Haoma-Soma in the world of ancient Greece

This historical analysis (1990) examines the cultural development of sacramental worship in ancient Greece whose ritual practices were marked by inebriation, hallucinatory visions, and ecstatic behavior. It is theorized that the Haoma-Soma of its predecessor cultures from Iran and India, which Gordon Wasson theorized to be Amanita Muscaria (Fly Agaric), became substituted by an alcoholic version of the beverage known as Dionysos.

Abstract

“Evidence of the worship of (nonalcoholic) Haoma-Soma in Iran and India (identified by Wasson as Amanita muscaria) can be found in Greece and its neighboring lands. While Iranian and Indic peoples preserved their original worship in their final settlements, Indo-European tribes, including the Thracians, the Phrygians, and the Greeks, after settling in Europe and Asia Minor, abandoned their ancestral worship of Soma (Sabazios) and substituted the Semitic (alcoholic) Dionysos. However, they retained traces of the original Soma worship in Dionysiac rituals. This modified Dionysiac worship spread throughout the Western world. Six formal criteria are used to establish the identity of Soma with Dionysos (Sabazios): both cults had the same aim (to cause ecstatic behavior); both cults required the attainment of the same spiritual state (purity); both cults had an idiosyncratic myth in common; both cults showed the identical word root in the name of the worshiped god; both cults had identical zoological and botanical associations with their god; and the alcoholic god (Dionysos) was depicted as having the same physical effects on human beings as that of the ancient nonalcoholic god (Soma).”

Authors: Joseph Wohlberg

Summary

The present article aims to find remnants of the Indo-European cult of Haoma-Soma in ancient Greece and its peripheral neighbors.

The Rigveda’s god Soma is close to humans, so close that if a human partakes of him, they acquire some of his divine essence.

Pre-Zoroastrian Iran worshipped the same gods as the Indian subcontinent, but Zoroaster’s religion consigned all the Indie divinities to the rank of devas, or demons. However, he ex coriated the manner in which the god was worshipped.

The identity of Soma has been one of the biggest question marks in the field of religious history. It is known that some aspect of a plant was crushed and its juice became an intoxicant.

R. Gordon Wasson’s identification of Soma with the poisonous but beautiful toadstool Amanita muscaria has found general acceptance by most experts.

Indo-European tribes may have lived side by side with Finno-Ugrian peoples on the Eurasian continent. They may have exchanged religious practices, although no existing knowledge of who borrowed from whom exists.

Burrow listed 30 words common to Finno-Ugrian and Indo-Iranian languages, and several of these words were used in the Rigveda as epithets of Soma. Furthermore, the original word for Amanita muscaria was *pong, a word apparently cognate with the Latin fungus, meaning a mushroom.

The Soma plant was brought by Indo-Iranian tribes to lands where Amanita muscaria does not readily grow. Over time, the connections with the homeland weakened and eventually disappeared, and some alternate substance had to be found to enable priests to en gage in their ancient rituals.

In India, Soma was likened to a cow’s udder to be milked, and to Heaven’s head. It grew in the mountains and absorbed the sun’s rays to acquire its miraculous potency.

Priests pounded the mushroom with stones, passed its pulp through a filter of lamb’s wool, mixed its juice with milk, curd or honey, and drank the yellow liquid thus produced. They then urinated the Soma, which was now purified and ready to be drunk.

Modern chemistry explains why people drink urine: when Amanita muscaria is dried, ibotenic acid is produced, which produces several compounds, including muscimole. When the juice is squeezed out and ingested, muscimole is not metabolized, and it passes through the body and is excreted in the urine.

Wasson noted that Amanita muscaria looks like a phallus and has a golden-red cap underneath that gleams like the sun, a bull or a single eye.

Wasson noted that Amanita muscaria grows in northern Eurasia in a symbiotic relationship with birches and firs. Further south, the birches and firs disappear and Amanita muscaria is nowhere to be found.

There is an interesting association between Amanita muscaria and creeping animals like lizards, toads, and frogs. The author believes that the mushroom requires shady terrain with considerable moisture and is a perfect natural companion for amphibians and snakes.

Ancient Greece worshipped a god similar to Haoma-Soma, though he was of totally different origin. This god was syncretized with the Greek god Dionysos or Bakchos.

Dionysos-Bakchos was originally a non-Greek god, probably of Semitic origin, who was a dying god of fertility and gave himself up for humanity’s nourishment and fertility, but also a god of death and ultimate resurrection.

The Semitic population referred to the god of death and mourning as Bakuy, and the god was worshiped from southernmost Arabia to the Black Sea.

The Semitic lamented god reached Greece by way of Thrace, a land that lies west of the Hellespont, in what is modern Bulgaria and European Turkey. The Thracians worshipped the Great Mother Goddess and practiced Semitic polygamy and circumcision.

A Thracian tribe called the Briges or Phrygians crossed the Hellespont into Asia and settled in Anatolia. They worshipped the god Haoma-Soma and were allies of Troy against the Greeks.

The Phrygians became neighbors of the Semites, who already had an ecstasy-inducing god, namely Bakuy. They translated the borrowed Semitic lamented god Bakuy into their own Indo-European language as Diounsis, who was later regarded as a guardian of tombs by the Greeks.

