36). The mushroom plays a role in traditional shamanistic ceremonies and is regarded as something much more than just a fungi.

When the mushroom spirit (Khanty, pong) takes possession of the human mind, the mushroom spirit pong works closely together with the shaman...

For example, in Russia, the indigenous Pim River Khanty ingest Amanita Muscaria as a transmitter and spirit, whose purpose and role is to be a mediator between the shaman beating the drum (in Khanty, kuijyp) and the spirit-world. When the mushroom spirit (Khanty, pong) takes possession of the shaman, the mushroom spirit pong works closely together with the shaman by returning and answering messages back and forth from the shaman to the spirit-world and vice versa (Anzori Barkalaja, 2002, p. 92; Graham Harvey, 2007, p. 225).

Among the Chukchi and the Koryak, there is a belief in half-mushroom, half-human beings that serve as guardians and may help them to enter the other-worlds. These mushroom beings are likewise depicted in several petroglyphs as human-fungi hybrids.

We can only speculate as to what the human-mushroom hybrid beings could have meant, but there's a possibility that the use of Amanita Muscaria, understood as a spirit and mediator, had its role in the creation of these petroglyphs. As some researchers have argued, it may have been likely that the use and knowledge of this particular mushroom was spread from Siberia into Europe via trade and cultural contacts (Dennis Loffe, 2020. p. 150).

Mushroom symbolism, however, appears in many European folktales from Ireland and Germany to the regions of European Russia...

In European folklore, the Slavic Baba Yaga has been most famously depicted as a Witch surrounded with Fly Agaric mushrooms as painted by Ivan Bilibin in 1902. Baba, which means ‘female ancestor’, ‘grandmother’, has been linked to a widely distributed myth known as female ancestor who functions as a Mistress of Animals, watching over the forest as a kind of guardian spirit that is in charge of the cycles of life and death, regeneration and balance in nature.

In Baltic mythology, there is a belief that Baba Yaga can shapeshift into animals such as frogs, a goat or a mare. She pecks at humans like a bird and the hut that she lives in, hidden deep in a dark forest, was built from bird legs (Gimbutas, 1999, p. 206). There are two theoretical questions that arise here:

Did the Slavic people also use mushrooms in their rituals, just as their Eurasian neighbors did?

Or was there significant cultural contact and transmission as a result of, for instance, trade?

More importantly, it has been proposed that the origins of Baba Yaga may have been influenced by western Siberian cultures such as the Khanty, creating a cultural-mythological hybrid deity deriving from ancient Baltic and Ugric beliefs, including the myth of a red-capped mushroom and water birds. (Frank Dugan, 2017, p. 16). In other words, the beliefs regarding wise elderly women who engaged in rituals and who knew about the use of mushrooms have been influenced by both European and western Siberian cultures (see also Dugan, 2008).

As Richard Schultes and German anthropologist Christian Rätsch write, the fly agaric might once have been employed all the way across Siberia and into Europe as a means of cultural transmission and trade (2001). The question is: where must we look to find evidence for its use and its proposed spiritual or religious significance? 

Let us now turn to Scandinavia. While Wasson indeed found the use of Amanita M. all over Eurasia, from western Siberia to the far eastern edges of Siberian Russia, the use of mushrooms in pre-Christian European cultures has been previously little explored.

Aside from the Slavic Baba-Yaga, who has been depicted alongside with mushrooms, little is known whether mushrooms played any role in ritualistic, medicinal or spiritual use in western Europe.

There are, for example, depictions of religious symbols which have been found in Sweden. These symbols are depicted almost exclusively on bronze razors from the region of Bohuslän.

Reid. W. Kaplan has put forward the idea that the person depicted is not holding the world-tree, as has been suggested previously, but a well-rounded, spherical kind of object. Another found object, a so-called bronze hanging vessel from Öland, Sweden, likewise appears to depict mushroom-motifs.

