Table of Contents:
Foreword by Richard Evans Schultes
I - Introduction
II - Chemistry and Pharmacology
III - The Persona of Soma: In the Beginning Was the Word
IV - Was There a Soma-urine?
V - Questions of Exegesis
VI - Conclusion
VII - An Excursus: Early Man and Plant Hallucinogens.
Appendix I - Recent Bibliography on A. muscaria.
Appendix II - Manner of Ingesting the Fly-agaric among Siberian Natives
Appendix III - Miscellany

Foreword by Richard Evans Schultes

On April 15, 1969 Mr. R. Gordon Wasson, Honorary Research Fellow in our Botanical Museum, brought out his SOMA Divine Mushroom of Immortality. In it he proposed a novel identification for Soma, the long enigmatic god-plant of the ancient Aryans, as Amanita muscaria, the brilliant red mushroom with white spots that is common in the birch and pine forests of Eurasia.

In June 1971 the Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies (the 'BSOAS') of the University of London published a 31-page article by John Brough, Professor of Sanskrit in the University of Cambridge, challenging the thesis developed in Mr. Wasson's book. On Sunday August 8, 1971 Mr. Wasson was host to Professor and Mrs. Brough in his home in Connecticut and on that occasion Professor Brough gave him an autographed copy of his paper, the first that Mr. Wasson had seen of it. On January 12, 1972 Mr. Wasson sent off his rejoinder to the BSOAS. On February 15 the Editorial Board declined to publish it, adhering 'to its general policy of not publishing rejoinders to reviews'. Thereupon Mr. Wasson on March 14 asked for the privilege of reprinting privately the Brough paper to accompany his reply elsewhere. So far as we know, the Board never took action on Mr. Wasson's request of March 14.

Following my return from a field trip in the upper Amazon and after familiarizing myself with all the facts, I decided that our Botanical Museum should publish Mr. Wasson's answer, and he fell in with my suggestion. On May 25 I addressed a letter to Professor Edward Ullendorff, M. A., D. Phil., F. B. A., Chairman of the Editorial Board of BSOAS, apprising him of our intention and soliciting permission to reproduce Professor Brough's paper together with the Wasson rejoinder. I expected this to be granted as a matter of course. On June 20 the Board finally declined to grant us the requested permission.

Together with Mr. Wasson I deplore the decision of the BSOAS Board not to allow us to reprint the Brough paper. In matters of moment editors should not feel hamstrung by their own house rules. Professor Brough may feel that it is unfair to him for Mr. Wasson's reply to go out unaccompanied by his text. But the Wasson rejoinder has now been so re-phrased as to stand adequately on its own feet. The journal in which Professor Brough's evaluation appeared is of limited accessibility to specialists in the diverse fields that the Soma problem will interest. While it would have been helpful to our readers, and only fair to Professor Brough, to have the Brough review before them, in the light of the decision of the BSOAS Editors, there is nothing that we can do about it.

On a larger stage, we deplore the decision of the Editors of BSOAS because we believe that a learned journal has a duty to encourage, rather than impede, the interchange of scholarly views. The mystery of the Soma plant reaches beyond questions of Vedic exegesis. The collection of hymns known as the ṚgVeda is a seminal document in Eurasian man's early history, and, as the Vedist Louis Renou wrote, the whole of the ṚgVeda with its problems is present in nuce in the themes that Soma presents to us. If the Vedists make no effort to identify the plant, others must undertake the task. As is common knowledge, over the past two decades notable achievements have been made by the Swiss team of Conrad Eugster and Peter G. Waser in the analysis of Amanita muscaria and the study of the properties of its constituents. Apart from many other matters, Mr. Wasson presents what seems to be telling evidence, especially to scientists, that the Brahmans of Vedic times were privy to the secret of those properties, unique so far as we now know in the plant world. He takes advantage of this paper to reformulate succinctly, in the light of all the discussion provoked by his book, the case for his identification of Soma and carries the argument into new ground.

The Soma question does not interest chemists and pharmacologists alone. It impinges on botany and especially on that field of botany which concerns itself with the psychotropic plants. It bears on anthropology and archæology, on religion and the early cultural history of Eurasia. Paraphrasing Georges Clemenceau on war and the generals, I would say that Soma and the ṚgVeda are too important to be left to the Vedists.

RICHARD EVANS SCHULTES
Professor of Biology
Director of the Botanical Museum
  of Harvard University

Cambridge, Mass.
June 30, 1972

I

Introduction

When the ṚgVeda was first revealed to the West after the middle of the last century, it aroused excitement and lively expectations in cultivated circles. But in recent decades that nascent enthusiasm has been receding, largely no doubt because of difficulties inherent in the text but also because many Vedic scholars have been content to live in isolation in what looks to the outsider like an hermetic coterie. This attitude is exemplified at every level, conscious and unconscious, in Professor Brough' s painstaking dissection of my SOMA Divine Mushroom of Immortality.

The ṚgVeda is unique in various ways in its antiquity, in its textual purity, and in the strong though narrow beam of light that it throws on the religious and spiritual life of one element in our Eurasian ancestry just as it was emerging from pre-history. There was always the enigma of Soma. With the strides made recently in exploring for psychotropic plants, Soma, permeating the ṚgVeda, cries for identification at last. But following the example of their Hindu predecessors, Western Vedists have chosen to ignore this question and some even seem to resent a proffered solution, saying that the problem is insoluble without having made an effort to solve it.

With two of John Brough's pronouncements in his review article¹ on my SOMA I agree. 'The importance of the Soma-plant in Vedic religion has never been underestimated. ... the ṚgVeda is, so to speak, permeated by Soma'.² Here he is right. Soma is indeed the key to the 1028 hymns of the ṚgVeda, and that key was long since mislaid. Brough goes on to call my views 'revolutionary',³ and again he is right. I was waiting for someone of stature to say this. That he devotes 31 pages to me in the BSOAS is in itself a recognition of the importance of the issue I raise. As this issue has wide bearings, reaching in diverse directions far beyond Vedic circles, he must expect me to discuss his views on their merits, according to my lights, not letting personal attachments affect my findings. This was his way in writing his review. I welcome his paper, supplying me as it does with a number of texts that allow me to clarify, amplify, and drive home my thesis.

Near the beginning of his paper Brough has this to say about the Siberian materials that I offer my readers in SOMA:

... as a matter of simple logic, such parallels have no probative value. They cannot even be adduced as confirmatory arguments for the theory that the Soma-plant was A. muscaria. Until this theory is proved for the ṚgVeda, and proved beyond any possible doubt, the non-Indo-Iranian materials remain, in the strictest sense, irrelevant. Even if the proposed identification for Soma seems probable, but is not proved on the basis of internal evidence, extraneous facts are not additional evidence. [JB 332-333]

Any such proposition is, I submit, untenable. How ambivalent is Brough's guidance line! Even though a 'proposed identification for Soma seems probable' what a big concession! - 'if not proved on the basis of internal evidence', it carries no weight with him as a Vedist. By this rule Brough achieves two ends: the exclusion by fiat of the testimony of my photographs, and unless I have misunderstood him the exclusion of non-Vedists from the field, for only accomplished Vedic scholars can pass on the internal Vedic evidence. By contrast I hold that the Soma problem has the widest cultural ramifications and it can only be met by drawing on the resources of diverse disciplines. The sterility of the traditional manner of handling the Soma enigma is manifest.

Brough goes further: the Vedic scholar may not advance an identification of Soma on what lawyers would call the weight of the internal evidence, nor yet on evidence proving his case beyond a reasonable doubt, as in a criminal trial. The proof must be 'beyond any possible doubt'. To exact unanimous agreement among Vedic scholars on a novel interpretation of the Vedic evidence is chimerical: there will always be dissenting voices, as Vedic scholars including Brough well know. What Brough is saying is that the identification of Soma is impossible, and one re-reads Brough's words at the end of his opening paragraph with fresh understanding as the full reach of its chilling sense dawns upon us; '... and the opinion is widely held that the problem is insoluble'. Can it be that many Vedists today hold to such a despairing view? Is the anonymity of Soma a built-in element in Vedic studies and are Brough and some other Vedic scholars content, perhaps determined, to have it so?

But no Berlin Wall sets off the ṚgVeda hymns in an encapsulated enclave. They are just one area of many - though a particularly fascinating and important one - in the republic of humane letters. Where would Biblical criticism be if Biblical scholars had not taken soundings in all the adjacent cultures and not least the non-Semitic ones? Where would Homeric studies be if a Schliemann had not gone beyond the text to look for Troy? Nor have the scholars in these fields hesitated to enlist the help of scientists in devising techniques to date and assess their archæological finds. Has Brough read Science and Civilisation in China by his colleague of Gonville and Caius College, or, if he has, has he failed to catch its message? Not all Vedic scholars share Brough's attitude, but he does not stand alone. F. B. J. Kuiper of the Kern Institute in Leiden has said that 'the search for the "original Soma" might lead us far beyond the field of Indo-Iranian studies proper',⁴ as though such excursions were dangerous temptations to be avoided. These two statements, Brough's and Kuiper's, reveal the absurd isolation in which some Vedic scholars live by choice. I should have expected Vedists to be foraging in all the highways and byways of science and the humanities for clues to the all-important enigma of the mysterious Soma. I should have expected all (not just a few) of them to welcome suggestions from those specializing in other disciplines such as botany, where the explorations for the hallucinogens have lately thrown wide the door to new interpretations in cultural history. I should have expected the Vedists not only to be abreast of the thrilling developments in the botanical exploration for the psychotropic plants of the world but to be pioneers in it, contributing suggestions from the ṚgVeda for identifying Soma. But many are not informed, not interested, and they resist suggestions. The fruits of interdisciplinary exchanges are to be rejected out of hand, in advance.

The Vedists with notable exceptions seem to be, as it were, the heirs to the Brahman caste, not touching ordinary mortals and not to be touched by them. True, in the rest of his paper Brough comes down into the market-place to rub elbows with the commonalty, and his friends may point out that he fails fortunately to live up to the rules laid down in his opening paragraphs. But this initial declaration of his, all the more meaningful for being a forthright admission, gives us the cast of his mind, discloses his attitude toward traspassers in the Vedic preserve.

1. ↑   'Soma and Amanita muscaria', BSOAS Vol. XXXIV Part 2, 1971, pp. 331-362, hereinafter referred to as JB. In my reply I have been helped in Vedic matters by Mr. Alexis Sanderson, but he is not to be held responsible for either the form or the substance of my reply.
2. ↑   JB 331
3. ↑   JB 332
4. ↑   From a review of SOMA in the Indo-Iranian Journal, Vol. XII No. 4, 1970, p. 284. I seize this opportunity to call public attention to an extraordinary act of scholarly elegance on Professor Kuiper's part. He sent me his review when it was written, months before its publication, and on my suggestion opened the columns of his Journal to my response, allowing me to appear in the same issue with his review and following immediately after it. Not only this: his review was printed in 8-pt type on a 9-pt slug whereas my reply was in 9-pt type on a 10-pt slug, making my paper more readable than his! In this case the characterization 'a scholar and a gentleman' is no mere cliché.

II

Chemistry and Pharmacology

I will start with the chemistry and pharmacology of the fly-agaric, Amanita muscaria, the plant that I am confident (more so than when my book came out, now that I begin to see what the opposition amounts to) was the Soma of the Aryans.

In our generation the pioneers and leaders in this research have always been Conrad H. Eugster, Professor of Chemistry in the University of Zurich, and his colleague Peter G. Waser, Professor of Pharmacology, with whose papers Brough was unacquainted.¹

Eugster's isolation of two new chemical entities in the fly-agaric, now called 'ibotenic acid' and 'muscimol', has been the epoch-making discovery to date in fly-agaric research. At first unveiled only in patent applications, they were revealed in a doctoral dissertation in Zurich in 1961. Both entities are psychotomimetics, or, in popular language, hallucinogens.

And here we come upon startling facts. Ibotenic acid is present in the fresh fly-agaric in widely varying amounts, ranging from 0.03% to 0.1%. When the fly-agaric dries, the ibotenic acid steadily disintegrates and disappears. It is replaced by muscimol, which is at least five times more powerful. Thus we have the unique situation where a psychotomimetic agent converts itself through simple drying into another active agent that is more potent by far and more stable. In SOMA I give in extenso (and in summary on pp. 153 ff) the almost unanimous testimony, extending over two centuries and throughout almost the whole of the northern tier of tribes from the valley of the Ob to the Chukotka, that the fly-agaric must not be eaten fresh: it should be dried, preferably sun-dried. The empirical knowledge of the Siberian natives is now confirmed by Eugster. Furthermore Eugster says that Swiss mushrooms gathered in mid-summer carry more ibotenic acid than in autumn. This echoes the testimony of von Langsdorf² about the practice of the Kamchadal of using mushrooms gathered in July and August. Thus these discoveries of Eugster's at the laboratory bench only confirm what the unlettered Siberian tribesmen have known empirically from time immemorial. My SOMA was in Eugster's library, but as he fails to mention the evidence from Siberia, I can only conclude that this element in it failed to catch his attention.

