R. G. Wasson. Soma: the divine mushroom of immortality

12000 ₸

Under the general editorship of Mikhail Vishnevsky
The detailed study of the purposeful amateur ethnomycologist R. Gordon Wasson, offered to the reader’s attention, reads like an exciting scientific detective story. His willingness to search for the necessary information with the help of various means of linguistics, archeology, folklore, philology, ethnobotany, plant ecology, human physiology and the history of primitive society is an object lesson for all researchers of human nature.
Regardless of whether Wasson was right in his vision of the “fly agaric” origin of Soma or not, his writings and ideas made a revolutionary contribution to understanding the nature of religion as such. Prior to the “Wasson era”, theologians, religious scholars and ethnographers mainly believed that Vedic and other mystical practices (including shamanism) assumed alcoholic intoxication among the ministers of worship and participants in ceremonies and rituals. Wasson was the first researcher who came to the conclusion that ancient religious and mystical practices and religions derived from them rely on entheogens and psychedelics of plant, mushroom and animal origin. In its scope, the significance of his discovery for understanding the emergence of modern religions can only be compared with the evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin in the context of its significance for understanding the origin of life on Earth.
A number of well—known contemporary Wasson scientists accepted his hypothesis unconditionally, others – skeptically. We can say that in our time the discussion broke out with renewed vigor, and the main contenders for the role of Catfish were fly agaric and cannabis. To show the current trends, the articles that most vividly reflect them are placed at the end of the book.