Huston Smith, H. (2003). Cleansing the doors of perception: the religious significance of entheogenicplants and chemicals (Rev. ed.). Boulder, CO: Sentent Publications.
Historical Evidence: India’s Sacred Soma
This essay steps back from the current scene to see what history can tell us about the entheogens. Preceding chapters have touched on that question, but this one zeroes in on an important chapter in religious history – Hinduism in its formative period – to treat it as a case study.
The contextual facts are these: Among the gods of the Vedic pantheon, Soma appears to have been the most revered. His home was a plant, and in the holiest of rituals priests ingested the god by drinking a brew that was made from this plant. Somewhere along the way the plant’s identity was lost, and any Indologist who retrieved it was assured of a permanent place in the annals of his discipline. It came as a surprise, therefore, when the prize went to an amateur – a retired banker named R. Gordon Wasson.
I considered the subject sufficiently important to give a summer to researching it, and this essay reports my findings. Its copious footnotes show that (like the second essay in this book) it was written for an academic journal; titled “Wasson’s SOMA: A Review Article,” it appeared in the December 1972 issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion.1 I pause for a moment to indulge myself. Because my best-known work, The World’s Religions, is an undergraduate text that appeared early in my career, I have had to struggle against the fear – self-imposed perhaps, but real nonetheless – of being written off by my colleagues as a popularizer. It has, therefore, encouraged me no end that the foremost linguist of my time, Roman Jakobson, called this essay “a magnificent survey, ” and that one of the two leading historians of religion in my generation, Wilfred Cantwell Smith (the other was Mircea Eliade) credited it with being “a model of a piece: superbly organized, marvelously informative, engagingly written, and altogether exactly right. ”
If I were writing it today, I would have to temper my claim that Gordon Wasson solved the soma enigma conclusively. The quarter-century that has elapsed has brought new criticisms of his arguments, and rival candidates for the soma plant have been proposed. I continue to think that Wasson’s arguments for his candidate are the strongest in the field, but the debate continues.
To get an immediate sense of the relevance of Wasson’s work for this book, I suggest that the reader begin by reading the long footnote that appears on page 51. It is as compelling an account of the entheogenic experience as I know.
I have spent so much time recently reviewing the work of others that I am growing impatient to get on with my own pursuits, but the thesis here considered is important enough to warrant another detour. Moreover, the excursion is bound to prove interesting, for it leads through one of the most colorful intellectual exploits of our century.
Having mentioned both importance and interest, let me begin with the former. Alfred North Whitehead is reported to have remarked that Vedanta is the most impressive metaphysics the human mind has conceived.2 The extent to which it may have influenced our own western outlook after Alexander’s invasion of India does not concern us here; what is at issue is its origins.
Etymologically and otherwise, Vedanta is “the culmination of the Vedas,” and the Vedas derive, more than from any other single identifiable source, from Soma.* Would it not be useful, then, to know what Soma was? Not particularly, India herself seems to have answered, judging from her scholars’ lack of interest in identifying
* As this statement may seem excessively categorical, I give my reasons for it. Soma enjoys a special place in the Vedic pantheon. I will indicate the specifics of that place shortly, but let me acknowledge that its position warrants my allegation only when supported by recognition of the extent to which the Upanisadic metaphysics could have been facilitated by the entheogen that Soma was, and in the Vedas was exclusively. My arguments supporting this recognition fall into three categories: personal experience, the role of the entheogens in engendering religious perspectives generally, and the distinctive character of the Soma experience in Vedic religion.
(a) Personal experience. I quote from the account of my own first ingestion of an entheogen, mescaline. ‘Another phrase came to me: ’empirical metaphysics.’ The emanation theory and elaborately delineated layers of Indian cosmology and psychology had hitherto been concepts and inferences. Now they were objects of direct, immediate perception. I saw that theories such as these were required by the experience I was having. I found myself amused, thinking how duped historians of philosophy in crediting those who formulated such worldviews with being speculative geniuses. Had they had experiences such as mine they need had been no more than hack reporters. Beyond accounting for the origin of these philosophies, my experience supported their truth. As in Plato’s myth of the cave, what I was now seeing struck me with the force of the sun in comparison with which normal experience was flickering shadows on the wall’’ (“Empirical Metaphysics,’’ in Ralph Metzner, ed., The Ecstatic Adventure [New York: The Macmillan Company, 1968], p. 73).
