Irish Soma
By Peter Lamborn Wilson

Many scholars believe that the Indo-Europeans used an entheogenic or
psychedelic drug in their rituals -- called soma amongst the Vedic
people of India, and haoma in Iran. The ancient Greeks also used an
ergot-based preparation in wine as the entheogenic trigger of the
Eleusinian Mysteries. Soma has been identified as amanita muscaria or
the fly agaric mushroom; haoma may have been the same, or it might be
"wild rue," a harmaline-containing shrub (see Bibliography under
Flattery and Schwartz). If there's any truth to these theories, we
would expect to find that other Indo-European peoples also used such
drugs shamanically or ritually. Terrence McKenna believes that
psilocybe was once even more widely distributed than it is now, and
therefore must also be considered in the soma context. Certainly
entheogenic religions are far more thoroughly attested today than when
Wasson launched ethnomycology with his "wild" speculations, which now
seem rather conservative. Even if we cannot accept the "psychedelic
experience" as the origin of religion, I believe that we must
certainly see it as one of a complex of "origins", a complexity which
might best be expressed in a palimpsest of theories about those
origins; in short, I would maintain that the failure to consider
entheogenesis ("birth of the god within" by ingestion of psychotropic
substances) must be considered a serious flaw in any integral History
of Religion.

I consider it strange that in all the writing I've read about
psychedelics, and about Ireland, not one text has connected the two
subjects. My reading is of course far from complete, and my first
query concerns this point. I can scarcely believe that I'm the first
to consider the question of a soma cult amongst the Celts, those
old-fashioned Indo-Europeans so loyal to ancient ways -- and so fond
of intoxication. An immediate presumption would be that the Celts lost
soma, if they ever had it, when they migrated West from the
Indo-European heartland; at best, they may have developed mead as a
substitute. I know of no reference to intoxicants other than alcohol
in use among the Celts, who in fact quickly became major importers of
Mediterranean wines. We know, however, that a vast amount of
orally-transmitted Druid lore is lost beyond recall, and we als/o know
how entheogenic cults can thrive under the very nose of "civilization"
and not be noticed (as in Latin America). Wasson and his school have
demonstrated how mushroom language tends to be euphemized, masked,
coded, buried in etymologies and even "false" etymologies. If we are
to speculate about the possible existence of a Celtic -- specifically
Irish -- soma, we must exercise a bit of detective work. Using some of
their findings as possible structures for our exegesis, we can go back
and read our texts over again and hope for a few glimmerings or clues.

Irish myths and legends were not written down till the Christian era,
and then only by monks who might well have misunderstood or even
censored any references to a soma-type substance or cult. By that
time, any entheogenic knowledge or ritual once possessed by druids
might well have already vanished (or retreated into folklore), and the
memory of soma distorted beyond recognition. Any mushroom lore that
survived till the ninth to twelfth centuries A.D. would be the
province of illiterate peasant wise-women and wizards -- not of
literate monks. For this reason we can expect that the myths and
legends of the monkish manuscripts will be hard to read from our
special perspective. But Irish folklore, as distinct from myths and
legends, may prove a much clearer source. For reasons known to
folklorists, Ireland is a special case of the survival of
Indo-European lore, comparable perhaps only to India. In fact, Indian
material should be used to throw light on Irish material where areas
of darkness exist. From this point of view I think we can take for
granted that whatever we may find in Ireland that looks like soma, and
smells like soma, so to speak, might very well be soma, although we
may never be able to prove the identity. But the well-known affinity
between Celtic and Vedic cultures should pre-dispose us to at least a
certain open-mindedness.

The Irish material abounds in references to magical substances which
bestow knowledge and/or pleasure when ingested. Perhaps the best-known
are the hazelnuts of wisdom, eaten by the Salmon, fished up by the
Druid, and cooked by young Finn--who, as "sorcerer's apprentice",
burns his thumb on the Salmon's skin, sticks thumb in mouth, and
attains all the wisdom in his master's stead. The "shamanic" overtones
of this story are quite obvious. Turning to the older manuscripts, we
have the enigmatic "Geste of Fraoch" [1], concerning the hero Fraoch
who is half-fairy (Sidh) in origin. His sister is the nymph of the
River Boyne. He seeks to marry Find-abair, daughter of Aillil and
Maeve, the witch-queen. He arrives at their kingdom with his retinue
and impresses everyone with his beauty, and his skill at music and
chess. Find-abair falls in love with him. They meet secretly and she
gives him her gold thumb-ring. Aillil and Maeve agree to the wedding,
but secretly plot the hero's destruction. Maeve invites Fraoch to
bathe in her magic spring. Growing on its bank is the rowan tree.