The testimony is abundant though not unanimous that the Siberian tribesmen, after having dried their fly-agarics, on ingesting them washed them down with water, or with the juice of berries (bilberries Vaccinium uliginosum or willow herb Epilobium angustifolium - or perhaps other berries), or thoroughly worked them over in human saliva. Alcohol is never mentioned and Krasheninnikov in the mid-18th century says expressly that the mushrooms were soaked in the 'must' or 'wort' (Russian: suslo) of Epilobium angustifolium.³ The parallel with the Vedic usage is remarkable. The dried mushrooms (in which the ibotenic add has been replaced by muscimol) are re-watered⁴ in the elaborate Soma sacrifice, and later, after filtering, the pávamāna is mixed with milk or curds or ghee or barley water, or occasionally with honey (mádhu). Nothing authorizes us to say the mádhu was mead.⁵

Now listen to Brough:

... it would be strange that the elaborate Vedic process of pounding out and filtering the juice should have been necessary. Why should the plant not have been simply eaten? There is no particular sanctity in liquid as such. [JB 338]

Not sanctity but chemistry! The plant must be first dried, then re-inflated, and finally the juice expelled.

Brough goes on to say there is no mention in my exhibits of the 'pounding' of the mushrooms to extract the juice. No, there is no mention, nor of a Brahman caste singing hymns in the Vedic language.

The Vedic hymns marked a high point in the religious life of the Aryan people, in which the rapturous experience produced by Soma led the Brahmans to clothe the celebration of the sacrament in an amazing ritual, perhaps without parallel in history. Let us now travel down the corridors of time three thousand years, and through the corridors of space for thousands of miles, and we find some dozen tribes almost pushed into the Arctic Ocean, in cultural disarray, minuscule in numbers, disappearing before our very eyes, but still possessing (I submit) the same mushroom that the Aryans possessed, insisting that the mushroom was of an order superior to the alcohol of the West,⁶ drying their mushrooms as the Aryans had dried theirs, only to steep them again in fluid in which water plays the operative role, consuming them, and then knowing rapture.⁷

Brough says he 'has no specialist qualifications in chemistry and pharmacology' [JB 360] and proceeds at once to supply documentary support for his lack of qualifications in a number of surprising statements in the chemical and pharmacological fields, e.g.,

... it is most probable that the muscarine is the chief nauseating agent in A. muscaria. [JB 360]

Since Eugster and Waser brought out their landmark paper in 1954 no informed person has entertained this notion. The drug muscarine is present in the fly-agaric in such small amounts that quantities far beyond human capacity would have to be ingested to provoke any kind of muscarine reaction. All that Brough says about the chemistry and pharmacology of A. muscaria is out of date.

A little later we come on this:

... much work remains to be done in botany, chemistry, and pharmacology before it will be sensible to make a further attack on the problem of the botanical identity of the Soma plant. [JB 361]

The readers of the BSOAS rightly look to the papers published therein for authoritative pronouncements in the fields under discussion and they may overlook Brough's warning that he is here speaking without credentials or they may skip over his disavowal of 'specialist qualifications' as only a standard cliché of false modesty. But the fact is that Brough shows no knowledge of the immense amount of work done and progress achieved in recent decades in psychoactive plant substances, and the fly-agaric is in the vanguard of these advances. At the last moment, when I caught wind of what was afoot, I sent him an elementary paper⁸ that might have rescued him, but it was too late. In an Addendum at the end of his paper [JB 362] he graciously acknowledged receipt of the paper but then goes on to minimize the importance of his lack of 'specialist qualifications' by saying that the 'chief point of [his] argument still stands', i.e., the 'nausea, vomiting, and coma caused by the fly-agaric', as though these effects were absolutes, not arguable, not subject to definition, to qualification, to circumstance. But let us reflect a moment. Wine as one of the Elements in the Mass is analogous. From earliest times (indeed since Noah's days!) wine has been known to cause nausea, vomiting, and coma; yet its sacramental rôle stands unchallenged.

Brough speaks of the work that remains to be done in botany, chemistry, and pharmacology before we can tackle the botanical identification of the Soma-plant. But if Vedists persist in remaining ignorant of the work that has been done and is being done in these other disciplines, his formula for progress leads to a dead-end. For Brough would confine work on the ṚgVeda to Vedists, and since most Vedists, and not least the good ones, are unlikely to have time to master botany or chemistry or pharmacology, the outlook is bleak.

But of course Brough is mistaken in claiming for Vedists pre-emptive rights in the ṚgVeda. He is wrong in his noli-me-tangere stand, which is simply a déformation professionelle.

1. ↑   For the bibliography of their papers, see Appendix I. They supply the names of two other teams, one Japanese and the other English, that have concerned themselves in the '60's with the fly-agaric.
2. ↑   See below Appendix II; also my SOMA, p. 247.
3. ↑   By definition 'must' or 'wort' is a non-alcoholic juice but a juice destined for fermentation. We all know that in popular usage 'must' is sometimes applied to a beverage that has begun to ferment. Krasheninnikov was a scrupulous reporter, and if alcohol had been involved I think he would certainly have told us so. Besides all of the rest of the dozen witnesses are unambiguous: water (sometimes sweetened with berry juice), not alcohol, was the vehicle that the natives relied on. ... Only Brough can explain why he misrepresents the Siberian sources saying that in Siberia 'the mushroom is apparently always consumed whole' (JB 336), and repeating this error on JB 338, though this time qualifying it somewhat.
4. ↑   There are numerous verses in the ṚgVeda alluding to the reflation of the dried Soma: e.g., IX 30.5, 62.5, 79.4. W. Caland and V. Henry in their classic L'Agniṣṭoma (Paris, 1906-1907) say that the Soma plants were mingled with water on the second day of the prolonged ritual (§ 47) that they were describing, and the pressing and filtering took place only three days later (§ 127), on the fifth day. In the ritual that they give us the original Soma was no longer being used, but the steeping in water that they report must have come down from earlier times, since there could be no point in inventing at a later date such a conspicuous feature of the liturgy, a feature that would be otiose with a substituted plant. The Soma sacrifice was ordinarily much simpler and briefer than the lengthy Agniṣṭoma, which is useful in giving us as it were a slowmotion picture of the sequence of events.
    The author of a review of SOMA that appeared in The Times Literary Supplement (22-V-69) denied that there was 're-hydration' (as he called the reflation) of Soma in the Vedic ritual. He had simply overlooked the numerous verses in the ṚgVeda referring to it, as well as the evidence in L'Agniṣṭoma. The reviewer was also certain, if Soma had been a mushroom, that the priests, when they gave up Soma, would have chosen another mushroom as a substitute. But no one is privy to the motives of the Brahmans of B. C. 1000. It seems to me that if they found it advisable to abandon Soma, the circumstances were probably such that they would wish to obliterate its very memory. The Brahmans were skilled in memory disciplines and had they desired to perpetuate the memory of their sacred plant, nothing could have been easier. The review ended with a frivolous (though in the critic's opinion serious) suggestion that the chanterelle (Cantharellus cibarius) was the original Soma. Eminent scholars, sheltered behind the anonymity of the TLS reviews, sometimes as here are careless and irresponsible in their handling of serious books.
5. ↑   Henry Wassén, Director of the Gothenburg Ethnographical Museum, a shrewd, widely read, widely traveled man, in conversing with me has always urged upon me, first, the key significance among the Paleosiberian shamans of the fluid that they took with the fly-agaric, and secondly, the psychological importance of the unanimity with which they tell, on returning from an ecstatic trance, of the far journeys they have been on. We now see the meaning of the fluid that they imbibe. I next draw attention to the following footnote in L'Agniṣṭoma (p. 450; preceding ftnt.), speaking of the Vedic hymns:

   ... le sacrifice [fut] souvent métaphoriquement assimilé à une marche, un voyage, une expédition, et comportant d'ailleurs réellement un grand nombre d'évolutions processionelles.

   In short, in that distant Aryan land Caland and Henry as early as 1906 gave us, in discussing Soma, a description of what today, in popular parlance, is called a 'trip.' The analogy with the Siberian tribesmen as well as with today's use of hallucinogens is manifest.
6. ↑   SOMA 250: Von Langsdorf says, 'The Koryaks greatly prefer fly-agarics to the Russians' vodka and maintain that after eating fly-agarics a man never suffers from headaches or other ill-effects.' 267-268: Jochelson says, 'Like all other primitive tribes, the Koryak are passionate consumers of brandy, and dealers often obtain an arctic or red fox in exchange for one wine glassful of brandy. To my question as to which they preferred, brandy or fly-agaric, many Koryak answered, "Fly-agaric". Intoxication from the latter is considered more pleasurable, and the reaction is less painful, than that following brandy.'
7. ↑   See Appendix III for additional evidence and comments on Russian, Siberian, and German practices and attitudes.
8. ↑   Appendix I, No. 15.

III
The Persona of Soma: In the Beginning Was the Word

The juice of the Soma-plant caused divine inebriation, mada or maδa in Indo-Iranian terms.¹ The 'reverential awe' (Brough's words) that Soma inspired permeates the ṚgVeda. This reverence, this awe, prompts Brough to see an analogy with the Greek ὲνθουσιασμός, 'God-possessed', and rightly so. 'All the words concerning poetic inspiration', says Brough, 'appear in connexion with Soma', and he lists six such words, dhī, dhīti, mati, vip-, gir-, manīṣā. Another term kavi, 'poet', is frequently applied to Soma, and kā́vya, translated by Renou as pouvoir-poétique, 'poetic potency', is preponderantly applied to Soma and to Agni, two gods in the ṚgVeda who are closely associated together. A kā́vya is an inspired utterance and also a magically potent spell, as Brough points out. He quotes Renou as equating vā́c, 'the Word', in French 'la Parole', with the 'Logos' of Greek. All this is splendid. I would have added some comment on amṛta, a powerful synonym for Soma, used time and again, a word cognate with Greek 'ambrosia', the food of the immortals.

These Vedic words tell us what is essential about the effect of Soma on the Brahmans who were the custodians of its secrets. My reservation - and a grave one - is that Brough seems to find these words foreign to him. He is not at home with them. He cites Vedic verses and words. He quotes Renou. He thinks he finds a Greek word that is applicable:

It is difficult to give an adequate equivalent [of mada], but the tenor of the hymns indicates something like 'possession by the divinity' in some way comparable to Greek ὁ ὲνθουσιασμός. [JB 339]

Why does Brough find it 'difficult' to render mada? Divine inebriation, divine possession - these are common coin of the realm where mystics and their commentators dwell. There has been no dearth of them from India to the Atlantic, from Vedic times down to today, in all the religions that we know anything about. I find it odd that a Professor of Sanskrit in Cambridge should not be at home in the idiom of the mystics. I do not of course insist that he be a mystic, but that with sympathetic understanding he should be attuned to them, listen to them, watch their performances, know their ways.

What is but a suspicion on the reader's part at this point is proved beyond a doubt a page later. Brough finds only one hymn² - and that a doubtful one - that may have been inspired by an 'hallucinogen', - only one out of 1028. After we have been told that Soma, permeating the ṚgVeda (as Brough himself says), the potent engine behind the hymns, leads to mada (divine possession), generates 'reverential awe', vibrates with the Word (vā́c), makes for kā́vya (poetic potency), when we are expecting Brough to lead us through the hymns and trace in them the all-pervading influence of these moving superlatives, when we are to be shown, in short, whither Soma took the poets, we are reduced to one dubious hymn, X 119. And why did Brough choose this one hymn? Is it only because each of its verses ends with a refrain, 'Have I not drunk the Soma juice?' An astonishing way to judge poetic inspiration! Let us suppose the poet had ended the verses of this hymn with a different refrain: Brough would not have cited it, but would it have been any less 'inspired'? Or let us suppose the poet of IX 113 had replaced his refrain with one mentioning Soma-juice: would this have made a difference? The poets were singing their hymns to each other, for those who knew the Way (ṛtá), not preparing road-maps for strangers thousands of years later and thousands of miles away.

Brough discovers a dichotomy between the 'inspired' hymns and the 'far more' that are liturgical. Why this dichotomy? Liturgy is the supreme communal expression of religious feeling. Liturgy is an enactment of a myth or a sacrament, and every word, every gesture, every posture, also the processions, solemnly performed by people duly appointed for the purpose, can be as inspired as Brough's 'inspired' hymns. When he thinks of the liturgical hymns, is he mistaking the rubrics, the 'stage directions', for the divine performance? In any case it is clear that Brough fails to feel the throb, the glow, the tingling sensation that the hymns conveyed to the priests who composed them, giving voice to the divine afflatus that moved the poets. Granted, religion has moved thousands of years and thousands of miles from the Vedic age, and to seize the poets' thoughts and feelings calls for highly developed empathy on our part. When the priests sang the opening verses of IX 74, with one numinous phrase after another, those in attendance must have felt the tug at the heart, their rising gooseflesh (as A:'E. Housman³ put it on a celebrated occasion in Cambridge), their tear ducts perhaps working. This was what was meant by kā́vya, and only at a lower level, among those who were incapable of reaching the heights of which I speak, did kā́vya convey the mundane sense of Brough's 'magically potent spell' or incantation.

After dwelling at some length on the 'reverential awe' generated by Soma, after discussing the Vedic words that eloquently describe its effects, after thus supplying us with the peculiarity, the very signature, of an hallucinogen when consumed by one ready to receive it, the reader is startled by Brough's question:

Yet, if we exclude this hymn [10.119], what indisputable evidence is there in the ṚgVeda that soma was hallucinogenic? [JB 341]

What additional evidence do we need? It is possible of course that Brough does not know an hallucinogen when he describes one. With an hallucinogen the 'reverential awe' of which Brough speaks imbues all the hallucinations of the five senses and together with them places one, for the nonce, among the Immortals. The 'reverential awe' holds one spellbound, entranced, for the time being, and nothing else matters. 'Reverential awe' is the hallmark of the hallucinogen.