(b) On the role of entheogens in occasioning religious purviews generally, I quote again, as I did in an earlier essay, Mary Barnard who asks, “Which was more likely to happen first: the spontaneously generated idea of an afterlife in which the disembodied soul, liberated from the restrictions of time and space, experiences eternal bliss, or the accidental discovery of hallucinogenic plants that give a sense of euphoria, dislocate the center of consciousness, and distort time and space, making them balloon outward in greatly expanded vistas? The [latter] experience might have had an almost explosive effect on the largely dormant minds of men, causing them to think of things they had never thought of before. [I interrupt to note that in reading for the present review I came across a pointed support of Ms. Barnard’s conjecture, specifically the part connecting the concept of an afterlife to hallucinogens. Concerning certain Algonquin Indians in the region of Quebec, Father Charles Lallemand wrote in 1626, “They believe in the immortality of the Soul; and in troth they so assert that after death they go to Heaven, where they do eat Mushrooms” (21).] Looking at the matter coldly, unintoxicated and unentranced, I am willing to prophesy that fifty theo-botanists working for fifty years would make the current theories concerning the origins of much mythology and theology as out-of-date as pre- Copernican astronomy,” The Mythmakers (Athens, Ohio University Press, 1966), pp. 21-22, 24. On the same theme, by the author of the book under review: ‘As man emerged from his brutish past there was a stage in the evolution of his awareness when the discovery of [an indole] with miraculous properties was a revelation to him, a veritable detonator to his soul, arousing in him sentiments of awe, reverence, gentleness and love, to the highest pitch of which mankind is capable, all those sentiments and virtues that mankind his ever since regarded as the highest attribute of his kind. It made him see what this perishing mortal eye cannot see. What today is resolved into a mere drug was for him a prodigious miracle, inspiring in him poetry and philosophy and religion” (1:162). (Numbers preceding colons refer to numbered items in the bibliography; those following colons to page numbers therein.)
(c) Finally, on the specific place of the entheogen experience in Vedic refigion, these words by Daniel Ingalls, Wales Professor of Sanskrit at Harvard University, written to register a perception that came to him on reading through Book IX, the Soma Book, of the Rig-Veda after reading Wasson’s book here under review. “Soma and Agni represent the two great roads between this world and the other world. They are the great channels of communication between the human and the divine.” But, Ingalls goes on to note, there is a difference. “The Agni hymns seek for a harmony between this world and the sacred, but are always aware of the distinction. The Soma hymns, on the other hand, concentrate on an immediate experience. There is no myth, no past, no need, for harmony. It is all here, all alive and one. The Soma experience was always an extraordinary event, exciting, immediate, transcending the logic of space and time.”
the lost plant – that characteristic Indian casualness toward history again. Western scholars, by contrast, have been curious from the first. In the two centuries since Indology became an academic discipline in Europe, forty-three candidates for Soma were proposed in the nineteenth century, and in the twentieth the number rose to a total of over one hundred. Any Indologist who settled the issue would have been assured of a permanent place in the annals, not only of Indian and religious scholarship, but of historical scholarship generally. Most ranking scholars had abandoned the quest as hopeless.
This is where the story picks up, for when the answer arrives – and it will be the burden of my review that it has arrived – it comes not from a Sanskritist, Indologist, or academician of any stripe. It comes from outside the world of professional scholarship altogether, from an amateur – a retired banker, and a high-school dropout at that. But more. Let the master clue be one of the most improbable lines in all Sacred Writ: “Fullbellied the priests piss the sacred Soma ; a line which, verging on scatology, had regularly thrown the pundits into confusion and leveled the exegetes. Let the discovery surface in a bibliophile’s dream that is a story in itself -printed in limited edition on handmade paper, the book became a collector s item overnight. Finally, let the subject fall squarely in taboo domain – the chaotic, puzzling, passion-filled world of the “psychedelics,” with all that word has come to mean to America in the last fifteen years – and the reader can see why I felt that my own work could wait. The immediate occasion for my review is the appearance of SOMA in a popular edition, but it is also time for a general stock-taking, because the three years since the book’s initial publication have allowed time for reviews to appear in the major critical journals.
