Ambrosia And Nectar Recipe

Amanita Muscaria: the Book of the Empress

The Empress of Mushrooms: Martijn Benders and the Psychedelic Revisioning of World History by Leopold van Empel If you think a book about a mushroom can be no more than a catalogue of hallucinations, think again. Amanita Muscaria – The Book of the Empress, the first volume in Martijn Benders’ Shhhhhhroom series, is a stunning hybrid of mythical archaeology, psychedelic philosophy, and esoteric manifesto. It is as much an ode to the fly agaric mushroom as it is a revolutionary rereading of human history. Benders writes with the bravado of a poet flipping the world upside down to see what falls out. His style is exuberant, associative, at times manic, but rarely gratuitous. The foreword's final line (“Avoid milk. Avoid it like the plague.”) sets the tone immediately: this is no polite analysis, but a literary gauntlet—provocative, humorous, and damn well written. What makes The Book of the Empress unique among the growing corpus of psychedelic literature is its literary merit. Where other authors lose themselves in doctrinaire neurochemistry or naïve hymns to “Mother Aya,” Benders constructs a rich network of references: from Heraclitus and Sappho to Goya and the Dead Kennedys, from Slavic folk medicine to esoteric readings of Botticelli and Dante. His central thesis—that the exclusion of the fly agaric mushroom from the human diet has led to neurological and spiritual degeneration—is unorthodox but argued with surprising coherence. He weaves evolutionary hypotheses (such as an expansion on McKenna’s “stoned ape theory”) with razor-sharp critiques of the nationalist food industry, religious dogma, and pharmaceutical capitalism. For Benders, Amanita muscaria is not a hallucinogen, but a portal, a teacher, a revolutionary nutrient. What he achieves here echoes what Robert Graves once did with The White Goddess: a merging of myth, poetry, and biology into an alternative genealogy of human consciousness. But Benders is more unruly, more ironic, and more willing to embrace the grotesque. He inserts himself into the narrative—sometimes as a shaman, sometimes as a sarcastic commentator, always with a playful defiance of genre. This makes the book both a personal travelogue and a philosophical tract. Still, Amanita Muscaria is not an easy book. Its structure is fragmentary; chapters leap from Vedic mythology to Russian literature and back to Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son. But those who surrender to its kaleidoscopic logic will find a book that refuses to be reduced to a summary or classification. When placed alongside other works in the psychedelic canon—Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind or Terence McKenna’s Food of the Gods—what stands out is Benders’ literary surplus. Where Pollan is journalistic and McKenna visionary, Benders is a poet-philosopher, launching his argument rhythmically, like a shamanic jazz solo. His project—to reinstate the fly agaric as a cultural axis—may sound utopian, but it is a beautifully written utopia. And perhaps that’s exactly what the world needs. Conclusion: Amanita Muscaria – The Book of the Empress is an exceptional work that elevates the mushroom to the throne of cosmic imagination. Wild, visionary, occasionally brilliant. A cult classic in the making.

Ancient Greece

The Folger Library