Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality

R. Gordon Wasson was an ethnomycologist, and this book is his own primary presentation of the hypothesis that Soma, the sacred plant of the ancient Rigveda, was in fact the fly agaric mushroom, a specific botanical identification he proposed and argued for himself rather than one that has been independently confirmed. As a primary statement of a theory its own author devised, the atlas holds it at the tier appropriate to that kind of source rather than to independent verification, since Wasson's fly agaric identification remains contested among Vedic scholars and no consensus botanical identification of Soma has been reached. Its value is as the clearest primary statement of an influential and still debated theory, in its originator's own words, documenting a real strand of Soma scholarship rather than establishing settled fact about the plant's identity.