In SOMA I suggested that the fly-agaric with its sturdy stanchion and resplendent capital happily coincided with the metaphor, 'mainstay of the sky' or 'pillar of the world', by which Soma is designated time and again in the ṚgVeda. Brough says on this:

I find the idea almost comic that the Vedic poets should have seen in this little mushroom a model of the sky supported by a mighty pillar. [JB 357, lines 9 and 10]

Brough is admitting (his admission being spontaneous and therefore the more significant) how little he knows of the poetic idiom of the enraptured mystic, who often tries to convey the ineffable by hyperbole and paradox. 'And a sigh is the sword of an angel king,' wrote Blake. If Brough came across this line for the first time without knowing the author, would he not find the metaphor of a sword for a sigh almost comic? The same insensitivity to a powerful metaphor marks Brough's treatment of the knot-studded cudgel of Indra,⁴ which also seems to have given Brough a merry time. We are postulating that the fly-agaric is the adored Soma. We are postulating that the Brahman poets knew divine inebriation from imbibing Soma, that they were gifted with kā́vya, 'poetic potency', that they spoke the vā́c, the Word. We are postulating a Soma glowing with holiness. No appropriate figure of speech is too exalted, too extreme, for the Soma-plant.

I do not of course hold the view that the fly-agaric itself was the fons et origo of the metaphors 'Mainstay of the Sky', the 'Single Eye', the 'Head' of Soma, etc. The Vedic conception of the universe - the vault of heaven, sūrya, and all the rest - found a surprising number of parallels in the shape and colouring of the superb fly-agaric and the poets seized on them for their tropes. Their cosmological ideas and the plant reinforced each other most beautifully. But some of the figures, such as the 'First Filter', the 'knot-studded cudgel' of Indra, and the 'Third Filter' could only have originated in the fly-agaric.

The words mada, kavi and kā́vya, vā́c, and the others listed by Brough - all emanations as it were of Soma - are the body and soul of the ṚgVeda. After citing them timidly, gingerly, Brough drops them for good. He embarks on the building of an utterly different, incompatible persona for this god, one with whom he seems at home. Brough thinks Soma is a stimulant; yes, a vulgar stimulant like alcohol, like the rum ration that has sometimes been given in the West to sailors and soldiers before entering a battle. Brough is sure about this Soma.

On a more mundane plane, the soma-drink was a powerful stimulant for those about to go into battle. [JB 340)

Who drank Soma in Vedic times? The priests - or some of them - certainly, and perhaps the wealthy patrons of the cult also. But who tells us that the ordinary warriors did so? Brough speaks of 'the secular use of soma in battle'⁵ as of a fact and he 'conjectures' that this use came first in time! I wish he had given us supporting evidence.

In the Vedic hymns Indra, the warrior god, as well as other deities, went into the fray against their mythological enemies with bellies full of Soma. But this is mythology, equipping the gods with the divine afflatus. The Brahmans conceived of their tribal gods fighting the enemy with full equipment, with mada and vā́c doing their part.

Brough quotes⁶ in favor of his warrior interpretation of Soma ṚgVeda IX 30.3 where the poet says, 'Bring us warrior-might [exaltation of spirit as well as bodily strength] fit to subdue warriors'; and IX 85.2 where he says, 'O Pavamāna, stimulate us in the battle... strike down our enemies.' But these two verses sound like the hymns that were sung in churches all over the world without any 'stimulant' during the last wars. Soma and Indra are mighty tribal gods, they are 'our side', and they are urged on together to enter the fray and do valiantly. The Brahmans were singing hymns pleading with their gods, Indra, Soma, and the rest, expressing ardent hopes, praying for victory with the gods' aid. The men may have fought better after they had heard such a stirring religious service.

Brough reverts to the 'stimulating' effect of Soma time and again.

There are ample grounds for believing that soma was a powerful stimulant. [JB 341]

What 'ample grounds'? He gives us no grounds at all.

Here, it would seem, is a plant [i.e., the fly-agaric] whose effects are totally unsuitable to stimulate Indra and human warriors for battle. [JB 360]

Yes indeed. At this point Brough is right. Soma stimulated the kavi to song, not warriors to battle.

Ephedrine is a powerful stimulant, and would thus be a more plausible preparation for warriors about to go into battle. [JB 361]

But divine inebriation is what moved the kavi who imbibed Soma. Mada and vā́c are its sweet fruits, not lust to do battle.

Brough does not reconcile his two personalities of Soma. Would a leader commanding troops about to enter battle choose that particular moment to have his men awe-struck with holy rapture? But until Brough documents his construction of Soma as a 'stimulant' like our spirits, it is idle to speculate on the possibilities, enticing though this exercise promises to be.

Brough finds stupor incompatible with the Vedic religion.⁷ How does a man in rapture look? There are many stupors and one kind is a man in rapture. Those Europeans who observed the tribesmen in Siberia did not know what they were seeing. They contented themselves with saying 'stupor' and they were right, but they did not look far enough. Everything that Brough holds against my theory on p. 360 is not only compatible with the fly-agaric as Soma but confirms it. He objects to the emetic properties of Soma, but in the East the attitude toward vomiting is far different from our modern Western attitude. We think vomiting a sign of illness or at least an imbalance in the organism, and in company vomiting is beyond the pale. Part of the yoga discipline is to extend the range of the voluntary nervous system to include vomiting and to vomit regularly. I do not assert that any such régime ruled 3,000 years ago in the Indus Valley, but I am fairly confident the Brahmans of the ṚgVeda did not share the modern Western conventional horror of vomiting, which I believe is limited to our own age and culture. Certainly once you are in a state of ecstasy, vomiting does not matter, as those who have experienced rapture well know.

Brough cites convulsions as caused by the fly-agaric. This must be based on von Langsdorf's testimony, pp. 248, 250-1 of SOMA. But von Langsdorf quotes informants as saying that convulsions are caused by excessive use of fly-agaric. Brough omits the word 'excessive'. He has reversed the tenor of his source. Furthermore von Langsdorf adds that cases of convulsions leading to death were 'extremely rare' and moreover, on inquiry, 'no one could recall any specific example'. (His informants were doubtless Russians exchanging hearsay in the Russian colony concerning the surrounding helots - the Kamchadal, Koryak, etc.) Brough does not quote von Langsdorf's careful caveat that covers this part of his text:

Although I made great efforts to find out something about the harmful or possibly deadly effects of the fly-agaric, I could obtain no satisfactory information on the subject. The Koryaks greatly prefer fly-agarics to the Russians' vodka and maintain that after eating fly-agarics a man never suffers from headaches or other ill effects.

Brough seems to know little of the varieties of religious experience. The Vedic religion was not a sedate, decorous, conventional service attended by well dressed well behaved families such as we have on Sundays in the churches and cathedrals of England and the United States.⁸

Brough asks me in a challenging tone why I feel certain mádhu in the ṚgVeda never meant 'mead' but always 'honey'. I am quite sure that I am right and here are my reasons. Soma in the ṚgVeda is exalted above all earthly things. Soma is of the earth but it is also divine. It possesses the power to confer the 'reverential awe' of divine inebriation, the pouvoir-poétique as Renou phrased this gift that surpassed all other gifts. Soma was the Word made juice. Only metaphors of superlative enhancement were worthy of it. Repeatedly the term mádhu is so used. In the Vedic age honey was unique, a product of nature having the colour of amber and a heavenly taste, virtually the only source of sweetness that the Indo-Iranians knew. In this guise, mádhu was worthy of Soma. Who would downgrade Soma by calling it 'mead'? Mead is a fermented drink in a class with beer. If mádhu had meant 'mead', why was not súrā an equally common trope for Soma?

We in the West, by long tradition, are obsessed with alcohol as the sole inebriant. A divine inebriant is utterly different in kind from an alcoholic beverage. Would a believing Christian liken the Elements in the Holy Eucharist to the beer being dispensed in a local pub? A fortiori would the Brahman, possessing an herb whose miraculous potency did not need to be taken on faith, call this herb by the equivalent of beer? If the Aryan culture knew mead, I think the Aryans must have called it by another name and in I 117.6 the poet obviously meant 'a hundred jars of honey', the highly prized honey, not mead. Had the Brahmans commonly used the same word for both, honey and mead, the confusion of senses would have precluded mádhu as a trope for Soma. At the expense of repetition I repeat that a fermented beverage must not be confused with a divine inebriant. This is the first and great commandment for the Western student of Soma to master.

1. ↑   Brough's discussion here is JB 339-340. In the Trentino dialect of Italian the fly-agaric is ovolo matto, 'mad mushroom'. Some philologists have thought that this adj. matto, apparently a hapax or rare in Latin, now common in Italian, was cognate with the Indo-Iranian mada, maδa.
2. ↑   I refrained in SOMA from citing X 119 because of its late date, not feeling certain that Soma was still being consumed by the Brahmans when the last batch of hymns was admitted to the canon.
3. ↑   The Name and Nature of Poetry, Leslie Stephen Lecture, Cambridge, 13 May 1933.
4. ↑   JB bottom of 359.
5. ↑   JB 340.
6. ↑   JB 340.
7. ↑   JB 360. W. Caland and V. Henry in their L'Agniṣṭoma, beginning on p. XI of the Preface, describe the function of the various priests and say of the first Priest the following:

   Le prêtre dit brahman occupe une place à part. En principe, i est muet et inactif, et pourtant il passe pour le personnage le plus important du drame qui se joue sous ses yeux impassibles. Il est le 'médecin du sacrifice': si quelque manquement s'y est produit, il sait le rite et la formule efficaces qui en annulent les conséquences; il accomplit le rite, profère la formule et rentre dans son repos. [Italics mine]

   And so the priest who ranked first in importance had virtually nothing to do! He remained in his place and then withdrew 'to take his rest'. The brilliant men who composed L'Agniṣṭoma were working from sources composed after the use of the Soma-plant had been abandoned. Was not this 'first priest' in line of succession to a priest who, in the days when the genuine Soma was present, had been singled out to drink the Soma and then to retire into seclusion and pass into a state of rapture - what Brough calls a 'stupor'? Vedic students should examine carefully the sources to see what additional light they shed on this first of the priests, who thus went off to prendre son repos.
8. ↑   I regret that I confused Brough with my presentation of the Vogul tale, to which he draws attention, JB 360. The two recensions of the Epic song 'about the creation of the heavens and earth', Reguly's and Munkácsi's, taken down 40 years apart, differ only in minute linguistic details that do not affect the meaning. The translation of the song was never in question, only the accuracy of Munkácsi's summary, which is printed in italic in my SOMA, pp. 307-308, and I went to Budapest to consult János Gulya for this purpose. It turned out that Munkácsi's summary was grossly inaccurate.

IV

Was There a Soma-urine?

As an inebriant the fly-agaric possesses a property that is peculiar to it: the potency in this mushroom passes through to the urine and the urine is as inebriating as the mushroom itself, possibly more so. Perhaps the Indo-Iranians made no use of this property, or made only occasional use of it when there was a shortage of the original plant, or they may have resorted to the urine in some areas and not in others, or they may have practiced urine-drinking early in the Vedic age and then abandoned it. But even if the Indo-Iranians never resorted to Soma-urine, if in the Vedic age they showed knowledge of the inebriating quality of the urine after imbibing Soma, this alone would suffice: it is proof - and what proof! - that we have identified the plant. It would rivet the superb fly-agaric to the Divine Soma. For the fly-agaric, so far as we know, is the sole source of muscimol, and muscimol, so far as we know, is the sole hallucinogen that passes through to the urine with unchanged potency.

I do not assert that the Vedic priests drank Soma-urine. I say the case for the practice is strong and cannot be dismissed out of hand. The intense repugnance of the West and among occidentalized Hindus to my idea is only an anthropological trait of Westerners and we must guard against being swayed by our tribal traits. A knee-jerk rejection tells more about us than about the Indo-Iranians of old.

As with vomiting, the attitude in the East toward urine is different from ours. Urine is extensively used as medicine and in ablutions and in certain religious offices. Urine is normally the chief source of sterile fluid available to peoples who do not possess our technology, especially useful for washing wounds.

In a Gatha of the Avesta, Yasna 48.rn, Zarathustra excoriates a practice of the priests:

When will you (O Mazdah) do away with the urine of this drunkenness with which the priests evilly delude the people? [Italics mine.]

It seems to me that Zarathustra was speaking of the Haoma-urine drinking in the ritual. F.B.J. Kuiper, who disagrees with me on my identification of Soma, is nevertheless cautious in his comment on my interpretation:

Since there is ample evidence to show that the fly-agaric can also be 'taken in the urine of the person who has ingested it,'... the surprising novel interpretation of Zarathustra's words... may well contain a grain of truth,... [Indo-Iranian Journal, Vol. XII No. 4 (1970) p. 283]

But now listen to Brough:

It seems certain that Zarathustra here is castigating the Haoma-ritual; but there is no reason to see in the word mūθra anything more than a strong term of abuse... [JB 348]

But was 'piss' a term of abuse in ancient Iran, let alone a strong one? Brough produces no parallel texts citing 'piss' as a term of abuse, not from the Avesta, nor from Sogdian or Khotanese sources, nor from the corpus of Pahlevi writings, nor from the vast body of Vedic and Sanskrit texts with which he is familiar. He produces none at all and I doubt whether he can. He would ask us to accept a usage probably running counter to Iranian attitudes that would be a hapax, rather than the plain meaning of the verse. He would conjure away a crux with a bland assertion! Let us note that our text speaks of the urine of this drunkenness.

