This is the Tom Hartman program.

So let's talk the real science of Santa Claus, the guy in the red suit with the pointy hat,

the weight-free trim and the tall black boots with the eight flying reindeer and the bag

of goodies.

It goes back to a group of indigenous arctic circle dwellers, the common chodalais and

the coriacs of Siberia specifically, but it's actually all the way around the North

Pole.

We've had Steve Larson on this program before talking about the native people of Finland

as well.

So Santa really does come from the North Pole.

On the night of the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, a coriac shaman would gather

hallucinogenic mushrooms called amonita muscaria or flyaguric in English as how we call them.

These are the red mushrooms with white spots, starting to see a parallel here, the shaman

would hang them on the lower branches of pine trees to dry them out before taking them

home back to the village, or alternatively he could take them in and put them in a sock

and hang the sock over the fireplace to dry them out, socks and fireplaces.

The problem with flyaguric, or amonita muscaria mushrooms, is that they are poisonous.

In addition to getting you high, they contain a poison, and so the way that they would get

rid of the poison is they would feed them to reindeer, reindeer love these things, and

their livers have an enzyme that breaks down and detoxifies the poison in this mushroom,

but does not break down the hallucinogen, which I believe is dimethyltryptamine, DMT,

in the mushroom.

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