There are several compounds in A.muscaria, let me break down some of the myth and bullshit surrounding these fungi.
I am experienced in their use, I go out yearly several times at least, so as to be able to pick enough to last me the remainder of the year and the next year to come until the next growth season.
I value them greatly, as herbal medicine, as psychoactive, and also, for cooking with (they make a great spice for the cookpot when used correctly, for meat dishes especially, beef most of all, then lamb. Pork not so much IMO. Never tried it with chicken.
Amanita is a large family with both poisonous fungi, including some of the deadliest, with edible and very choice fungi, some choice fungi which must be first detoxified, and with psychoactive fungi in also.
Concerning A.pantherina, this is a dangerous mushroom. Its very unpredictable and I will not use it. It contains two other compounds, albeit at low levels, but which are extraordinarily potent (active at low femtomolar concentrations) glutamatergic agonists, I THINK of kainate receptors, but possibly AMPARs. stizolobic and stizolobinic acid, a pair of shockingly potent ionotropic GLuR orthosteric agonists, present more in A.pantherina than in A.muscaria. A.pantherina is overall also a much more potent mushroom, it contains far more ibotenic acid and far more muscimol content when prepared. I have what I'd call a very good working relationship with A.muscaria. But I will not touch A.pantherina, primarily for the unpredictable nature of the two trace-level excitatory carboxylic acid derivatives stizolobic/stizolobinic acid. Wouldn't be too surprising if these too decarboxylated to give orthosteric GABAa agonists (this happens with several other excitatory aminoacids when decarboxylated, for instance the neurotoxins ibotenic acid, and quisqualic acid, NMDA and AMPA agonist excitotoxins respectively, both end up with the pharmacology changing from excitatory glutamate receptor agonists to GABAa agonists which act as competitive agonists at GABAa (GABA binding site). Seems to be a trend, and the two pharmacophores, that of excitatory ionotropic glutamate receptor agonist excitotoxin and parallel decarboxylated derivative being a GABAa agonist at the orthosteric site often pair up.
All the same, A.pantherina is not for somebody who is not intimately familiar, through extremely careful experimentation starting at low dose with that mushroom species specifically. Avoid.
For A.muscaria, in the raw state it's likely to sicken the user and make them feel like hammered dog shit, molded into nails, frozen and hammered into your eyeballs and nutsack.
It needs curing before use, this is easy to do by simply lining baking trays with foil and placing the mushrooms on top, its most useful to take only the caps, these are the most potent, and the caps when cured, and dry are easier and take up less storage space. There isn't much value in the stems unless one is to do an extraction.
Once on the baking trays, just leave the oven door open wedged a tiny crack and the gas flame as low as it can go without going out. Overnight long, slow, low heat bake dry, until dry and seeking to retain as best possible as faithful a rendition of the original coloration of the mushrooms as possible.
There IS a muscarinic agent (agonist) present, muscarine, but in A.muscaria it is present at only tiny levels, not able to do much more than cause some salivation or sweating. It is a quaternary ammonium derivative and does not cross the blood brain barrier, so thus is limited to peripheral action only. A good way to counteract this is to take a buscopan tablet, an OTC med used for IBS, containing a quaternary ammonium derivative of an antimuscarinic, hyoscine butylbromide (aka scopolamine butylbromide) and this too, in this specific form does not cross the BBB and the hyoscine will block any peripheral side effects due to muscarine. Muscarine is not found in dangerous levels in these fungi. It is in SOME families of mushroom, The genus Inocybe is packed with muscarine-laden bad actors and no mushroom from this family ought to be eaten, ever. Most are poisonous, quite a lot of them very much so, and some easily lethally, such as the red staining Inocybe is a notorious killer if eaten, although poisoning is treatable in hospital from these. Also the deadly Clitocybe species C.dealbata and C.rivulosa contain lethal amounts of muscarine, it kills generally by causing severe bradycardia and potentially stopping the heart, as well as typical SLUDGE type symptoms similar to nerve agents, although muscarine does not interact with nicotinic ACh receptors or block cholinesterases, its a peripherally-restricted muscarinic receptor agonist.
