*Warning!!!* Do not read this if you're averse to either natural or organic mind-food; otherwise - enter at your own risk. The price of admission: your mind. (This essay has been updated and edited for easy reading.)
[image: Inline image 1] Introduction The sacramental basis of the Vedic Religion was the preparation and consumption of a decoction obtained by mixing the juices of various psychoactive ingredients, one of which may have been Cannabis Indica, a species of weed, or a beverage prepared by extracting the juice from the Amanita Muscaria, a magic fungus, which together produced the substance 'Soma' mentioned on numerous occasions in South Asian sacred scripture - the "Nectar of the Gods." According to MMY, Soma can be manufactured in the gut during the regular practice of a meditation that is transcendental. Thesis In this fellow's humble opinion, this 'ur-religion' does not begin with the composition of the hymns which are codified and arranged as we know them, termed the Vedas, when the Aryans arrived in modern Pakistan, but much further back in time, in the late Ice Age up in Siberia. During this cold age, when people had to live most of the time deep inside caves or other dwellings, an 'inward direction' was given to their spiritual endeavors. Due to this fact, and with the aid of certain magical herbs and plants, man first invented religious reflection, geo-alchemy, and the art of placement. When the Aryans came down from Siberia they brought with them their shamanic religion and an urgaritic language which became the Vedic and Persian proto-religious language and later the Indo-European tongue, which includes Sanskrit, and Persian, and the dialects of Greek, Latin, German, Celtic, Irish, English, French, Hindi, and Urdu, but not Finnish. Go figure. The evidence for this is centered on three incontrovertible facts: 1. There is a direct affinity between Sanskrit and other Indo-Iranina languages. Therefore, it seems logical to conclude that the Aryans who composed the Vedas were akin to the same Aryans who occupied the Caucasus when the last ice age forced them to seek warmer climes. Then due to rapid population expansion and threats from insurgent, nomadic notions, the Aryans migrated into Persia (not for nothing do they now call it 'Iran') and there composed the Avesta, and a little later, the Rig Veda, both of which scriptures center on the cult of the magic mushroom, the so-called 'fly agaric'. According to Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty, translator of the Rig Veda, a Scholar of some repute, "...the soma sacrifice was the focal point of the Vedic religion" (cited in Wasson 95). Soma, in the case of the South Asian Indians, and Hoama in the case of the Central Asian Iranians, that is, the Persians. These migratory people called themselves 'Aryans', a word which originally meant 'noble tiller of the earth', i.e., an Agriculturist, digging stick in hand. So, they came from Siberia, not by invasion, and not in 1500 BCE, but by a process of diffusion, as described by the famous archaeologist Colin Renfrew, around 7000 BCE. The first Aryans settled in what is called the Saraswati Valley. However, there is evidence that successive waves of Aryan immigrants came to India in later years perhaps up to as recently as 2000 BCE. 2. The cult of the Amanita Muscaria has been traced by mycologists to Siberia. This has been proved by not only G. Gordon Wasson, the author of "Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality", but also by other eminent botanists such as S. Hajicek-Dobberstein, the author of the paper "Soma Siddhas and Alchemical Enlightenment: Psychedelic Mushrooms in Buddhist Tradition" published in the Journal of Ethno pharmacology and cited by Wasson . The Amanita Muscaria spoken of in the Rig Veda thus has its origin in the northern area around Finland and Siberia, where the fungus still grows and can be seen each year. 3. There is no evidence that the Amanita Muscaria, that is, the Vedic Soma, grows in the Himalayas or in the desert which comprised the Land of the Five Rivers, that is, Arya Bharata. Based on this fact, it is clear to this fellow that the Aryans came from outside India, brought with them a language very similar to Finnish, a people who had an intimate knowledge of the mycro-mizomes which grow in Siberia, but does not grow in South Asia. It is obvious, at least to me, that these immigrants composed the Rig Veda while under the influence of a psychedelic substance when they arrived in Pakistan, after parting company with their Persian cousins, who stayed back in Iran. Also, it is logical to conclude