Soma supplies, in large part at least, on the natives living in the 

 mountains. The supply depended on the weather and the state of 

 the relations with the natives, whereas the needs were swelling 

 with every generation. The Brahmans must have found it in their 

 interest to cultivate the Dasyus and the Dasyus would have 

 found it advantageous to discover every spot where A, muscaria 

 grew, above all the stands of birch but also other host trees. {A. 

 wiiscaria has been reported lately from Tamilnadu, especially 

 from the Nilgiri Hills, in Southern India, but its presence there 

 has been attributed by mycologists to plantings of exotic conif- 

 ers in the past century.) Most of the Soma sacrifices must have 

 used make-do phanerogamic subtitutes and in the post-Vedic 

 Brahmanas and other writings we learn how the priests from 

 early times faced this scarcity with such make-do plants. 



The Brahmans probably continued to trade with the moun- 

 tains of Afghanistan seeking Soma, and with the Hindu Kush, 

 but there is no knowing whether these tribesmen were friendly, 

 perhaps intermittently. The Afi^hanisian Journal 6.2 1979 an- 

 nounced the finding of A. muscaria in Nuristan, in the Shetul 

 Valley high in the Hindu Kush in the extreme northeast of the 

 country. The authors, Gholam Mochtar and Hartmut Geerken 

 of Kabul, talked with three old codgers, ostensibly habitues of 

 the "ravens' bread," claimed to be A. muscaria from which an 

 inebriating concoction is made. The episode is insufficiently 

 documented to permit conclusions about its bearing on Amanita 

 muscaria and the Soma questions. Their report antedates the 



Russian invasion. 



The use of substitutes by the Aryans must have been a reluc- 

 tantly adopted practice from the start. They are mentioned for 

 the first time in the last batch of hymns incorporated into the 

 canon, Mandala X 85 through to the end, 191. In SOMA we 

 failed to take into consideration these hymns of Mandala X, 

 since they were admitted to the canon at a late stage, shortly 

 before the Vedic age ended. But some years ago Professor Clif- 

 ford Wright, in a lecture delivered at Cambridge University, 

 took the position that many of those hymns, the last to be admit- 

 ted to the canon, on strong stylistic grounds were by no means 



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