The popular picture is simple: in Siberia, the fly agaric was the shaman's sacred mushroom. That's only half the story. The ethnographic record describes shamans using it, but it also describes ordinary people eating it at gatherings, trading dried caps and, famously, drinking the urine of those who had eaten it. The Amanita muscaria of Siberia was a ritual tool, a social intoxicant and a trade good, sometimes all in the same community.
Amanita muscaria use in Siberia is well documented but wasn't only shamanic. Mall Saar's 1991 review in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology, drawing on published literature and decades of ethnographers' fieldwork, concluded that peoples with the tradition used the mushroom "for several purposes", mainly as a psychostimulant. Accounts collected by Wasson (1968) describe lay use among the Koryak and Chukchi, trade in dried caps and urine drinking; Merova and colleagues' 2008 lab work confirmed muscimol and ibotenic acid can be detected in human urine, which makes those reports chemically plausible.
This article sorts out who used the mushroom, how they took it, what the sources can and can't tell us, and why the people who wrote those sources shaped the story as much as the mushroom did.
Was the Fly Agaric Only a Shaman's Mushroom?
No. Saar's 1991 review, which surveyed the "cases and rules" of consumption across Siberia and north-east Asia, says the peoples who used it were aware of its different psychotropic qualities and used it for several purposes. It describes the mushroom as a psychostimulant affecting several mental functions at once.
That wording matters, because it doesn't fit the romantic image of a single sacred rite. The ethnographic accounts gathered by R. Gordon Wasson in Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality (1968) include shamans using the mushroom to reach trance, but also ordinary people taking it at gatherings and social occasions. In some communities, it was valuable enough to trade.
Why does the shaman-only version persist? Partly because it's the more dramatic story. Partly because Wasson himself had a thesis to argue, that the fly agaric was the sacred Soma of the ancient Indian Rig Veda, and a sacred Siberian mushroom supported it better than a party drug did. And partly because later popular writers, as the cultural historian Andy Letcher points out in Shroom (2006), tended to romanticise the "shaman's mushroom" well beyond what the sources say.
Who Used It, and How Did Their Traditions Differ?
The best-known accounts concern peoples of north-eastern Siberia, especially the Koryak and Chukchi, with further evidence from the Khanty of western Siberia. Saar's companion 1991 paper on the Khanty places the fly agaric in their folk medicine alongside several other fungi.
The Koryak
The Koryak of Kamchatka and the neighbouring coast feature heavily in the accounts Wasson collected. They describe the mushroom eaten by shamans, but also by ordinary people at gatherings, with dried caps prized and exchanged.
The Chukchi
The Chukchi, reindeer herders and coastal hunters of the far north-east, appear in the same body of accounts. The reports describe dried caps being obtained through trade, which fits Saar's picture of a mushroom with social and economic value, not only a ritual one.
The Khanty
The Khanty live in the forest zone of western Siberia. Saar found that they eat only around ten of the many local fungi, and that several are used for specific purposes. Her paper describes folk-medicine uses of Amanita muscaria alongside the tinder fungus Fomes fomentarius, chaga (Inonotus obliquus), Phellinus nigricans and puffballs. Our fly agaric in folk medicine article covers the wider European picture.
| Type of use | What the sources describe | Main source |
|---|---|---|
| Shamanic or ritual | Trance and divination by specialists | Accounts collected by Wasson 1968; Michelot & Melendez-Howell 2003 |
| Lay and social | Eaten at gatherings by non-specialists | Wasson 1968; Saar 1991 ("several purposes") |
| Psychostimulant | Used for its stimulating effect on several mental functions | Saar 1991 |
| Trade | Dried caps exchanged where the mushroom was scarce | Accounts collected by Wasson 1968 |
| Folk medicine | One of several fungi in Khanty remedies | Saar 1991 (Khanty paper) |
How Was the Mushroom Taken?
Mostly dried. The accounts describe caps dried and then chewed, swallowed or taken in a drink. Saar's review surveys these "ways of administration" among the peoples with the tradition. Fresh mushrooms appear far less often in the reports, which makes chemical sense, even though nobody at the time knew why.
