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Reviews:
According to the
author, Soma would be the fly agaric (Amanita muscaria) ...
which, has been known since the 18th century, was used by most of
the paleo-Asiatic peoples for ritual consumption and to which they
devoted a veritable cult because of its hallucinogenic properties
... Mr. Wasson's work establishes, in our opinion convincingly, that
among all the candidates put forward for representing Soma, Amanita
muscaria is by far the most plausible. - Claude Levi-Strauss,
L'Homme
Excerpts:
In a word, my belief is that Soma is the Divine Mushroom of
Immortality, and that in the early days of our culture, before we
made use of reading and writing, when the RgVeda was being composed,
the prestige of this miraculous mushroom ran by word of mouth far
and wide throughout Eurasia, well beyond the regions where it grew
and was worshi pped. (Chapter 1: The Problem, page 9)
There is I think an inference that we may draw: a plant with
properties that could be plausibly named the Herb of Immortality
responded to one of man's deepest desire s in the early stage of his
intellectual development. The superb fly-agaric gave him a glimpse
of horizons beyond any that he knew in his harsh struggle for
survival, of planes of existence far removed and above his daily
round of besetting cares. It contributed to the shaping of his
mythological world and his religious life. (Epilogue, page 210)
On the contrary I now suggest that the source and focus of diffusion
of all these myths and tales and figures of speech-all this poetic
imagery-were the birch forests of Eurasia. The peoples who emigrated
from the forest belt to the southern latitudes took with them vivid
memories of the herb and the imagery. The renown of the Herb of
Immortality and the Tree of Life spread also by word of mouth far
and wide, and in the South where the birch and the fly-agaric were
little more than cherished tales generations and a thousand miles
removed from the source of inspiration, the concepts were still
stirring the imaginations of poets, story-tellers, and sages. In
these alien lands, far from the birch forests of Siberia, botanical
substitutions were made for Herb and Tree. Here is where absurdities
were introduced into the legends, where fabulous variations
proliferated, where peoples who had never known the North such as
the Semites were influenced by the ideas and in one way or another
incorporated them into their religious traditions. The end-products
of these extravaganzas have caused scholars much (and I think
needless) trouble as they subjected them to sober exegesis and tried
to reconcile them. (Epilogue, page 215)
[Did] the Mithraic beliefs and rites come down from the forest of
what we now call Siberia? Let us look again at what is known of the
Orphic mysteries, and reconsider the archetype of our own Holy
Agape. On what element did the original devotees commune, long
before the Christian era? Certainly the overt vocabulary relating to
the birch and the fly-agaric carried great prestige over millennia
throughout the south and east of Asia: the Tree of Life, the Pillar
of the World, the Axis of the World, the Tree of the Knowledge of
Good and Evil-all these were variations stemming back to the birch
and fly-agaric of the northern forests. The Herb (or Plant) of Life,
the Herb of Immortality, the Fruit of the Tree of Life, the Divine
Mushroom of Immortality-these are alternatives ultimately
representing the fly-agaric, no matter how far removed the poet or
sage or king might be from the real thing. In remote China we have
seen the devotees of the Manichaean sect as late as the 12th century
eating `red mushrooms' in such quantity as to arouse the indignation
of a pillar of the Chinese Establishment: is not this an echo of
Siberian shamanism, not having passed direct from Siberia to China,
but tortuously, through successive Middle Eastern religions, until
we reach the last of Mani's followers, far from his Iranian home?
(Epilogue, page 220)
CSP's
Entheogen
Chrestomathy entry for Soma
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