Haoma and Harmaline: The Botanical Identity of the Indo-Iranian Sacred Hallucinogen and Its Legacy in Religion, Language, and Middle Eastern Folklore

David Stophlet Flattery and Martin Schwartz are scholars of ancient Iranian religion and philology, and this University of California Press book is their scholarly argument that the Avestan sacred drink haoma, and by extension the closely related Vedic soma, was Peganum harmala, Syrian rue, rather than the various other candidate plants that have been proposed. Its strength is a closely reasoned philological and botanical argument engaging directly with the primary Avestan and Vedic textual descriptions. Its limit is the same one this atlas applies to other closely argued but unproven botanical identification hypotheses, such as Wasson's fly agaric proposal for soma, it remains a serious candidate among several rather than an established finding, which is why it sits at this reliability tier and is cited as one candidate identification rather than the settled answer.