that the mysterious substance referred to in Buddhist text, variously described as 'amrita' is none other than a similar decoction containing a similar alkaloid as contained in the soma fungus. This fellow is fully convinced that the knowledge of the true nature of the Soma substance was 'lost' by the Aryans before they even got to India, and that substitutes have been used to this day in the Vedic 'Soma Sacrifice'. I have further come to the conclusion that 'Yoga', a system of ecstatic stasis, was invented in Bharatvarsh in order to attain the same state of consciousness experienced while under the influence of sacramental substances. Meditation and Yoga have clear origins in Siberian shamanism. "The ethnobotanist co-author of Psilocybin: The Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide , McKenna, puts forth the theory that magic mushrooms are the original "tree of knowledge" and that the general lack of psychedelic exploration is leading Western society toward eventual collapse or destruction--controversial statements, to say the least, though the argument's details often prove fascinating. In the beginning, McKenna tells us, there were protohumans with small brains and plenty of genetic competition, and what eventually separated the men from the apes was an enthusiasm for the hallucinogenic mushrooms that grew on the feces of local cattle. Claiming that psilocybin in the hominid diet would have enhanced eyesight, sexual enjoyment, and language ability and would have thereby placed the mushroom-eaters in the front lines of genetic evolution--eventually leading to hallucinogen-ingesting shamanistic societies, the ancient Minoan culture, and some Amazonian tribes today." Fagan notes that the term Aryan refers to speakers of Indo-European and Indo-Iranian languages, and does not signify a race of people. In the Rig Veda we read that the Vedic Aryans came from the Land of the Seven Rivers, that is, India. The Vedic Aryans did refer to themselves as Aryans but the Vedas do not state that the Aryans 'conquered' the native peoples of India and destroyed their forts. According to David Frawley, author of "Gods, Kings, and Sages", who supports the "out of India" hypothesis, the Vedic Aryans are autochthoutonous to India, that is, they were not part of an invasion of people who came from outside India. Frawley thinks that the Vedic Aryans were fighting among themselves, just like in the Battle of Kurukshetra. According to Witzel it is a mistake to equate the Vedic 'Aryans' with any particular people. >From these people we got our language which spread over the Asia, South Asia, and much of Europe. And, from these people we got 'religion', a belief system which originally centered around the consumption of alkaloid plants and herbs. As further evidence, please note that the Tibetan word for 'cannabis' is 'So.Ma.Ra.Dza', that is, Soma-raja, 'King of Soma', and 'bDud.rTsi', which in Tibetan means 'drink juice', as translated from the Sanskrit and taken to Tibet by the Eighty-four Mahasiddhas of Vajrayana Buddhism sometime in the tenth century of our era. Works cited: "The Post-Vedic History of the Soma Plant" By Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty, Ph.D. p. 95. "Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality" By G. Gordon Wasson Harcourt Brace Javanovich, 1969 p. 88 "The Oxford Companion to Archaelogy" Edited by Brian M. Fagan Oxford University Press, 1996 p. 563 Other resources of interest: http://www.rwilliams.us/archives/etheogens.pdf 'Food of the Gods : The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge' A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution by Terence McKenna Bantam, 1993 'Autochthonous Indians?; Out of India and Aryan Invasion Theories By Michael Witzel Harvard University 'Gods, Kings, and Sages' Vedic Secrets of Ancient Civilization By David Frawley Passage Press, 1991 Side notes: 1. Soma lost? Indeed, and that may not be all that was lost! Because, according to MMY, a consciousness expert, even the practice of authentic 'meditation that is transcendental' was lost, due to such a "long lapse of time", a technique so simple, so subtle, and so profound, that it would almost defy a forgetting! Go figure. Below are some of the many Rig Vedic citations that this fellow has discovered in Wasson's great book. 2. The so-called "fly agaric" apparently has no effect on the fly. Rig Veda - Mandala I: 32-6 43-9 46-10 80-2 84-8 87-5 119-9 135-3 Rig Veda - Mandala II: 13-1 Rig Veda - Mandala III: 36-6 43-7 45-4 48-2 48-3 Rig Veda -Mandala IV: 1-19 3-9 18-13 32-1 26-6 57-7 Rig Veda - Mandala X: 43-4 45-9 51-4-7 85-2
