Egyptian Blue Lotus

Lotus Soma-theories | Secret Drugs of Buddhism

Named in imitation of Wasson’s SOMA: Divine Mushroom of Immortality, David L. Spess’s SOMA the Divine Hallucinogen offers the hypothesis that soma was a species of lotus. Or, rather, that it may have been any of a number of lotus or water-lily species of the Nympaea and Nelumbo genera. Spess bases his reasoning on the Ṛig Veda and on Vedic mythology, supplemented with appeals to European and oriental alchemy. Yet despite the intricacy of his arguments, Spess does not tell us what, if any, psychoactive substances are to be found in lotuses. Richard Rudgley does, though. In an account of Meso-American drug traditions, he mentions the presence of apomorphine-like compounds in the Egyptian blue lotus (Nymphaea caerulens) and noted that it is used in North Africa as “an effective substitute for opium”. (Could this be the source of Homer’s North African lotophagoi?) Jonathan Ott, however, dismisses all claims to psychoactivity in lotuses and water-lilies as unfounded and pharmacologically unsound.

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sacred shroom

we used them as currency
cost sometimes more than a reindeer

first chewed by the women
then eaten by the men
baked in the rysbes

the flesh of the gods
high in protein
when meat is scarce

illud tempus of the soma
by snake and by toad
we seek thee

divine mushroom of immortality

line my memory

I open my eyes slowly, it takes me a while to remember where I am, where I have been and what I have been doing. I recognize the ceiling and the windows of my room, I know them, and this is my room. I can recall a bright intense light and fragments are returning like remembering a dream. My head is a little groggy but I feel fantastic, I am lying on my bed and I turn over onto my side. On the coffee table are cups, teaspoons, sugar, ashtray and a baggie of left-over mushrooms. I congratulate myself on the safe return and the comfort of my reality. I smile on the inside at my new found insights; the glimpses of the infinate that line my memory like silk.

A year on the Broad Red Avenue (2003)

Funky Fungi by Ribbz