In Days of Old they Went Out on the Piss. Literally!

 

Pardon the colloquial expression but were ya on the piss! These days we don’t take that phrase literally unless of course you happen to be asking Bear Grylls, but there was a time when people did actually drink urine in order to get…am… well …pissed! Consuming hallucinogenic mushrooms is a dangerous pastime but the risks could be reduced by first allowing the mushrooms to pass through a digestive system. Accordingly, people in Siberia many moons ago would first feed the mushrooms to reindeers and then drink the animals’ urine.

You will recognise the mushrooms from depictions in children’s fairy tales. These particular mushrooms are called Amanita Muscaria, commonly known as the fly agaric or fly amanita as it was once used as a household fly killer.

The mushrooms could be eaten without first putting them through a digestive system but carried a higher risk of suffering nausea as the mushrooms are difficult to digest. Amanita Muscaria are also expensive and as you will see later the poor drank the golden nectar of richer people.

The Irish writer Oliver Goldsmith noted in his book Citizen of the World (1825)…

The mushrooms are prepared by boiling, by which the water acquires an intoxicating quality, and as a sort of drink whitish the Tartars prize beyond all Other. When the nobility and ladies are assembled, and the ceremonies usual between people of distinction over, the mushroom broth goes freely round; they laugh, talk double entendre, grow fuddled, and become excellent company.  The poorer sort, who love mushroom broth to distraction as well as the rich, but cannot afford it at the first hand, post themselves on these occasions round the huts of the rich, and watch the opportunity of the ladies and gentlemen as they come down to pass their liquor, and holding a wooden bowl, catch the delicious fluid, very little altered by filtration,  being still strongly tinctured with the Intoxicating quality. Of this they drink with the utmost satisfaction, and thus they get as drunk and as jovial as their betters.

Filip Johann von Strahlenberg, a Swedish prisoner of war in the early eighteenth century, reported seeing Koryak tribespeople waiting outside huts where mushroom sessions were taking place, waiting for people to come out and urinate. When they did, the warm, steaming tawny-gold nectar was collected in wooden bowls and greedily gulped down. The Amanita muscaria effect could apparently be recycled up to five times in this manner, and remarkably, was less likely to cause the vomiting often associated with the direct ingestion of the mushroom itself.

Because of its red and white appearance, the association with reindeer an urban myth has grown up that this has links to the legend of Santa Clause. However, Scott Hajicek-Dobberstein, researching possible links between religious myths and the red mushroom, notes, "If Santa Claus had but one eye [like Odin], or if magic urine had been a part of his legend, his connection to the Amanita muscaria would be much easier to believe."

Now I predict that when someone asks you ‘are ya going on the piss’, you will forever more think of this story!