The Sámi on Camera

Lapland is definitely cold and stays cold longer than southern parts, but the Saami weren't living in all that much colder conditions than your average Finnish peasant from Karelia or Ostrobothnia.

I like to joke about how excited the hosts got about vegetables, but it kind of makes people mad.

10 minutes of television and then there is a big reveal for the carrot.

It's about two police detectives in Norway's northern Finnmark county. The book offers a fascinating introduction to the way of life of the Sami people and their land, Sápmi.

I'd love to visit there someday.

https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/le-dernier-lapon_olivier-truc/...

And they still exist, by the way. They mainly eat reindeer meat.

There's another article on this topic from the New York Times, available here: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/21/opinion/santa-christmas-m....

To quote:

> It’s the holiday season, and I’m thinking of mushrooms. The hallucinogenic Amanita muscaria to be exact — a red-and-white toadstool mushroom — most closely associated with fairy tales. At first glance, Amanita muscaria and the Christmas holiday appear to be an unlikely duo. But would it be too far-fetched to propose that the story of our modern Santa Claus, the omnipotent man who travels the globe in one night, bearing gifts, and who’s camped out in shopping malls across the United States this month, is linked to a hallucinogenic mushroom-eating shaman from the Arctic?

> I don’t think so.

> And neither do a number of scholars. As it turns out, the shamanic rituals of the Sami people of Lapland, a region in northern Finland known for its wintry climate and conifer forests, bear an uncanny semblance to the familiar narratives of Santa and Christmas that we have come to know.

> According to the writer and mycologist Lawrence Millman, the shaman would make use of Amanita muscaria’s psychoactive effects in order to perform healing rituals. The use of Amanita muscaria as an entheogen (that is, a drug used to bring about a spiritual experience) would enable the shamans to act as intermediaries between the spirit and human world, bringing gifts of healing and problem-solving. (Although these mushrooms are poisonous, the Sami reduced their toxicity by drying them..) Various accounts describe the shaman and the rituals performed in ways that are fascinatingly similar to the narrative of Santa. An all-knowing man who defies space and time? Flying reindeer? Reindeer-drawn sleds? Climbing down the chimney? The giving of gifts? The tales of the Sami shamans have it all.

Or another article from NBC News, available at https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna50263554.

> In his book Mushrooms and Mankind (The Book Tree, 2003) the late author James Arthur points out that Amanita muscaria, also known as fly agaric, lives throughout the Northern Hemisphere under conifers and birch trees, with which the fungi —which is deep red with white flecks — has a symbiotic relationship. This partially explains the practice of the Christmas tree, and the placement of bright red-and-white presents underneath, which look like Amanita mushrooms, he wrote.

> "Why do people bring pine trees into their houses at the Winter Solstice, placing brightly colored (red and white) packages under their boughs, as gifts to show their love for each other … ?" he wrote. "It is because, underneath the pine bough is the exact location where one would find this 'Most Sacred' substance, the Amanita muscaria, in the wild."

> Reindeer are common in Siberia, and seek out these hallucinogenic fungi, as the area's human inhabitants have been known to do. Donald Pfister, a biologist who studies fungi at Harvard University, suggests that Siberian tribesmen who ingested fly agaric may have hallucinated into thinking that reindeer were flying.