Strange mushroom is latest wellness kick

In a snow-covered village on the northern outskirts of Moscow, Russia’s most famous mycologist, Mikhail Vishnevsky, poured me a cup of light psychoactive mushroom tea. But it wasn’t psilocybin, the psychedelic drug in so-called “magic” mushrooms, but instead the world’s most charismatic fungi, the red and white fly agaric mushroom, known to scientists as Amanita muscaria. While both shrooms contain trippy molecules, their effects can be profoundly different.

“Fly agaric, unlike other mushroom or plant-based psychedelics, immerses you so deeply that you can’t tell what you’re seeing from the real world,” he explained. “With psilocybin you see things too, but you understand that you’re in a room. There’s the microwave, it might look funny but it’s still there. Fly agaric turns the world away from you completely and replaces it with something else entirely. You can be sitting at the table in this room and around you there’ll be a forest, and a path you must follow. So your experience is far stranger than you’d have from other plants or mushrooms. For you, this new world seems real, and this can be very scary for first-timers.”

With its iconic bright red cap dotted with white spots, Amanita muscaria, is probably the most recognizable fungi in the world: the default mushroom emoji on WhatsApp, and a power-up for Mario on his quest to rescue Princess Peach. With his books and lectures, Vishnevsky almost single-handedly started a massively popular trend of Russians microdosing or trying to invoke lucid dreams and mystical experiences with fly agaric. He's the closest Russia has to a Rick Doblin, Paul Stamets, Michael Pollan or Terence McKenna — some of the patriarchs of the so-called psychedelic renaissance.