It is my suggestion that the 'third filter', mentioned twice in the ṚgVeda (IX 73.8, 97.55), is the human organism filtering the Soma juice through to the urine. Abundant testimony from travelers, anthropologists, linguists, and others sheds light on the practice as it has survived down to our times among the most remote peoples in the northern tier of cultures in Siberia, the Paleosiberians, and also some of the Uralic tribes - the Samoyed, one branch of the Lapps, the Ob Ugrians, and possibly some of the Finnie peoples. The urine-drinking custom is strong among the Northeastern tribes in the Chukotka. These facts are challenged by no one, no matter how surprising they are to Westerners coming upon them for the first time. It is the thesis of my book that a practice, amply attested in modern times for northern Siberia and Europe, was shared in the remote past by the Indo-Aryans who brought it down from their northern homeland, a plausible thesis that needs to be weighed, rather than rejected out of hand. Brough proffers no explanation for the 'third filter'.

Here is what Claude Levi-Strauss in his review article on my SOMA (L'Homme, Vol. 10, No. 1, 1970, p. 9) had to say about my construction of the 'third filter':

Quant au troisième filtre, sa nature et son rôle demeurent inexplicables, sauf à y reconnaître le corps même du consommateur... à travers lequel le Soma passe en se clarifiant pour rejaillir sous forme d'urine. Il est de fait que de nombreux versets prêtent une extrême attention au cheminement du Soma clans l'estomac, le ventre et les entrailles du dlieu.

After dismissing cavalierly a series of Vedic verses discussing Soma in the enormous belly and the entrails of Indra, Brough concludes:

... there is no hint in the RV that Indra ever excreted soma. [JB 359]

Brough overlooked VIII 4.10:

Like a thirsty stag, come here to drink;
Drink Soma, as much as you wish.
Pissing it out day by day, O generous one,
you have assumed your most mighty force.
    (Tr. by Daniel H. H. Ingalls)

How does Brough render this verse? Until we hear from him, there stands Indra with his vast belly full of Soma daily pissing Soma.

And in II 34.13 the Rudras in the shape of horses seem to have pissed Soma. This is certainly a possible construction of the verse.

When one drinks tea or coffee or milk or beer, one urinates not tea or coffee or milk or beer, but urine. Why does Indra, why possibly do the Rudras, urinate Soma? How did the Vedic priests learn about Soma-urine unless they had drunk it?

Among the hallucinogens known so far to science, the fly-agaric is unique in that its active agent - muscimol - is carried through to the urine unchanged.¹ If Indra pisses Soma, as he does, what can he have drunk other than the pressed juice of the reflated fly-agaric? How else is Soma-urine to be explained? This reminds me of Voltaire's apophthegm: Si Dieu n'existait pas, il faudrait l'inventer. With Soma-urine the opposite holds true: Si cela n'existait pas, qui pourrait l'inventeri?

As for Brough's discussion of IX 74-4, he says that Geldner's conjecture making the priests piss in the ritual seems 'not impossible', though for him it is 'highly improbable'. Geldner's conjecture is all the more remarkable in that he did not, when he made it, suspect the possibility of Soma-urine. What would he have said now that I have introduced the fly-agaric? Brough accepts Renou's rendering of náro in this verse as referring to the Maruts:

'... the presence of the Maruts in this verse is beyond dispute.' [JB 347]

But Daniel H. H. Ingalls a year earlier had already disputed this finding of Brough's. Ingalls, who rejects my Soma-urine theory, had declared in April 1970 that I had 'been sharper than most Vedic; translators in seeing that the word náro in that verse must refer to the priests. It must;...'² Ingalls and Brough disagree with each other and with me on the interpretation to be given to this whole passage.

In later times we find references to Soma-urine and the drinking of it. According to a well known Brāhmaṇa story³ Indra drinks so much Soma that it flowed out from all of the orifices of his body as well as from his bladder. In the Mahābhārata there is a quaint apologue,⁴ a late interpolation, telling how a mātan̄ga (lowest of the low) invited the holy man Uttan̄ka to drink his urine to quench Uttan̄ka's unbearable thirst and how Uttan̄ka, feeling insulted and indignant, refused the proffered beverage, only to learn later that the mātan̄ga had been Kṛṣṇa in disguise who had been offering him amṛta urine. Amṛta is often used in the ṚgVeda and the old texts as a synonym for Soma. These are telling citations difficult for even the most determined exegete to conjure away. Brough fails to mention them.

There is more evidence, remote but nonetheless enlightening. The Parsis, descendants of the Zoroastrians, to this day consume urine in their religious devotions, though only in symbolic amounts and only bull's urine.⁵ The Manichæans, whose religion was an off-shoot of Zoroastrianism, exercised considerable influence in China for some centuries and from a late date in Fukien Province there survive two reports by a high civil servant to his superiors of the Chinese Establishment criticizing the religious activities of those Manichæans sectarians. In their devotions, he said, they consume too many red mushrooms and moreover they were making use of urine, apparently human urine.⁶

If my interpretation of the ṚgVeda in the matter of Soma-urine meets with resistance in the West, in India in some quarters it has proved acceptable, even illuminating. A lady of English origin writes me that she was in a circle of Indian ladies and one of them, a ranee, was expatiating on the infatuation of her husband, the rajah, for a certain sādhu. Why, he even wishes to drink the sādhu's urine, she said. The Indian ladies accepted this calmly, as though not surprised, and my correspondent therefore remained silent. Again, an Indian intellectual says that the present-day sādhu conveys his spiritual powers to his disciples in any one of four ways: 1) by a 'laying-on' of hands, precisely as in our Church; 2) by having his disciple repeat incessantly for long periods a certain mantra; 3) by having him fix his gaze undeviatingly on the sādhu's countenance for long periods; and finally 4) by giving his favoured disciple the privilege of drinking his urine. I think these instances of contemporary urine-drinking may come down from the time when urine was still impregnated with the essence of Soma.

Sometimes I am asked why, if there was Soma-urine in Vedic times, it is not more specifically described: the Brahmans in those remote days were certainly not squeamish about the bodily functions. True, Victorian squeamishness was foreign to the Aryans. Our sole source of information about this practice is the body of hymns known as the ṚgVeda. The hymnologists composed their verses for other Brahmans and themselves to chant and hear, and their audience of course knew all about the practice. We are fortunate that there should be two direct references to the Third Filter, and a number of oblique allusions. There must have been a reticence, not from squeamishness, but from a sense of holiness that attended the miracle of transubstantiation when the urine of the priest became the divine Soma, to the accompaniment of the liturgy and hymns rendered with careful perfection. A Holy Mystery always and everywhere leaves the devout believer reticent, as he sings and acts out the canon of the liturgy in awesome measures... Transubstantiation! How surprising are the parallels between certain features in the Soma sacrifice and the heavy burden of centuries of Christian theology!

V

Questions of Exegesis

Brough advances, tentatively it is true, the hypothesis that aṃśú was the name of the Soma plant. We agree that Soma was a god and that pávamāna, the juice of the plant, was worshipped as a god. I would consider that the god on the mountain heights was immanent in the plant's juice, and this immanence continued after it was gathered, as it was drying and was being transported to its destination where the sacrifice took place, during storage, and after being expressed from the plant and before and after filtering. Whether 'Soma' was the name of the plant or was applied to it by metonymy is important but need not for the moment detain us. I will revert to this toward the end of my paper.

That the Vedic priests should have had two or more names, in addition to many metaphors, for their great god Soma seems to me natural, even inevitable, each of such names having had its genesis in one aspect of the plant. The names in time would overlap, but each would retain, so to speak, its own center of semantic gravity. 'Soma' grows in the mountains and upland valleys: this is its home where it reigns supreme. 'Soma' was used only on the most exalted plane. Pávamāna is the expressed juice, the liquor ready for consuming. Aṃśú, Brough says, is a third name: what aspect of the plant did it originally represent?

Perhaps the Brahmans felt the need of a word free of the portentous associations of 'Soma' to use in their daily round for the dried, shriveled, lacklustre globs of fungus that were their constant preoccupation. Aṃśú extended its meaning also to the pressed juice: vide, e.g., VI 71.2; IX 86.45, 91.3, 96.8 and 97.14, where the sense of aṃśú overlaps that of pávamāna.

But the etymology of aṃśú remains as obscure as ever and is it not useless to speculate? Its Avestan cognate sheds no light and in the rest of the Indo-European languages no cognate has yet been found. Moreover, we know the word only in the sacred hymns and the Avesta. Its use, if any, in the lay language of Vedic times is a blank. Darmesteter and later Renou used tige for it in their translations; and Bartholomae, in his dictionary of Avestan, 'tender shoot'.

From the meanings given to the word in 'later Indo-Aryan', Brough, though rejecting 'fibre' as the meaning of Vedic aṃśú, concludes:

... the later development of such a meaning strongly suggests that the Soma-plant was fibrous or stringy, rather than the fleshy texture of a mushroom. [JB 338]

But the later Indo-Aryans had before their very eyes the fibrous, stringy plants that passed for Soma, for the Brahmans had selected surrogates for the genuine Soma following the Vedic era. Even today there are countless Brahmans who will solemnly tell you that the original Soma was one of these surrogates, most of them Somalatā or Soma-vallī. I urge the reader who is seriously interested in these matters to read Part II of our SOMA by Dr. Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty to inform himself on this extraordinary chapter in cultural history. The descriptions of these plants are insufficient for us to identify them. The earliest identifiable surrogates are species of Sarcostemma or Periploca or Ephedra, of which we carried a picture in our SOMA on p. 105, here reproduced on the facing page. They are indeed 'fibrous' and 'stringy', and might even have given rise to the meaning 'ray' that aṃśú also carried in later times. I think that the most learned and intelligent of the Brahmans must always have known these plants were only surrogates, but the changelings seem to have been generally accepted. There may well have been other substitutes in the beginning, and rhubarb has been suggested as one of them. To all of them 'fibrous' and 'stringy' are appropriate.

Under these circumstances in post-Vedic times, with 'Soma' surrogates aplenty at hand and accepted as the genuine article, who would think of running the movie backward for centuries, even millennia, in quest of a plant that no one living knew anything about? Here is indeed a case where the Law of Parsimony imposes itself.

Soma was the pole-star of the hymns of the ṚgVeda. Its abandonment must have been a momentous event in the lives of the Brahmans. Not once do the Brāhmaṇas describe the original Soma. Not once do they say that the surrogates (which they do describe as surrogates) resemble the original Soma. This consistent silence about the original Soma must have had a meaning. Negative evidence is usually weak evidence but in this instance the silence is deafening and so for once the negative evidence becomes positive. The Brahmans were masters of the mnemonic techniques - and what masters! - needed to preserve what they wished to preserve in their culture. To have preserved the memory of Soma would have been child's play for them. Did not the Brahmans hope, did they not feel (and in the event rightly so), that later generations would assume the original Soma was in some way similar to the surrogates? Here in Soma is an example of successful priestly obfuscation on the part of the Brahman custodians of the secret - successful down to our own day. (The Brahmans must have had their own good reasons for acting as they did.) Professor Brough himself attributes to the original Soma the properties of the surrogates!⁷

⋆

Now I quote from Brough's paper, to illustrate the nature of his exegesis

'Soma grew in the mountains.' This is important for the fly-agaric theory, since the plant grows only in mycorrhizal relationship with the birch and (less frequently) conifers. 'In northern Eurasia the birch and conifer grow at sea level. South of the Oxus and in India they are found only at a great height in the mountains, around 8,000 to 16,000 feet'... This would account for the increasing difficulty in obtaining supplies of the plant as the Indo-Aryans penetrated further south. The implicit syllogism is obviously invalid, by reason of the undistributed middle: at this point in the argument, many other plants growing in the mountains may still be considered possible. The twelve RV verses quoted here by Wasson show only that Soma (but plant or god?) was located on the mountains. [JB 342]

'The implicit syllogism is obviously invalid.' But I implied no syllogism. What I meant I wrote, nothing more. Brough inferred, mistakenly, an invalid syllogism and would father it on me.⁸ Who could suppose me such a simpleton as to assert that Soma and the fly-agaric are identical because they both grow in the mountains? In SOMA I developed successively a number of propositions each of which served to limit the area of search for Soma. For an example, the poets insistently place Soma in the heights: ergo, we exclude the lowland flora. I pointed out, step by step, how Soma and the fly-agaric shared in these successive attributes. Instead of a faulty syllogism on my part, we are offered a faulty inference on Brough's.

⋆

The twelve verses that I quoted in SOMA indeed show that Soma, both plant and god, dwelt in the mountains, as Brough concedes.

Then Brough goes on to quote two verses where the poets have referred to Soma as growing also in valleys, as though valleys had of necessity to be close to sea-level and lofty valleys were a rarity. True, Brough may be thinking of the Cotswolds and the Grampians, but we are not speaking of England or Scotland. We are speaking of the Hindu Kush and the Himalayas where mountains rise from the hot plains quickly to great heights and where valleys start at the hightest level. Mountains and valleys go together; they are the recto and verso of a page, the observe and reverse of a coin. When the composer of Yasna 10.17 spoke of 'the Haomas whether those on the heights of the mountains, whether those in the valleys of the rivers', was he not resorting to the familiar poetic device of parallelism, saying the same thing in different words? And where in ṚgVeda VIII 6.28 the poet speaks of 'the hidden place of the mountains, and in the confluence of the river's', he is surely referring to the celestial counterpart lying in the heavens.