Therefore Kaplan asks, if we must consider the possibility of the ritualistic or religious use of mushrooms in pre-Christian Scandinavia? (Kaplan, 1975, p. 76). As he further writes it is difficult today to reconstruct the meaning and interpretation of these mushrooms in ritualistic practice or cosmological significance.

However, he mentions a Swedish custom that was practiced until recently and was part of the midsummer bonfires. Indeed, so-called midsummer fires are widely known in the neighboring countries, including Norway and Denmark. 

In 'Balder the beautiful', the renowned British anthropologist Sir James Frazer studied fire-festivals across Europe and noted that there was one highly interesting custom called Baldr's Balefire. This bonfire took place on St. John's Eve.

The fires are kindled at dusk on hills while people dance or jump over the fire. In Norrland, Frazer writes, people gather nine different types of wood to burn during the fire. Of particular interest is the custom of throwing a toad-stool into the flames.

The toad-stool (bäran) is said to protect against trolls and evil-spirits who roam the landscape on that very night. If a troll is present, the troll will manifest itself as a he or she-goat. The mushroom, we learn in this context, provides protection during a time of midsummer when all kinds of spirits are believed to be present (James Frazer, 1923, p. 172, Znamenski, 2007, p. 137). Was that toad-stool Amanita Muscaria?

The question that remains is: Is there much more to the widespread symbolism of mushrooms in folklore and fairy tales and, more importantly, how can we find out about it?

References:

Anzori Barkalaja (2002). Sketches towards a theory of shamanism: associating the belief system of the Pim river khanties with the western world view. Tartu University Press.

Dugan, Frank. (2017). Baba Yaga and the Mushrooms. FUNGI Magazine. 10. 6-18.

Dugan, Frank. (2008). Fungi, Folkways and Fairy Tales: Mushrooms & Mildews in Stories, Remedies & Rituals, from Oberon to the Internet. North American Fungi, 3, 23-72. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.2509/naf2008.003.0074

Frazer, J. G. (1923). The Golden Bough: A study in magic and religion. Abridged ed. London: Macmillan.

Gimbutas, M., & Dexter, M. R. (1999). The living goddesses. Berkeley: University of California Press

Harvey, Graham and Wallis, Robert eds. (2004). Historical Dictionary of Shamanism. Historical Dictionaries of Religions, Philosophies, and Movements Series, 77. Lanham, MD, USA: Scarecrow.

Kaplan, R. W. (1975). The Sacred Mushroom in Scandinavia. Man, 10(1), 72–79. https://doi.org/10.2307/2801183

Kálmán, Béla (1988). "The history of Ob-Ugic languages". In Denis Sinor (ed.). The Uralic Languages: Description, History and Foreign Influences. Handbuch Der Orientalistik (Abt. 8, Vol. I). Leiden: BRILL. pp. 395–412.

Ioffe, Dennis. (2020). The Grand Narrative of the Mukhomor: “Communist Dunaev” as a Mushroom Eater in Mifogennaia Liubov’ Kast: Understanding the Ethnobotanical History of the Younger Group of Russian Conceptualists. The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review. 47. 135-184. 10.30965/18763324-04702002.

Rosenbohm, Alexandra (1991). Halluzigene Drogen im Schamanismus. Mythos und Ritual im kulturellen Vergleich. Berlin. Publisher: D. Reimer.

Schultes, Richard Evans; Hofmann, Albert; Ratsch Christian, (eds.). 2001. Plants of the Gods: Their Sacred, Healing, and Hallucinogenic Powers. Rochester: Healing Arts Press.

Wasson, R. Gordon; Kramrisch, Stella; Ruck, Carl; Ott, Jonathan (eds.). 1986.Persephone’s Quest: Entheogens and the Origins of Religion. New Haven (CT): Yale University Press.

Wasson, Valentina Pavlovna; Wasson, R. Gordon. 1957. Mushrooms, Russia and History. New York: Pantheon Books.

Wasson, R. Gordon. 1971. Soma: The Divine Mushroom of Immortality. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

Znamenski, A. A. (2007). The beauty of the primitive: shamanism and the Western imagination. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press.