Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality
Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality

WASSON, R. Gordon. Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality.

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J.P. Morgan Bank and mushrooms – a double life

WASSON, R. Gordon. Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. 1968.

8vo. Original blue cloth with gilt title to spine, with original price-clipped illustrated dust jacket; pp. xiii, [3], 380, [4]; light white staining to front board, minor black mark to front panel of jacket, light toning and scuffing to spine ends; still a near-fine copy; bookplate of Anthony Storr to front pastedown; a typed copy of his contemporary review of the book is loosely inserted.

First edition, with an excellent provenance: from the library of English psychiatrist and author Anthony Storr (1920-2001), who reviewed the work on publication.

This groundbreaking study identifies Soma, the divine, intoxicating substance of the Rig Veda, as the psychoactive fly agaric mushroom (Amanita muscaria) and traces its influence across Indo-European religious and cultural traditions. Wasson’s radical thesis challenged the prevailing academic view that Soma was an alcoholic preparation, offering instead a compelling case for its mycological origin – one that has since proved enormously influential.

R. Gordon Wasson (1898-1986), a vice-president at J.P. Morgan, made his most lasting contributions not in finance but in the pioneering field of ethnomycology. He and his wife Valentina began their serious study of mushrooms in 1927 and went on to become the first Westerners to participate in a Mazatec mushroom ceremony in Mexico. Two species of hallucinogenic fungi were named in his honour, and it was specimens collected by Wasson that allowed Albert Hofmann to identify the active compounds psilocybin and psilocin. His work laid the foundations for the “psychedelic renaissance” of the 1960s, most famously through the influence it had on Timothy Leary, who encountered Wasson’s writing just before embarking on his own experiments with LSD.

A copy of uncommon interest, combining a fine association with a key moment in the intellectual and cultural history of psychedelics.

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