Contact Highs: Intoxicants in ritual and yoga

This paper critically examines R. Gordon Wasson’s 1968 book, Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality, and traces its influence on both modern yoga and psychedelic research. A banker by trade, Wasson became fascinated with fungi and published a hugely influential article on the ritual use of psychedelic mushrooms in Life magazine in 1957. In 1968, he turned his attention to the enigmatic plant of the Vedas, Soma, arguing that it too was a hallucinogenic mushroom, Amanita muscaria. Although largely discredited by Indologists today, Wasson’s identification of Soma with psychedelics helped solidify in the popular imagination an idea that was already present in Aldous Huxley’s work – namely, that psychedelics can occasion the same mystical states described in South Asian religious texts. With the recent renaissance of psychedelic research in the 21st century, this idea has resurfaced both in popular yoga literature and in many scientific studies of psilocybin, with some problematic implications.

Botanical candidates proposed for the authentic soma of ancient India have all too neatly followed modern drug trends—soma has become a sort of floating signifier of the Urpsychedelic. Aiming to disrupt the paradigm of soma scholarship, this paper shifts our gaze away from botany back towards soma’s primary domain: ritual. My focus is the Sāmaveda, a corpus of chants performed during the soma sacrifice, which attest many “non-lexical vocables,” sounds and phonemes with no semantic meaning. Does the high incidence of non-semantic speech in Sāmaveda correlate with the psychoactive profile of soma? This inquiry also provides a rich basis for cross-cultural comparison with the aesthetics of other psychedelic traditions. Nonlexical vocables occur in both the peyote songs of the Native American Church and the ayahuasca prayer songs of Amazonian shamanism; and traditional practitioners throughout the Americas report non-semantic phonemes in the speech of otherworldly entities they encounter.

The paper will argue that, prior to the apparent prominence of intoxicating cannabis in the early second millennium, the only intoxicant of any significance in South Asia was alcohol, betel being considered a fragrant digestive, datura used for nefarious means, and soma, however we understand it, never presented as a mind-altering substance in the Common Era. We examine experiences of intoxication according to the testimony of the religious agents under examination, without involving contemporary applications of intoxicating substances. We especially note the understanding that there were a range of intoxicating experiences caused by alcoholic drinks to demonstrate that modern notions of drunkenness are insufficient to account for the experiences detailed in the first millennium CE.

Transnational yoga traditions are playing an important role in the culture of the 21st century “Psychedelic Renaissance.” The bodily disciplines and contemplative practices associated with yoga have long been in the orbit of psychedelic science and culture—as a precursor to, a skill set within, and as an integrative method following psychedelic journeys and lifestyles. I argue that the “classical” framework for understanding power in yoga and in āyurveda with respect to the use of bioactive, if not psychoactive, herbs (oṣadhi) offers acute insights into contemporary psychedelic science and culture. These include 1) that yoga, historically, incorporated various endogenous and exogenous methods, paralleling the hybridity of modern, transnational yoga; 2) Pātañjala yoga philosophy provides a framework for understanding psychedelic experience that anticipates elements of psychedelic science; and 3) Contemporary descriptions of DMT-based psychedelic experience echo discussions of yogic experience by Larson and Grinshpon, with regard to “fantastic beings” and “near-death-experiences.”