B. THE COLOR OF SOMA. 
We said in SOMA that hari in the RgVeda meant red when 
that color word was applied to Soma, which we think was A. 
muscaria, amushroom that throughout Eurasia, when mature, 
is almost always an intense and striking red. John Brough says: 
‘I have been unable to find any evidence that any shade of red is 
included in the colour-range denoted by hari’, and winds up his 
discussion by declaring that ‘red is absolutely excluded’. 
Scholars know that to arrive at the value of color words in 
texts 3000 and more years old calls for intense linguistic re- 
search, citation by citation, pinpointing as close as possible the 
time and place of each citation, and the study of other overlap- 
ping color words, and of cognate color words in surrounding 
languages, efc., etc. In Brough’s discussion of hari there is 
none of this, only his ipse dixit. 
Sir Harold W. Bailey, Brough’s predecessor in the chair in 
Cambridge that Brough now holds, undertook a study of the 
meaning of ZAR, cognate in Khotan Saka to Vedic hari. His 
findings appeared in a collection of learned papers: Mémorial: 
Jean de Menasce, published in 1974 as #185 by the Fondation 
Culturelle Iranienne. I will quote only one sentence of his 
conclusions: 
Important for the Irano-Indian period is the corresponding Old 
Indian vocabulary. Here hari-, harit-, harita- has the same wide 
range from red through orange to yellow and green. (p. 372) 
Bailey mentions neither Brough nor me. 
C. THE ETYMOLOGY OF *“SOMA’ 
‘Soma’ has been known in the West for almost two centuries 
and has been a focus of scholarly attention for most of that 
time. Yet Indic scholars including Brough have docilely ac- 
cepted the ‘etymology’ that the Brahmans have given it and say 
that so- is the Vedic su-, meaning the ‘pressed thing’, from the 
liturgical act in the Soma sacrifice when the plants were noisily 
pounded with stones on hide-covered boards. As Bailey said in 
1971 in Tokyo, this is ‘a poor kind of way to designate a 
sacrificial plant of great potency’. Indeed, the plant must have 
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