Episode #7 Ash Ritter: Amanita muscaria Ethnomycology

Episode #7 Ash Ritter: Amanita muscaria Ethnomycology

Webpage • www.blacksagebotanicals.bigcartel.com 

IG @black.sage.botanicals

Patreon • www.patreon.com/blacksagebotanicals

Upcoming Merry Mushroom Ethnomycology course • https://blacksagebotanicals.bigcartel.com/product/merry-mushroom-2024-trio 

This was a fun deep dive into Amanita muscaria ethnomycology with herbalist Ash Ritter.

We both have a deep fondness to Amanita spirit and it's a great conversation between two mycophiles.

We touch on mythology, ethnobotony, riffing on spiritual subjects, bridging the world between science and spirit and she shares an interesting take on something related to Amanita muscaria you will only find if you listen to the whole podcast! ;)

Ash Ritter is a west coast born, desert-dwelling ethnobotanist, educator, writer, multi-disciplinary animist, and poet in disguise as herbalist. For twenty years & counting, Ash continues to reverently devote her life to fungal & botanical studies, encompassing traditional, academic, clinical, and directly relational terrains.

Ash's approach places emphasis on plants, fungi, and planet as relations, and is manifested through her practice as fostering engagement with & as the living world, rather than "using" plants as commodity. She counsels & creates in her private practice, Black Sage Botanicals.

One-on-one longterm apprenticeships are the cornerstone of her training, with a focus in Druid herbalism, clinical botanical medicine, Cali-Mexican curanderismo & MacGuyver-style urban & wilderness first aid. Ash also attended acupressure school, permaculture certification training, and studied journey work with Michael Harner, just to name a few of the adjunct teachings that inform her practice.

Her bachelors degree thesis in the earlier 2000's focused on botanical & fungal agents for initiation, and altered states as evolutionary technology. Over the years, Ash’s research has honed in on entheogenic traditions of her ancestry, mainly the folklore and pharmakon of Amanita muscaria, and the Solanaceae-laden Flying Ointments of Europe. 

Ash feels blessed beyond measure to have shadowed naturopathic Dr. Kenneth Proefrock in his office for 2 years upon her relocation to the Sonoran Desert, and almost went to medical school, until coming to recognize the potency of keeping her practice out of bureaucratic matrices. Previously, she apprenticed with history buff & lineage keeper Charles "Doc" Garcia, and worked for several years as a plant-based personal chef, and apothecarist in a bustling California Bay Area clinical herbal practice, etc!


Ash currently lives in a century-old gnome house on an old ranch in southern Arizona, and enjoys tracking deer through the spiny brush, sitting with 200-year-old cacti, and waiting for monsoon season thunderstorms as she writes her first book. 

where to find us:
www.allthingsamanita.com
www.harmonyacresfarms.org
https://gablab.buzzsprout.com/share

IG: 
@gablab.show
@harmony_acres
@all_things_amanita