reason? But the sarjom trees themselves were not animate, and 
putka grew abundantly elsewhere: how then could that be the 
reason? No answer. 
Just as I was about the leave the Santal country I engaged 
Ludgi Marndi in one final talk. We went over the same ground. 
Suddenly she leaned forward and in a whisper made a most 
curious remark, which she said was her guess as to why the 
putka were animate: the putka must be eaten on the very day 
they are gathered, ‘for within twenty-four hours they will stink 
like a cadaver’. She was whispering. She was so earnest that I 
wrote down in my journal at once what she had said. But I 
confess that it meant nothing to me. 
In 1967 the mycologist Roger Heim, then directeur of the 
Museum National d’ Histoire Naturelle and former President of 
the Académie des Sciences, and I, he from Paris and I from 
New York, journeyed to the Santal villages of Orissa and 
Bihar. We went in July. We found putka growing in abundance 
and Heim identified them. They were fungi without inebriating 
potency. The Santal gathered these hypogenous fungi just as 
they were appearing on the surface, little dark-brown globular 
mushrooms. We questioned villagers along our whole route but 
no one could tell us why these mushrooms were animate. When 
we published our paper on our trip in Les Cahiers du Pacifique 
#14, in September 1970, we offered that baffling sentence of 
Ludgi’s to our readers, though it still meant nothing to us. 
It meant nothing to us until the April-June 1975 issue of the 
Journal of the American Oriental Society (JAOS) came out. 
Then it developed that her remark meant everything to us. That 
JAOS paper explained 1) Ludgi’s baffling remark, 2) why the 
putka were animate, 3) and the etymology of putka. It fortified 
even further, some say immeasurably, the thesis that we had 
presented in SOMA: Divine Mushroom of Immortality. 
The paper in the JAOS was written by Stella Kramrisch. She 
has spent 27 years in India as Professor of Indian Art at the 
University of Calcutta. She also taught concurrently at the 
Courtauld Institute, London University. From there she had 
gone to the University of Pennsylvania as Professor of South 
Asian Art. She was and is now the Curator of Indian and 
Himalayan Art in the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Profes- 
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