9 hours ago
(This post was last modified: 6 hours ago by Magical Realist.)
https://davidluke543044.substack.com/p/s...t-your-elf
"It’s probably a relatively rare day that the BBC, that ancient UK news outlet (to clarify for American readers), runs with a headline reporting on The mushroom making people hallucinate dozens of tiny humans. No need to adjust your sets. This is for real.
While the buzz from the Beeb is new, knowledge of this sort of fantastical fungi within the occidental Academy (as it were) has been known of since 1934 with reports of what was called ‘mushoom madness’ by anthropologist Marie Reay following the consumption of ‘nonda’ fungi in Papua New Guinea. The mushroom in question bears a great deal of resemblance to a species recently identified as a bolete (i.e., of the Boletaceae family) named in 2015 as Lanmaoa asiatica in China, where it has been used as a wild culinary mushroom called ‘Jian shou qing’. According to locals the mushrooms left uncooked have long since been known to cause visions of tiny people marching like militia, called ‘xiao ren ren’, or little people.
“One professor from Yunnan, China, recently reported that he tried the mushrooms aware of the effects, and “began looking for xiao ren ren [little people] but was disappointed to find none—until he lifted the tablecloth and peeked underneath, seeing “hundreds of xiao ren ren, marching like soldiers.””
The mushrooms are now the focus of research in China for their potential medical properties, and by a research team in Utah led by and doctoral student Colin Domnauer under the supervision of expert mycologist Prof Bryn Dentinger. I was once lucky enough to share the stage with Bryn as he gave an overview of the ten known wild UK psilocybin-containing mushroom species at his talk for the first public forum on psychedelics to be held at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, where he worked back in 2014. After him I gave a talk about psilocybin and psi, from the CIA to the Sistine Chapel, but that is another story...cont'd."
"It’s probably a relatively rare day that the BBC, that ancient UK news outlet (to clarify for American readers), runs with a headline reporting on The mushroom making people hallucinate dozens of tiny humans. No need to adjust your sets. This is for real.
While the buzz from the Beeb is new, knowledge of this sort of fantastical fungi within the occidental Academy (as it were) has been known of since 1934 with reports of what was called ‘mushoom madness’ by anthropologist Marie Reay following the consumption of ‘nonda’ fungi in Papua New Guinea. The mushroom in question bears a great deal of resemblance to a species recently identified as a bolete (i.e., of the Boletaceae family) named in 2015 as Lanmaoa asiatica in China, where it has been used as a wild culinary mushroom called ‘Jian shou qing’. According to locals the mushrooms left uncooked have long since been known to cause visions of tiny people marching like militia, called ‘xiao ren ren’, or little people.
“One professor from Yunnan, China, recently reported that he tried the mushrooms aware of the effects, and “began looking for xiao ren ren [little people] but was disappointed to find none—until he lifted the tablecloth and peeked underneath, seeing “hundreds of xiao ren ren, marching like soldiers.””
The mushrooms are now the focus of research in China for their potential medical properties, and by a research team in Utah led by and doctoral student Colin Domnauer under the supervision of expert mycologist Prof Bryn Dentinger. I was once lucky enough to share the stage with Bryn as he gave an overview of the ten known wild UK psilocybin-containing mushroom species at his talk for the first public forum on psychedelics to be held at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, where he worked back in 2014. After him I gave a talk about psilocybin and psi, from the CIA to the Sistine Chapel, but that is another story...cont'd."
