Vintage Botanical Print - Amanita muscaria

The iconic archetypal mushroom from fairy tales, Super Mario and the emojis on your phone, Amanita muscaria is perhaps the most instantly recognisable of all mycological species.

This is a quality reproduction vintage print of Amanita muscaria, Fly Agaric, from an illustration in John Stephenson and James Morss Churchill's Medical Botany (1836).

Found throughout the northern Hemisphere and introduced and now naturalised throughout the southern Hemisphere, Amanita muscaria is a mycorrhizal fungus, growing in symbiotic mycorrhizal associations with tree roots, often pines, birch or oak where it assists the uptake of nutrients and minerals from the soil.

First described by Carl Linnaeus in 1753 as Agaricus muscarius it was renamed Amanita muscaria in 1783 by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. It has however, had a long association with humans, in particular with the peoples of Siberia and the Sámi peoples of Scandanavia. Its powerful hallucinatory and intoxicant properties were probably first noted observing its effects on reindeer. Amanita muscaria contains the alkaloids muscimol and the neurotoxic ibotenic acid together with muscarine and muscazone. Ibotenic acid is a powerful agonist of glutomate and GABA receptors and its toxic properties and water-soluble toxins are only reduced after a process of parboiling and draining the resultant liquids has been performed several times.

In 1968, Gordon Wasson proposed that the Soma mentioned in the Rg Veda was derived from Amanita muscaria and that its ancient use in the Hindu Kush had traveled down with the peoples who migrated there from the Caucasus mountains.