Ibotenic acid is an excitotoxic aminoacid neurotoxin, it is thermolabile and broken down via decarboxylation either via first-pass metabolism in the case of traditional peoples drinking shamen's urine (most of a dose of muscimol is excreted unchanged) or during the curing process for people who don't fancy suffering so somebody can drink their piss to get high
Ibotenic acid's target is the NMDA receptor, as an agonist (I.e excitotoxic, causing neuronal death in lab animals, when it is used via microinjection to locally destroy select populations of neurons in specific areas, which express the NMDA receptor)
The targets of muscimol, the decarboxylation product of ibotenic acid are GABAa receptors and the GABAa-rho receptor (as said, mainly located within the retina in the latter case, these have also been classed as GABAc receptors, current terminology is GABAa-Rho however, as the Rho-type receptor is composed of a homomultimeric channel built entirely of GABAa-Rho subunits.
The effects when consuming A.muscaria prepared correctly are biphasic, first there is a stimulatory phase, often accompanied by small motor jerks and twitches, then a deep, deep trance or almost coma-like sleep, where the person could be mistaken at first glance for dead, so still are they. During this latter phase, one dreams intensely, in a hallucinatory and oneirogenic manner.
It tends to leave one feeling very refreshed after such a trance state, like a reboot for the brain, is as best I can word it by analogy. Intensely stimulated and roaring to go, as if one's mental engine just got given a belt of nitrous oxide and switched to a nitromethane/nitroethane blended fuel with their regular gas
In subpsychedelic doses it can provide analgesia, anxiolytic activity and alleviate fatigue. I love a little in tea as a tonic, when feeling ennervated and generally, to use the vernacular,
'pretty damn well buggered'. It can hasten sleep and will provide particular relief from the unpleasantness of being too cold. This last is a most pronounced and powerful effect of the mushroom. I tested the extent once, and walked several miles, maybe 4-5 miles, in a howling blizzard, in the middle of winter (in the UK) with no clothing above the waist bar my facial piercings and a light leather jacket, left unzipped and to fly freely in the storm as I went to a shop designated as an end target to denote range for the purpose of the testing. Ordinarily I suffer a lot of pain walking at all, due to an old injury to my knee, failed surgery on it, to remove broken glass that went through the patellar tendon after I fell on it as a kid and in recovery had it stamped on by a large gang of chavscum, got the shit kicked out of me, along with later, a 40-odd foot drop onto a railway track off a bridge (not intentionally). Lucky to survive that one, let alone be able to walk away without a single broken bone, but it was certainly a rough bloody landing.
And due to the change over time in my walking gait, I got landed with bilateral trochanteric bursitis, the combination of that and the tendon&joint injury, plus failed surgery, leaving me with nerve damage, I usually must take a couple of hundred mg of IM or IV morphine a day plus 80 of oxy IR at least. But that trip to the shop, ordinarily even in clement weather would have been painful unless I'd just shot up, and I'd be dragging myself and feeling very, very sorry for myeself in the process to get there.
After a mug of honeyed fly amanita tea however, served steaming hot, made from the cured mushroom, I found myself able, topless, to force-march myself through a vicious blizzard, through the snowstorm with n'eer a damn given and not a twinge felt. There and back, and feeling as though had I chosen to do so, I would have been able to have run the distance without stopping, other than to enter and leave the shop at the end of the journey and my return home.
Got back home, and found I didn't feel the cold, snowstorm or no, biting winds or no, even shirtless and wearing only the light leather jacket, open to the elements.
It won't of course protect from hypothermia, but in case of cold-induced discomfort it makes for an extraordinarily powerful energy-booster, lending one great stamina, and shielding one from the discomfort. If physical limitations on the body are not surpassed due to this capacity to mask the cold and its effects, then there seems to be no backlash from doing so. No pain merely staved off and held back to come and hit one later, rather just a rock-solid stamina boost.
Also, at night, taken before sleep, in sub-psychedelic-stroke-dissociative funkyness doses, it acts to cause vivid and intense dreaming, and in this pairs very well indeed with valerian extract at high doses in particular, and also with a mixture of lemon balm infusion and oral valerian extract. This is probably the most astounding synergistic effect of an oneirogenic type I've ever felt. The likes of anticholinesterases have nothing on the dreaming that results after this mixture, even without the balm (which has GABA-transaminase inhibiting effects, as well as some nicotinic acetylcholinergic receptor agonistic effects)
And lastly, the use as a spice, I make up a blend for steaks from the following:
A base of dried, cured fly agaric, caps only, powdered to dust in a spice grinder, with added the following:
The seeds from a few cardamom pods, say 2 pods per steak, maybe three per steak
Black pepper, a goodly quantity
The seed of Piper cubeba, which have a camphoraceous, cooling taste to them, just a few, 6-7 seeds per steak, just a few, stalks snapped off and discarded.
