mushroom, however pejorative its telling name... . (p. 233 
col. 2) 
The mantle of King Soma had fallen on this notable mush- 
room, which inherits the glory of Soma for whom it is a surro- 
gate. Its heyday is in the Pravargya ritual. Then the mushroom is 
lost to us in a millennial darkness from which, miraculously, it 
emerges ‘endowed with a soul’, amongst the aboriginal Santal of 
Eastern India in our own day. . . . (p. 235 col. 2) 
How amazing it is that through a concatenation of happen- 
stances we are able, here in 1978, to define the precise species 
of the plant putika, which the Aryans, perhaps 3000 years ago, 
adopted as a surrogate from Soma! Preserved as in a time 
capsule in the Santal country and called in the Santal language 
putka, for 3000 years it waited to be discovered and its meaning 
made known by Roger Heim, Directeur of the Museum Na- 
tional d’ Histoire Naturelle, by the Austrian-born art historian, 
Stella Kramrisch, and by the ethnomycologist Gordon Was- 
son, two of us working as a team, Heim and Wasson seeking 
the reason why putka, alone in the vegetable kingdom, was 
animate and not finding the answer, not until Kramrisch re- 
vealed it to them, on the strength of evidence we had gathered 
but had failed to understand! According to the laws of Manu, 
mushrooms have been forbidden for thousands of years to 
Hindus of the twice-born castes. This makes it all the more 
significant that a mushroom was at one time the Holy of Holies. 
The late R.C. Zaehner, a distinguished scholar in the Indo- 
Iranian field and a professor in Oxford, in his review of our 
SOMA in The Times Literary Supplement, 22-5-1969, gave as 
the main argument against my mushroom theory the fact that 
when Soma came to be abandoned other mushrooms were 
never the substitutes. He did not live long enough to learn that 
the primary surrogate, the putika, was a mushroom. 
Manfred Mayrhofer in his Concise Etymological Sanskrit 
Dictionary presented two identical words that he spelled 
puatikah: 1) ‘foul, stinking’, and 2) ‘a species of plant serving as 
a substitute for the Soma plant’. Fortunately, in his ** Additions 
and Corrections’ at the end of Vol 3, he was able to cite 
Professor Kramrisch’s paper and thus reconcile and unite in 
one word what he had presented as homonyms. 
218 
