FIELD JOURNAL
Old stories,
red caps.
Folklore, history and botany of Amanita muscaria - no health claims, no instructions, just the record.
From Mario to the Mushroom Emoji 🍄, how the fly agaric conquered pop culture
A power-up, a Smurf village, a keyboard glyph on two billion phones: why the one mushroom everyone can draw is Amanita muscaria, and nobody notices.
How to Store Dried Amanita Muscaria - an archivist's guide
Air, light, heat and humidity are the four thieves of a dried specimen. Here is how a fly agaric cap keeps its brick-red colour and its structure for years.
The Red Cap in Church and Parlour - frescoes, icons, and Victorian England
From the Plaincourault fresco to Alice's caterpillar: eight centuries of the fly agaric hiding in plain sight - in chapels, manuscripts, icons and Christmas cards - and the fierce scholarly fight over what it means.
Was Santa a Mushroom? The red-and-white theory, weighed
Flying reindeer, a red-and-white visitor, gifts through the smoke-hole: the famous theory that Santa Claus is a folk memory of the fly agaric - and what folklorists actually say.
Where fly agaric grows in Canada - shield, mountains and coast
A habitat map for Amanita muscaria: the trees it partners with, the ground it likes, the two-week window when the red caps rise, and the corner of British Columbia our own caps come from.
Amanita muscaria & its look-alikes, a field ID guide
How to recognize the fly agaric with confidence, and how to tell it from the caps that copy its colour, a botanist's checklist, not a forager's.
Baba's Forest - Slavic whispers
Мухомор: the fly-killer at the window, the trickster of the fairy tale, and the red cap that Slavic folk art never stopped painting.
Reindeer & Drum - Siberia's red cap
The steppe's oldest field note: how Koryak and Evenki tradition carried the fly agaric through winter, and why a red-and-white gift-giver still flies with reindeer.
Odin's Wager - the Norse thread
Where the sagas keep their mushrooms, why the berserker theory refuses to die, and what the north actually remembers about red.