A two-fingers-and-thumb pinch of szechuan pepper, an odd spice which has a camphoraceous although not cooling sensation, and which if chewed itself numbs and anaesthetizes the oral mucosa
Birds-eye chilli peppers, to taste, I like my steak plenty blazing hot
A teaspoon of tabasco sauce, added to a generous squirting of brown sauce, like HP sauce, or better, 'devil's brown sauce', a spicy take on the same kind of thing,
some dark soy sauce, to make a paste, deep slashes cut into the steaks, and the paste rubbed in, also, if I can get them, the mushroom which grows as a parasite on fly agaric mycelium when the fly agaric is found under silver birch rather than in pinewoods, Chalciporus piperatus, a primitive member of the Boletus group, perhaps a stem-member of the family, which has a unique biting, fiery hot spicyness of its own, the fruitbodies, dried and with an electric spice grinder, for they are pretty leathery and difficult to powder in a mortar and pestle, as well as a good couple of pinches of pink peppercorns, pounded in a mortar to release the oils within.
All be taken and after marinading the steaks in worcestershire sauce mixed with brown sauce and tabasco, the same mix, with soy added, teriyaki sauce is an optional though nice addition to the marinade, then this same marinade has the solid ingredients, powdered to dust in an electric spice grinder mixed to make the aforementioned paste, rubbed into the crosshatched slashes in the steaks surfaces, both sides, given a brushing of toasted sesame seed oil and then a pan heated to a searing high temperature, throwing the steaks on, to sear the juices in, each side and edges quickly sizzled at high temperature, then the heat taken to low and slow-fried in their own fat and a little sesame oil if needs be to stop them sticking.
And when nice and browned outside and cooked through and the juices run clear, 'tis ready to eat. And once you try my custom steak spice mix, you won't ever want to taste a joint of beef or a steak or a chilli con carne without, ever again.
The leaves also, of Polygonum hydropiper, a relative of the plant known as bistort, but with a fiery, biting sharpness to them, dried and crumbled, if you can find yourself any, they like to grow near meadow edges where the grassland runs next to a river, or wet meadow ground at the edges especially. These are another good addition. Can't buy these, nor the peppery bolete (Chalciporus piperatus) but must find them oneself. At least the bolete is common though and in fact is parasitic on fly agaric mycelia, so where you see one, under birch, hang about and check back if there are none for a week or so and you are likely to find yourself some, and if lucky some brown birch boletes (Leccinium spp. a few of them, such as L.pseudoscaber, or if even luckier, the rarer orange birch boletes, of which there are several. And the browns, they are good fried in butter to serve as accompaniment to the steaks. And the orange too, but better yet. And for shop-bought mushrooms, get some shiitake and oyster mushrooms, the shiitake's meaty flavour especially is complimented and compliments the fly agaric-ed steak/chilli and fried in butter with oyster mushrooms, maybe some chanterelles if they are to be found or bought, cooked separately, or the oyster fungi and chanterelle, since both have delicate flavors, whilst that of shiitake is quite forceful and meaty. Fly agaric seems to bring out the 'umami' basic taste in foods already possessed of it, like the fungal answer to MSG, inosine etc. and will have you slavering and straining at the leash to dump the goods in a bowl, on a plate etc, and tuck in. It makes good meat great meat and great meat exceptional meat, and exceptional meat to begin with into something you'll find yourself seriously considering the quick and expedient murder of other diners possessed of such a spiced cut of meat, it is THAT good.
I reccomend a good cut of fillet steak, or of prime beef rump. A lamb roasting or beef roasting joint spiced up thus also and cooked long and low until it be so tender and juicy that it falls apart on the tongue...oh me, oh my...now that is FOOD. And if one can get hold of some Lactarius deliciosus, a pinewoods species of milk-cap, the saffron milkcap, and have these served roasted with some butter on them and some black pepper, you've got the meal from heaven there. Food of the fucking gods. Call it Soma, name it Ambrosia, either way, you got it, food of the gods and you'll be finding yourself hunting them down yearly as much as you can get.
I confess, even to sneaking some into my dad's chilli con carne once, he said when seeing ME use the fly agaric spice blend in one of mine 'don't do that, you'll ruin it' but I certainly heard not one single complaint leave his lips once he tasted it. And without....it just isn't right. Its chilli con carnage, as I say, unless its got some fly amanita in there
