Quotes from R. Gordon Wasson

Ecstasy! In common parlance ecstasy is fun. But ecstasy is not fun. Your very soul is seized and shaken until it tingles. After all, who will choose to feel undiluted awe? The unknowing vulgar abuse the word; we must recapture its full and terrifying sense.

It is in the nature of a hypothesis when once a man has conceived it, that it assimilates everything to itself, as proper nourishment, and from the first moment of your begetting it, it generally grows stronger by everything you sec, hear or understand.

In the light of our Mexican discoveries, I was now asking myself whether Soma could have been a mushroom. I said to myself that inevitably the poets would introduce into their hymns innumerable hints for the identification of the celebrated Soma, not of course to help us, millennia later and thousands of miles away, but as their poetic inspiration freely dictated.

under the Chairmanship of Carl Ruck to devise a new word for the potions that held Antiquity in awe. After trying out a number of words he came up with entheogen, `god generated within', which his committee unaninmously, adopted, not to replace the `Mystery' of the ancients, but to designate those plant substances that were and are at the very core of the Mysteries.

Ergot, growing millennia later on certain cultivated grains, seems to have coincided in its arrival on the human stage with the discovery by Man of agriculture.

One well known English professor of Greek burst out in anger at our saving that a potent potion was drunk at Fleusis: we had touched him at a sensitive spot. He seemed to wish to join the class of those pastors in our Bible Belt who, when Prohibition was flying high, seriously pretended that Jesus served grape juice, not wine, at his Last Supper!

Soma - as I will call it hereafter - was common everywhere in the woodlands of the temperate zone. All in all, Sonia was the entheogen of choice, until grains came to he cultivated in prehistory and then ergot emerged as a major alternative, also thoroughly safe to those who knew how to use it. No genuine entheogen is, so far as I know, an addictive under any circumstances. All entheogens inspire awe and reverence and possess power for good.

Three millennia ago Soma was known to the Brahmans, who composed many hymns exalting it. The hymns to Soma are still being sung, yet no one, not even among the Brahmans, knows what it was.

Throughout Siberia, indeed Asia, wherever grow the trees that serve as hosts to A. muscaria, - the birch, the pine, the cedar, the larch, others - that tree is revered as giving birth to the Marvelous Herb. The entheogen at the foot of the tree is the explanation of the reverence paid to the tree by the natives round about. How has the world overlooked for so long a time this key to the mystery of the Tree of Life?

The priestly redactor who set down the Genesis tale, an initiate and a believer, attributed to the `fruit' the gift of self-consciousness, a remarkable observation because self-consciousness is one of the major traits that distinguish humankind from all other creatures. Is it not surprising that the composer of the story gave credit for this particular gift to our mushroom? It is unlikely that he was alone in doing so.

Each of us had harbored a nascent thought that we had been too shy to express even to each other: religion possibly underlay the myco-,phobia contrast that marked the peoples of Europe.

We were seeking an answer to the strange fact that a mushroom, one single species, the pucka, was 'animate' in their language, was 'endowed with a soul', like all animals and human beings, but unlike all other vegetation, which is construed grammatically as 'inanimate', as 'without a soul'.

the putka was derived from the Sanskrit putika, the name of a plant never theretofore identified that the Aryans had used as the first surrogate for Soma.