Αλλοκοτον

[LuX]

The peoples we visited are known as Koryaks and Even (or Evensk). The Koryaks live in the central part of Kamchatka in villages separated by forest and tundra, and reachable by us only by helicopter.



The Even person we interviewed, Tatiana Urkachan, is a shaman or tribal healer, living in the town of Palana. Tatiana told us that she was a 7th generation shaman, and that what she knew about healing had come to her by being passed down through the ages. The Koryaks use this mushroom in a variety of ways, including administering it to their old people to insure their sleep at night and their energy during the day. Tatiana, the Even shaman, uses this mushroom externally as a poultice to treat patient wounds, as an anti-inflammatory and analgesic, and internally (by herself) as a device to allow her to visit the spirit world to seek, for example, the cure for an illness (physical, mental, or spiritual), or the place where a successful hunt could occur.

The Koryaks use only this mushroom (Amanita muscaria) and no other.

Across the Sea of Okhotsk, on the continent and on the outskirts of Khabarovsk, near the border between Russia and China, is a tribal people called the Nanai. Although they do not use the Amanita muscaria mushroom, so far as we were able to determine, they do use other mushrooms for ritual purposes. They perform a “bear dance” in the woods. It shows people hunting for mushrooms while watching out for bears. They place the mushrooms they collect, all good edibles, in ritual bowls that they leave as an offering on the ground in the forest. This is supposed to protect them from bears and evil spirits in the forest.

The fly-agaric mushroom is gathered by the young and middle-aged Koryaks in the summer and early fall and dried for use during the winter months primarily by the elderly. It is also used by villagers during feast times, to celebrate the end of a hunting/gathering season, or a wedding. It is eaten dried or soaked in blueberry juice and drunk with the juice. One to three mushroom caps are usually consumed at a time, and there are no reported side effects when taken in this way. Excessive numbers of mushrooms eaten, or mushrooms eaten by people who also drink alcohol, such as vodka, are known to cause 24 hour poisonings. [How the mushrooms are collected, that is, what implement is allowed to be used to unearth the mushrooms, how many are allowed to be (or must be) collected at one time, and the physical condition of the mushrooms being collected, are all critical issues that take precedence over the mere gathering of the mushrooms. The difference between Koryak and western mushroom hunting is, in part, the difference between a sacred (spiritual) act and a profane (materialist or scientific) one: we were told that collecting or using the right mushroom the wrong way can be dangerous.]



The fly-agaric is also used by Koryak musicians who claim that it both enhances their creativity and allows them to perform music all night long. One young Koryak musician we interviewed told us that he had, up to that point, taken the fly-agaric a couple of dozen times before performing in a Koryak musical event. A reindeer herd manager we interviewed told us that some of his herders ate the Amanita muscaria when they had to chase after run away reindeer: the mushroom allowed them to go for long periods of time without stopping to eat or rest.

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