peculiar circumstances pre\ailing in the area, but ultimately 

 those circumstances must have doomed that cult. Today it lives 

 on in India only as an intense and glowing memory of an ancient 



rite. 



Under the British Raj the rich and diverse vegetation of India 



W 



f the Economic Products of 



volumes, edited and partly written by him, is a major legacy of 

 the British rule in India. However, the mycophobic British did 

 little to ad\ance knowledge of mycology, and the Hindus nothing. 

 No one ever suggested a mushroom for Soma, let alone A. mus- 

 caria. Our SOMA came out in 1968 but no A. muscaria since 

 then has yet been found in Pakistan or Kashmir: there have been 

 numerous reports of finds but voucher specimens have not been 

 deposited in herbaria. Dr. Roy Watling, mycologist of the Royal 

 Botanic Garden of Edinburgh, spent three weeks in the field in 

 1978 on a general sur\ey of the Kashmir area, in the vicinity of 

 Srinagar. He collected in stands of birch in two areas but he 

 arrived there late in the growing season and moreover the season 

 was dry. In his printed report^ he writes, "The species /I. musca- 

 ria is almost certainly native to the Bclu/a-7onc of northern 

 India." There he found Bctula uiilis from 9,000 feet up to the 

 timber line at 10,500 feet but no A. muscaria. In the Northwest- 

 ern Himalayas the birch grows intermixed with Rhododendron 

 in scrub-vegetation up to I 1,500 feet. 



We may think we are feeling the frustrations of the Aryans but 

 by comparison with them we are making only lackadaisical 

 efforts to find a few voucher specimens, whereas the Brahmans 

 must have developed urgent need for quantities of fruiting 

 bodies to dry, and then to reflate, and bring to the pressing 

 stones. Their needs must have been constantly increasing with 

 the increasing population. Whatexer may have been the case 

 later, the relations at first with the natives were surely hostile. 

 The natives seem to ha\'e come to occupy the intermediate 

 mountain heights, precisely where A. muscaria grows and where 

 the RgVeda time and again says Soma grows. As we know from 

 the ^Saiapatha Brahmana, the Brahmans depended for their 



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