Psychedelic Urine Drinking and Sycophantic Toad Eating

My friend Lucy Cooke, aka the Amphibian Avenger, is in the Amazonian jungle to investigate the deadly Chytrid fungus that threatens the very survival of the world’s frogs and toads.

 

Hearing of her mercy mission, I felt compelled to discover whether amphibians and fungi had ever before crossed scatological streams, as it were. I was delighted to find this description of tea drinking amongst the Turkic Tartars of the 18^th century. Just as in Great Britain at the time, tea was highly prized and its consumption was initially limited to the richer members of Tartar society. The difference between the Tartars and the British, however, is that the Tartars made their tea from psychedelic mushrooms and the poorer Tartars would catch and drink the urine of their social superiors. This uriposia was because the psychoactive elements in the mushroom tea would still have a considerable effect when consumed a second time.

 

The Russians who trade with [the Tartars of Koraki] carry thither a kind of mushroom… These mushrooms the rich Tartars lay up in large quantities for the winter; and when a nobleman makes a mushroom feast all the neighbours around are invited. The mushrooms are prepared by boiling, by which the water acquires an intoxicating quality, and is a sort of drink which the Tartars prize beyond all other. When the nobility and the ladies are assembled, and the ceremonies usual between people of distinction over, the mushroom broth goes freely round, and they laugh, talk double-entendres, grow fuddled, and become excellent company. The poorer sort, who love mushroom broth to distraction as well as the rich, but cannot afford it at first hand, post themselves on these occasions round the huts of the rich, and watch the opportunity of the ladies and gentlemen as they come down to pass their liquor, and holding a wooden bowl, catch the delicious fluid, very little altered by filtration, being still strongly tinctured with the intoxicating quality. Of this they drink with the utmost satisfaction, and thus they get as drunk and jovial as their betters.

(Oliver Goldsmith – The Citizen of the World: Letter XXXII 1762)

 

The amphibious reference comes further down in this same passage.  Its connection to fungi is somewhat spurious but fascinating nonetheless. Oliver Goldsmith (1730-1774) refers to sycophants as toad-eaters (from which we get the word ‘toady’). This usage first appears in 1629 and derives from the fact that all toads were thought (erroneously) to be poisonous. Quack doctors would hire an assistant to eat a toad in front of an audience and then ‘cure’ him of the poison; so unpleasant was the job of this assistant, that to be a toad-eater became synonymous with the type of person who would do anything for a superior. Of course, some toads are indeed psychoactive...

 

 ‘Happy nobility!’ cried my companion, ‘who can fear no diminution of respect unless seized with strangury, and who when drunk are most useful! Though we have not this custom among us, I foresee that if it were introduced, we might have many a toad-eater in England ready to drink from the wooden bowl on these occasions, and to praise the flavour of his lordship’s liquor. As we have different classes of gentry, who knows but we may see a lord holding the bowl to the minister, a knight holding it to his lordship, and a simple squire drinking it double-distilled from the loins of a knighthood?’

(Oliver Goldsmith – The Citizen of the World: Letter XXXII 1762)

Dramatic Claudio from Amphibian Avenger on Vimeo.

Comments

[penny]

I like the linking of frogs and shit. A must for any contemporary commentator!

[Alistair]

The mushroom in question is the Fly Agaric. When grazed upon by reindeer (it's one of their favourites) their piss also becomes psychoactive. A possible source of the idea of flying reindeer and a whole new outlook on Santa Claus' outfit in red and white. Santa was a shaman, it's all becoming clearer now.