Where Things Stood
In the pantheon the Aryans brought with them when they swept into Afghanistan and the Indus Valley in the second millenium b.c.e., Soma occupied a unique position. Indra with his thunderbot was more commanding, and Agni evoked the awe that fire readily inspired before the invention of matches made it commonplace. But Soma was special, partly (we may assume) because one could become Soma through ingestion, but also because of what one then became: “We have drunk Soma and become immortal.” The Soma hymns are vibrant with ecstasy. It appears to be virtually the only plant man has deified; the Mexican Indians regard mushrooms, peyotl, and morning glories as “god’s flesh” or in other ways mediators of the divine, but the plants do not figure in their pantheons. The crucial Mandala IX consisting of 114 of the Rig-Veda’s 1,028 hymns is dedicated exclusively to Soma, as are six other hymns, but his significance extends far beyond these hymns in which he is invoked in isolation. “Soma saturates the Rig-Veda” (7:169); the entire corpus is “shot through with Soma.” “The Soma sacrifice was the focal point of the Vedic religion,” writes W. D. O’Flaherty, adding,
Indeed, if one accepts the point of view that the whole of Indian mystical practice from the Upanisads through the more mechanical methods of yoga is merely an attempt to recapture the vision granted by the Soma plant, then the nature of that vision – and of that plant – underlies the whole of Indian religion, and everything of a mystical nature within that religion is pertinent to the identity of the plant. (4:95)
Louis Renou once said that the whole of the Rig-Veda is encapsulated in the themes Soma presents.
In the course of the Soma sacrifice dried plants were steeped in water and their juice pounded out with stones and wooden boards covered with bull hides. This juice was then forced through wooden filters and blended with milk, curds, barley water, ghee, and occasionally honey. To the priests who drank the holy brew it is said to have given strength, magnitude, and brilliance. “One has only to read the Soma hymns,” Daniel Ingalls observes, “to grant some truth to the claim” (15:15).
Then, even as the last parts of the Vedas were being composed, Soma disappears. The Bramanas, codified around 800 b.c.e., contain no mention of it. Reverence for the god persisted; his sacrifice continues to be performed right down to today. But surrogates replaced the original plant. For nearly three thousand years, Soma retreats to the mountain fastnesses from whence it came. Like a yogi in training, deliberately isolated so his austerities won’t be interrupted, Soma drops out of history – to the historians’ dismay, as I earlier remarked.
Enter Gordon Wasson
In certain respects Gordon Wasson was an unlikely candidate for the discoverer. He knew no Sanskrit, had no special interest in India, and his years were against him; born in 1898, he was already in his sixties and had retired from his banking career when he turned to Soma. But it goes without saying that he didn’t just stumble on his find. He was equipped for the search – ideally so, we can say with wisdom of hindsight. To begin with, he was intelligent. His career bears this out from beginning to end. Without having completed high school he was appointed to teach English at Columbia University. Turning from that to journalism, he served as financial reporter for the New York Herald Tribune until his uncanny sense of the business world caused J. P. Morgan and Company to take him on and advance him, in time, to a vice-presidency. And atop this basic intelligence Wasson had erected a specialist’s repertoire. Though he was neither scholar nor scientist by profession, there was a field in which he was a master, and it was the one that proved to be decisive: ethnomycology. Assisted by his wife, Valentina Pavlovna, a pediatrician who died in 1959, his work in this area had led to (a) rediscovery of teonanactl, the sacred mushroom of Mexico3 and the worldwide attention it subsequently received; (b) publication in 1957 of a monumental two-volume treatise, Mushrooms, Russia and History (3), which argued the possibility of the mushroom cult being man’s oldest surviving religious institution; (c) reputation as founder of a science of “ethnomycology,” a name analogous to “ethnobotany”; (d) appointment as Research Fellow (later Honorary Research Fellow) of the Botanical Museum of Harvard University; and (e) Honorary Research Fellow of the New York Botanical Garden and Life Member of the Garden’s Board of Managers.
