Fact ' Shrooms send Santa and his reindeer flying?

Hallucinogens mushroom amanita muscaria. Harvard biologist Donald Pfister claimed that both the people and the reindeer eat the mushrooms. "Flying reindeer - are you fly, or are your senses say fly because you hallucinate are?" he says.

Children across the country on Christmas Eve are all nestled snug in their beds to hear the classic poem "The Night Before Christmas." There is a parallel tradition on the Harvard campus in this time of year. Students and faculty to collect the history of Santa Claus and hear the psychedelic mushrooms.

I stumbled across this curious blend of biology and Fable during a winter campus visit to Harvard's Farlow reference library and herbarium a few years ago.

Curator and Biology Professor Donald Pfister greeted me in a majestic room, filled with Vitrines, Folio and portraits. There is even a look in the room, the 1.5 million copies of fungi, algae, lichens, mosses and Liverworts a short tour - no time.

As we prepared to leave, we we turned a corner and there, in one case, glass was an odd choice of artifacts: Christmas decorations shaped as red mushrooms with white spots on you, amanita muscaria, by name. A Santa Claus there, dressed in his traditional red robe with white trim.

While I in this screen enigmatic, Pfister turned to a colleague, Anne Pringle, and mentioned that he planned his annual lecture on the connection between amanita muscaria make – which happens to be - a fungal hallucinogens and Santa.

Flying reindeer or 'Flying' reindeer?

He said that back in 1967 an amateur of scholar named R. Gordon Wasson published a book argued that amanita muscaria was used in ancient ceremonies of shamans in the far East. Other scholars, the then in should be noted that in Siberia, both were the shamans - and the reindeer - known that to eat these fungi. Human and animal alike hallucinates.

You can see the Christmas connections Pfister said.

"This idea [is] berserk to go the reindeer because you amanita muscaria food," said Pfister. "Flying reindeer - are you fly, or are your senses say fly because you hallucinate are?"

See the Christmas decorations here, he said.

"We use — the Western world at least - these have [the] amanita muscaria Christmas decorations or other mushrooms."

And finally, he said, check the color schemes.

"So here is a red mushroom with white spots." "And Santa Claus in red with white trim was dressed."

Add click all and what do you get? Pringle the points connected: "People fly." "The mushroom into a happy personalization named Santa."

She said with a laugh, but the connection between psychedelic mushrooms and the Santa story has gradually even in woven popular culture, at least the popular culture of Mycology, mushroom science.

Each year when Christmas close, Pfister collects students in its introductory Botany class and no doubt with a mischievous twinkle in his eyes, tells the story of Santa and the psychedelic mushrooms.

Zoom AP

A copy of 1860 Clement Clarke Moore's poem "A visit from St. Nicholas," starting: "'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the House / no creature was stirring, not even a mouse."

AP of a 1860 copy of Clement Clarke Moore's poem "A visit from St. Nicholas," starting: "'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the House / no creature was stirring, not even a mouse."

The real Santa?

Now, some say that certain stories to wondrous are easy to make this magical season in question. Others have no such contrition, like Ronald Hutton, a history professor at the University of Bristol.

"If you look at the evidence of Siberian shamanism, I've done" Hutton said "see that shamans deal spirits by sled travel, not the rule with reindeer, rarely took the mushrooms to retrieve trances, didnt have red and white clothes."

And not even run around gifts distribute.

"The Santa we know and love, was invented by a New York, it's really true" Hutton said. "It was Clarke Moore, the work of Clement in New York City in 1822 who sanctify a medieval suddenly into a flying, reindeer-drive from the Northern spirit transformed Midwinter."

And Moore, brought to life that true love Santa Claus in his poem, "A visit from St. Nicholas," otherwise known as "The Night Before Christmas."

Science

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