--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Marco Moretti"
<marcomoretti69@...> wrote:
>
> I believe that soma is the amanita muscaria.
Original ritual *sauma was clearly ephedra, with or without
additional varying ingredients added.
See
http://www.maps.org/forum/1999/msg00638.html
"I'll be as brief as possible, but actually, Wasson's
treatment of the subject is not credible at all, as
many who have studied Vedic Sanskrit can testify. There
is a multitude of errors and misconceptions in Wasson's
attempt to identify soma with Amanita muscaria, but his
work seems to have caught on in popular imagination.
Flattery and Schwartz's more recent book, attempting to
identify soma with Peganum harmala L., is better, but
also quite flawed in several respects."
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http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/321
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http://www.wac.uct.ac.za/croatia/kochhar.htm
"It is clear from a study of the texts that the Rgvedic
Soma and Avestan Haoma refer to the same plant, a leafless
shrub whose stalks (but not the fruits or berries) were
crushed to yield a drink of the same name. The Soma juice
was immediately strained and drunk fresh, either neat or
after mixing with milk, grain or honey. Note that substances
like cannabis or poppy were not added. Also, in the ritual
there was never any time for fermentation.
The Soma-yielding localities named in the Rgveda cannot
be identified. But it is said that Soma/Haoma qrew on the
mountains. In the Brahmana period, it became difficult to
obtain Soma which was rationed and substituted. In the
later texts, all references to original Soma disappear,
and the name Soma, suffixed with late or valli (creeper),
is applied to different plants in different geographical
areas.
The Soma studies constitute the most dubious part of the
19th century Indic scholarship. Much effort was expended
on the secondary question of the identity of Soma substitutes,
while no attempt was made to collate textual references to
original Soma and draw conclusions from them. The hopeless
declaration that ``It is very probable that the plant cannot
now be identified" meant that this vital diagnostic was
completely ignored.
In relatively recent times it has become clear that the
Soma/Haoma plant was the alkaloidal varieties of Ephedra,
with the drink corresponding to Ephedrine. ``There is no
need for a plant other than Ephedra for the original Soma
..
Ephedra fits
..each and every detail of the texts. These
Ephedras grow in the mountains, from the Himalayas to Hindu
Kush to Mt Elburz. The plains of south Punjab and Rajasthan
grow an Ephedra which does not contain Ephedrine. The rest
of India is not the natural habitat of any type of Ephedra."
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http://www.ub.rug.nl/indianmedicine/index.htm
Search under 'soma' for a list of writings on the topic
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http://users.primushost.com/~india/ejvs/ejvs0901/ejvs0901b.txt
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http://www1.shore.net/~india/ejvs/ejvs0901/ejvs0901e.txt
"the ephedra-theory has been around for a long time(3),
primarilybecause of the well-known fact that Parsis have
been using ephedra in their rituals for many centuries,
and they have been calling it something like 'um', 'oman',
'hum', 'huma', or 'hom', etc., in Iranian languages [all
obviously from 'haoma'], or in Indic 'som' or 'soma' or
somalatA', etc. [all obviously from 'soma'].(4) Flattery
& Schwartz were the first to point out the rather significant
implication of this fact: "that ephedra was called *sauma
already in the common ancestral Indo-Iranian language" [p.
68]. Now, for Falk, the obvious conclusion to draw from
this is that the inherited term *sauma referred, as it
still does among Parsis, to the juice or extract of an
ephedra plant, which in fact is readily found throughout
the relevant regions.(5) For Falk, then, there is no need
to look elsewhere for the ur-plant: it is straight-forwardly
an ephedra [as was assumed much earlier by Geldner in his
still standard translation of the Rgveda]."
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www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~witzel/AryanHome.pdf
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> It is a nice mushroom, red with white spots. It is possible to
extract drinks from it, with
> variable strength. In many regions of the world people use it. In
> Russia, for example, in some district muscaria is used in funerals.
> In some valleys of Piedmont these mushrooms are almost disappeared,
> because many youngsters eat them getting terrible halucinations and
> rave.
The evidence for soma being a powerful hallucinogen is
exaggerated. When the typical poetic hyperbole in the
verses taken as evidence of such, is compared to that
found in other verses dealing with such mundane things
as milk, butter, the cow, rain, sunshine, etc., no
powerful halucinogen is necessary to explain it. The
ancients were close to the foods and medicines they used
and to the routines involved in collecting them and
processing them in a way with which we moderns can't
readily identify. They celebrated in exultant terms
what to us are nonconsequential items like barley, milk,
butter, the birthing of calves, etc. I know myself that
after a hard day when I sit down to a bowl of tea, I can
easily wax poetic about the energizing yet relaxing effect
it has. I have actually described it on ocassions as
"like pure life essence being transfused into my body",
or as "washing the pain out of my shoulders as it goes
down", or "making me feel twenty pounds lighter". I've
found that exessive tea drinking can even, before the
inevitable crash, often stimulate increased mental acuity
and creativity for a time. If this is true of simple tea,
then a similar love affair of an ancient nomadic people
with their own stimulant of choice is easy to understand.
The need to identify soma with some powerful hallucinogen
or other is, I suspect, the result of jaded moderns, many
of whom have experimented with much stronger drugs than
ephedra themselves, not being able to believe that something
so mild would be described in such exultant terms. There
is also the possibility that substances with a stronger
effect were mixed with the ephedra.
> It is more probable that the use of soma ended because of fierce
> persecutions when Buddhism became the official religion of India.
Do you have any evidence for this? I've never heard of
anything like that before.
> I'm incline to think that Indus Valley civilization ended because
of
> the unending and terrible marauds of the Indo-Aryans tribes.
What do you base this on? Is there archaeological
evidence of such endless marauding, and of marauding
extending across the I.V.C.-'s entire enormous territory?
David