in the cultural past of the Santal and of Soma.) But, just as 

 before, it was "jvc/" and soulless, "t/c/" is "mushroom" in Ho. 



We published the account of our trips to the Santal country in 

 Les Cahiers du Pacifique, #14, September 1970. Kramrisch in 

 time saw our paper and she grasped immediately that the pufka 

 of the Santal was the Puiika of the Brahmanas, of the Pravargya 

 sacrifice and the Mahavfra pot.^ The Pudka had been the surro- 

 gate for Soma and naturally it would possess a soul! Kramrisch 

 deserves a rich accolade for discovering that S>'dnXdi\\ p u t k a was a 

 loan word from the Sanskrit Puiika. When Soma was being 

 abandoned, probably over a long period that ended shortly after 

 B.C. 1000, the Putika took its place, not as an entheogenic drink 

 like Soma in the earlier sacrifice but as a component with the 

 clay in the ceremonial firing of the MahavFra vessel. Its stench 

 (of which Ludgi Marndi had spoken) was turned into fragrance 

 when the pot, held by tongs, was fired in the course of the rite. 

 No one had ever known what plant it was. We now know that, 

 like Soma, it was a mushroom, but a common mushroom, and it 

 possessed divine qualities though less than Soma's. 



^P ^P ^^ 



In Santal culture not only is the putka animate, endowed with 

 a soul: it possesses another of Soma's attributes. The belief is 

 apparently universal among the Santal that the putka is gener- 

 ated by (mythological) thunderbolts.^ Long after the Brahmans 

 have lost any use for or knowledge of this mushroom, and have 

 lost all special contact with the Santal, these hunble, hardwork- 

 ing people, untouchables, still believe that the putka is pro- 

 created by the lightningbolt, as the Vedic Brahmans believed 

 that Soma was procreated by the Vajra of Indra, or Parjanya, 

 the god of lightning. Here is another manifestation, another 

 proof, of the breathtaking cultural intensity millennia ago of the 

 religion of the hierarchs of the Aryans. The lightningbolt was 

 thought of as the sperm, the spunk, fecundating the soft mother 

 earth with the entheogenic mushrooms. 



The Santal believe there arc two kinds of putka, the hor putka 

 and the seta putka, one smooth and the other rough. Heim said 

 the two kinds were merely different stages in the life cycle of the 



230 