⋆

It is difficult [says Brough] to imagine that the ritual utterances of the ceremonies of Soma Pavamāna... should be dominated by rapturous descriptions of A. muscaria, a plant which can be seen in its beauty during only a few days in the year. [JB 335]

Why is it difficult? The difficulty lies rather in imagining the opposite. When the whole of the religious life of the Brahmans was centered on this miraculous plant, when the Brahmans were constantly preoccupied with assuring a regular supply of it, when it evoked overpowering awe and reverence among them, could they be heedless of its provenience? Of its life-cycle? That it was visible for only a short time in the year in places perhaps inaccessible to all but a few of the priests would create for the glowing plant a scarcity value, enhancing yet further its unique status in the world's order. They were not living in our segmented culture, many of us shut off from all-providing Nature, the umbilical cord to Nature severed. They were living in a sparsely settled countryside. They were doubtless great walkers as the Hindus are today. They lived close to nature. The harvesting of the Soma-plants must have been the occasion for special ceremonies and holy rejoicings, all perhaps ordered according to the movements of the sun and moon, as was and still is the case in Mexico when 'God's flesh' (the inebriating mushrooms) is gathered on the mountainside just before sunrise. But we know nothing of this: the abandonment of Soma meant that any ceremonies proper to its gathering lapsed. When Soma at last came to be abandoned, the difficulties in the way of achieving this drastic, this revolutionary, step must have been greatly eased by two facts: first, the Brahmans alone were custodians of its secrets, and, second, certainly only some of the Brahmans knew the plant in situ, growing in the mountains.

If I understand Brough, he thinks that the poets' interest in the Soma-plant began only when someone else delivered the dried plants to them in the lowlands. Are there those (other than Brough) who can believe this? I cannot.

Brough performs a similar feat in dismissing the poets' failure to mention the roots, leaves, blossoms, fruit (or seed) of Soma. He thinks it natural for scores of poets over generations or even centuries, in different religious centers, to sing of the holy plant, focus of their religion, without a single one of them mentioning these indispensable organs of the phanerogams. This omission does not strike him as in the least surprising. It is my position on the other hand that these parts of ordinary plants failed to be mentioned because a mushroom does not possess them.

⋆

The Colour of Soma. When I returned from the Far East in the winter of 1965-66, I spent the thirty-five days of voyage on a freighter drafting a 31-page précis of my argument. I also drew up a list of questions to put to those who knew the ṚgVeda. My précis with illustrations went to Louis Renou in Paris. I followed a few weeks later with my questions. The most important one, as important as all the others put together, was whether hári was incompatible with the fly-agaric. I put the question to Renou at our first meeting and discussed it thoroughly again when I was spending Sunday with him in the country, right after Easter of 1966. He had already seen, of course, my principal photographs that accompanied the précis and that were later published in SOMA. Brough asks on what evidence the two sentences that he quotes from me were based. Those sentences read as follows:

Hári is not only a colour word: the intensity of the colour is also expressed by it. It is dazzling, brilliant, lustrous, resplendent, flaming. [JB 349]

They were the judgement of Louis Renou. The wording is mine, the substance was his. It was I who raised this point, being sceptical about the applicability of hári. It was Renou's idea that the intensity of the colour might have been the common denominator linking the fly-agaric with the sun and fire. He developed his thinking on this at some length and delighted me with his illuminating exposition. In many languages there is one colour word that carries a further meaning of superlative intensity, of ultimate enhancement, etc., a meaning independent of its position in the spectrum.

The horse was the noblest of domesticated animals, full of brio and fire, and among horses the bay was outstanding. What could be more natural than that 'bay' would serve as the adjective to express what the sun, fire, the steed of the sun-god, and the fly-agaric possessed in common, a superlative intensity in colour? In Appendix III c we cite an instance of such a word in circumstances not unrelated to the point at issue here.

We are discussing poets, not spectrum calibrators, not exegetes. The Vedic poet would feel the need of a word to characterize the glowing scarlet of his mushrooms, a mot juste. He saw, he chose to see, he arrived at a convention to think of the sun, fire, the steed of the sun-god, the fly-agaric as equally flaming, resplendent, lustrous, brilliant, dazzling: as sharing in these supreme qualities. Soma and the sun and Agni were all-important in his world. The poets saw them as in a class by themselves. Other poets will quickly grasp this, and also poets in posse, among whom will be found some exegetes, including in the end I hope John Brough.

⋆

On this question of the meaning of hári Brough says that 'red is absolutely excluded'.⁹ He is as sure of this as he was of the Maruts whose presence in IX 74:4 was 'beyond dispute' only to be confronted with Ingalls who had already, a year earlier, disputed their presence.

I have made no effort to find a plant that would fit the preconceptions of any one Vedist. I have chosen a plant that I think can be reconciled with the ṚgVeda, let the chips fall where they may. It is incumbent on Vedists to see whether, even at the price of revising their previously held individual views, my solution is compatible with the ṚgVeda. Many Vedists are taking their time with my SOMA: they are living with my idea. They may come up with a hard core of objections and the fly-agaric will then pass into the lumber room of discarded notions. But everything of worth that has turned up so far since my SOMA appeared has in fact buttressed my case.

The identification of Soma calls for a rationale of its own. If we were privileged to travel on H. G. Wells's time machine, we could all ride together backward in time and there in the mountains of northwest India confront the plant Soma. The sight would resolve innumerable doubts with clean finality. Not possessing a time machine, however, we must stand before every candidate and see whether it can be reconciled with the ṚgVeda. It matters not at all if there have been two or more interpretations to a given verse, provided one interpretation fits the candidate. For example, when the poet speaks of 'valleys' as a home for Soma, meaning perhaps lowland valleys, this is irrelevant, if the poet could have had in mind upland valleys. And does the candidate shed light on words and expressions heretofore obscure? Or wholly new readings may be suggested by the fly-agaric... Our quest is an obstacle course, and every obstacle overcome means a substantial gain and an accelerating achievement, until we face virtual certainty.

⋆

Of my plates VII and IX in SOMA Brough says [JB 353-356] that they are 'among the most visually persuasive for Wasson's theory'. We are discussing the Vedic lines, 'He makes of milk his vesture-of-grand-occasion' and 'The hide is of bull, the dress of sheep'. But Brough says my photographs are ruled out as evidence because I must first prove that the fly-agaric is Soma before they qualify. He is reverting here to the rule that he lays down in his opening pages and that I reject as untenable. We all know of many valued discoveries, in humane letters as well as science, that have been made following precisely this procedure, reaching out and discovering analogies, exploring further, finding additional parallels, in the end establishing the case for which proof was being sought.

The ṚgVeda IX 97.9 says that 'by day he [Soma] appears hári, by night, silvery white.' Brough finds [JB 352] my photographs illustrating this verse 'charming' but says they will not do. He prefers Geldner's comment: Soma als Sonne und Mond. I submit that it is questionable for the exegete to cite Geldner as an authority when Geldner did not have before him my alternative reading. How does Brough know that Geldner would hold to his view today? (Let us not forget that Geldner, unaware of my Soma-urine theory, went so far as to suggest the possibility that the priests piss in the course of the rite!) Or perhaps Geldner would accept both readings, the Vedic poets being eminently skilled in expressing two planes of meanings with the same words. We must remember that Soma as the moon figures overwhelmingly in post-Vedic, Brahmanical times, and that this conception in the ṚgVeda is of disputed strength, especially if we eliminate from consideration the last batch of hymns to be admitted to the canon. Geldner's rendering may well be an out and out anachronism. He may have resorted to it for want of a better explanation. I have sometimes asked myself whether the moon as 'Soma', rather than as candrámas, was associated with the abandonment of Soma, when the translation to the skies of this divinity was a happy solution for the problem of Soma's disappearance here below.

⋆

I will finish this section with a question. Do we not find in the fly-agaric a happy solution to the identity of the Vedic divinity, Aja Ekapād? Already in the last century Abel Bergaigne was saying that this meant the Non-né Unipéde, 'the Not-born Single-foot',¹⁰ but he was at a loss to explain this curious name. Now we see what was meant. The god Soma has a single foot and he is also 'Not-born', for the herbalists of old knew well that mushrooms have no seed and come into being, not like all other creatures, but springing up mysteriously, children as they thought of the gods. (In those days there were no microscopes to reveal the spores.) There is a verse in the ṚgVeda that says Parjanya, the god of thunder, was the father of Soma, and according to another verse, 'the gods, those fathers with a commanding glance, laid the Somic germ'.¹¹

Bergaigne showed noteworthy prescience in divining the sense of Aja Ekapād, groping blindly as he was; and so did Geldner when he surmised that the priests might be pissing in the course of the ritual, though he knew nothing of the fly-agaric or muscimol.¹²

In the ṚgVeda the full name of Aja Ekapād is cited six times, always in hymns to the Viśvadevas, and accompanied in five of the citations by another divinity, Ahi Budhnya, the serpent of the depths, a chthonic being who invariably guards the holy plant throughout Eurasia. That Aja Ekapād is another name for Soma, perhaps already archaic in Vedic times, finds support in RV X 65.13, where the epithet proper to Soma, 'Mainstay of the Sky', is applied to him. Pliny¹³ tells us of a single-legged folk (monocoli) said to live in India who take their siesta in the shadow of their own single foot. Is not this the Vedic personification of Soma, Ekapād, which by the time it reached the Mediterranean 1000 years later had become confused with a genuine people, and is not this fabulous folk revealingly linked in Pliny's text to a chattra, a parasol mushroom? In RV X 82.6 Aja appears, not now linked to Ekapād, but to the navel, nābhi, and thus two seemingly disparate metaphors are reconciled in the divine mushroom, both referring to Soma. Even more exciting, at the far end of Eurasia, is the myth of the Chukchi to explain thunder.¹⁴ The Chukchi live in the peninsula known as the Chukotka, opposite Alaska. They are linguistically related to the Koryak and the Kamchadal. The Russian anthropologist V. G. Bogoraz reports that thunder is

the rattling noise made by girls [the 'fly-agaric girls' of Chukchi parlance] playing on a spread sealskin. Rain is the urine of one of the girls. In one tale the lightning is described as a one-sided man [a 'Uniped', monocolus] who drags his one-sided sister along by her foot. She is intoxicated with the fly-agaric. The noise caused by her back as it strikes the floor of heaven is thunder, her urine is the [Soma-impregnated] rain.

In this myth we find the same forest-belt themes as in the Vedic hymns - Ekapād (him of the single foot), the fly-agaric inebriant, with the thunderstorm complex and the Soma urine.

1. ↑   The Eugster-Waser team ignored the Siberian experience but Peter Waser in a paper published in 1967 (No. 10 in Appendix I, pp. 437-438) made known that muscimol, the most important psychotomimetic so far discovered in A. muscaria, passed through to the urine. Once again his finding confirms what the tribesmen have known for ages from personal observation. Richard Evans Schultes drew attention to this convergence of herbal lore of the tribesmen with contemporary scientific discovery in his paper published in the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs, Spring 1971, Vol. 3, No. 2, p. 105.
2. ↑   Paper read at annual meeting of American Oriental Society, 15 April 1970. Published in Journal of American Oriental Society, Vol. 91, No. 2, April-June 1971, p. 188.
3. ↑   Taittirīya Saṃhitā 2.3.2.5-6, 'Satapatha Brāhmaṇa 5.5.4.8-9, and in most detail 12.7.1.1-9. This last citation is a scholiast's effusion carried to absurd lengths, but it raises an interesting question. The muscimol in the dried and reflated fly-agaric passes through to the urine, but does it also come through in the secretions of the sweat glands and tear ducts? The pharmacologists and chemists must answer this and it can easily be answered. If we found muscimol in the sweat and tears of those who have ingested the juice of the reflated fly-agaric, it would mean that the ṚgVeda had called our attention to something we did not know about the hallucinogenic Amanita muscaria!
4. ↑   Aśvamedha Parvan, 14.54.12-25.
5. ↑   J. J. Modi: The Religious Ceremonies and Customs of the Parsees, Bombay, 1923; 2nd edition 1937. 2nd ed. p. 93 and index entries under 'gaomez', 'nirang', and 'nirangdin'.
6. ↑   Un traité manichéen retrouvé en Chine, traduit et annoté par Ed. Chavannes et P. Pelliot, Paris, 1912, pp. 292-340, especially pp. 302-305 and 310-314.
7. ↑   In his discussion of aṃśú Brough has this curious sentence that I call to the reader's attention:

   There are no grounds for believing that the Indo-Iranians were sufficiently skilled herbalists to have made such discoveries. [JB bottom of p. 336]

   On the contrary there is every ground for so believing. The Indo-Iranians, not advanced like us technologically, must have been skilled herbalists like all other peoples at their stage of development. They lived in intimate contact with nature. They knew their plants: which to use for what illnesses and accidents, and whether the roots or the bark or the leaves or the blossoms or the seed, and how to prepare and apply the medication, whether externally or by ingestion, and the dosage, etc., etc. True, we know this chiefly by analogy with peoples living today in conditions similar to theirs, but the evidence is conclusive. Our alert pharmaceutical enterprises listen with respect to what the unlettered old woman in New Guinea or the upper Amazon or Mesoamerica or India has to say about the herbs known to her, hoping always (and sometimes with success) to learn of some new Rauwolfia. The vast herbal lore of ancient India survives, however obscurely for us, in the compilations of Caraka and Suśruta. It survives to this day, passing from one generation to the next by word of mouth, and is a resource that has scarcely been tapped by students of economic botany. To assume a condescending attitude toward this fund of empirical knowledge of botany is grievously wrong. The ṚgVeda is filled with herbal lore and one hymn, X 97, is devoted to plants, óṣadhi. One does not ordinarily look to a collection of hymns for herbal medicine and is it not noteworthy how frequently plants are cited?
8. ↑   Here is the important though not the only lapsus on Brough's part. There are others. A few lines earlier he speaks of illustrations 'photographed from an angle which conceals' the annulus of the fly-agaric. Several of my colleagues have seen in this wording (which could have been easily changed to remove the sting) an implication of deliberate concealment. Brough's question about the annulus carries no weight. Seldom is it so conspicuous as in Poluzzi's illustration and often it has completely or almost completely disappeared. It is a flimsy discard of the organism.
9. ↑   JB 350.
10. ↑   La Religion Védique, Vol. III, pp. 20-25. Aja also carries the meaning 'goat', but Bergaigne rightly rejected this homonym here. See App. III C for a present day application of 'single-foot' to the fly-agaric.
11. ↑   IX 82.3; 83.3; also see Abel Bergaigne, La Religion Védique, Vol. I, pp. 172-3. When man depended for his survival on his knowledge of plants, and even after the domestication of certain plants became firmly rooted, the mystery of the generation of fungi, having no seed and not lending themselves to cultivation, was, it seems, widely known. Cf, e.g., Plutarch's Symposiaka, Prob. 2, Bk. 4. ... In 1953 our Mazatec muleteer was Victor Hernández, a man who had traveled the mountain trails of the Sierra Madre Oriental all his life and spoke Spanish with grace, though he could neither read nor write, nor even tell the hour by the clock's face. We asked him why the sacred mushrooms were called in his native tongue 'that-which-springs-forth'. His answer, breathtaking in its sincerity and feeling, was filled with the poetry of religion, and I quote it word for word as he gave it:
    

    El honguillo viene por sí mismo, no se sabe de dónde, como el viento que viene sin saber de dónde ni porqué. The little mushroom comes of itself, no one knows whence, like the wind that comes we know not whence nor why.