Drying pushes ibotenic acid, the harsher excitatory compound, towards muscimol, the calmer one. The traditional preference for dried caps may have produced that conversion in practice long before the chemistry was understood in the 20th century. That's an important distinction: people can do something effective without knowing the mechanism, and modern retellings sometimes credit them with knowledge they couldn't have had. Our ibotenic acid vs muscimol and drying guides explain the chemistry.
Michelot and Melendez-Howell's 2003 review in Mycological Research places the start of human use in ancient times and ties it to mysticism. How ancient, exactly, isn't something the Siberian record can tell us, because the written accounts only begin with outside observers.
Does the Urine-Drinking Story Hold Up Chemically?
Yes, it's plausible. Merova and colleagues at Palacký University in Olomouc published a liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry method in 2008 that isolates and identifies ibotenic acid, muscimol and muscarine in human urine, and found it sensitive enough to analyse the urine of intoxicated patients.
That matters for the Siberian reports. Travellers' accounts from the 18th and 19th centuries, collected by Wasson in 1968, describe people drinking the urine of someone who had eaten the fly agaric in order to feel its effects too, sometimes passing it along to more than one person. To outsiders, it read as the strangest detail in the whole tradition, and some later writers doubted it.
The chemistry doesn't prove every account is accurate, and the 2008 paper doesn't say what share of a dose leaves the body unchanged. What it shows is that the active compounds really do appear in urine. So the practice isn't physiologically absurd. It's a way of stretching a scarce, traded mushroom further, which fits a setting where dried caps had value.
What About the Reindeer?
The accounts Wasson collected link reindeer with the fly agaric too, including reports of reindeer seeking out the mushroom and being drawn to human urine. For herding peoples, the animals and the mushroom belonged to the same everyday world and the same stories.
There's a genetic footnote here. Geml and colleagues' 2006 DNA study in Molecular Ecology concluded that the ancestral population of Amanita muscaria likely evolved in the Siberian-Beringian region, then spread across North America and Eurasia. So the mushroom isn't a visitor to Siberia. It's arguably native to the very region where its best-known human traditions were recorded.
The reindeer are also where Siberian ethnography meets modern myth, most famously in the claim that Santa's flying reindeer descend from Koryak mushroom lore. That theory rests on imagery rather than documented transmission, and it's a separate story from the Siberian record itself.
Who Wrote These Accounts, and Can We Trust Them?
Mostly outsiders, and that shapes everything. The earliest written descriptions come from 18th- and 19th-century travellers, officials and missionaries passing through Siberia, followed by professional ethnographers in the late 19th and 20th centuries. Saar's review combined that literature with information from ethnographers working in the region in recent decades.
Each group brought its own lens. Travellers wanted striking stories and tended to describe mushroom use as drunkenness or vice. Missionaries had reasons to present native religion as dark or foolish. Ethnographers were more careful, but they still worked through interpreters and saw only what their hosts chose to show them. Wasson, collecting all of this in the 1960s, was building a case for his Soma hypothesis, and he selected and framed accordingly.
None of that means the accounts are invented. It means we should read them the way a historian would: as reports filtered through outsiders' expectations, not as transparent windows onto Koryak, Chukchi or Khanty life. The voices largely missing from the record are those of the users themselves. Our panther cap history article makes a similar point about the gap between documented and assumed use.
What Does Modern Toxicology Add to the Picture?
It supports Saar's description of the mushroom as a stimulant as much as a sedative. Vendramin and Brvar's 2014 study of Slovenian poison-centre cases found Amanita muscaria patients were more often confused (26 of 32) and agitated (20 of 32) than panther cap patients, a difference they linked to muscaria's higher share of excitatory ibotenic acid.
That's a useful reality check on modern marketing, which often presents the fly agaric purely as a calming mushroom. The Siberian record, the toxicology and the chemistry agree that it's more complicated: stimulating and disorienting for some people, sedating for others, and heavily dependent on preparation. Moss and Hendrickson's 2019 Oregon review, which recorded five intubations among 34 cases, is a reminder that the effects can be serious outside a traditional setting too.
