Alice and the Mushroom

Alice gazed quizzically at the mushroom pondering what the hookah-smoking caterpillar had just told her: “One side will make you grow taller, and the other side will make you grow shorter.”

As Alice – the heroine in 1865 children’s classic Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – was only three inches tall at that point, she fervently hoped she’d nibble the side that would make her taller. 

The mushroom in the popular story written by Lewis Carroll, is believed to be based on fly agaric. Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane in the psychedelic ’60s tapped into Alice’s encounter with the mushroom in the song “White Rabbit”, an early rock staple that alludes to fly agaric’s psychotropic qualities.

Fly agaric grows over a vast circumpolar range. It is fungi royalty. Known in scientific circles as Amanita muscara, it has insinuated itself into the cultural fabric of our world as thoroughly as its mycelium threads insinuate themselves into the roots of forest trees. 

Think mushroom and the image conjured is often of the red subspecies of fly agaric, spangled by white patches. These are the mushrooms that proliferate in fairy tales and fantasy books. Red fly agarics generally grow in Asia. 

Our fly agarics – same species, different subspecies – are usually orange or yellow and like their more popular Asian cousins they are beautiful fungal standouts. 

Some cultures have used fly agaric for millennia, both for health issues and to connect with the spirit world. Stories, perhaps apocryphal, describe Siberian reindeer avidly consuming the mushrooms, seeking ungulate highs.

There is burgeoning interest in the use of psychoactive mushrooms like fly agaric to ease health issues like insomnia, depression and PTSD. The indigenous Siberians may have been on to something. 

Best, of course, to leave these investigations to expert mycologists (fungi scientists). Though few deaths have been attributed to eating fly agaric mushrooms, tasting one as Alice did can provoke violent illness.  

So, let’s leave these lovely enigmatic mushrooms in the ground and ponder their fascinating connections with trees, and to the imaginations of authors and song writers.