I, and a friend, have eaten a bunch of agarics. They did absolutely nothing, even from different sources. With about 18g each, we didn't even feel any stomach twitches. And these were genuine, out in the forest, agarics or picked by other people. We even tried smoking them after seeing someone on Erowid had tried it, absolutely nothing. The only effect it produced was laughter, at the size of the monumentally gigantic joint we rolled with it; it must have been four or five kingsize papers long. We ended up having to snap it in half to get it to burn.
I've heard people saying some strange things from agarics alone. Either they're not used to taking hallucinogens, or they've taken some particularly strong agarics. It may be that they're strongly affected by the soil and tree type they're growing from, or the specific strain. Amanita's grow parastically on trees, not on decomposing organic material like psilocybe. Personally, I've never experienced ANYTHING I could even call a drug induced effect from agarics; there's not only a lack of hallucinations, there's a lack of everything else.
In my experience, Amanita Pantherinas are faaaaaaar stronger and the effect is in no way subtle. It's also nothing like psilocybe, I didn't see anything. It was more like my memory had started looping. I couldn't tell if someone had just asked me something or said it an hour ago. If I was lying on my bed or if I'd actually made it to the toilet for a pee.
After someone suggested it looked like we were in comas, I became convinced I was. Then that I might have imagined the last few months of knowing these new people whilst I was in a coma.
I couldn't work out what to do. I thought, either I'm in a coma and I need to wake up, or I need to follow the advice of these people to wake up. I thought I might be on hospital bed and someone was trying to wake me up. But I was convinced one of them was death, trying to tell me to let go to it, and the other was trying to help me, and I couldn't work out which was which, so I just stopped responding to either.
Once I got outside in the cool air and elements, I started to predictably wake up from that (d)illusion. And I also think a huge percentage of that was the fault of the people around me, who had no idea how to be around someone tripping. They were putting horrific music videos on; like Aphex Twin's "Come to daddy", not tripper suitable material. The girl with me started getting really upset and I had to fight the effects and tell them to turn it off.
But I enjoyed the feeling of being convinced I close to death (but not actually being there), it's something very few get to experience normally until it's actually happening, or close to happening. And the experience is more realistic than I expect it is with normal hallucinogens. So I'll be meeting death armed with some tactics. The girl with me on the mushrooms wasn't so impressed.
Never try picking your own Pantherinas unless you're already very used to picking and eating strange looking things on a regular basis; agarics and psilocybes are easy by comparison. Pantherinas look remarkably like death caps, the baby kind do in particular. They're all in the same genus, with death caps being Amanita Phalloids and destroying angels being Amanita Verosa. They all emerge from an underground egg, they have similar vailing, similar gills, same spore prints, similar stems, similar cap colors (except Verosa) and, if the rain washes the spots off, similar patterns on the caps (except Verosa). You may also find white spots on death caps as remnants of them emerging form the underground egg phase. One or two Pantherinas will be enough to seriously mess with your mind. I think I had one and it was as powerful as a few psilocybe cubensis or more, in an entirely different way.
And a few death caps will seriously mess with your liver.
I just cut up a dried mushroom with some scissors and put it in some hot coffee temperature water, then left it to cool down to luke warm and gave it a swirl every now and again. Tastes like a hippy's old leather jacket that's never been washed and has spent it's life in a damp caravan; but easier to eat or drink than psilocybe. Agaric doesn't taste too bad, particularly if you mix it with a stock cube (then it actually tastes quite nice, Pantharinas are probably the same, I didn't have any stock cubes to hand to try it out). As it starts, you might feel kind of warm and tiny bit drunk, a slight lack of ability to co-ordinate all of your senses. As it goes further, you'll start loosing track of what someone has just said. The drunk feeling will start to disappear. At the peak, you'll be wondering what on earth happened when; it's like someone has condensed all your recent memories into slides and is randomly showing you a new one every second or so, rather than them being in the right order.
Death caps are not fun, even if you don't die from them. Your liver will end up looking like a lifetime alcoholics. So don't risk it.
Fly Agarics also earned that name because something in the flesh attracts flies, which lay their eggs in it. It's quite normal to find that 90%+ of your mushrooms are riddled with maggots, which start crawling all over the place as you dry them out. SICK! You can see that the maggots are there before picking the mushrooms; the surface of the skin will have holes in it, like someone's stuck a pin in it. Sometimes it'll be so bad the whole stem is covered in holes.
I don't check these forums very often, so a PM is a better idea if you have a specific comment or question.
DO NOT USE THE FOLLOWING AS A GUIDE FOR PICKING;
Pantherina
Death caps, note the white spots on the one that's second from the left (something pickers will try to use to discriminate between the two, and fail. the spots will wash off in the rain, or be left over from the egg phase on caps that shouldn't normally have them)
