Merry Mushroom: Ethnomycology of Amanita Muscaria

Name: Merry Mushroom: Ethnomycology of Amanita Muscaria
Start: 2025-09-11T18:30:00+02:00
Location: Centrála

Schedule

Thu, 11 Sep, 2025 at 06:30 pm

UTC+02:00

Location

Centrála | Prague, PR

"Merry Mushroom: Ethnomycology of Amanita muscaria"
Throughout eras of great socio-cultural shift, Amanita muscaria has remained in the hearts and minds of the people in an unending web of continuity, albeit with varied connotations. By what authority did a simultaneously friendly emoji and feared decomposer get it's modern cultural thumbprint? How can this misunderstood toadstool enmesh with todays multifaceted, myco-curious world?
What started out as an intellectual endeavor exploring notions of poison/medicine narratives became, over several years, a personal quest to reconcile with my own lineage, and the significant lore, magic, and pharmakon therein.
Indeed, as Amanita muscaria gains a foothold in the minds of daring entheogen enthusiasts, profit-driven “legal-high” peddlers of the west, and the allopathic medical industry alike, we face the complexity of a semi-regulated entity that has been almost severed from a rich, global folk-knowledge, with minimal clinical research to boot.
This presentation will touch upon:
• Global Amanita muscaria archeology: from Siberian petroglyphs to American art
• The enigmatic soma, the illustrious amrita, and the forbidden fruit: Moving beyond the Wasson & Allegro debates
• Toads, toadstools, lightning deities, and witches: European winter solstice celebrations, and the enigma of true flying ointments
• The significance of fairy tales: Gnomes, smurfs & the preservation of unsanctioned cosmologies
• Myco-chemistry primer: bridging applications of Amanita muscaria from the mythopoetic to the clinical

BIO:
Ash Ritter is an ethnobotanist, herbalist, and writer with over 23 years of study in clinical, traditional, academic, and directly-relational terrains. She is a devotee of curiosity, and especially savors the inquiry of history & mystery through the woven threads of fungi, people, and plants.
One-on-one long term apprenticeships are the cornerstone of her training, with a focus on clinical botanical & naturopathic medicines, Druid herbalism, California-Mexican curanderismo, and urban & wilderness first-aid. Her college thesis focused on the history of funga and flora in rites of passage, and altered states as evolutionary technology. Over the years, Ash’s research has honed in on the ethnobotany and ethnomycology of her wild west United States homelands, and the entheogenic traditions of her Bohemian ancestry.
Ash lectures internationally, and was recently mentioned in High Times Magazine “…her content on the mysterious Amanita muscaria mushroom merits recognition as some of the most thoroughly researched and exhaustively compiled content on the ethnomycology (folk traditions) and chemistry of this psychoactive fungus…"
While at home in the Sonoran desert, you can find Ash tucked away in her century-old gnome home, counseling and creating in her private practice Black Sage Botanicals. She enjoys tracking deer through the spiny brush, sitting with 200-year-old cacti, and waiting for monsoon season thunderstorms as she writes her first book.

The talk will be in English.