Soma was a god, a plant, and an intoxicating beverage. It is referenced in some 120 of 1028 verses of the Indian Rig Veda (mid second millenium BC.). Haoma was its Iranian counterpart. Although the Iranian Avesta mentions haoma less frequently, there is little doubt that the substances were similar or identical. In both India and Iran, at some point the true identity of soma/haoma was forgotten, and substitutes for it were adopted.
It has been suggested that abandonment of the divine entheogen and its replacement by surrogates occurred because the original substance was no longer available or was difficult to obtain once the proto Indo-Iranians left their “original homeland” and emigrated.
During the past two hundred years, scholars have tried with varying degrees of success to identify this mysterious plant which was at the base of early Indo-Iranian worship. As early as 1794, Sir William Jones suggested that haoma was “a species of mountain rue”, or Peganum harmala L. (Arm. spand). Other soma candidates in the 19th and early 20th centuries have included cannabis (Arm. kanep’) and henbane (Arm. aghueshbank).
All of these plants are native to the Armenian highlands, and all of them were used by the Armenians and their predecessors for medicinal and magico-religious purposes. If the divine elixir really was a single substance rather than a mixture, then, in our view, none of the above-mentioned nominees alone qualifies.
The pharmacological effects of Peganum harmala, cannabis, or henbane, taken alone, simply do not match the Vedic and Iranian descriptions of the effects of soma/haoma. In the 1960s, R. Gordon Wasson proposed a new candidate, whose effects are more consistent with those mentioned in the Vedas. The present study will examine Wasson’s thesis and look for supporting evidence in ancient Armenian legends and customs.
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