The Phrygians worshiped Dionysos, a god of wine, and so did the Thracians, although Diodorus Siculus spoke darkly about Dionysos’ vengeance on Lykourgos, a king of the Thracians.

The only significant religious evidence from Thrace is the omnipresent depiction of the “Hero,” the god on horseback, who is never named and who is often shown hunting down a wild boar. He wears a Phrygian cap and makes the Benedictio Latina, a prominent characteristic of Sabazios.

The hero of Asia Minor was called ZuXoiv, the “Saving God” by the Greeks, who identified every foreign deity with their own, often resorting to false etymology to enhance the argument.

Some aspects of the Thracian Diounsis (Dionysos) slowly filtered down to Greece, and the Greeks did maintain a tradition that their Dionysos came to Greece from Anatolia-Lydia or from Thrace, thus indirectly from Asia Minor. However, Bakchos and Dionysos are actually one god with two names.

The Greek states managed to domesticate this alien god, but he was cruel and unforgiving to those who denied him. He gave to anyone under his influence a feeling of immortality, an experience of divine essence.

The nebris, the spotted fawnskin, was the most specific symbol of the worship of Dionysos-Sabazios in the Hellenic and quasi-Hellenic world. It was worn by every Dionysiac initiate, who became one with the god at the moment of don ning the nebris.

Euripides’ The Bakchai contains a puzzling passage about the nebris symbol, which makes one pause to seek some other explanation.

The passage is mystifying. Dodds suspected that an allusion was made to some obscure ritual, but Wasson pointed out that the white woolen tufts were unnecessary if the nebris were to reveal the god as a stag or a deer.

The spotted fawnskin of Dionysos, embellished with tufts of white wool, is worn by mystai because it reveals in a naturalistic manna that the god, and through him the mystes, is the mushroom.

Human beings have tried to represent themselves as the quintessential personification of the mush room. The Siberian Koryaks believed that they could transform themselves into fungi by putting on the skin of an animal or taking on the outward physical character of an object.

In the above passage, one finds a definite trace of primitive sympathetic magic. The individual becomes the substance he or she desires to possess by showing the supreme power some attribute of the desired object.

People have tried to intimate to heaven what they want by trying to behave as the desired object behaves. The nebris, as a symbol of Sabazios-Dionysos, goes back to the time when Sabazios was the sacred mushroom.

Before the end of the fifth century B.C., two plants were chiefly associated with the god Dionysos in popular worship: the grape and the ivy. The ivy symbolized Dionysos after he had reached Europe, and the grape leaf symbolized the god’s Semitic origin as the incarnation of food.

The thyrsus of Sabazios-Dionysos was frequently topped by a fir cone, and in Euripides’ The Bakchai, the Maenads were described as reposing on fir needles, and Pentheus was shown perched on a fir tree, offering himself up unwittingly as a human sacrifice to the god.

Demosthenes described Aischines leading a public procession of devotees with their heads entwined with teoKt, a white poplar, although a white birch did not exist in ancient times.

With the arrival of Sabazios on the Athenian scene, two trees suddenly came into prominence – the fir and the “white tree”. The association of the fir and the white tree with Savos-Sabazios is remarkable.

Dionysos, who was syncretized with Sabazios, was suddenly associated with creeping an imals, such as snakes, toads, frogs, and lizards, with the end of the fifth century B.C. This association was probably transmitted by Semitic tradition to the Phrygian branch of Thracians.

The snake aspect of the god Soma was Semitic in origin, but the Rigveda speaks of Soma as Amanita muscaria.

The god Sabazios was associated with snakes, frogs, toads, and lizards. His hand was literally crawling with reptiles and amphibians.

The great historian of Greek religion, Nilsson (1967: 660), threw up his hands and declared that Savos-Sabazios had an inexplicable preference for crawling animals. Nevertheless, the association between Savos-Sabazios and crawling animals is very real.

Wasson discussed the association between Amanita muscaria and toads, frogs, and lizards, but did not account for the cause of the association. It is probably caused by the need for moisture and the closeness of mushrooms to the ground.

The ingestion of Amanita mus caria causes euphoria, lightness of foot, and an ability to perform tasks beyond a normal capacity. The user sees a mushroom man who exerts total power and orders the partaker to do anything the mushroom man wishes.

In Greek literature, Dionysos and King Pentheus encounter each other, and Pentheus experiences strange feelings. He sees two suns and two Thebes, each with seven gates.

Pentheus sees the god in human form and in his theriomorphic shape as a bull, and exhibits an unusual type of euphoria. He is persuaded to spy on the Bakchic women and wear women’s clothes in order not to be found out.

If Wasson’s identification of Haoma-Soma with Amanita muscaria is valid, then the Thrako-Phrygians and the Macedonians may have worshipped the same liquid of immortality as the Hindus and the ancient Iranians.

The god Haoma-Soma, Amanita muscaria, was a thigh born, fir and birch tree worshipped god. The weird attendants of Amanita muscaria, crawling creatures like toads, frogs, and lizards, remained with Sabazios until the time when Christianity drove the god’s worship underground.