Ötzi
He quite resembles the other Iceman, Wim Hof, in this recent reconstruction: Ötzi, whose mummified remains were discovered in the Alps in 1991.
About this discovery, Carl Ruck wrote as follows:
“Oetzi, the ice man of the alps, has been uncovered, a Celtic shaman, exactly as we postulated, from the third pre-Christian millennium, at the dawn of the Indo-Europeans’ arrival, caught unawares on the mountaintop in his meditative trance by a sudden storm, and frozen until our day, with his trove of ‘medicinal’ mushrooms.”
This, in several respects, is nonsense.
Yes, Ötzi carried mushrooms with him. Four fruiting bodies in total, in two different varieties of polypores: Fomes fomentarius, also known as “tinder fungus”, as it was used as a firestarter; and Piptoporus betulinus, which has medicinal properties, and can be used as a laxative, but also to treat bacterial infections (by virtue of the indoles it contains, while the additional presence of sterols and triterpenes may also carry health benefits)—but also, again, as a firestarter (together with his mushrooms, Ötzi carried flint and pyrite, used to create sparks). These two types of mushroom have no hallucinogenic properties whatsoever. And for what it’s worth: no remains of these mushrooms were found inside Ötzi’s stomach, which, however, did contain his final meal: fat and meat from ibex, and einkorn wheat.
Ötzi was indeed “caught unawares”, yet by no means in a “meditative trance”: he was struck by an arrow that killed him. The arrow shattered his shoulder blade, struck nerves and blood vessels, and damaged one of his lungs, after which he bled to death. Nothing pretty.
So: no, Ötzi was not “uncovered exactly as Ruck postulated”. Ruck’s postulations are simply viciously circular.
And therefore, the problem with Ruck is not just that he sees mushrooms everywhere: it is also that, when there are actual mushrooms, he tends to misinterpret them.
To be continued.
Notes:
For Ruck’s description of Ötzi, see R. Gordon Wasson, A. Hofmann, C.A.P. Ruck, The Road To Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries, 3rd ed., Berkeley CA (North Atlantic Books) 2008, p. 15.
Notice how Ruck, in the passage cited above, qualifies the use of “medicinal”, by placing quotation marks around the word. His intention is to be sarcastic. A number of scientists had qualified Ötzi’s mushrooms as medicinal, and rightly (or at least understandably) so; but according to Ruck, they should have been qualified as hallucinogenic (which they are not). This tendentiousness is, unfortunately, a sad case of bad scholarship.