Every fourth and every month
Ripe fruit the rowan bore:
Fruit more sweet than honey-comb;
Its clusters' virtues strong,
Its berries red could one but taste
Hunger they staved off long.

Rowan Berry juice could preserve life and cure dread disease. Maeve,
sitting on the shore, begs Fraoch to swim over and pluck some berries
for her. As she well knows, the rowan-berries are guarded by a dragon
(or water-serpent), who attacks Fraoch. In one version, the beast
kills him. In another version, as Maeve, her daughter, and the court
ladies enjoy the sight of Fraoch sporting naked in the pool, Aillil
steals the gold thumb-ring from Fraoch's purse, shows it to Maeve, and
throws it into the water. Fraoch notices this, and also notices that a
salmon gulps down the ring. Without anyone seeing him, he catches the
fish barehanded, and hides it "a hidden spot by the brink" of the
water. Thereupon Maeve demands the rowan-berries; Fraoch complies; the
monster appears. Find-abair strips to the buff and leaps into the
water with a sword, which she tosses to her lover. He slays the beast.
Aillil and Maeve now plot the death of their own daughter. A ritual
bath is prepared for Fraoch, "of fresh-bacon broth and heifer-flesh
minced in it," a sign that he will be raised to royal status.
Afterwards a feast is organized. During the feast Aillil orders that
all his treasures be brought out and displayed. In order to complete
this vulgar show, he demands that Find-abair produce her gold
thumb-ring; when she fails to do so he threatens her with death. But
Fraoch has meanwhile retrieved the salmon from its hiding-place and
given it to Find-abair's maid to cook. The girl brings in the fish,
"broiled..., well prepared with honey dressing." The ring is of course
discovered. Aillil and Maeve are foiled.

In this version the tale ends happily. Ignoring the temptation to
unpack too many clues from this story, we should confine ourselves to
asking whether or not it can be read for possible ritual content. The
sacred pool, the sacred tree, the combat (which can be seen as a
sacrifice, either of Fraoch or of a substitute, the salmon, or of the
monster), the beef-and-bacon bath -- during which a chorus of fairy
women (Fraoch's sister Boyne and her maidens) appear and sing. All
these motifs suggest that our legend is (at least in part) a masked
ritual. In that case, the berries may also have a ritual significance.
The salmon (with honey) and the thumb ring remind us of the shamanic
complex again. The old manuscripts also preserve a number of imrama,
or sea-going voyage-tales: the voyages of St. Brendan, of Bran, of
Maeldun, and of the O'Corra brothers. The sailors in these romances
find many marvelous islands, and on some of these islands they find
marvelous fruits -- some poisonous, some euphoriant, and some which
stave off hunger. In "the voyage of the sons of O'Corra," for example,
they visit an island whose trees are "laden with fruit, and the leaves
dropped honey to the ground. In the midst of the island was a pretty
lake, whose waters tasted like sweet wine. But after a week of rest by
its shores, a "monstrous reptile rose up from the lake, and looked at
them." The monster, however, disappears without harming them. [2]

Maeldun and his crew also experience an "Isle of Intoxicating Wine
Fruits:"

They were now a long time tossed about on the great billows, when
at length they came in view of an island with many trees on it. These
trees were somewhat like hazels, and they were laden with a kind of
fruit which the voyagers had not seen before, extremely large, and not
very different in appearance from apples, except that they had a
rough, berry-like rind. After the crew had plucked all the fruit off
one small tree, they cast lots who should try them, and the lot fell
on Maildun. So he took some of them, and, squeezing the juice into a
vessel, drank it. It threw him into a sleep of intoxication so deep
that he seemed to be in a trance rather than in a natural slumber,
without breath or motion, and with the red foam on his lips. And from
that hour till the same hour next day, no one could tell whether he
was living or dead. When he awoke next day, he bade his people to
gather as much of the fruit as they could bring away with them; for
the world, as he told them, never produced anything of such surpassing
goodness. They pressed out the juice of the fruit till they had filled
all their vessels; and so powerful was it to produce intoxication and
sleep, that, before drinking it, they had to mix a large quantity of
water with it to moderate its strength.