These talents alone might have sufficed, but the longer one ponders the Soma discovery, the more facets of Gordon Wasson appear relevant until one has to remind oneself that it wasn’t the preordained purpose for which he was born. Though advanced in years when he hit the Soma trail, his health and zest for research, including fieldwork, had held up; ten years later he continues to sleep in a sleeping bag on a screened porch the year ’round in Connecticut temperatures that can dip to fifteen degrees below zero. His depth-exploration of the Mexican mushroom – for years he and his wife spent their annual vacation in joint expeditions with the great French mycologist, Roger Heim – had made him directly, experientially knowledgeable about entheogens and the way they can function in a religious setting.*
* I do not consider this an incidental resource. I find it not only aetiologically natural but metaphysically apposite that Soma’s identity should have been discovered by an initiate – not, to be sure, in the Soma cult itself, but in a western counterpart. We both search and find according to our sensibilities, a point which (if I may be pardoned a personal reference) has been borne in on me by the one empirical discovery of my career. Had I not possessed, first, a musical ear which alerted me immediately to the fact that in the Gyiito (Tibetan) chanting I was in the presence of something subtly astonishing; and second, a musical temperament which required that I get to rhe bottom of what had so moved me, the “important landmark in the study of music,” which Ethnomusicology (January 1972) credited the find as being, would not have been forthcoming. Something comparable, I am certain, was at work in Wasson’s discovery of Soma. To indicate what it was, I quote at length from Wasson’s response to the sacred mushroom of Meso-America which he came upon twenty years earlier.
“When we first went down to Mexico, we felt certain, my wife and I, that we were on the trail of an ancient and holy mystery, and we went as pilgrims seeking the Grail. To this attitude of ours I attribute such success as we have had. A simple layman, I am profoundly grateful to my Indian friends for having initiated me into the tremendous Mystery of the mushroom.
“In the uplands of southern Mexico the rites take place now, 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. The orthodox Christian must accept by faith the miracle of Transubstantiation. By contrast, the mushroom of the
Aztecs carries its own conviction; every communicant will testify to the miracle that he has experienced. ‘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,’ Blake writes. The mushroom puts many (if not everyone) within reach of this state. 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 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 agape. 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 the 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. 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, with strange, ventriloquistic effect. Your body lies in the darkness, heavy as lead, but your spirit seems to soar and leave the hut, and with the speed of thought to travel where it listeth, in time and space, accompanied by the shaman’s singing. You are poised in space, a disembodied eye, invisible, incorporeal, seeing but not seen. In truth, you are 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. 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! 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 ecstasy is fun. But ecstasy is not fun. Your very soul is seized and shaken until it tingles. Who will choose to feel undiluted awe, or to float through that door yonder into the Divine Presence?
“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 the night, compare notes, and utter ejaculations of amazement.” (Condensed and slightly transposed from 1:149-62.)
Even the careers Wasson pursued on his way to Soma were only seeming detours. English and journalism gave him a feel for language which was to grace his report when it appeared,* and banking, being lucrative, enabled him to travel when fieldwork beckoned and to consult the authorities whose diverse areas of expertise – Sanskrit, history, philology, comparative mythology, folklore, art, poetry, literature, ecology, ethnobotany, phytochemistry, and pharmacology – he was to fit with his own mycological knowledge to craft the solution. Also, when it became apparent that the Vedic references would be crucial, he could employ a talented Sanskritist, Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty of the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London, to translate the relevant passages. Wasson’s comfortable circumstances bear, too, on SOMA as a de luxe publication, to which a later section of this review will be devoted. Its author is an aristocrat; every dimension of his life has style.
Finally, it was in Wasson’s favor that he was not an academic. We need not go as far as Robert Graves and credit his innocence of a university education with preserving his genius. It is enough to share Professor Ingalls’s suspicion, voiced at a testimonial dinner at the Harvard Faculty Club on the occasion of the publication of the book under review, that the specialists, each burrowing deeper and deeper down the narrowing shaft of his own specific competence, would never have discovered Soma’s secret. The problem called for an amateur, a man who could approach it with innocence and love and across disciplinary boundaries.
