The Longest Night of the Year
Mushrooms, psychedelic Santa, and the winter solstice.
A few years ago, I read an article1 about the connection between Santa Claus and Amanita muscaria mushrooms.
In it, an anthropologist and an ethnomycologist,2 through their own individual research, had separately come to the same conclusion — Christmas is totally psychedelic.
Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but basically, a lot of the imagery we now associate with Christmas may have originated with the pre-Christian winter solstice ceremonies and celebrations of indigenous people living near the Arctic Circle in what is now Siberia.
On the night of the solstice, the shamans of certain groups would collect Amanita muscaria mushrooms (usually growing at the base of pine trees) with the intent of using them in ritual psychedelic journeys.
But the mushrooms are super toxic to people, so before they could ingest them they had to either eat pine needles (they have some chemical in them that counteracts the toxins in the mushroom), feed the mushrooms to reindeer and then drink the reindeer’s pee (reindeer are able to process the toxin that humans cannot and then pee out only the mushroom’s psychotropic substance), or put the mushrooms in a sock and dry them out over a fire.
The shamans would go on their journeys, learn a bunch of shit, and come back and give their gift of information to the community.
Also, the yurts that people lived in had their entrances in the roof because it snowed so much — people would come and go through a hole in the ceiling.
And finally, the Amanita muscaria itself is red and white.
Similar winter solstice rituals made their way into Nordic and Druid culture, then the church rebranded those pagan holidays as their own, and eventually the symbolism began to take on a different meaning: now, Santa’s flying reindeer take him from house to house, where he slides down a chimney, leaves some presents under an evergreen tree and stuffs others into stockings hanging over the fireplace.
Is Santa’s origin story really psychedelic? Unsure, but I love that for him.
I’m more interested in the meaning behind the rituals.
WHY THE WINTER SOLSTICE?
Winter is a time of shedding and release; a time of literal and metaphoric death. Animals hibernate. Daylight wanes. The trees have lost their leaves.3
When humans still had an intimate connection to the earth, we understood that we, too, were a part of nature, and that the nature of nature is cyclical. Life, death, rebirth.
During the dark nights, people across cultures incorporated fire into their rituals and celebrations — the Yule log, the lighting of candles during the ancient Roman festival of Saturnalia — to call the sun back from the underworld, a reminder that after the darkest times, the light would return.
The winter solstice on December 21 is the longest night of the year. The culmination of the season’s release — its turning point.
It makes sense, then, to choose such a night to turn inward on a psychedelic journey. To embrace the shedding of self, the ritual death of the ego.
Time to let go in order to begin again.
The psychedelic component in Amanita muscaria isn’t psilocybin, it’s muscimol, and its effects sound pretty different. It transports you to a whole new world that seems completely real. Like one minute you’re sitting in your living room and then suddenly it becomes a field and there are small mushroom people talking to you and telling you to follow them. So you do, and then they teach you all sorts of things about life and death and the nature of the universe.
Part of me thinks that these entheogens like mushrooms or ayahuasca or peyote actually transport you to a different realm and let you communicate directly with the plants.
In ancient religions, nature itself was god. Deities were inseparable from the cycles they governed. The sun, whose death and rebirth structured the year itself, made winter one of the most sacred thresholds of all.
In the later Roman Empire, December 25th was actually celebrated as the Birthday of the Unconquerable Sun. The church then reframed the birthday of the Sun God into the birthday of the son of God.
When we bring these ideas of release and renewal into the current moment, they take on even more significance. We are, after all, in the final months of the Year of the Snake, a year whose themes are transformation and rebirth, like the way the snake sheds its skin.
We also have the last new moon of 2025 happening in Sagittarius on Friday December 19th.
I don’t know about you, but for me, this year (honestly the last couple of years) has definitely been one of intense shedding. And I can feel that it’s not quite done yet.
This is the time to slough off any remaining actual or metaphoric dead skin.
Then we can plant the seeds that need to be nurtured until spring, and we will be ready to emerge anew in 2026 and beyond.
A SIMPLE RITUAL FOR THE SOLSTICE
Start by clearing your space from clutter. This includes your mental space and your digital space. For example, I went through old folders on my desktop and trashed stuff that I’m not working on anymore.
Make a list of things in your life that no longer serve you. These can be literal things or behaviors.
Light a fire. If you have a firepit or fireplace, great. If not, you can simply light a candle.
If you are using a candle, gather a heat safe bowl and a glass of water.
Call upon your ancestors. Thank them for everything they have done for you and ask them to help you shed the remaining things you want to shed.
If you’re using a firepit or fireplace, throw your list into the fire. If you’re using a candle, light the edge of your list on fire, then drop it into the heat safe bowl and watch it burn. Throw the water on the fire to put it out if necessary.
Now make a list of the seeds you want to plant for the new year. You can think of these seeds as things you would like to manifest. Keep the list with you and refer back to it as 2026 progresses.
And if you like, you can watch the winter solstice sunrise livestreamed from Stonehenge.
Happy solstice.
Until next time,
Tara
What a cool job, btw. I bet they too have some serious feelings about The Last of Us.
Except the evergreens, which in itself is quite interesting.
i'm going to have to do that solstice ritual! 🔥