James Delingpole
Tripping Merrily Through the Fields
Shroom: A Cultural History of Magic Mushrooms
By Andy Letcher
Faber & Faber 360pp 12.99 order from our bookshop
We all know the true story of how Father Christmas came to be. It was the work of Siberian shamans high on magic-mushroom-infused reindeer urine climbing in and out of the smoke holes of their yurts, dressed in red-and-white costumes inspired by the distinctive colours of their drug of choice, the Fly Agaric mushroom.
The sad thing is, Andy Letcher tells us in Shroom, this is just another of those legends concocted by hippies to give their recreational drug use a bit more historical and cultural depth. In fact, even before they were exterminated by Stalin, hardly any of Siberia’s shamans used Fly Agaric; none of them wore red and white; they didn’t use sleighs; and they never drank reindeer pee. (Though it’s true – at least according to an eighteenth-century Swedish colonel named Philip von Strahlenberg – that the peasants of Siberia’s Koryak tribe would gather outside rich people’s mushroom feasts and wait for the guests to come outside to relieve themselves so that they could collect the hallucinogenic wee-wee in wooden drinking bowls and enjoy a free trip.)
Nor – despite what New Age travellers might like to think – is there any evidence that the Druids took magic mushrooms. And the notion that the ancient Greeks imbibed them during their secretive Eleusis celebrations (the disclosure of whose mysteries
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'There are at least two dozen members of the House of Commons today whose names I cannot read without laughing because I know what poseurs and place-seekers they are.'
From the archive, Christopher Hitchens on the Oxford Union.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/mother-of-unions
Chuffed to be on the Curiosity Pill 2020 round-up for my @Lit_Review piece on swimming, which I cannot wait to get back to after 10+ months away https://literaryreview.co.uk/different-strokes https://twitter.com/RNGCrit/status/1351922254687383553
'The authors do not shrink from spelling out the scale of the killings when the Rhodesians made long-distance raids on guerrilla camps in Mozambique and Zambia.'
Xan Smiley on how Rhodesia became Zimbabwe.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/what-the-secret-agent-saw