St. Brendan seems to have visited the same island but, being a saint,
he failed to experience the deep trance and euphoria of the more
worldly Maeldun. [3] Note that the color of the magic substance is
usually red. Even hazelnuts are "reddened" by association with
salmon-flesh. Maeldun sees red apple-like or nut-like fruit with a
rough rind -- which could be an accurate description of a fly-agaric
"toadstool" or its dried cap. Maeldun's squeezing of the juice reminds
us directly of Vedic soma-ritual, and the warning to cut the juice
with water reminds us of the Greek injunction to mix certain "wines"
twenty-to-one with water, lest they be too powerful -- obviously not
wine as we now know it, as C. Ruck points out in Persephone's Quest. [4]

Persephone's Quest is the book which sparked my intention to draft
this query. The specific impetus rose from Ruck's brilliant essay on
"The Offerings from the Hyperboreans," i.e., the votive offerings sent
from the semi-mythical land of Hyperborea to Apollo's shrine oracle at
Delos. In this text, Ruck makes no mention of the often-repeated but
not very convincing identification of Hyperborea as Ireland, or the
insular-Celtic lands in general. The route taken by the offering (a
sheaf of wheat hiding some other plant, apparently), is traced by
three ancient authors, who all place Hyperborea beyond the Danube and
beyond Scythia, near the Altai Mountains. This might locate Hyperborea
somewhere near the vague (and controversial) origin-point of the
Indo-Europeans and hence of the Celts. A Siberian origin for the
Indo-Europeans is strengthened by Vedic references and a mass of other
material which must not detain us here; suffice to say that the
"Hyperboreans" are very close to the area in which A. muscaria still
provides the entheogenic juice for shamanic practice. Ruck marshals a
great deal of circumstantial evidence to identify the offerings as fly
agaric, dried and wrapped in straw.

A possible historical connection between Hyperborea and the Celts,
however fascinating, will not serve our purpose so well, however, as
Ruck's discussion of a certain tribe living along the route of the
offerings and involved with their delivery, the Arimaspeans. Their
name, in the Scythian language, supposedly describes them as a
one-eyed people, akin to gorgons and griffins. A number of other
one-eyed and/or one-legged races appear in the story of Apollo and the
Hyperboreans--for example, the Telchines, magic metallurgists "with a
reputation for sorcery and drugs" [5], masters of herbalism and the
"evil eye". Ruck explains:

"The fungus of the Hyperborean homeland would have come ... from
the wooded slopes of the Altai Mountains, where conifers and birch
abound, an environment, therefore, where Amanita muscaria is commonly
found. Presumably, it would have fruited in the autumn and been
preserved by drying so that it could be conveyed over the long
journey, wrapped in straw, to arrive on Delos in late spring along
with the other offerings of first fruits. Is there anything, we must
now ask, in the Apolline traditions that might suggest that this was
the identity of the secret plant?

The one-eyed Arimaspeans, who, as we have seen, were either just
another name for the Hyperboreans or, as a separate people, were the
first intermediaries in the transmission of the subterranean gold that
was mined by the griffins. [They] are a personification of one of the
attributes of soma as the "single eye." So, therefore, are the
Cyclopes, whose murder as primitive surrogate occasioned Apollo's
expiatory sojourn amongst the people of his northern homeland. There
were two versions of these Cyclopes, and the Anatolian ones probably
arose from a separate dissemination of the metaphor through Asia
Minor, where the later discredited Lycian Telchines display the same
attribute as their evil eye. These one-eyed creatures are a variant of
another attribute of soma as the figure with a single foot, a
characteristic of a supposed race of people called the Shade-foots,
who came from the Indus valley and were fancifully implicated,
according to Aristophanes6 in a profane celebration of the Lesser
Eleusinian Mystery. It appears that the Arimaspeans may have come from
the same general region, for Herodotus's supposed Scythian etymology
of their name is probably not correct, but they were really an Iranian
tribe, called the Argempaioi or Argimpasoi. All these fabulous
creatures can be traced to fungal manifestations and testify strongly
that it was some kind of mushroom, if not actually Amanita, that was
originally the Hyperborean plant. In its Hesperidean version, the
plant bears still another attribute of soma as the 'mainstay of the
sky', which is the role that Atlas plays as 'pillar of heaven' in the
west [7], just as his Titanic brother in the east, Prometheus, when
presented as a Shade-foot, impersonates the sacred plant as a
"parasol," which is the same Sanskrit word as mushroom. The
single-footed trait can also be seen in certain Greek heroes who, like
Oedipus, have mythical roles as Apolline surrogates."

