The Rig Veda, the earliest sacred text of the ancient Indo-Europeans, includes dozens of hymns in praise of this psychedelic plant which, when drunk, takes its subjects to the realm of the gods. But, in the later Hindu tradition, soma is declared to have been lost, and its use abandoned. The botanical identity of soma remains one of the great unsolved mysteries of the ancient world. Blue Tide tells the story of the search for soma, and uses a diverse range of approaches - travel and
ethnography, science and
narrative history, detective story and first-person drug experiences - to examine the question of its nature and identity. The search takes the author from drug rituals in Brazilian…
This unorthodox book combines
anthropological detective story, cultural history, pharmaceutical research as the author recounts his quest to find Soma, the original drug used in ancient religious…
