What's with the Mushrooms?
Some thoughts as we begin a new year
Welcome to Long Live the ABB: Conversation from the Crossroads of Southern music, history, and culture.
For many, the end of one year/beginning of another is a time of reflection—looking back at the past year and/or considering possibilities in the new.
In all honesty, the idea of a new year somehow inaugurating a new me has never really hit home. But what has, for whatever reason, is the winter solstice, the darkest day of the year. There’s something about the rhythm that the days get longer1 for six months. With that comes the warmth of spring and summer—the summer solstice, the longest day of the year. And the cycle begins anew.
Wintertime Blues2
I’ve long attached meaning to the holiday season from a faith perspective, the Christian celebration of Jesus’s birth. Only recently have I even begun to unpack my own burden of expectations this time of year.3
I’d long witnessed family members struggle with the holiday season—roughly Thanksgiving through New Year’s for my family. My younger brother Brian, whom I’ve mentioned before, struggled mightily with drug and alcohol addiction for most of his life. It seemed like each time he got sober for any appreciable amount of time, he’d fall off the wagon around Christmastime. The cycle went on for years.
Brian had been sober five years when he overdosed in December 2019. Four months later, he took his last, fatal dose.
The season leading into and immediately out of the winter solstice can be difficult for a lot of people. It was only last year that I realized I’d become one of those people.
I’m genuinely not sure how that happened. But I do remember sometime in the twenty teens thinking, “Damn, it’s dark at like 430 around here4!” Noticing that, then it started bothering me each year. Such that my wife got me a light therapy lamp last Christmas.
Combine that with the grief I felt (feel) losing my parents a decade earlier than I expected to. It was January 2012 when my mother had a pathological fracture of her hip (cancer literally destroyed the bone and it crumbled); six weeks later she died of lung cancer. Dad was diagnosed with ALS the week of Thanksgiving 2014 and passed two years and two weeks after Mom.
And Christmas 2014 is when I learned I didn’t get a promotion I’d long strived for. All, it seems, leading me to tense up at the holidays.
I share much of this as it helps me process. But it also occurs to me some of y’all are going through similar seasons in your own lives and can relate, which is at the very core of the humanities and my idea for conversation from the crossroads of Southern music, history, and culture here on Substack.
And on a more personal front, as one who has fought anxiety for most of my life and has had bouts of depression, I want to destigmatize mental health. If you’re reading this and need help, call 988 Lifeline at any time. You’ll be connected to trained crisis counselors who are there to connect you to resources.
You matter. Never forget that.
So what’s with the mushrooms?
Funny you should ask…
Whatever the reason for my seasonal malaise, Christmas around my family is a joyous time. And I was determined this year to soak that joy in as much as I was able. For the most part, I was successful.5
One of my mom and dad’s greatest legacies was Christmas. It was an all-out affair in our house and a truly magical time in my childhood. (The Mrs. and I have done our best to give the same to our kids. I feel like we’ve been successful in that endeavor.)
Sometime in the early 1980s, Mom started giving us an ornament each year. It was a tradition she got from my Aunt Charlotte.6 These would comprise our collection when we started our own families.
That collection has grown exponentially over the years as my family uses ornaments to document all kinds of things related to either personal interests or family experiences. Our trees are books we get to rewrite each year. I even enjoy taking them down and reminiscing about them, which is what I’m doing here.
I look forward to trimming the trees7 each year because it gives me the chance to relive these memories—and add new ornaments for all kinds of little reasons.
Since there are few official Allman Brothers Band ornaments, I’ve taken to collecting mushroom ornaments instead. I posted quite a few of them this year on social media, leading my mom’s cousin to ask “What’s with the mushrooms?”
My first answer, and the truest one for me, is that the mushroom is the Allman Brothers Band’s original logo.8
Here’s why, according to Gregg Allman in 1975:
“The mushroom became our symbol because of a big bag of psilocybin that some cats laid on us a while back when we were really hungry. We were really grateful for those mushrooms.”9
Years later, in his memoir (2012), he elaborated on their importance to the band’s creative process.
“We’d get up in the morning, have a little breakfast, and then we each pop half a pill. Our shit would be set up, somebody would name a key, and we’d start jamming, and that really spurred on our creative process.
The mushroom logo for our band came out of this early experience.”10
But really, he wrote,
“That mushroom logo wasn't screaming, ‘Hey, people, go take psilocybin.’ It was screaming, ‘listen to the fucking Allman Brothers.’”