The Shade-foots were also known as Monocoli or "One-legs". [8] This
latter name is particularly interesting because when we find these
people in modern times, they will be a particular plant involved in
Asiatic shamanism. Monocoli in Greek was an epithet of plants9. In
modern times, the prodigious strength of their single leg will also be
remembered from ancient traditions.

In his own essay, "Persephone's Quest," Wasson also discusses a number
of one-eyed, one-footed beings from various folkloric and iconographic
sources, including the Cyclopes, and soma itself, which is described
in Vedic Sanskrit as Aja Ekapad, "Not-born Single-foot." Mushrooms are
"not born" because they have no seed; they are caused by lightning
bolts. And mushrooms are single-footed, of course. The penis is the
"one-eyed serpent," and the mushroom is a penis. Folklore can be
scoured endlessly to rake up further examples; Wasson's point is that
one-eyed one-legged beings are to be decoded as mushrooms, at least in
certain contexts.

The Irish also have a one-legged one-eyed race in their past: the
Fomoire or Fomorians. In some legendary histories they seem to be the
very oldest inhabitants of the island, but still they come from
elsewhere, either "from the sea" (but "sea" is probably a false
etymology for their name, fomorian); or else they invaded Ireland from
Africa. In some tales the Fomorians live under the sea (like Chinese
dragons) or else more prosaically on Tory Island. Sometimes they are
giants, and moreover they can appear as one-eyed one-footed giants.
Sometimes they appear to be a race of wizards, "human" enough to
inter-marry with the Tuatha de Danaan (who, however, aren't all that
human themselves). In fact the half-breed King Bres, who causes war
between the two races10 is described as the most beautiful youth in
Ireland -- even though the Fomoire are usually depicted as ugly, low,
hideous, deformed, etc. One gets the impression that the Fomorians
represent a pre-Celtic Irish race, and that we are seeing them through
the texts of the Celts, who invaded their land and subdued them, and
now wish to present them as villains, boors, snake-worshippers, or
even nonhuman monsters. This is a universal theme in folklore, which
often seems to harbor memories of an archaic "us/them" situation.
Ultimately it may lead us back to the emergence of agricultural
peoples and their "conquest" and enslavement of hunter/gatherer tribes
-- i.e., back to the very beginnings of civilization and history. The
Fomorians, who are connected with the megaliths by folklore, and who
survive to play roles as ogres and giants in Irish fairy tales, may
have been remnants of the great Atlantic Megalithic peoples, who
created the culture of New Grange and Stonehenge long before the Celts
arrived in Europe. The marginalized "race" or "caste" survives as
tinkers (primitive metallurgists, perennial outsiders), minstrels,
vagabonds, fortune-tellers, herbalists, servants, grooms, prostitutes,
wizards. Much later in history the Celts will undergo the same
marginalization by new "invading races"--the Fomorization of the
Celts, as it were.

What interests us here, however, is not the fate of the Fomorians but
their special role as one-eyed shade-foots -- i.e., their role in
folklore. Whatever their other qualities in history, myth, or legend,
they are clearly "Arimaspeans", and hence are to be suspected of
kinship with mushrooms. And if hazelnuts, or red berries, are used to
"mask" the mushroom in Irish tradition, we should look for Fomorians
lurking somewhere in the underbrush near the sacred tree.

Just such a conjunction occurs in the saga of Dermat and Grania, which
in turn forms part of the Finnian Cycle. [11] The hero and heroine are
fleeing from the jealous wrath of Finn himself. Their flight takes
them all over Scotland and Ireland, where many dolmens are still
called "beds" of Dermat and Grania. At one point they come to the
Forest of Dooros (a name containing the Celtic word for "oak" and thus
identifiable as a druid grove) in the district of HyFicra of the Moy
(later known as the barony of Tireagh, in Sligo). At this time the
forest was guarded by Sharvan the Surly, a giant of Lochlann.

"Now this is the history of Sharvan the Surly, of Lochlann. On a
certain occasion, a game of hurley was played by the Dedannans against
the Fena, on the plain beside the Lake of Lein of the Crooked Teeth.
They played for three days and three nights, neither side being able
to win a single goal from the other during the whole time. And when
Dedannans found that they could not overcome the Fena, they suddenly
withdrew from the contest, and departed from the lake, journeying in a
body northwards.