Frequently Asked Questions
Did Siberian shamans really use Amanita muscaria?
Yes, but they weren't the only users. Ethnographic accounts collected by Wasson in 1968 describe shamanic use, and Saar's 1991 review in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology confirms the peoples with the tradition used the mushroom for several purposes, including as a psychostimulant. Lay use at gatherings and trade in dried caps are also described.
Which Siberian peoples used fly agaric?
The best-known accounts concern the Koryak and Chukchi of north-eastern Siberia. Saar's separate 1991 paper documents the fly agaric in the folk medicine of the Khanty of western Siberia, alongside other fungi including chaga and tinder fungus. Saar's broader review covers several peoples across Siberia and north-east Asia.
Is the urine-drinking story true?
It's reported in 18th- and 19th-century travellers' accounts collected by Wasson, and it's chemically plausible. A 2008 study by Merova and colleagues developed a method that detects ibotenic acid, muscimol and muscarine in the urine of intoxicated patients. That shows the active compounds are excreted in urine, though not how strong such urine would be.
Did Siberian peoples eat fresh or dried fly agaric?
Mostly dried, according to the accounts, with caps chewed, swallowed or taken in a drink. Drying converts much of the harsh ibotenic acid towards the calmer muscimol, so the traditional preference had a chemical basis, even though that mechanism wasn't understood until the 20th century.
Is modern fly agaric use the same as Siberian tradition?
No. Siberian use sat inside specific social rules, relationships and knowledge that Saar's review describes as "cases and rules" of consumption. Buying dried caps today doesn't recreate that context. Modern users also face different risks, and poison-centre data such as Moss and Hendrickson's 2019 review show real harm can follow careless use.
Shop Amanita Muscaria
If you want to explore the mushroom itself, Amanita muscaria Grade A dried caps cost €55 for 50 g and €79 for 100 g. One honest note: buying dried caps is modern use, not ritual use, and the Siberian traditions above can't be bought in a jar. Check your local law first; more formats are in the Amanita muscaria collection. Free shipping on orders over €50.
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- Fly Agaric in Folk Medicine: Traditions of Different Peoples
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- What Is Amanita Muscaria: History, Types and Biology
- Ibotenic Acid vs Muscimol
- How to Dry Fly Agaric: Methods and Tips
- Fly Agaric vs Psilocybin Mushrooms
- Interesting Facts About Amanita Muscaria
Sources
- Saar M. Ethnomycological data from Siberia and North-East Asia on the effect of Amanita muscaria. J Ethnopharmacol. 1991;31(2):157-173. PubMed 2023425
- Saar M. Fungi in Khanty folk medicine. J Ethnopharmacol. 1991;31(2):175-179. PubMed 2023426
- Michelot D, Melendez-Howell LM. Amanita muscaria: chemistry, biology, toxicology, and ethnomycology. Mycol Res. 2003;107(Pt 2):131-146. PubMed 12747324
- Merova B, Ondra P, Stankova M, Valka I. Isolation and identification of the Amanita muscaria and Amanita pantherina toxins in human urine. Neuro Endocrinol Lett. 2008;29(5):744-748. PubMed 18987593
- Geml J, Laursen GA, O'Neill K, Nusbaum HC, Taylor DL. Beringian origins and cryptic speciation events in the fly agaric (Amanita muscaria). Mol Ecol. 2006;15(1):225-239. PubMed 16367842
- Vendramin A, Brvar M. Amanita muscaria and Amanita pantherina poisoning: two syndromes. Toxicon. 2014;90:269-272. PubMed 25173077
- Moss MJ, Hendrickson RG. Toxicity of muscimol and ibotenic acid containing mushrooms reported to a regional poison control center from 2002-2016. Clin Toxicol (Phila). 2019;57(2):99-103. PubMed 30073844
- Wasson RG. Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; 1968.
- Letcher A. Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom. London: Faber & Faber; 2006.