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Title: Irish Soma
Author: Peter Lamborn Wilson
Language: en
Topics: Ireland, soma
Source: Retrieved on 17th May 2021 from https://hermetic.com/bey/pw-irishsoma

Peter Lamborn Wilson

Irish Soma

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 [6], 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”. [7] 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. [8] 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. [9]

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.

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 3^(rd) 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).

[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] Aeschylus, Prometheus 351

[7] Pliny, Natural History 7.2.23; Aulus Gellius 9.4.9

[8] Joyce, 313 ff

[9] See “The True Identity of soma” in M. T. Greene, Natural knowledge

in Preclassical Antiquity (J. Hopkins University, 1992), p. 116.]