The Dedannans had for food during the game, and for their journey
afterwards, crimson nuts and arbutus apples and scarlet quicken
berries, which they had brought from the Land of Promise. These fruits
were gifted with many secret virtues; and the Dedannans were careful
that neither apple nor nut nor berry should touch the soil of Erin.
But as they passed through the Wood of Dooros, in Hy Ficra of the Moy,
one of the scarlet quicken berries dropped on the earth; and the
Dedannans passed on, not heeding. From this berry a great quicken tree
sprang up, which had the virtues of the quicken trees that grow in
Fairyland. For its berries had the taste of honey, and those who ate
of them felt a cheerful flow of spirits, as if they had drunk of wine
or old mead; and if a man were even a hundred years old, he returned
to the age of thirty, as soon as he had eaten three of them.

Now when the Dedannans heard of this tree, and knew of its many
virtues, they would not that any one should eat of the berries but
themselves; and they sent a Fomor of their own people to guard it,
namely Sharvan the Surly, of Lochlann; so that no man dared even to
approach it. For this Sharvan was a giant of the race of the wicked
Cain, burly and strong; with heavy bones, large thick nose, crooked
teeth, and one broad, red, fiery eye in the middle of his black
forehead. And he had a great club tied by a chain to an iron girdle
which was round his body. He was, moreover, so skilled in magic that
fire could not burn him, water could not drown him, and weapons could
not wound him; and there was no way to kill him but by giving him
three blows of his own club. By day he sat at the foot of the tree,
watching; and at night he slept in a hut he had made for himself, high
up among the branches"

The Fena or Finnians or followers of Finn are Milesians, the last Iron
Age Celts to arrive in Ireland. The Tuatha De Danaan are an earlier
people, perhaps also Celtic but Bronze Age. The De Danaan have magical
power, and after their final defeat by the Milesians they will retire
into the megalithic mounds, such as the Brugh na Boine at Newgrange
(which in this tale is the Castle of Angus, the god of love, patron of
Dermat and Grania). They are in fact the fairies. The land of Promise
or Land of Youth or Tirnanog, etc., is the mundus imaginalis or
fairyland, Isles of the Blessed, Hy Brasil, etc. -- the spirit land
where the De Danaan are also "at home". This is the origin of the
various "crimson nuts and arbutus apples and scarlet quicken berries,"
which are not native to Ireland but to the "other world," the place
where shamans go in trance. The quicken tree is the "quicken beam or
mountain ash, or roan-tree; Gaelic Caerthainn," a tree holy to the
druids. The tree with its red fruit guarded by a giant recalls the
Golden Fleece and the Golden Apples of the Hesperides; it is thus the
world-axis, the shamanic ladder, and also the tree beneath which one
finds fly agaric; it is the beanstalk, Alice's tunnel to Wonderland,
and all other liminal structures or gateways between levels. The fruit
of the tree, like that of the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil
in Genesis, is the principle of transformation and realization; it is
the sacrifice; and it is soma. This will become more clear as the tale
unfolds.

Dermat makes a peace-pact with Sharvan the Surly: refuge in the
Forest, so long as Dermat keeps his hands off the quicken berries. For
a while all goes well. Meanwhile, Finn receives an offer of fealty
from two former enemies, the sons of Morna. Before he forgives them,
however, he demands an erc, or blood-price: either "the head of a
warrior, or the full of my hand of the berries of a quicken tree."

Finn's son Oisin takes pity on the sons of Morna and explains the
situation to them; nevertheless they undertake the quest and set out
for the Forest of Dooros. Dermat easily overcomes them. Meanwhile
Grania has developed an overwhelming obsession with the berries: she
must taste them, or perish. Reluctantly Dermat sets out to find
Sharvan, taking the sons of Morna along as witnesses. The giant is
asleep; Dermat whacks him on the head and rouses him. The hero asks
for berries, the Fomor refuses. They fight a ferocious duel, and
Sharvan is slain by three blows of his own club (just as the soma was
sacrificed by pressing or "wounding" the plant). Dermat orders the
sons of Morna to bury the corpse while he goes to fetch Grania. Dermat
then satisfies Grania's desire, and also gives berries to the sons of
Morna, who thank him profusely for sparing their lives, and set off to
return to Finn. Dermat and Grania take over Sharvan's tree-house high
in the branches of the fairy-quicken, and settle down in bliss again.

