Psychedelic Soma: R. Gordon Wasson’s Interpretation of Soma and its Impact on both Modern Yoga and Psychedelic Research

This paper critically examines R. Gordon Wasson’s 1968 book, Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality, and traces its influence on both modern yoga and psychedelic research. A banker by trade, Wasson became fascinated with fungi and published a hugely influential article on the ritual use of psychedelic mushrooms in Life magazine in 1957. In 1968, he then turned his attention to the enigmatic plant of the Vedas, Soma, arguing that it too was a hallucinogenic mushroom, Amanita muscaria. Although largely discredited by Indologists today, Wasson’s identification of Soma with psychedelics helped solidify in the popular imagination an idea that was already present in Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception – namely, that psychedelics can occasion the same mystical states described in South Asian religious texts. With the recent renaissance of psychedelic research in the twenty-first century, this idea has resurfaced both in popular yoga literature and in many scientific studies of psilocybin, with some problematic implications.

Wasson began his exploration of psychedelic fungi with a series of trips to central Mexico in the early 1950s, where he persuaded a Mazatec healer to allow him to participate in her rituals. His subsequent article, “Seeking the Magic Mushroom,” in Life  magazine helped inspire the massive interest in psychedelic fungi that followed in the 1960s and 70s and played a major role in the American counterculture. From Mexico, Wasson then began to explore the possible role of hallucinogenic fungi in other cultures, making the controversial claim that the Eleusinian Mysteries were inspired by the hallucinogenic ergot fungus (Claviceps purpurea). Enlisting the aid of the then young graduate student Wendy Doniger, he further claimed that the elusive Soma plant described in the Vedas was none other than the Amanita muscaria mushroom that had also been used in some Siberian shamanic traditions. In Wasson’s narrative, the divine inspiration described in the early Vedas and in later texts such as the Upaniṣads and yogic literature originally derived from ingestion of a psychedelic mushroom. This ancient use of psychedelic fungi, he believed, lay at the origin of virtually all religion and perhaps of human consciousness itself.

Today, few if any Indologists accept Wasson’s’ identification of Soma with a psychedelic mushroom, and most usually identify it instead with Ephedra or some other non-hallucinogenic plant. Nonetheless, Wasson’s psychedelic interpretation of Soma has become cemented in the popular  imagination and continues to circulate to this day. His narrative also built upon the hugely influential work of Aldous Huxley, whose Doors of Perception had suggested that the psychedelic experience (in his case, mescaline-inspired) was comparable to the mystical experiences described in yogic, Vedantic and Buddhist literature. This equation of psychedelic experience with yogic samādhi or the “sat cit ānanda” of Vedānta was repeated throughout classic works of the counterculture such as the writings of Timothy Leary and many others. From Leary’s essay “The Buddha as Drop Out” to the Beatles’ song “Tomorrow Never Knows,” the equation of psychedelics with yoga, meditation, and Asian spirituality more broadly had become a key feature of the counterculture.

Some authors of the late 1960s and 1970s, it is true, were deeply suspicious of the yoga = psychedelic experience formulation. Gurus such as Meher Baba, Ram Dass, Swami Prabhupada, and others warned against the “psychedelic trap” as a dangerous short-cut to samādhi and argued instead that traditional forms of yoga and meditation were the only true means to “stay high forever.” Nonetheless, Wasson’s psychedelic interpretation of South Asian religion has persisted and resurfaced in the twenty-first century, particularly amidst the recent renaissance of psychedelic research. As the therapeutic use of Psilocybe mushrooms has become increasingly mainstream, we see popular articles in venues such as Yoga Journal  that discuss the “Psychedelic Roots of Yoga.” These articles essentially restate Wasson’s identification of Soma with Amanita muscaria and often go further by suggesting, for example, that Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtra also recommends the use of hallucinogenic plants and that psychedelics can be a useful supplement to traditional yogic practice.

Much of the current renaissance of psychedelic research was pioneered by Roland Griffiths and others at Johns Hopkins University, who re-ignited the interest in the links between Psilocybe mushrooms and mystical experience. Griffiths’ 2006 article “Psilocybin Can Occasion Mystical Experiences having Substantial and Sustained Personal Meaning and Spiritual Significance” was a seminal text in the modern explosion of psychedelic research. Since Griffiths’ 2006 article, dozens of articles have been published and millions of dollars poured into psychedelic research, with many large pharmaceutical companies eager to capitalize on these as a revolutionary class of marketable drugs. Not only does Griffiths’ work frequently cite Wasson among its sources, but it also assumes his basic equation of psychedelic and mystical experience, which is seen as essentially universal across culture, time, space, and religious context.

While all this renewed interest in both mysticism and psychedelics is exciting for many reasons, I do think it also has some real potential problems. First, much of this research is based on a kind of uncritical universalism and perennialism – that is, an assumption that there is a common, “universal core” of mystical experience, a claim that is both unfalsifiable and quite outdated from the perspective of the modern academic study of religion. Second, it also rests on a kind of “psychedelic perennialism,” or the assumption that all psychedelic experiences are also comparable, whether generated by Psilocybe species, Amanita species, LSD, DMT, or mescaline. Third, in the process, it largely obscures the questions that most historians of religions tend to care about,  such as the social, cultural, and historical contexts in which different texts, rituals, and religious experiences were generated.