Most people have some passing familiarity with the theories about amanita muscaria and indo-european culture – well, these folks made a funny song and video about it. Cmon, it’s cute.
Erowid on amanita, images of amanita muscaria, discussions board about amanita muscaria, soma, soma shamans, and most famous of all, and now rare, Gordon Wasson’s Soma, Divine Mushroom of Immortality.
What’s the saying – “Keep the Saturn in Saturnalia”. Holidays, rituals and ritual behaviors, festivals and symbolic activities are one of the ways we humans orient ourselves as groups, familes, tribes, and herds to the flow of time and change here on this surface of our planet. It’s an oppurtunity to practice conscious religion, religion as an art form, or even to try practicing what I have called “final religion”.
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Even psychology today covers the Santa-Muscaria connection…
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/sex-dawn/201112/have-merry-trippy-christmas
“This all seems rather innocent and arbitrary – unless you know something about people like the Sami, Koryak and other reindeer-herding people who live in the far north of Europe and Siberia. Clearly, the Christmas tradition has roots in many different places and times: Christianity, pagan winter solstice celebrations, old Germanic mythologies, etc. But these aspects of Santa mythology seem to come directly from these reindeer-based cultures.
The key to understanding Santa is Amanita muscaria – the well-known red and white mushroom with a long history of shamanic use from Western Europe to Siberia. I am convinced that Santa is essentially a shaman that has quietly yet forcefully entered into the consciousness of Western culture”