Finn explodes with fury, rouses his loyal and not-so-loyal followers,
and sets out to capture Dermat and Grania in their lair. They arrive
at the Forest and find the tree, but no sign of the lovers. They gorge
on fruit, and then settle down to wait. Finn and Oisin play chess
beneath the tree. Time passes. Finn tells Oisin that he can win in one
move, but Oisin can't see the move. He ponders endlessly. Suddenly a
quicken-fruit falls ripely onto the chessboard, as if to show Oisin
the correct move; he makes it and wins. They play again, and the same
thing happens: wisdom falls from the tree as fruit: Oisin wins. And a
third time!

Finn finally realizes what's up. He calls up into the tree, and Dermat
answers from the treehouse. In a fury, Finn orders his men to surround
the tree -- then offers a huge reward for the head of Dermat O'Dyna.
At this point nine men, all called Garva (and all hailing from various
mountains around Ireland) attempt the coup against Dermat, but they
all fail. The love-god Angus -- deus ex megalitha -- has flown
invisibly from Newgrange to save his worshippers, Dermat and Grania.
As each Garva climbs the tree, Angus casts a spell over him so that he
appears to be Dermat. Each Garva is then pushed from the tree by the
real Dermat, falls to the ground, is mistaken for the enemy, and at
once beheaded. The Garvas might be related to the Ghandarvas, who
appropriated soma from the gods and became its guardians. [12]

Angus then wraps Grania in his cloak of invisibility and flies off
with her to Bruga of the Boyne. Dermat decides to stay behind, do the
honorable thing and fight his way out. He makes a speech in in
self-defense, and the great hero Oscar is converted to sympathy with
him. Oscar offers his life as surety for Dermat's, but to one dares to
fight him. Dermat leaps lightly out of the tree, lands on his two
spear shafts, pole-vaults over the heads of Finn's circle, and escapes
with Oscar. He and Grania wll live to flee Finn again and again -- and
eventually die at his hands.

On the assumption that the fairy-fruit of the quicken-tree is indeed
soma, and that as soma it must be associated with a ritual, with a
sacrifice (of itself), and with transcendence (either ritual or
pharmacological), this charming tale would appear to function as a
"mask" for just such a ritual. The berry is constantly equated with
the head. The Celts were head-hunters, very much like the Dyaks of
Borneo, the Guarani of Paraguay, etc. All wisdom and power are in the
head. Because Dermat has taken on (or stolen) the wisdom of Sharvan by
"dashing out his brains" (no doubt beheading him), Dermat acquires
insight. In this heightened state, he plays the near-magic trick with
the fruit and the chess-board, thrice-repeated. This foreshadows the
thrice three heads of the Garvas, which will also (in a sense) fall
ripely from the tree.

The one-legged one-eyed Fomor loses his head like a berry. Dermat
should be the next sacrifice (like Gawain after the Green knight) but
a substitution is made "at the last moment" (as usual). Nine
mountain-men's heads are sacrificed -- nine more berries, as it were
-- in Dermat's place. In the original tale, Dermat (like Grania) would
no doubt have ascended the tree and escaped into the "other world";
instead another substitution (or "rationalization") is made, the
acrobatic spear-leap. The point is, Dermat flies. He goes above. He
transcends. He has shamanic powers, gained (or reinforced) by his
overcoming and absorption of Fomorian/Fairy magic.

The tale of Sharvan the Surly is just that, a tale, not the text of a
ritual. Nevertheless folktales have been known to "mask" myths, which
in turn may serve as aetiological legends for certain rites, which in
turn may derive in part from earlier myth, ritual, or lore. This
particular tale seems to contain such ritual elements. The structure
of the tale and many of its details might well pre-date its inclusion
in the Finnian Cycle; any hero might experience such an adventure. And
the Finnian Cycle itself seems to have roots in a past so distant that
agriculture has not yet appeared, a world of pastoralism and
hunting/gathering. Finn and his "merrymen" are anachronisms, free
forest guerrillas held by only a slender link of reciprocity with
settled society, and perilously close to that taboo realm of sorcery
and alien otherness, the Forest. The world of Sharvan the Surly seems
an archaic one indeed, ancient enough to contain traces of the soma
ritual once common to all Indo-European people, as well as to the
Semites, the Siberians and the New World Indians, etc.