12. ↑   Similar prescience was shown by Philippe de Félice in his Poisons Sacrés Ivresses Divines when he gave a surprisingly accurate description of Soma, pp. 268-9, Editions Albin Michel, Paris, 1936. To none of them - neither Bergaigne, Geldner, nor de Félice - did the possibility of the single-footed mushroom occur.
13. ↑   Quoting Ctesias: Hist. Nat. VII ii 23 (Loeb translation, Vol. II, p. 521). Ctesias derived the information from Megasthenes. See J. W. McCrindle: Ancient India as described by Megasthenes and Arrian, 1877; p. 76.
14. ↑   Bogoras, Waldemar: The Chukchee, Memoir of the Amer. Museum of Nat. Hist. Jesup North Pole Expedition, 1904-1909, pp. 322-323. In the English translation 'one-sided' is confusing. The Chukchi original of this, as well as Bogoraz's Russian translation, does not appear in the Russian publications of Bogoraz. In an analogous context, however, 'one-sided' appears in the Russian text as ljudi-polovinki rather than odnobokij, as one might have expected, and this would seem to mean a race of people equipped with only half of man's attributes, a human organism split down perpendicularly in the middle. This would fit the personification of the fly-agaric as a tribe of people having only one pedal extremity, only a single eye, etc. The Siberian tribes under tabu influences devise many fanciful names for the fly-agaric, of which this seems to be one. Pliny's monocoli is derived from the Greek μονόχωλος, for which 'one-sided' is given as a meaning by Liddell & Scott. A. P. Okladnikov in Yakutia before its Incorporation into the Russian State (McGill-Queen's University Press, 1970, p. 446) reports on the wide dissemination of tales about one-sided folk among the primitive tribes of the tundra and the northern taiga of Siberia. If I am right, we hear distant echoes of these fabulous beings, evoked by the fly-agaric working on the stone-age imagination in the Far North, in the 'Arimaspi' of Herodocus and the 'single-eye' of Soma, and also in Pliny's 'monocoli'; and the conception finds full expression in the 'Aja Ekapad' of the ṚgVeda, which I would anchor to the fly-agaric of the taiga. It has been suggested that the important 'one-sided' mythic folk figuring in the mentality of the Siberian tribesmen of the north should be called 'halflings' in English.

VI

Conclusion

In his 31-page review article Professor John Brough rakes me fore and aft with grape and ball. As the smoke slowly drifts away he finds me riding the waves much as before, with a shot here and there through my rigging. His gun sights had suffered a consistent deviation from the true.

In Victorian days there was a familiar literary device: a long lost heir, vanished and since many years believed dead in the endless spaces of Australia, would turn up and make dramatic entry when all the kin had gathered around the table to listen to the reading of the will. Each of those present, in the surprise of the moment, would react according to character, and the reactions were as diverse as the author could make them. There is some analogy here with my SOMA. A stranger to the Vedic coterie, I have offered to Vedists a jeune premier as claimant to the honours paid to Soma in absentia for 3,000 years, a stunningly handsome plant, small, fleshy, paralleling in colour and shape those features of the cosmos to which the Vedic Brahmans paid utmost homage, an actual plant that until lately still evoked adoration and awe and fear among the Eurasian tribes of most ancient cultural lineage who dwell in the farthest reaches of remote Siberia. This plant is an hallucinogen, the dried plants being re-watered and then their juice pressed out, mixed with other fluids, and consumed. Furthermore, the ordinary urine of the drinker becomes impregnated with the god and then in turn is sometimes imbibed.

Professor Brough, eminent scholar of secure reputation, did me the honour of paying my candidate lengthy and courteous attention, for which I am duly grateful. By fiat he would dismiss ab initio the testimony of my photographs as irrelevant, as also the Siberian practices because they are Siberian and not Aryan, forgetting that human cultures are a seamless garment. He supposes - he must suppose in order that my photos be irrelevant - that the Vedic Brahmans were uninterested in the appearance of their glorious growing plant-god, uninformed about features of its appearance that bear breathtaking analogies with their conception of the cosmos. He offers us a persona of Soma that is a travesty, a staggering misconception of that holy being, if we are to believe our sole source of information, the hymns of the ṚgVeda. He would conjure away many exegetical questions, either by dogmatic pronouncement or by flitting lightly over deep-seated problems. Surprisingly, he asserts that the Indra of the ṚgVeda never pisses Soma-urine. He plunges ahead into matters botanical, chemical, pharmacological, and physiological where he has done no homework.

⋆

In the course of the past fifty years has it occurred to a single Vedist that Vedists are primarily responsible for the identification of Soma? Is any Vedist of the past fifty years aware of the upsurge of interest in psychotropic plants among botanists, chemists, and pharmacologists, and aware also of their achievements in this area, of the work in progress? And if not, why not?... It becomes imperative for accomplished Vedists to reread the ṚgVeda from beginning to end, not merely Maṇḍala IX nor those other passages where the poet uses the word 'Soma', and uncover places where the new identification of the plant clarifies the text, suggests fresh readings, and introduces additional planes of understanding. For, as Brough says, Soma 'permeates' the ṚgVeda.

Let the Vedists leave off feeding exclusively on the ṚgVeda and each other. Let them be on easy terms with the outside world, with botanists, chemists, pharmacologists, physiologists: with anthropologists, pre-historians, and students of religion among early cultures, living and moribund and dead. Brough's paper on every page shouts his need (unfelt by him) for those interdisciplinary contacts to which on principle he closes his eyes and ears. If the older generation of Vedists includes many for whom this expanded opportunity is disturbing, younger scholars will certainly seize on it with enthusiasm. As for the identity of the Soma plant, I am not without confidence in the results of any further enquiries. The annals of pioneering research count instances where the valid discoveries of workers outside the inner fold of traditional scholarship are initially ignored or rejected out-of-hand.

⋆

On an earlier page I promised to return to the meaning of 'Soma' and this I now do.

A few days after Renou received my précis and a couple of weeks before my meetings with him he wrote on 30 March 1966 a two page memorandum addressed to a confrére of his. He had read my précis. He knew nothing of mushrooms. He was taken aback, incredulous, sceptical. But toward the end of his memo he said:

Ou alors, il faudrait admettre que la racine védique su- ne signifie pas 'pressurer' et que le mot qu'on traduit par 'tige' signifie autre chose.

With insight he had placed his finger on the crux, insofar as linguistics is concerned.

I have discussed the meaning of tige, aṃśú. As for la racine védique su-, meaning pressurer, which is the traditional and accepted etymology for 'Soma', perhaps never challenged up to now, it should be reviewed by an Indo-Europeanist of stature, preferably one intimate with the Indo-Iranian linguistic area. Is not the traditional etymology merely a popular etymology sanctified by age? Did it evolve at an early age, before the elements of philology were known, for the express purpose of fitting the liturgy? There was the need to dry the mushrooms, and then steep them in water again, and finally to squeeze the juice out and to consume the juice mixed with other fluids. In fact, the swollen importance that the pounding assumed in the liturgy the hypertrophy of the 'pressing' act - the thunderous pounding of the water-steeped plants - all this elaborate ritual may be reflected in the 'popular' etymology that became traditional, the ritual serving to consolidate the 'popular' etymology arrived at by paranomasia, act and word serving as resonators for each other. (By 'popular' I mean of course in Brahman circles, which alone were concerned with the ritual usage.) But in reality the word 'Soma' may have had a different origin. Is an alternative etymology available? Had Renou lived, had Emile Benveniste not been stricken, this matter would surely have been explored.

VII

An Excursus: Early Man and Plant Hallucinogens.

V. Gordon Childe in what must be considered his valedictory¹ despaired of ever recapturing the emotions, the motive forces, that actuated Stone Age man: they were as dead as the microliths scattered around his settlements. But was Childe altogether right?

Only now are we beginning to sense the rôle of the plant hallucinogens in early man's cultural history, beginning to identify these plants, to analyze them from every angle, to perceive that over a large part of the habitable world (including of course the land mass of Eurasia) they quickened early man's imagination, stirred early man to the innermost core of his being, led him to know ecstasy and enthusiasm in the etymological meaning of those pregnant words. They were a heaven-sent relief from the perils and the hard drabness of his day-to-day chores. It is easy now-a-days to dismiss the hallucinogens as mere chemical compounds with surprising effects on the psyche, and so they are. But our Stone Age ancestor did not know this. He saw these astonishing effects as miraculous, and the plants opened portals for consulting his ancestors or his gods: gave him a vehicle to travel where he willed in time and space. Their unearthly splendor elicited the reverential awe of which Brough rightly speaks, and also fear and adoration, and the secrecy that naturally accompanies these emotions.

By reason of this veil of secrecy our 'advanced' civilization lost the identity of the plants themselves but perhaps as a reflex of those breathtaking visions we elaborated in their place solemn rites of utmost majesty, a mythology, a theology, which for centuries held us spellbound, though these lack the immediacy of the hallucinogenic experience that our ancestors knew. Our scientists are now searching for a use that the psychotropic plants may be put to, but whatever that use may prove to be, the contribution that they have already made to our knowledge of pre-history is of outstanding importance, no less than a Pisgah view of early man's cultural vision, where heaven and hell lay spread out on all sides of him. In this area of his existence we now grasp an aspect of Stone Age man's cultural life that until now eluded us. Childe's despairing summation must be qualified to accommodate our new knowledge.

We have always heard of the tantalizing Mysteries of Eleusis, of Mithra, of Orpheus, of Apollo, of countless others. But the secrecy with which they were surrounded proved an impassable barrier for us. A potion was drunk at Eleusis. What was that potion and whither did it lead? One Aristides in the 2nd century A. D. allowed us the faintest glimpse of what went on. The initiate experienced something 'new, astonishing, inaccessible to rational cognition'. And, speaking of the Eleusinian Mystery, he said:²

Eleusis is a shrine common to the whole earth, and of all the divine things that exist among men, it is both the most awesome and the most luminous. At what place in the world have more miraculous tidings been sung, where have the dromena called forth greater emotion, where has there been greater rivalry between seeing and hearing?

And then he went on to speak of the 'ineffable visions' that it had been the privilege of many generations of fortunate men and women to behold.

'Shamanism' is the convenient name that we give to the religious experience of the Stone Age, and its key is ecstasy, rapture. Fortunately for us, the cult of the hallucinogen did not die out in pre-history. Shamanism lingered on here and there, reaching as with fingers down the corridors of time into early history. I suggest that it survives to this day in the secret rites of the divine mushroom in Mesoamerica, and also that we possess in the potent cult of Soma among Aryan Brahmans a shamanic legacy that we are only now in a position to esteem at its inestimable worth. Here was a group who when the moment came to abandon Soma, the Element in their communion, worked out mnemonic devices of incomparable strength, this strength being a measure of the potency of the hallucinogenic visions they knew well, to assure the perpetuation of the hymns they sang, words and music, so that we today may, as with a tape recording, listen in their chants to the very words and notes they sang. We do not yet know how it came about that shamanism, in this instance, passed on to a priestly class its most precious gift, the gift of Soma.

Let us remember that Soma was not born (Aja) as elements of this world are born; his birth was miraculous, conceived in the soft, fertile earth by an ejaculation of thunder and lightning accompanied with a downfall of rain. The plant-god was sacrificed in the course of the liturgy and his juice consumed by chosen men, and even by transubstantiation the urine of the priest who drank the potion was converted in turn into more of the divine fluid.

The reticence that the hallucinogen imposed on its devotees was only natural, inspired by the reverential awe that still handicaps the student of the hallucinogenic mushrooms in the remotest mountains of southern Mexico, an awe so overwhelming, a reticence so complete, that only now, after four centuries of the Spaniards' Conquest, is the outside world penetrating to the heart of the Mystery and a few are partaking of the Marvelous Herb in native rites.

