Soma

Soma, the god-narcotis of ancient India, attained an exalted place in magic religious ceremonies of the Aryans, who 3,500 years ago swept down from the north into the Indus Valley, bringing with them the cult of Soma. These early invaders of India worshipped the holy inebriant and drank an extract of it in their most sacred rites. Whereas most hallucinogenic plants were considered merely as sacred mediators, Soma became a god in its own right. An ancient Indian tradition recording in the Rig-Veda asserts that "Parjanya, the god of thunder, was the father of Soma" (Indra).

"Enter into the Indra, receptacle of Soma, like rivers into the ocean, thou who pleasest Mitra, Varuna, Vaya, mainstay of heaven!... Father of the gods, progenitor of the moving force, mainstay of the sky, foundation of the earth."

Of the more than 1000 holy hymns in the Rig-Veda, 120 are devoted exclusively to Soma, and references to this vegetal sacrament run through many of the other hymns. The cult was suppressed, and the original holy plant was forgotten; other plant surrogates-with little or no psychoactivity were substituted, yet the identity of Soma remained one of the enigmas of ethnobotany for two thousand years, Only in 1968 did the interdisciplinary research of Gordon Wasson provide persuasive evidence that the sacred narcotic was a mushroom, Amanita muscaria, the Fly Agaric. Amanita muscaria may be the oldest of the hallucinogens and perhaps was the most widely used.

 

 

John Marco Allegro argues in The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross that the Christian religion is derived from a sex and psychedelic mushroom cult, although his theory has found little support by scholars outside the field of ethnomycology. In Magic Mushrooms in Religion and Alchemy (formerly called Strange Fruit) Clark Heinrich interprets A. muscaria usage by Adam and Eve, Moses, Elijah and Elisha, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jonah, Jesusand his disciples, and John of Patmos. In the book Apples of Apollo the mushroom is identified in a wide range of mythological tales such as those involving Perseus, Prometheus, Heracles, Jason and the Argonauts, Jesus and the Holy Grail.