The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines “amateur” as “one who is fond of; one who cultivates a thing as a pastime.” The French is stronger; my dictionary renders it “lover, virtuoso.” Wasson was an amateur mycologist in the French sense. His love and consequent
virtuosity respecting the mushrooms rooted back into nothing less decisive than his love for his wife. In August 1927, newly wed and enjoying a vacation in the Catskills, they chanced on a forest floor that was covered with wild fungi. Their responses were exact opposites: he was indifferent, even distrustful, while she was seized by wild glee. Some couples might have left the difference at that, but the Wassons were of an inquiring bent. Examining their difference, they found it to be rooted in a difference between entire peoples. Dr. Wasson, a White Russian who practiced pediatrics in New York, had absorbed almost cum lacte (with her mother’s milk) a solid body of empirical knowledge about mushrooms and a passionate regard for them; even “worthless” varieties were arranged with moss and stones into attractive centerpieces. By contrast, Gordon, of Anglo-Saxon heritage, had been shielded from the plants. Given to pejoratives like “toadstool” and exaggerated rumors of their toxicity, his people had been as mycophobic as hers had been mycophilic. In Russian literature mushrooms figure in love scenes and pastoral idylls; in English they are emblems of death. For over thirty years the Wassons devoted much of their leisure to dissecting, defining, and tracing this difference until it led to the thesis – supported by comparative philology, mythology, legends, fairy tales, epochs, ballads, historical episodes, poetry, novels, and scabrous vocabularies that are off-limits to proper lexicographers – that at some point in the past, perhaps five thousand years ago, our European ancestors had worshiped a psychoactive mushroom, and that their descendants had divided according to whether the facinans (fascination) or the tremendum (fear) of its holy power predominated.
Two years after the publication of Mushrooms, Russia and History in 1957, Mrs. Wasson died, and Gordon, forced into life changes and with a pension sufficient for his needs, retired from banking and promoted ethnomycology from his hobby into a second career. Soma was not on his docket. He wanted to look into the “mushroom madness” of New Guinea (still unsolved) and why the Maoris of New Zealand share the Eurasian association of mushrooms with lightning. Somewhere down the line he intended to examine India’s largely negative attitude toward mushrooms, and
this led him to spend some weeks in 1964 at the American Institute of Indian Studies at Poona where he began reading Renou’s translation of the Vedas. It proved to be the turning point. During the days that followed, on a freighter to Japan, a number of disjointed things he had learned during forty years of research fell into place. The hypothesis that Soma was a mushroom, specifically the Amanita muscaria or fly-agaric,4 came to view. From that point on it was a matter of corroborating his hypothesis.
* I content myself with a single example: “Often have I penetrated into a forest in the fall of the year as night gathered and seen the whiteness of the white mushrooms, as they seemed to take to themselves the last rays of the setting sun and hold them fast as all else faded into the darkness. When fragments of the white veil of the fly-agaric still cling to, the cap, though night has taken over all else, from afar you may still see Soma, silver white; resting in his well-appointed birth-place close by some birch or pine tree. Here is how three thousand years ago a priest-poet of the Indo-Aryans gave voice to this impression: “By day he appears the color of fire, by night, silver white (IX 979d)-” Soma’s scarlet coat dominates by day; by night the redness sinks out of sight, and the white patches, silvery by moon and starlight, take over” (4:41-42).
The Evidence
To enter all the evidence Wasson uncovered in his five ensuing years of concentrated work in the libraries and botanical centers of the United States and Europe, and in the field in Asia, would be to duplicate his book. Instead I shall summarize the evidence he marshals for his conclusion under six points.
- The references to Soma contain no mention of the leaves, flowers, fruit, seeds, and roots that pertain to chlorophyll-bearing plants. They refer repeatedly to stems and caps.