I would not be understood as contending that only these substances (wherever found in nature) bring about visions and ecstasy. Clearly some poets and prophets and many mystics and ascetics seem to have enjoyed ecstatic visions that answer the requirements of the ancient Mysteries and that duplicate the mushroom agapé of Mexico. I do not suggest that St. John of Patmos ate mushrooms in order to write the Book of the Revelation. But the succession of images in his Vision, so clearly seen and yet such a phantasmagoria, means for me that he was in the same state as one bemushroomed. Nor do I suggest for a moment that William Blake knew the mushroom when he wrote his telling account of the clarity of 'vision':

The Prophets describe what they saw in Vision as real and existing men, whom they saw with their imaginative and immortal organs; the Apostles the same; the clearer the organ the more distinct the object. A Spirit and a Vision are not, as the modern philosophy supposes, a cloudy vapour, or a nothing: they are organized and minutely articulated beyond all that the mortal and perishing nature can produce. He who does not imagine in stronger and better lineaments, and in stronger and better light than his perishing eye can see, does not imagine at all. [Italics mine. From The Writings of William Blake, ed. by Geoffrey Keynes, vol. III, p. 108]

This must sound cryptic to one who does not share Blake's vision or who has not taken the mushroom. The advantage of the mushroom is that it puts many (if not everyone) within reach of this state without having to suffer the mortifications of Blake and St. John. It permits you to see, more clearly than our perishing mortal eye can see, vistas beyond the horizons of this life, to travel backwards and forwards in time, to enter other planes of existence, even (as the Amerindians say) to know God. It is hardly surprising that your emotions are profoundly affected, and you feel that an indissoluble bond unites you with the others who have shared with you in the sacred agapé. All that you see during this night has a pristine quality: the landscape, the edifices, the carvings, the animals - they look as though they had come straight from the Maker's workshop. This newness of everything - it is as though the world had just dawned overwhelms you and melts you with its beauty. Not unnaturally, what is happening to you seems to you freighted with significance, beside which the humdrum events of everyday are trivial. All these things you see with an immediacy of vision that leads you to say to yourself, 'Now I am seeing for the first time, seeing direct, without the intervention of mortal eyes.'

And all the time that you are seeing these things, the priestess sings, not loud, but with authority. The Amerindians are notoriously not given to displays of inner feelings - except on these occasions. The singing is good, but under the influence of the mushroom you think it is infinitely tender and sweet. It is as though you were hearing it with your mind's ear, purged of all dross. You are lying on a petate or mat; perhaps, if you have been wise, on an air mattress and in a sleeping bag. It is dark, for all lights have been extinguished save a few embers among the stones on the floor and the incense in a sherd. It is still, for the thatched hut is apt to be some distance away from the village. In the darkness and stillness, that voice hovers through the hut, coming now from beyond your feet, now at your very ear, now distant, now actually underneath you, hic et ubique, with strange ventriloquistic effect. The mushrooms produce this illusion also. Everyone experiences it, just as do the tribesmen of Siberia who have eaten of Amanita muscaria and lie under the spell of their shamans, displaying as these do their astonishing dexterity with ventriloquistic drum-beats. Likewise, in Mexico, I have heard a shaman engage in a most complicated percussive beat; with her hands she hits her chest, her thighs, her forehead, her arms, each giving a different resonance, keeping a complicated rhythm and modulating, even syncopating, the strokes. Your body lies in the darkness, heavy as lead, but your spirit seems to soar and perhaps leave the hut, and with the speed of thought to travel where it pleases you, in time and space, accompanied by the shaman's singing and by the ejaculations of her percussive beat. What you are seeing and what you are hearing appear as one: the music assumes harmonious shapes, giving visual form to its harmonies, and what you are seeing takes on the modalities of music - the music of the spheres. 'Where has there been greater rivalry between seeing and hearing?' How apposite to the Mexican experience was the ancient Greek's rhetorical question! All your senses are similarly affected: the cigarette with which you occasionally break the tension of the night is imbued with such an aroma as no cigarette before had ever possessed, the glass of simple water is infinitely better than champagne. Elsewhere I once wrote that the bemushroomed person is poised in space, a disembodied eye, invisible, incorporeal, seeing but not seen. In truth, he is the five senses disembodied, all of them keyed to the height of sensitivity and awareness, all of them blending into one another most strangely, until the person, utterly passive, becomes a pure receptor, infinitely delicate, of sensations. (You, being a stranger, are perforce only a receptor. But the Mazatec Indians are also participants with the curandera in an extempore religious colloquy. Her utterances elicit spontaneous responses from them, responses that maintain a perfect harmony with her and with each other, building up to a quiet swaying antiphonal chant. In a successful ceremony this is an essential element, and one cannot experience the full effect of the rôle of the mushroom in the Indian community unless one attends such a gathering, either alone or with one or at most two other strangers.)

As your body lies there in its sleeping bag, your soul is free, loses all sense of time, alert as it never was before, living an eternity in a night, seeing infinity in a grain of sand. What you have seen and heard is cut as with a burin in your memory, never to be effaced. At last you know what the ineffable is, and what ecstasy means. Ecstasy! The mind harks back to the origin of that word. For the Greeks ekstasis meant the flight of the soul from the body. Can you find a better word than that to describe the bemushroomed state? In common parlance, among the many who have not experienced ecstasy, ecstasy is fun, and I am frequently asked why I do not reach for mushrooms every night. But ecstasy is not fun. Your very soul is seized and shaken until it tingles. After all, who will choose to feel undiluted awe, or to float through that door yonder into the Divine Presence? The unknowing vulgar abuse the word, and we must recapture its full and terrifying sense... A few hours later, the next morning, you are fit to go to work. But how unimportant work seems to you, by comparison with the portentous happenings of that night! If you can, you prefer to stay close to the house, and, with those who lived through that night, compare notes, and utter exclamations of amazement.

In Nahuatl, the language spoken by the Aztecs, the sacred mushrooms were and are called teo-nanácatl, God's flesh. I need hardly remind the reader of a disquieting parallel, the designation of the Elements in our Eucharist: 'Take, eat, this is my body... ', and again, 'Grant us, therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of thy dear son...' But there is one difference. The orthodox Christian must accept by an act of faith the miracle of the conversion of the bread into God's flesh: that is what is meant by Transubstantiation. By contrast the mushroom of the Nahua carries its own conviction: every communicant will testify to the miracle that he has experienced. The Mazatec Indians call³ the sacred mushrooms ^ʔnti¹xi³tho³, 'what leaps forth', that is, what leaps into being without the measured growth from seed, i.e., the mushroom. ... We now know that there are dozens of hallucinogens, each with its own potentialities, sometimes differing greatly from each other, and we have not yet determined the specific hallucinogen or hallucinogens used in Greece and the Middle East.

I find the parallels between the mushroom cult and Christianity disquieting. In both the deity is conceived miraculously, not from seed after the order of normal generation. In both the miraculous conception is effected by a ray from heaven. In one the deity is a man-god, in the other a plant-god, and the deity is consumed in both in the course of an agapé wrapped in holy mystery. In one by an act of faith the bread and wine through a Miracle of Transubstantiation are converted into the body and blood of the Lord. In the Eurasian mushroom cult the act of transubstantiation takes place when ordinary urine becomes the divine essence.

As man emerged from his brutish past, thousands of years ago, there was a stage in the evolution of his awareness when the discovery of a mushroom (or was it a higher plant?) with miraculous properties was a revelation to him, a veritable detonator to his soul, arousing in him sentiments of awe and reverence, and gentleness and love, to the highest pitch of which mankind is capable, all those sentiments and virtues that mankind has ever since regarded as the highest attribute of his kind. It made him see what this perishing mortal eye cannot see. How right the Greeks were to hedge about this Mystery, this imbibing of the potion, with secrecy and surveillance! What today is resolved into a mere drug, a tryptamine or lysergic acid derivative, was for him a prodigious miracle, inspiring in him poetry and philosophy and religion. Perhaps with all our modern knowledge we do not need the divine mushrooms any more. Or do we need them more than ever? Some are shocked that the key even to religion might be reduced to a mere drug. On the other hand, the drug is as mysterious as ever it was: 'like the wind it cometh we know not whence, nor why.' Out of a mere drug comes the ineffable, comes ecstasy. It is not the only instance in the history of humankind where the lowly has given birth to the divine.

To conclude I will quote a passage that I wrote many years ago, before I had thought about Soma; the passage is applicable, mutatis mutandis, in broad terms to any hallucinogen including Soma;

'If our classical scholars were given the opportunity to attend the rite at Eleusis, to talk with the priests, what would they not exchange for that chance? They would approach the precincts, enter the hallowed chamber, with the reverence born of the texts venerated by scholars for millennia. How propitious would their frame of mind be, if they were invited to partake of the potion! Well, those rites take place now, unbeknown to classical scholars, in scattered dwellings, humble, thatched, without windows, far from the beaten track, high in the mountains of Mexico, in the stillness of the night, broken only by the distant barking of a dog or the braying of an ass. Or, since we are in the rainy season, perhaps the Mystery is accompanied by torrential rains and punctuated by terrifying thunderbolts. Then, indeed, as you lie there bemushroomed, listening to the music and seeing the visions, you know a soul shattering experience, recalling as you do the belief in both Eurasia and Mesoamerica that mushrooms, the sacred mushrooms, are divinely engendered by the God of the Thunder-bolt in the fertile Mother Earth.'

1. ↑   Piecing Together the Past: the Interpretation of Archeological Data, Frederick A. Praeger, N. Y., 1956; pp. 170-172.
2. ↑   For the source of the quotations see Walter F. Otto: 'The Meaning of the Eleusinian Mysteries,' published in The Mysteries, 1955, ed. by Joseph Campbell, Pantheon Books, Bollingen Series XXX, 2; pp. 20 et seq. Italics are mine.
3. ↑   The sign that precedes the Mazatec word is a glottal stop. The Mazatec language is tonal, and the superscript digits represent the four registered tones, '1' being the highest and '4' the lowest. '^ʔnti¹' is a respectful diminutive that I find difficult to translate. The 'x' somewhat resembles in pronunciation English 'sh'. The 'th' is an aspirated 't'.

Appendix I

Recent Bibliography on A. muscaria.

[Here is a chronological list of the principal papers written by Conrad H. Eugster and Peter G. Waser on Amanita muscaria, its chemistry and pharmacology, and also papers and dissertations written under their direction or as a result of their work. The complete bibliography exceeds 50 items.]

1. C.H. EUGSTER and PETER G. WASER, 'Zur Kenntnis des Muscarins', Experientia, Vol. X, 298 (1954).
2. C.H. EUGSTER, 'The Chemistry of Muscarine', Advances in Organic Chemistry. (Raphael, Taylor, Wynberg Ed.) Methods and Results, Vol. 11, 427 (1960).
3. GÜNTER F. R. MÜLLER, 'Beiträge zur Kenntnis der Inhaltsstoffe des Fliegenpilzes (Amanita muscaria L.)', Dissertation, Universität Zürich 1961. (Leitung Prof. C. H. Eugster)
4. PETER G. WASER, 'Chemistry and Pharmacology of muscarine, muscarone and some related compounds', Pharmacol. Rev., 13, 465-515 (1961).
5. GÜNTER F. R. MÜLLER and C. H. EUGSTER, 'Muscimol, ein pharmakodynamisch wirksamer Stoff aus Amanita muscaria', Helv. Chim. Acta, Vol. 48, 910 (1965).
6. R. GOOD, G. F. R. MÜLLER and C. H. EUGSTER, 'Isolierung und Charakterisierung von Prämuscimol und Muscazon aus Amanita muscaria', Helv. Chim. Acta, Vol. 48, 927 (1965).
7. A. R. GAGNEUX, F. HÄFLIGER, C. H. EUGSTER and R. GOOD, 'Synthesis of Pantherine (Agarin)' Tetrahedron Letters No. 25, 2077 (1965).
8. A. R. GAGNEUX, F. HÄFLIGER, R. MEIER and C. H. EUGSTER, 'Synthesis of Ibotenic Acid', Tetrahedron Letters No. 25, 2081 (1967).
9. C. H. EUGSTER, 'Isolation, Structure and Syntheses of Central-active Compounds from Amanita muscaria (L. ex Fr.) Hooker', Proceedings of a Symposium San Francisco 1967, published as Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs. U. S. Public Health Service Publication No. 1965, 416-418 (1967); discussion of papers on A. muscaria, 441.
10. Peter G. WASER, 'The Pharmacology of Amanita muscaria', Proceedings of a Symposium San Francisco 1967, published as Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs. U. S. Public Health Service Publication No. 1965, 416-439 (1967); discussion of papers on A. muscaria, 441.
11. C. H. EUGSTER, 'Wirkstoffe aus dem Fliegenpilz', Naturwissenschaften, Heft 7, 305 (1968).
12. W. THEOBALD, 0. BÜCH, H. A. KUNZ, P. KRUPP, E. G. STENGER und H. HEIMANN, 'Pharmakologische und experimental psychologische Untersuchungen des Inhaltsstoffe des Fliegenpilzes (Amanita muscaria)'. Arzneimittelforschung (Drug Research) 18, 311 (1963).
13. PETRA BERSIN, 'Beeinflussung des Monoaminumsatzes im Gehirn durch Muscimol und Ibotensäure', Dissertation, under the direction of Prof. Peter G. Waser and Prof. J. Buchi. Zurich 1969.
14. C.H. EUGSTER, 'Chemie der Wirkstoffe aus dem Fliegenpilz (Amanita muscaria)', Fortschritte der Chemie organischer Naturstoffe, Vol. XXVII, 262 (1969).
15. P. CATALFOMO and C.H. EUGSTER, 'Amanita muscaria: Present understanding of its chemistry', Bull. on Narcotics, Vol. XXII, No. 4, 33 (1970).
16. P. KÖNIG-BERSIN, P. G. WASER, H. LANGEMANN and W. LICHTENSTEIGER, 'Monoamines in the Brain under the Influence of Muscimol and Ibotenic Acid, Two Psychoactive Principles of Amanita muscaria', Psychopharmacologia 18, 1-10 (1970).
17. PETER G. WASER, 'Pharmakologie der Halluzinogene', Schweiz. Rundschau Med., Praxis 60, 1001-1005 (1971).
18. PETER G. WASER, 'Pharmakologische Wirkungsspektren von Halluzinogenen', Bull. Schweiz. Akad. Med. Wiss., 27, 39-57 (1971).

