J.P. Morgan Bank and mushrooms - a double life
WASSON, R. Gordon. Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanich, Inc. 1968.
8vo. Original blue cloth with title lettering in gilt to spine; ownership bookplate of John Erikssons to front pastedown; illustrated unprice clipped dust jacket with picture of mushroom; pp. xiii, [3], 380, [3]; enclosed in paper slipcase; minimal rubbing to top and bottom of spine and dust jacket spine with a slight crease to top right corner of dust jacket, general toning to slipcase; otherwise a very fine copy.
First edition.
This groundbreaking work identifies Soma, the intoxicating plant-god of the Rig Veda, as the psycho-active fly agaric mushroom, and traces the influence of the fungus on Indo-European culture. Wasson's brilliantly argued and researched theory flies in the face of traditional scholarship, which until then had identified Soma as an alcoholic beverage.
R. Gordon Wasson (1898 - 1986) was a Vice-President of J.P. Morgan, a banker whose greatest contribution was in the field of entheogenic fungi. He became interested in edible mushrooms on his honeymoon in the Catskills in 1927. Passionately interested in the place of mushrooms in myth and folklore, he and his wife Valentina became serious ethno-mycological scholars with a large number of publications. They were the first Westerners to participate in a Mazatec mushroom ritual in Mexico. Wasson had two species of psychoactive mushrooms named after him and provided the specimens used by Albert Hofmann, the discoverer of LSD, to identify the chemical structure of the active compounds psilocybin and psilocin. Timothy Leary's reading of Wasson's early research into these mushrooms led to his experimentation with and promotion of LSD as a consciousness-expanding agent.
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