- All the color references fit the Amanita muscaria. There is no mention of its being green, black, gray, dark, or blue (the colors of vegetation), while the colors that are mentioned conform without exception to the mushroom’s cap (bright red), the membrane, unique to the muscaria, that protects it in its early stages (brilliant white), or its pressed – sauma means “to press” – juice (golden or tawny yellow). Wasson makes the latter point by using quotations from the Rig-Veda to caption a series of stunning photographs of the fly-agaric. The color-epithet that is invoked most often is hari, which in Sanskrit “seems to have run from red to light yellow” (4:37), always accenting its dazzling and resplendent character which the photographs that Wasson himself took capture brilliantly. “The hide is of a bull [red bulls are favored in India], the dress of sheep” (IX 707). This “dress of sheep,” the white membrane, is invoked by a variety of analogies: “He makes from milk his robe of state” (IX 712), and “with unfading vesture, brilliant, newly clothed, the immortal [Soma] wraps himself all around. He has taken to clothe himself in a spread-cloth like to a cloud” (IX 69s). The mushroom’s rupture of its embryonic envelope, too, is noted. “He sloughs off the Asurian colour that is his. He abandons his envelope” (IX 722). “Like a serpent he creeps out of his old skin” (IX Sd446). The flecks of the veil that cling to the mushroom’s crown after the veil bursts give meaning to “he lets his color sweat when he abandons his envelope” (IX 712).
- References to shape are equally apposite. The mushroom’s head, peering through the undergrowth while still in its white skin, is “the single eye” (IX 94). When its cap is fully formed, it mirrors the vault of heaven and is “the mainstay of the sky.” Or again, its curved cap can look like an udder – “the swollen stalks were milked like cows with [full] udders” (VIII 9I9ab) – and its puffy foot like a teat: “The priests milk this shoot like the auroral milch cow” (I i37ab).
- Soma altered consciousness but was not alcohol; it was an entheogen. The Aryans knew alcohol in the form of sura, a beer, but the time allotted for Soma’s preparation in the sacrifices precludes fermentation. Moreover, whereas the Vedas generally disapprove of sura, noting the muddleheadedness and other bad effects it produces, Soma is not only aducchuna, without evil effects; it leads to godliness:
We have drunk the Soma, we have become immortal, we have arrived at the light, we have found the gods.
What now can the enemy do to harm us, and what malice can mortals entertain? Amplify, O Soma, our lives for the purpose of living.
These splendid waters, granting much, protecting.
Like fire produced by friction, may the waters inflame us! May they cause us to see afar and to have increasing welfare (Rig-Veda, VIII 48).
- Geography fits. Amanita muscaria requires, for host, the north temperate birch forest, and the Indus Valley is bordered by lofty mountains whose altitude compensates for its southern latitude. South of the Oxus River, A. muscaria grows only at altitudes of eight thousand feet or more, and this fits with the fact that Soma was confined to mountains. Parts of Afghanistan, where the Aryans resided before continuing their southeastward push, and the Hindu Kush through which they entered the Indian subcontinent, are muscaria country.
- Finally, there is the line of the Rig-Veda that I quoted at the beginning of this essay which has priests urinating diluted Soma. The Amanita is an entheogen whose vision-producing properties are known to survive metabolic processing. Ritualistic urine-drinking forms a part of a number of fly-agaric ceremonies that have survived to the present in Siberia and elsewhere. As translated by most Indologists, a verse in the Rig- Veda, (IX 744) reads, “The swollen men urinate the on-flowing Soma.” There is, in addition, the fact that the Vedas mention a “third filter” for Soma while describing only two; Wasson thinks this third filter could have been the human organism which, there is reason to believe, reduces the nauseous properties of the fly-agaric while retaining for as many as five ingestions the chemical, musicimol, which in the dried mushroom is the en- theogenic agent.
Critical Response
Wasson’s SOMA appeared in 1969; this review is being written three years later. The interval has allowed time for authorities to review the use Wasson makes of their respective fields, and I categorize the most significant of their verdicts.
(a) NONCOMMITTAL
F. B. J. Kuiper, Vedist, University of Leiden: “Wasson may be perfectly right in assuming that the original Soma plant was the Amanita muscaria, but the problem cannot be solved beyond doubt” (18:284).
Winthrop Sargent, critic: “Wasson has given us the most persuasive hypothesis that has yet appeared, but nobody really can say what Soma was” (25).
CONFIRMING
Sanskritists and Indologists
Daniel Ingalls, Harvard University: The “basic facts about the Soma plant as described in the Rig-Veda cannot well be accounted for by any of the previous identifications. . . . They are all perfectly accounted for by the identification with the mushroom Amanita muscaria or fly agaric. Not all the epithets remarked on by Wasson need be taken just as he takes them, but enough still remains to be convincing. Wasson’s identification is a valuable discovery” (14:188).
