Faith, Mushrooms Linked

Abstract

> ANCIENT HINDUS, like the Aztecs of Central America, may have found their religion in a mushroom with hallucinogenic properties. R. Gordon Wasson, an ethnomycologist, believes the redcapped fly mushroom, A manita Muscaria, is the holy plant celebrated in the Rig Vedaa book of hymns the Hindus claim as their earliest religious heritage. Aryan tribes which swept down into India some 3,000 years ago brought with them a plant worship called Soma. The Sanskrit term bears no relation to the Greek soma, meaning body, Mr. Wasson said. By drinking the juice of the squeezed stalks, Aryan priests, as described in the Rig Veda, experienced divine ecstacy, he said. Though Soma was never identified as a mushroom, Mr. Wasson noted that descriptions of this plant given by Vedic poets clearly point to the fly mushroom. Later Hindus abandoned the worship of Soma, but Mr. Wasson thinks it is possible they remembered the hallucinogenic experience and were able to develop other purely physical means of reaching religious ecstacy, such as through great austerity and self-discipline. But there is nothing in the Rig Veda to indicate the early Indo-Aryan Hindus knew those methods, he noted. The fly mushroom or fly agaric is a poisonous plant that grows widely throughout Europe, from Portugal to Siberia. It is also found in the United States, though Mr. Wasson said the European and American mushrooms diffcr so much as to be almost a different species. Usually the U.S. mushroom is yellow, not red. Taken in very careful quantities the plant will produce hallucinations much like the psilocybe species of Mexico, eaten by ancient Aztecs. Today, particular tribes in Sibera still use the fly mushroom, but for orgiastic purposes. Superhuman feats of strength and violence have been attributed to tribesmen under its influence, though some accounts refer to religious-type visions. Mr. Wasson believes the mushroom worship extended much past the Aryan domain in the Indus Valley and northern India. He said strong circumstantial evidence indicates the mushroom was used throughout Northern Europe and by the Hungarians and Slovakians. He cannot, however, endorse the common view that Viking gangs called 'Berserks (from which comes the English word, berserk) carried out their violent deeds after using the mushroom. Though it may well have been the case, no plant was ever mentioned in these Viking accounts, he said. Mr. Wasson presented his theory during a Yale University symposium marking the centennial of the Peabody Museum of Natural History.