 An account of the journeys of Philip von Strahlenberg to Siberia and his descriptions of the use of the mukhomor there was published in English in 1736 . The drinking of urine of those who had consumed the mushroom was commented on by Anglo @-@ Irish writer Oliver Goldsmith in his widely read 1762 novel , Citizen of the World . The mushroom had been identified as the fly agaric by this time . Other authors recorded the distortions of the size of perceived objects while intoxicated by the fungus , including naturalist Mordecai Cubitt Cooke in his books The Seven Sisters of Sleep and A Plain and Easy Account of British Fungi . This observation is thought to have formed the basis of the effects of eating the mushroom in the 1865 popular story Alice 's Adventures in Wonderland . A hallucinogenic " scarlet toadstool " from Lappland is featured as a plot element in Charles Kingsley 's 1866 novel Hereward the Wake based on the medieval figure of the same name . Thomas Pynchon 's 1973 novel Gravity 's Rainbow describes the fungus as a " relative of the poisonous Destroying Angel " and presents a detailed description of a character preparing a cookie bake mixture from harvested Amanita muscaria . Fly agaric shamanism is also explored in the 2003 novel Thursbitch by Alan Garner . 
