grasses, whether cultivated or uncuhivated. The cryptogams are 

 lower orders of vegetation, less developed along the evolution- 

 ary trail, and the mushrooms are the cryptogams that interest us. 

 Only in recent centuries have three or four species out of thou- 

 sands lent themselves to commercial exploitation, and a meager 

 handful also to expensive cultivation in laboratories. In Aryan 

 times, in the Indus Valley and Kashmir, there was the widest 

 variety of climate, owing to the variety of accidented terrain 

 therein— lofty mountains, low lying plains, valleys, wetlands, 

 and stretches— and any needed phanerogam could probably 

 ha\e been grown in some part of that large country. But only 

 those fiiushrooms f^re^v there that the eountry produced .spon- 

 taneously. Since we know that the supply of Soma was limited at 

 best to the mountains and must have been further reduced when 

 the monsoon failed, conforming to what we know about Soma 

 in Vedic times, this points to the entheogenic mushroom Atnan- 

 ita muscaria for their Soma. That the birch and also the conifers 

 act as hosts to A. tnuscaria was not realized by anyone among 

 the Aryans, and therefore no one thought of planting the host 

 trees to see whether by this means man could thus increase the 

 yield of the holy plant. 



Other fungal entheogens grow at the lower lexels. They come 

 in cattle dung, are easily identified and gathered, and are effec- 

 tive. But they fail to conform to Brahman practices: they are 

 known to tribals and 'sudras. Soma on the other hand exacts 

 self-discipline of the priests, a long initiation and training: it is, 

 for proper exploitation, an affair of a priestly ehte. But the 

 possible role of Stropharia cuhensis growing in the dung of 

 cattle in the lives of the lower orders remains to this day wholly 

 unexplored. Is S cuhensis responsible for the elevation of the 

 cow to a sacred status? And for the inclusion of the urine and 

 dung of cows in the pahcagavya'} And was that a contributing 

 reason for abandoning Soma? Given the ecological conditions 

 prevailing in the Indus Valley and Kashmir, only a few of the 

 Aryans could know by personal experience the secrets of the 

 Divine Herb. The cult of Soma must have been shaped by the 



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