I’m Bob Beatty and I approve of this message.
Mushrooms and Christmas
That’s reason 1 for mushroom ornaments: listen to the Allman Brothers.
But just this year, I learned of a new meaning for mushroom ornaments, a specific type of mushroom—red with white spots: the Amanita muscaria, the “Holy mushroom.”
Some scholars have connected the Santa Claus myth to the Amanita muscaria, also called the Fly Agaric. “It's become commonplace and is generally believed that the whole Santa Claus myth is a folkloric tradition of shamanic travel,” Boston University classicist Carl A.P. Ruck says, “and that reindeer are notorious for liking to eat these mushrooms and become inebriated on them.”11
Digging a little deeper, I learned the winter solstice ceremony of the indigenous people of the North Pole—Koryaks and Kamchadales in Siberia and the Sami of Finland—had similar traditions to our own Christmas celebrations.
Shamans dehydrated the mushrooms on the branches of the pines where they grew or put them socks and hung them by a fire. Once they’d been detoxified, they’d ingest the mushrooms.
Another way to consume them was urine. Yep, pee. Reindeer love Amanita muscaria and eat it without issue. Shamans would collect and drink the reindeer urine as it had been filtered of all but its hallucinogenic effects.12
Each winter solstice, shamans would visit homes and perform rituals using the “Holy mushroom.” They even donned red-and-white suits and often had to enter through the roof of a snowed-in family’s yurt.13
Let’s see…
Pine trees with red and white gifts (mushrooms) underneath
Socks hung by a fireplace
A magic man in a red and white suit who:
hangs out with reindeer
visits each year in the middle of winter
enters by the roof
brings gifts (mushrooms)
Does any of this sound familiar?
Yeah, some of it makes at least as much sense as the entire Santa Claus myth does.
And this doesn’t even take into account the German roots of mushroom ornaments. Does its origin as a good luck charm connect to these psychedelic rituals? Or it could just be that they were red and white mushrooms that stood out from the snow underneath the branches of the pine trees?
I’ve long wondered about the mushroom tradition at Christmastime and the Amanita muscaria story sounds plausible enough. (I have a similar curiosity about the ubiquity of mushrooms on 1970s home decor.)
Having said that, I honestly just looked into this whole concept this year and though I found a bunch of mentions, only one contained citations14 and they all reference the same couple of sources including Rusk, a professor of classics, and anthropologist John A. Rush. I’ve read neither of their books.
Anyway, here are some “Holy mushroom” ornament on my trees—all purchased before I learned that Santa Claus was originally a mushroom. 🍄
Langiappe
I can’t say for sure the Allman Brothers Band were on mushrooms when they played Ludlow Garage in Cincinnati on April 4, 1970, but at the end of “Hoochie Coochie Man,” Duane says the band was gonna take a break and drink some “electric wine”—which honestly could mean psylocibin, LSD, mescaline—I’m 100% sure it wasn’t the Holy Mushroom. 🍄
Either way, there’s something truly psychedelic in this 45+-min version of “Mountain Jam” that I just ABBsolutely love.
Give it a listen.
A bonus for sticking it out this long
As a thank you gift for being a reader, I’d like to send a bit of swag to some selected readers. Reply to this email with your address if you’d like to participate and I’ll accommodate as many as I can.
Thanks for reading. Please tell others.
Big fan of Daylight Savings Time and wish we’d just stick with it because I am a fan of more daylight.
Not the excellent 2000 album documenting Warren Haynes’s 1999 Christmas Jam, which is well worth checking out.
Nashville-ish.
One of the tricks I learned is from Chris Barron, lead singer of the Spin Doctors, on his Threads feed: Breathe in (count to 5); breathe out (count to 7). It’s a mini-meditation. Works wonders.
She wasn’t really my aunt, only in the Southern sense as an adult your family is close to.
Yes, trees. There are five. Two in our family room one for our “personal” ornaments and the other for our family’s adventures together. One is in the den, it’s Mom’s Florida Gator tree. One daughter has always had one in her room. I have one in my basement office—what I call my “work” tree of places I’ve visited in my work travels working for and with museums and historic sites.
Wrote about the history of the logo here:
Bill Douglas, “Gregg Allman: Laid Back Tattoo Intact,” Creem April 1975.
Gregg Allman, My Cross to Bear.
Some accounts I’ve seen state they do the same with human urine—recycling the same dose via pee for 5 different “trips.”
Shout-out to the entire Yurt crew at Roots Rock Revival!