That's my hypothesis. I wouldn't even begin to argue that we have
"detected" an Irish soma. What we have here is a mere suspicion, not a
case. I'm looking for support and/or refutation. A number of queries
must be directed to specialists. From philologists we need exhaustive
comparisons of mushroom and soma/haoma vocabulary from all the
relevant languages, such as that which Allegro carried out for the
Semitic languages in The Mushroom and the Cross. Celtic, Persian, and
Sanskrit should be the main candidates for word-sleuthing. The Vedic
soma ritual needs to be compared in detail with all texts and
fragments from Celtic sources relevant to magic substances.

Ethnomycologists should investigate Irish (and insular Celtic)
mushroom lore. Does Amanita muscaria grow in Ireland, and might it
have grown in Ireland in ancient times? I've never come across any
written material on this, but during my last trip to Ireland (May,
1993) I made a few discoveries. At least one magic mushroom grows in
Ireland, the "Liberty Cap," a type of psilocybe; I saw it grown at a
mushroom farm in County Cork, but it is also found wild. Subsequently,
in a village on the coast of the province of Munster, I interviewed a
certain well-known shanachie or traditional story-teller, who must
remain anonymous here due to his involvement in gun-running and
pot-farming (neither very successful). "Mick" is said to speak the
purest Irish in the southern Gaeltecht--and (somewhat magically) is
reputed to live on nothing but pigsfeet and Guinness. In response to
my query, he stated that magic mushrooms were known in Ireland in the
time of the druids, and he agreed with me that "this explains a lot"
about the druids! Since I'd been introduced to Mick by an old friend
of his, I doubt he was trying to pull my leg; certainly he failed to
elaborate on his statement, which he appeared to think was rather
unexceptional.

Yes, it would explain a lot--but itself needs to be explained!
Therefore, I ask for collaboration. The answer (however tenuous) seems
genuinely worth knowing.

Peter Lamborn Wilson,
c/o Autonomedia, Box 568 Brooklyn, NY 11211
dmandl@panix.com


FOOTNOTES
1. v. the Celtic Dragon Myth, J. F. Campbell and G. Henderson
[Edinburgh, 1911]; Lemma Publisher, New York, facsimile, n.d.

2. Joyce, 421; see bibliography.

3. The Voyage of St. Brendan, translated by J. O'Meara [Dolmen Press,
1976], pp. 46-47.

4. Persephone's Quest: Entheogens and the Origins of Religion, a
collection of essays by Wasson, Stella Kramrisch, J. Ott, Carl Ruck,
and Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty (Yale, New Haven, 1986)

5. Ruck, p. 236

6. Birds, 1553 ff.

7. Aeschylus, Prometheus 351

8. Pliny, Natural History 7.2.23; Aulus Gellius 9.4.9

9. Theophrastus, How Plants Grow, 2.25, Enquiry into Plants, 9.18.8

10. In the Cath Maige Tuired, or Second Battle of Mag Tuired, ed. E.A.
Gray [Irish Texts Society, Naas, Co Kildare, 1982])

11. Joyce, 313 ff

12. See "The True Identity of soma" in M. T. Greene, Natural knowledge
in Preclassical Antiquity (J. Hopkins University, 1992), p. 116.]




BIBLIOGRAPHY

Court, Artelia, Puck of the Droms: the Lives and Literature of the
Irish Tinkers (University of California,1985).

Davies, Michael, Mythic Ireland (Thames and Hudson, London, 1992).

Flattery, David S., and Martin Schwartz, Haoma and Harmaline: The
Botanical Identity of the Indo-Iranian Sacred Hallucinogen soma and
its Legacy in Religion, Language, and Middle Eastern Folklore
(University of California, Near Eastern Studies #21, 1989).

Joyce, P.W., Old Celtic Romances (Gill and Macmillan, Dublin, 1978;
facsimile from the 3rd edition, 1907).

MacCana, Proinsias, Celtic Mythology (P. Bedrick, NY, 1968, 1983).

O'Driscoll, R, ed., The Celtic Consciousness (Geo. Braziller, NY,
1981); contains "Near Eastern and African Connections with the Celtic
World" by Heinrich Wagner, and "Irish Folk Tradition and the Celtic
Calendar" by Kevin Danaher.

Quinn, Bob, Atlantean: Ireland's North African and Maritime Heritage
(Quartet Books, London, 1986)

Rees, Alwyn and Brinley, Celtic Heritage (Thames and Hudson, London,
1961).