Every Finn knows that the link between the fly agaric and Coca-Cola is Father Christmas, who reached the Latvians by way of Russian, although his European roots go back to the 4th-century wonder-worker Saint Nicholas of Bari, in the very south of Italy. The Finns know him as Odin's winter goat (Joulupukki), with whom, once you have crossed the Arctic Circle, you can have your photograph taken even in summer. One legend has it that the winter goat took the colouring of his Father Christmas costume from the fly agaric; another, that he passed his own colours on to the red and white of Coca-Cola (or the other way round). In older texts the fly agaric is understood both as the Vedic soma that connects one with the gods and as an ingredient of Gautama Buddha's last meal before he entered nirvana. The boldest hold that for 25,000 years, across the whole territory from present-day Lisbon to present-day Vladivostok, there was only one teacher – the fly agaric. From anyone who, on meeting the fly agaric, had passed three times through the terrors of death, nothing was hidden any longer (and nothing is hidden still, as the mycologist Mikhail Vishnevsky tells it). It is not for nothing that the tribes of northern Siberia fought among themselves not so much over women as over fly agarics. As it colonised the tribes and peoples of Siberia, the Russian Empire deliberately used the Orthodox Church to convince them that touching fly agarics was a sin, and later, in communist times, spread with even greater conviction the rumour that the fly agaric is poisonous. Only in this way could the symbiotic relationship between the beautiful mushroom and human beings, built up over centuries, be replaced by the alcohol the colonisers brought with them, with which to besot the subjugated tribes and peoples. When a Russian ethnographer asks a Yakut heading home laden with a harvest of fly agarics, “Are you a fool? What do you need so many poisonous mushrooms for?”, the Yakut replies: “Eat a little – healthy; eat more – happy; eat more still – sleep well.”

Doctors say that Latvia has never had as many cases of fly agaric poisoning as in the autumn of 2022. Most likely this is connected with the growing interest, in the depths of the internet, in this mushroom as a miracle cure. But an upset stomach from inept handling is not the most terrible thing one can hear about the sovereign of the forest. Vavilen Tatarsky, for example, on his first fly-agaric-guided journey in Pelevin's novel “Generation П”, saw that she aspires to become an atomic mushroom cloud, though it is clear that what this vision expresses is not the darkest longings of the fly agaric but those of an adman's soul. You need only look at a fly agaric to understand that the main thing it strives for is to be seen.

In 1256 Albert the Great, to a large extent the teacher of Thomas Aquinas, wrote in his work On Plants: “It is called the fly mushroom (fungus muscarum) because it is crumbled into milk in order to kill flies.” In all likelihood this practice of dairy farmers was also familiar to Kārlis Skalbe, who, having fled the Riga cops of the Russian Empire, wrote fairy tales in Helsinki. In 1907 he also wrote there the tale “Fifteen”, in which Dēkla hands the wise man a fly agaric as the best remedy against the flies that have befuddled the minds of the people of the grey city, to be sown in the city's streets so that people “would begin to listen and to think”. For reasons unknown, there is not a single monument to Skalbe in Latvia, not even a simple cast of his head with a fly agaric cap on it.

When, in the spring, in a conversation with Elena Lukyanova, rector of the Free University, I was asked what external factors might bring down Putin's regime, I confessed that I did not know: better to put that question to the distinguished expert in constitutional law. I can answer for only one internal factor that might do it. When I said that this factor was the fly agaric, an awkward silence fell among the generous listeners.

For each of us the jokes end and the horror begins in a different place; each of us has our own border between sense and madness, but I recommend following Skalbe. He knew that flies die from the fly agaric. Everyone has to work out for themselves what the flies of their own mind are, and which spores of thought can kill them off.