With medicinal mushrooms continuing to trend within the nutraceutical and wellness industries around the world, we’ll look at the mysterious Agarikon mushroom and the benefits it exudes.

We’ll also discuss how it has been shown to be among the strongest anti-virals known, how ancient Greeks used it as a Tuberculosis treatment, how Indigenous tribes and shamans used the mushroom as protection from archons and why it is believed to be a protector of women’s sexuality.

The popular medicinal mushrooms like Reishi, Chaga, Lion’s Mane and Turkey Tail seem to be in the spotlight these days, but perhaps the most important and most fascinating of all the mushrooms is the Agarikon mushroom.

The Greek physician Dioscorides described the Agarikon mushroom as “elixirium ad longam vitam” (“the elixir of long life”) in 65 A.D. in Materia Medica.

In ancient Greece, Agarikon was suggested as a treatment for respiratory illnesses, coughing, asthma, rheumatoid arthritis, night sweats, and consumption, which was later termed tuberculosis.

Famed mycologist Paul Stamets has worked with the Institute of Tuberculosis Research at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the Institute identified two novel coumarins unique to Agarikon that showed anti-tubercular activity.

They also found that Agarikon was “extraordinarily active against XDR-TB, a rare type of tuberculosis that is resistant to even the most effective drug treatments.”

Even more impressive, Paul Stamets’ Agarikon samples were studied by the BioShield BioDefense program via the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, and a few of the eleven strains showed “exceptionally strong activity against viruses including pox (cowpox), swine (H1N1) and bird (H5N1) flu, and herpes (HSV1, HSV2) viruses.

In several sets of tests, dilutions of our natural ethanol extracts against flu viruses exceeded the potency of the positive drug control — ribavirin — against flu viruses by a factor of 10 or more.”

Of more than 200,000 samples submitted to the program, Host Defense’s Agarikon showed the most anti-viral activity of all the natural products submitted, and were the only ones to demonstrate such strong activity.

It also was shown to be highly effective in breaking down neurotoxin VX, which is an illegal chemical weapon.

Paul Stamets also promotes Agarikon as a possible counter to the growing antibiotic resistance and says:

“I am convinced Agarikon and other polypore mushrooms hold yet-undiscovered medicines of incalculable value. If Agarikon’s antivirals prove to be effective in clinical trials, I do not think it is an exaggeration to say we should save our old growth forests as a matter of national defense.”

The Spiritual Significance of Agarikon Mushrooms

While the positive physical health benefits are astounding, the beliefs surrounding the spiritual benefits reveal to us the magnitude of Agarikon’s power.

In Paul Stamets book MycoMedicinals: An Informational Treatise on Mushrooms, he describes how “the Haida First Peoples of the Queen Charlotte Islands and elsewhere on the coast of British Columbia, associated this mushroom with the powerful creator spirit Raven, and as a protector of women’s sexuality.”

The mushroom was also carved into animalistic looking forms and placed on shaman’s graves to protect them from evil spirits, or now commonly known as archons.

The native peoples believed that Agarikon protected them from diseases caused by these same dark spirits.

In fact, even the ancient Gnostics believed that archons were “etheric viruses.”

What is compelling to take note of is the fact that Agarikon was used to protect people from these etheric realm viruses (archons) and today, science has confirmed how Agarikon is strongly anti-viral against physical realm viruses.

As above, so below.

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Author: Lance Schuttler graduated from the University of Iowa with a bachelors degree in Health Science.