Stella Kramrisch, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University: “Wasson proves beyond doubt that Soma was prepared from Amanita muscaria. He has set right almost three thousand years of ignorance about the ‘plant of immortality’” (17).
Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty, University of London: “For long she [O’Flaherty] was skeptical about my thesis, but she now authorizes me [Wasson] to say here today [at the International Congress of Orientalists, Canberra, January 1971] that she is a full- fledged convert” (7:169).
Ulrich Schneider, University of Freiburg: In his book Der Somaraub des Manu, 1971, he concludes that Soma is Amanita muscaria.
Botanists and mycologists
Albert Pilat in the Swiss bulletin of mycology: “In this interesting and magnificently produced work, the noted American ethnomycologist, R. Gordon Wasson, proves that the religious drug known under the name of ‘Soma’ is Amanita muscaria” (24:11).
Richard Evans Schultes, Botanical Museum Harvard University: “The data fit together as tightly as pieces of an intricate jig-saw puzzle. Wasson provides, so far as I am concerned, incontrovertible proof of the strongest kind that Soma must have been Amanita muscaria. Once and for all he has provided the identification” (27:101-5).
Anthropologists
Claude Levi-Strauss, College de France: “Mr. Wasson’s work establishes convincingly that, among all the possible candidates for Soma, Amanita muscaria is far and away the most plausible” (20).
Weston La Barre, Duke University: “The closure of linguistic, botanical, ethnographic, and ecological evidence is exhilarating. The identification of soma with Amanita muscaria is definite and the Sanskrit puzzle of two millennia, from the Brahmanas to this day, can now be regarded as finally solved” (19:371).
Linguists
Calvert Watkins, Harvard University: “I accept Wasson’s identification of Soma with A. muscaria. I am myself by way of being an amateur mycologist, and in my review article (in preparation for Wolfgang Meid [ed.], Gedenkschrift fur Hermann Giintert [Innsbruck, 1973]), I hope to show that there is considerably more evidence for his hypothesis in the Rig-Veda, and also in the Iranian, Avestan, data, with which he was not concerned” (from a letter, 19 June 1972, to the author of this review).
Generalists
Robert Graves, poet, mythologist, savant: “Wasson has identified Soma, without any possibility of scientific or scholarly doubt, as the Amanita muscaria, or ‘fly-agaric’. The argument is as lucid as it is unanswerable. His book satisfies me completely. I congratulate him on his feat” (12:109, 113).
REJECTING
John Brough, Professor of Sanskrit, Cambridge University: “It is with regret that I find myself unable to accept that Wasson has proved his theory that the original Vedic Soma was Amanita muscaria” (10:362).
ROMAN JAKOBS
As Professor Emeritus at Harvard and M.I.T., Jakobson merits a category to himself, not only because he is the world’s greatest living linguist (which he is), but by virtue of his special relationship to the book. The fact that the de luxe edition is dedicated to him removes him from controversies over it, and it is unlikely that he will write about it. He permits me to report, however, that although, not being a Vedist, he feels unqualified to pronounce on Wasson’s conclusion, he has been impressed from the first with the caliber of his search. Wasson is free of stereotypes and prejudices that have impeded the Soma quest, his standards of scholarship are of the highest, and he has consistently checked his findings with ranking authorities in every field he has entered.
[I omit the next, long section of my original review, titled “Disputed Points, ” because it deals with technicalities that are likely to be of interest only to professional Indologists. The issues the experts debate there are: (a) whether evidence outside of India and Iran is relevant for identifying the soma plant; (b) whether the Vedic tropes and epithets for soma refer primarily to the soma plant or to its indwelling god; and (c) soma’s relation to urine – whether the startling line in question says that priests piss soma or, metaphorically, that the god Indra does that.]
The Book
There remains the book as a physical object, lying open on my desk, inviting comment in its own right as an exhibit in bookmaking.
