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Berserkers, Drugs and War

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  • 18-10-2011 9:53am
    #1
    slowburner
    Moderators, Science, Health & Environment Moderators Posts: 5,219 Mod ✭✭✭✭


    From Cúchulainn's and the Vikings' possible use of Fly Agaric, Bog Myrtle and alcohol, to the prescription of Prozac to US troops in Afghanistan; psychoactive drugs have played a part in the performance of fighting forces.

    EFFECTS OF AMANITA MUSCARIA #
    Before proceeding it will be useful to review the main symptoms of Cú Chulaind's two maladies. Those exhibited during his warp spasm are: agitation (manic behavior, bristling hair); visual distortions (one eye protrudes, the other recedes); facial distortions (he grimaces and gapes, a thick "warrior's moon" projects from his forehead); tachycardia (booming heartbeat); blood rushes to his head (a drop of blood at the tip of each hair, a geyser of it spurts from his crown); light rushes to his head (a spark of fire appears at the tip of each hair, the "warrior's light" from his crown); he becomes very strong and very limber. He also becomes very hot, needing three successive dousings in vats of cold water before his temperature returns to normal. The symptoms of his wasting sickness are: sleepiness, vivid dreaming and prolonged lassitude.
    http://www.erowid.org/plants/amanitas/amanitas_writings5.shtml

    Kopék’s toadstool epiphany was widely reported, and it began a fashion for re-examining elements of European folklore and culture and interpolating fly agaric intoxication into odd corners of myth and tradition. Perhaps the best example of this is the notion that the berserkers, the Viking shock troops of the 8th to 10th centuries, drank a fly agaric potion before going into battle and fighting like men possessed. This is regularly asserted as fact not only among mushroom and Viking aficionados but also in text-books and encyclopaedias; nevertheless, it’s almost certainly a creation of the nineteenth century. There’s no reference to fly agaric, or indeed to any exotic plant stimulants, in the sagas or eddas: the notion of mushroom-intoxicated berserker warriors was first suggested by the Swedish professor Samuel Ödman in his Attempt to Explain the Berserk-Raging of Ancient Nordic Warriors through Natural History (1784), which was simply speculation based on eighteenth-century Siberian accounts. By the end of the nineteenth century scholars like the Norwegian botanist Frederik Christian Schübeler had taken Ödman’s suggestion as proof. The rest is history – or, more likely, urban myth.
    http://mikejay.net/articles/mushrooms-in-wonderland/

    In some ways, the prescriptions may seem unremarkable. Generals, history shows, have plied their troops with medicinal palliatives at least since George Washington ordered rum rations at Valley Forge. During World War II, the Nazis fueled their blitzkrieg into France and Poland with the help of an amphetamine known as Pervitin. The U.S. Army also used amphetamines during the Vietnam War.
    http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1812055,00.html


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