The fly agaric is a very special plant spirit for me. It entered my life around 1,5 years ago, and I have only loved it more, the more I connected with it.

You have probably heard that it´s super poisonous and deadly.

If you pay attention in this world, you will notice that many good things are kept secret 🗝️

When we´re young, we already learn to stay away from this beautiful red mushroom with its white little dots.

Interestingly though, you still see so many children books decorated with this mushroom. In the world of fairy, nymphs, gnomes and trolls, the fly agaric can be commonly seen 🍄

It´s the mushroom that cannot be missed.

It stands out from the crowd, being so different than all other plants and mushrooms around it (one of the many beautiful wisdoms from Amanita).

So let’s dive into the secret – is it really deadly?

Anything at a certain dosage can be deadly. So yes, if you would eat about 1kg of fly agaric, it is possible to die from it. To compare: you only need 100g of salt to die from, and even too much water can potentially kill you. It´s very very difficult to eat 1kg of mushroom, so you can at least not accidentally die from it.

Amanita Muscaria is a psychoactive plant – which in low doses is only very subtly noticeable.

It was an important, perhaps even the most important shamanic plant in Europe.

Amanita was often taken in ritual contexts to open up to the world of mysticism. It played a huge role in Siberian shamanism (where the word “shaman” originally came from). Shamans would collect them in the woods, dry them and connect with otherworlds through this plant.

Many spiritual traditions and groups collected their wisdom’s through connecting with Amanita Muscaria.

I can only recommend you Amanita Muscaria to smudge as an incense.

However, I personally connect with the fly agaric by drinking it, either with water, oat milk or in my cacao. The taste is very “mushroomy” and earthy.

I usually connect with it as a microdose of 0.5 – 2g. I started with 0.5g and slowly increased it. With around 15g, the mushroom has a really strong psychoactive effect, not comparable to a magic mushroom trip. It has quite a different effect / energy and is really very intense and challenging in higher doses. It can be difficult to navigate even for experienced shamans and people who have a lot of experience with psychoactive plants.

At a microdose, I personally feel the effects mild and subtle, similar to cacao or Blue Lotus (the latter you can also purchase from me HERE if you’re interested 𓆸 ). It´s only in higher doses that the psychoactive effect is noticeable.

To me, Amanita feels like a beautiful guide for inner work.

Amanita intensifies my dreams, it speaks through subtle energies within me. For me it has an incredibly wise, ancient, calming and grounding energy.

The plant spirit feels almost as old as Earth itself.

What I love about Amanita Muscaria is that it only grows wild, it cannot be cultivated. All tries to cultivate this mushroom have failed. It only grows in its own terms, in symbiosis with certain trees like birch, pine, oak and spruce.

This means, the fly agaric absorbs minerals and water and delivers them to the tree, while the tree in turn provides the mushroom with important nutrients.

So Amanita also carries the energy of the wild, the raw, the earthy. The untamed.

The mushroom part that you can see above the earth, the red cap and white stem, is actually only a small part of the actual mushroom. It´s called the fruit body, and its purpose is to spread spores around, so the mushroom can spread and grow elsewhere. It´s basically the sexually reproducing part of the mushroom.

Which means, this part of the plant also carries fertile, reproductive energy.

Underneath the earth, there is the mycelium: a net of fungal threads which can be huge. I can highly recommend watching the documentary “Fantastic Funghi” to dive deeper into the nature of mushrooms. It´s one of my favorite docus ever and I promise you’ll become fascinated with mushrooms after you watch.

One more interesting fact about the fly agaric is that like other mushrooms too, it’s neither a plant nor an animal, but a species on its own.

This is an amazing podcast episode to dive deeper into Amanita.

Interested in connecting with the plant yourself? You can order the wild collected Amanita that I always use HERE.

For shipping outside of Germany, please contact me at hello@siljajanina.com

Important disclaimer: if you ever want to collect it by yourself, be aware that every single mushroom has a completely different effect intensity. They can vary immensely, some being 10 times (!) as strong as others – which is why you should always collected many mushrooms, dry them (!), and then mix all of them together so you get an “average”. Only ever collect mushrooms when you have enough expert knowledge on how to properly collect, distinguish them and dry / process them.

If you have questions, message me! I´d also love to hear about your personal experiences of connecting with Amanita 🍄

If you don’t know how to connect with this mushroom for the first time, I have a beautiful Amanita Rose Ceremony & a Plant Spirit Meditation in my Membership.