Wasson’s first book, his two-volume opus written with his wife titled Mushrooms, Russia and History, appeared in a limited edition of 512 numbered copies. I recall that it rated a multi-paged spread in Life magazine, which may help account for the fact that, announced at $125, its sales became so brisk that the surprised publishers started raising the price, and its last copies retailed at twice the original figure. Of SOMA, twelve years later, 680 copies were printed of which 250 were allotted to the United States. Being a single volume, its price was kept to $200 (inflation must be kept in mind), and again the stock was exhausted within months.
Is it known what is the most expensive book that has ever been published? Regardless, SOMA is by all accounts a sumptuous production. Wasson lavished on the bookmaking dimension of his work the same meticulous attention he devoted to the Soma search itself. The volume is in blue half-leather with a dark blue spine, stamped in gold and slip-covered in fine blue linen cloth. The book was designed by Giovanni Mardersteig and set in Dante type; the text and illustrations were printed by the Stamperia Val- donega, Verona. I have already spoken of the stunning photographs: thirteen color tip-ins of the fly-agaric in its natural habitat. The paper was handmade by Fratelli Magnani, Pescia; pages are of International Size A-4. In all, it is a book lover’s dream, and in the three years that have elapsed since its publication it has been hard to come by. In the face of the declining quality in the format of botanical publications in the 1930s, Professor Oakes of Harvard argued that “the results of a scientist’s research are jewels worthy of a proper setting.” Wasson’s book would have satisfied him.
As I was telling the SOMA story in class last fall, noting that to get at the book itself students would have to get the key to the Houghton Rare Book Room at Harvard University, one of them raised his hand to say that he had seen the book in the Tech Coop, M.I.T.’s bookstore, on his way to class. I told him he must have been mistaken, for I felt certain that Wasson’s aristocratic tastes precluded a popular edition in principle. Happily, it was I who was mistaken. Popular editions have appeared in both cloth ($15) and paperback ($7.50). They lack the jacket watercolor and generous margins of the original and their paper is not handmade, but in other respects they are faithful to the de luxe edition.
Conclusion
Soma seems to have been rediscovered, but why was its identity lost in the first place? Wasson believes that its importance, coupled with the famed mnemonic capacities of the Vedic priests, rules out its having simply been forgotten; it must have been deliberately suppressed. In SOMA he proposes, as the reason for suppressing it, distribution problems. As the Aryans moved down the Gangetic plains, this high-altitude mushroom became increasingly more difficult to procure. Inconsistency – now the fly-agaric, now a substitute – proved ecclesiastically unworkable; a patron discovering that rhubarb was used in the sacrifice while his neighbor got the genuine article could be difficult. A crisis developed and the governing Brahmins decided that the originals had to be eliminated completely.
Recently Wasson has been inclining toward a different reason: that the substance may have started to get out of hand. Quality declines in the last Soma hymns, and some border on irreverence. Three thousand years in advance of our times, India may have found herself on the brink of a psychedelic mess like the one America created in the 1960s. She wasn’t able to close the door on it completely – plenty of bhang smoking sadhus (wandering ascetics) in whom it is impossible to determine whether sattva (illumination) or tamos (sloth) predominates, can be found in India right down to the present. But at a critical moment, Wasson hypothesized, the Brahmins did everything they could to prevent such abuse. They would rather have the botanical home of their god forgotten than let him be subjected to profanation. If the hypothesis is correct, it would help to explain why the Buddha felt strongly enough about drugs to list them with murder, theft, lying, and adultery as one of the Five Forbidden Things. It could also throw light on Zarathustra’s angry excoriation of those who use inebriating urine in their sacrifices: “When wilt thou do away with the urine of drunkenness with which the priests delude the people” (Avesta, Yasna 48:10).
I will myself stretch this line of thought to its conclusion. Even among those who are religiously responsible, entheogens appear to have (in the parlance of atomic decay) a half-life; their revelations decline. They are also capricious. Opening the gates of heaven at the start, there comes a time – I can attest to this myself – when they begin to open either onto less and less or onto the demonic. It is precisely apposite that the book that introduced the entheogens to the contemporary West, Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception, was followed quickly by his Heaven and Hell. It seems that if God can manifest himself through anything, it is equally the case that nothing can commandeer him and guarantee his arrival. It is compatible with the notion that the Absolute entered India by way of a mushroom to hold that sometime later it stopped doing so. – Huston Smith