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 Anthony Storr to front pastedown; illustrated price clipped dust jacket with picture of mushroom; pp. xiii, [3], 380, [3]; minimal white staining to front board and minor black marking to front cover of dust jacket with mild, general toning; Slight scuffing to top of dust jacket spine; otherwise near fine.
First edition from the library of fellow academic and psychoanalyst Anthony Storr who reviewed the book when it was issued. A typed copy of this review, loosely inserted, is included in this issue making this book even more of a unique item.
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 identifed 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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