Ploughing the Clouds: The Search for Irish Soma

Ancient India's collection of sacred hymns, the Rig Veda (circa 1500 B.C.), describes the ritual use of a plant called soma; whoever drinks it ""becomes a kind of god, exalted to a visionary state."" Combing Celtic folktales, myths and epics, and drawing parallels between Irish gods, heroes, seers, dragon-slayers and shape-shifters, and those of the Rig Veda, Wilson (Sacred Drift: Essays on the Margins of Islam) attempts to show that ancient Ireland, like Vedic India, had a psychedelic soma cult. Irish soma, Wilson believes, could have been a Psilocybe mushroom or Amanita muscaria, the mushroom identified as India's soma in Gordon Wasson's controversial Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality (1968). Wilson uses his considerable research to explain and interpret the Indian soma ritual, and to imagine the Irish one, maintaining, for example, that Beltane (May Day) and the summer solstice were important in the Celtic soma ritual. All this is not so far-fetched as it might sound--many prehistorians believe that an Indo-European people branched out from central or northeast Eurasia to become Indians, Greeks, Iranians, Celts, Norse, Russians. Yet the parallels that Wilson delineates between Irish lore and the Vedic hymns often seem strained and tenuous. His convoluted analyses, freighted with academic prose, will appeal chiefly to serious students of comparative religion, folklore and myth, ancient history or drug use. For all his anthropological armature, Wilson makes his agenda clear: soma in Ireland, India and elsewhere ""was repressed [by] religion and society based on rigid hierarchy... nothing is more democratic than"" soma, ""the entheogen, the god within""--and Wilson therefore hopes for a ""revival of ceremonial entheogenism [psychedelic plant use] in the modern world."" 20 pages of illustrations not seen by PW. (Jan.)