Appendix II

Manner of Ingesting the Fly-agaric among Siberian Natives

The manner of ingesting the fly-agaric among the Siberian natives is important. All sources save one say the mushrooms must be first dried. The one exception is Georgi, whose testimony for reasons that I explain (see SOMA, pp. 240-1) is suspect. Almost all of them say the dried mushrooms are washed down with water or in the juice of berries or thoroughly mixed with saliva before swallowing. Saliva consists chiefly of water. Some informants call attention to the thorough and prolonged mastication that precedes ingestion. This corresponds, I suggest, to the 'pounding' of Soma, already immersed in water, a feature in Vedic ritual that seems to have undergone hypertrophic development, probably for liturgical effect. Alcohol is never cited as an additive, neither among the Aryans nor the Siberian tribesmen. Many of our witnesses from Siberia are Europeans who were quick to despise the 'filthy' practices of the tribesmen, and to contrast their 'superior' vodka with the mushrooms that, to their dismay, some of the tribesmen, when asked, preferred over alcohol. Where in one or two instances they report the ingestion of the mushrooms without mentioning the accompaniment of other fluid, this is not conclusive; the drinking of water may have seemed too banal to record. Until recent centuries distilled alcohol was unknown in the Siberian North, as it was also among the Vedic Aryans. Here are the relevant texts, with the page references to my SOMA:

1. KRASHENINNIKOV, STEPHAN; pp. 235-236: 'Sometimes for their enjoyment they also use the mukhomor, the well known mushroom that we ordinarily use for poisoning flies. [Mukhomor = fly-agaric] It is first soaked in must of kiprei [Epilobium angustifolium], which they drink, or else the dried mushrooms are rolled and swallowed whole, which method is very popular.'
2. STELLER, GEORG WILHELM; p. 239: 'The fly-agarics are dried, then eaten in large pieces without chewing them, washing them down with cold water.'
3. GEORGI, JOHANN GOTTLIEB; p.240: 'To that end they either eat one of these mushrooms quite fresh, or perhaps drink the decoction of three of them.'
4. LANGSDORF, GEORG HEINRICH von; pp. 247-248: 'The Kamchadals gather them usually during the hottest months of July and August; they maintain that those that dry by themselves in the earth, on the stalk, and that are somewhat furry and velvety to the touch on the underside of the cap have a far stronger narcotic effect than those picked fresh and strung up to dry in the air... The usual way to consume fly-agarics is to dry them and then to swallow them at one gulp, rolled up into a ball, without chewing them; chewing fly-agarics is considered harmful, since it is said to cause digestive disturbances.'
   'Sometimes these mushrooms are cooked fresh and eaten in soups or sauces, since they then taste more like the usual edible mushrooms and have a weaker effect, so that when the mushrooms are prepared in this way, a larger amount can be eaten without harmful results. Occasionally, too, fly-agarics are soaked in berry juice, which one may thereafter drink at his pleasure as a genuine intoxicating wine. Juice squeezed from bilberries (Vaccinium uliginosum) is said to be most suitable for this purpose because it heightens the intoxicating effect, so that one may expect to achieve a more potent result with a smaller quantity.'
5. ERMAN, ADOLPH; pp. 253: 'Of the various ways of using mukhomor he said that the best was the simplest way, viz., drying it, swallowing it raw, and washing it down with water. On the other hand, the Russians of Klynchevsk, who according to him pick whole packhorse loads of this valuable plant, prepare an extract by decocting it in water, and try to take away its extremely disgusting taste by mixing the extract with various berry juices.'
6. MAYDELL, BARON GERHARD von; p. 254: 'At the Paren' I also obtained some dried fly-agaric (Amanita muscaria), which is very highly prized among the Koryaks for its intoxicating effect. It is not eaten in the fresh state, in which it is believed to be poisonous, but always hung up to be smoked until it is shriveled and quite dry so that it will keep well. It is said to occur only among birch trees and hence is confined to a few localities, among which I heard Penzhinskoye and Markovo mentioned in particular. When a Koryak consumes the fly-agaric, he chews the dried mushroom and then drinks it down with water.'
7. DITTMAR, CARL von; p. 256: '... the mukhomor is only chewed, and the juice is then swallowed.'
8. JADRINTSEV, NIKOLAI MIKHAILOVICH; p. 260: '... Furthermore, the natives are passionately addicted to the fly-agaric (i.e., to a decoction of Amanita muscaria), which replaces liquor and is also sold to merchants.'
9. SLJUNIN, NIKOLAI VASIL'EVICH; p. 261: 'The Koryaks maintain that fresh fly-agarics are highly poisonous and hence do not eat them. They are first dried for a long time in the sun and over the fire in the tent. Only then is the mushroom consumed, together with fresh water to wash it down.'
10. ENDERLI, J.; p. 262: 'At the man's order, the woman dug into an old leather sack, in which all sorts of things were heaped one on top of another, and brought out a small package wrapped in dirty leather, from which she took a few old and dry fly-agarics. She then sat down next to the two men and began chewing the mushrooms thoroughly. After chewing, she took the mushroom out of her mouth and rolled it between her hands to the shape of a little sausage. The reason for this is that the mushroom has a highly unpleasant and nauseating taste, so that even a man who intends to eat it always gives it to someone else to chew and then swallows the little sausage whole, like a pill.'
11. JOCHELSON, WALDEMAR; p. 266: 'Accordingly, fly-agaric is dried in the sun or over the hearth after it has been gathered. It is eaten by men only; at least, I never saw a woman drugged by it. The method of using it varies. As far as I could see, in the villages of Penzhina Bay, the men, before eating it, first let the women chew it, and then [the men] swallow it. Bogoraz says that the Chukchee tear the fungus into pieces, chew it, and then drink water. Sljunin describes in the same way the Koryak method of using fly-agaric. In describing the use of fly-agaric by the Chukchee and Koryak, Dittmar says that they chew it and keep the quid in their mouths for a long time without swallowing it, Krasheninnikov says that the Kamchadal roll the dried fungus up in the form of a tube, and swallow it unchewed, or soak it in a decoction of willow-herb and drink the tincture.'
12. BOGORAZ, VLADIMIR GERMANOVICH; p. 273: 'The mushrooms are usually dried up and strung together in threes, that number being an average dose. ... When eaten, the mushrooms are torn to small shreds, and these are chewed piece by piece, and swallowed with a little water. Among the Koryak the woman chews the mushroom, and offers the ready quid to her husband to swallow.'

Appendix III

Miscellany

A. Professor Marija Gimbutas on Uses of Fly-agaric in European Russia.

In 1961 a Lithuanian by birth and cultural heritage, Marija Gimbutas, now the renowned pre-historian, wrote me this concerning the fly-agaric in her native land:

... A happier use for the raudonoji musmirė ['fly-agaric' in Lithuanian] was to add them, raw or dried, to vodka, on occasions such as wedding banquets: the effect was a curious, extremely hilarious intoxication. Before World War I orthodox Russians in Lithuania are known to have used this 'fly-agaric vodka'. Around 1905, the fly-agaric vodka was put to good use on Russian prison guards in arranging prisoners' escapes. Around 1942 the old custom was revived in the district of Vilnius: the people added the fly-agaric to home-made vodka.
It is known that in the 19th c., or earlier, Amanita muscaria was exported from the East Baltic area to the north (North Russia) for the shamans as an intoxication medium. This I read myself in the books, but cannot now remember the source.

Here is the only responsible testimony that I have found concerning a customary use for purposes of inebriation of the fly-agaric in Europe. The practice that Professor Gimbutas reports cannot go back far, since aquavitæ was introduced into Eastern Europe only in the 16th century. Was there a synergistic action when vodka was mixed with muscimol? This remains to be determined.

The final solution to the fly-agaric mystery is held up by the heavy tabu that hangs over the ingesting of A. muscaria throughout our European culture area. When I ingested dry fly-agaric in the Burgholzli Clinic in Zurich, doctors and nurses stood around viewing me with ill-concealed anxiety, though I defied and defy them to cite me a single authenticated case where anyone has suffered serious ill effects from this mushroom. Roger Heim, for the past 30 years the world's outstanding mycologist, has looked through the annals of mycology and medicine in France and has not found a single instance. A. muscaria, the supreme 'toadstool', is often held synonymous with 'deadly mushroom' and reports have occurred frequently where the fly-agaric is credited by careless and unqualified persons with deaths caused by other mushrooms. Brough speaks of the fly-agaric as deadly, saying that A. phalloides is 'much more [sic] deadly'. (JB 353) He cites no instance of a death, properly authenticated as to cause, from the Eurasian fly-agaric. He here gives renewed expression to the ancient European attitude toward this lovely mushroom of the peculiar properties, an attitude in which fear and rejection mingle in some localities and in some contexts with a certain awe and affection - the precise syndrome of a religious tabu.

B. Official Soviet View toward Fly-agaric Ingestion.

Sometimes I am asked why we do not enlist the cooperation of Soviet anthropologists. The Soviet authorities labour under an ideological handicap when it comes to the fly-agaric, what is commonly called today a 'hang-up'. The official position is set forth in SOMA (pp. 337-8) when Messrs. Brekhman and Sem gave voice to the official view that no traces of the practice survive:

The minor nationalities of Siberia and the Far East now do not use any psychoactive drugs, which have been relinquished because of radical changes in economy, culture, mode of life, and ideology of the population of this part of the Soviet Union. After the October Socialist Revolution and the establishment of the Soviet power these not numerous nationalities have embarked on a new way of historical development. Formerly backward nationalities of one of the borderlands of Russia, with the help of the Russian people and Soviet Power, passing through intermediate stages, they have soon reached the socialist phase of social development.

Even the best workers in the field in the USSR - and they are first-rate men like A. P. Okladnikov and A. F. Anisimov, seem never to mention the fly-agaric. When we bear in mind that the larch is one of the favourite hosts to the fly-agaric, how odd it sounds to read in Anisimov, retelling a Gilyak myth, the following evasive language:

... As he went up the river, the younger brother saw a larch, 'A thick larch rising to the very sky.' At the foot of the larch there was food, grown and placed there by the 'master of the larch,' unknown to the brothers. The younger brother tasted the food and took some to give to the older one. The next day the titmice brothers proceeded together to the source of the food. There they met heavenly people - two little birds, a silver and a gold one, which had descended to the base of the larch and declared themselves the masters of the food.

[Studies in Siberian Shamanism, ed. by Henry M. Michael, University of Toronto Press, 1963, published for the Arctic Institute of North America. Pages 169-170. Italics mine.]

The marvelous food at the foot of the larch was obviously the fly-agaric.

This quotation from Anisimov's text permits us to add the Gilyak (called Nivkhi in Russia today) to the Paleosiberian tribes familiar with the inebriating mushrooms. Our count is complete; we have positive evidence for the other five Paleosiberian peoples still extant, and the Gilyak are the sixth and final one. ... I have learned that the Gilyak often wear a crudely carved little wooden figure, usually with one leg, suspended around their necks to ward off illness; they call it pangkh. Though my sources do not say so, I think this is obviously the Ob-Ugrian word for the fly-agaric, pango. (See, e.g., Religioznye verovaniia narodov SSSR, vol. I, Moscow-Leningrad, 1931, p. 79.)

To make inquiries of the Soviet authorities about the present-day use of the fly-agaric might only lead to harassment of the tribesmen in the northlands.

C. The Manikin in the Wood.

I will now quote German verses that are familiar to every child (and therefore adult) born to German as his mother tongue. It is a riddle:

Ein Männlein steht in Walde Ganz still und stumm. Er hat von lauter purpur Ein Mäntlein um. Sag' wer mag das Männlein sein Das da steht auf einem Bein?

A manikin stands in the wood Stock-still and mute. He has of purple pure A mantle around him. Say, who may the manikin be Who stands there on one leg?

Alternative ending:

Sag' wer mag das Männlein sein Das da steht im Wald allein Mit dem purpur roten Mäntlein? Children: Glückspilz! Fliegenpilz!

Say, who may the manikin be Who stands there in the wood alone With the purple red mantle? Children: Happiness mushroom! Fly-agaric!

I have supplied the text of these children's verses for two reasons. We see in the use of 'purple' how a people calls 'out its name' a colour word in a special context. Purple is altogether inappropriate to describe the cap of the fly-agaric. Adopting Brough's idea and manner, we should be constrained to say that purple 'is absolutely excluded' as a colour adjective for the fly-agaric. But there in the verses stands the 'purple' fly-agaric in all his imperial majesty!

By a happy but perhaps not fortuitous chance, the answer to the question posed by the riddle:

Say, who may the manikin be
Who stands there on one leg?

is our Soma. History is punctuated by ironies, and how ironical it would be if Max Müller and his fellow Vedists, asking everybody, everywhere, what Soma was, could have found the answer, by listening to the little children playing around his feet in Germany. We can't prove it, but the riddle sounds as though it went back long before the dawn of history. The manikin of the single leg is of course our Vedic Ekapād.

This paper has been printed in 1000 copies
from Dante Face by Stamperia Valdonega.
VERONA • NOVEMBER 1972