Soma Brought Up-to-Date

Already a decade has passed since the publication of the English edition of our SOMA: Divine Mushroom of Immortality. SOMA first made its bow to the world in an expensive de luxe format. That edition is exhausted and copies are quoted in the auction markets for rare books at a considerable advance in price. The hard cover edition is also exhausted. Of the paperback edition there has been a succession of printings. It sells steadily, especially in university centers of the English-speaking world. When I undertook to study the Soma enigma, I approached it from outside the Sanskrit discipline, from ethnobotany. After all, if a plant is to be identified, why not turn to botany? And if the plant, when its juice was ingested, inspired its devotees with glowing rapture and adoration, why not have recourse to someone conversant with plant hallucinogens? The West has known the RgVeda for more than a century. The Vedists have failed to identify the Soma plant, if indeed they ever made any effort to do so: of such effort I have found no serious trace, however strange this may seem to nonVedists. Naturally I needed a Vedist to work with me. My first stroke of good fortune was to win the enthusiastic cooperation of a young and brilliant Sanskrit scholar, Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty , who holds doctorates in Sanskrit and Indian Studies from Harvard and Oxford Universities and

Biology · Soma · Complementary and Alternative Medicine Studies · Ethnobotanical and Medicinal Plants Studies · History · Neuroscience · Psychedelics and Drug Studies

• Are Plants Conscious? Vegetal ‘Being’ in the Caraka Saṁhitā

  Open Access•Pushya A Gautama, Sangeetha Menon•Journal of Dharma Studies•2025

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• The Alternation of *-L-/*-L- And *T- In Metathetical Forms in Dravidian

  Stephan Hillyer Levitt•Folia Linguistica Historica•2003

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