The identities of Soma, an ancient psychoactive inebriant that inspired the shaman poets who wrote the Indian Vedas (e. 1500-500 BCE), and its counterpart the Persian Haoma which gave equal inspiration to the pre-Zoroastrian authors of the Yasna, has long been a subject of scholarly debate. The connection between the two sacraments and two cultures goes back into the shadowy time of pre-history and the common ancestry of the two cultures in ancient Indo European groups originating along the Russian Steppes. In this book, Bennett dissects and debunks long held theories about the identity of the Soma/Haoma, such as R. Gordon Wasson’s hypothesis of the Fly Agaric mushroom as the Soma, as well as David Stophlet Flattery and Martin Schwartz’s identification of Haoma as Syrian Rue, and instead traces the roots of the Soma/Haoma cults back to its origins amongst a cannabis burning and drinking Proto-Indo European group known as the Sredeni Stog, (4500-3500 BCE) a nomadic culture that originated in the Ukraine and whose high mobility, through their domestication of the horse, allowed them and their descendants to spread the use, mythology and linguistical root of numerous modern names for cannabis around much of the ancient world. Indeed, the modern term “cannabis” comes from an ancient Proto- Indo-European root word, “kanap”; the “an” from this root is believed to have left traces in many modern terms for cannabis, such as French “chanvre”, German “hanf”, Indian “bhang”, Sanskrit “sana”, Persian “bangha” , Dutch “Canvas”, Greek “Kannabis,” etc. Cannabis would accompany such Indo European groups for millennia, like the later Scythians, known as the Haoma-Varga (Haoma gatherers), who with their horses and the first wagons spread the use and mythology of cannabis throughout Western Europe, Greece and Rome, Persia and the Middle East, India, and even into China, leaving an imprint of their cultural traditions regarding hemp as they travelled. Recently discovered archaeological evidence from the Yanghai Tombs in China have revealed an Indo-European culture, the Gushi, populated the region from about 1800-200 BCE, and considerable amounts of cultivated female cannabis have been found accompanying the mummified remains of Gushi Shaman. The homeland of the Gushi culture in mainland China marked a trading post for a vast trade network that spanned much of the ancient world, and it was likely with this group, that the Indo-European sacred plant kanna (hemp) first picked up the Chinese name Hu-Ma, (fire hemp), which would become Haoma in the Bactria Afghanistan region populated by the pre-Zoroastrian Mazdean partakers of the sacred beverage who traded with the Gushi, eventually becoming Soma as this primordial cultic tradition reached into India. Although largely forgotten in the mists of time, Bennett also clearly identifies a cannabis-Soma cultic influence at the inception of a number of existing religions, such as Hinduism, Sikhism, Zoroastrianism, Taoism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, making hemp the common perennial source of the world’s most popular and oldest religious traditions.
Posted on: Fri, 28 Nov 2014 20:28:11 +0000
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