R. Gordon Wasson

Valentina Pavlovna Wasson y R. Gordon Wasson — Mushrooms, Russia and History (Pantheon, 1957) [DECLARADA]

Wasson, Hofmann y Ruck — The Road to Eleusis (ponencias de 1977; edición del trigésimo aniversario, 2008) [DECLARADA]

Wasson — Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality (1968) [DECLARADA]

Chamanismo · Comentarista

«And so in the fullness of time it has fallen on me, a retired banker, to be greatly daring and to submit to the intellectual world a new theory of Soma’s identity.» — se presenta a sí mismo como banquero retirado y pone esa posición fuera del gremio dentro del argumento.

«And so, while well aware of the perils that attend my enterprise, I present my case. If I am wrong, how quickly will my proposal be forgotten! If I am right, I claim the privilege of adding a new and exciting chapter to the world’s knowledge of the remote past, the proto-history of our own Indo-European culture.» — deja escrita su apuesta con las dos ramas: el olvido si se equivoca, y un capítulo nuevo de la proto-historia indoeuropea si acierta.

«Any suggestion for the identity of Soma must meet the following criteria: 1) Is it in conflict with the RgVeda? 2) Does it fit comfortably into such descriptive terms as the RgVeda poets apply to Soma, and into the indications as to the source of supply, methods of handling, etc.? 3) Does the proposal happily resolve some of the many cruces in the RgVeda? On all three counts I am hopeful that my suggestion meets the requirements.» — fija los tres criterios con que pide que se juzgue cualquier propuesta de identidad del Soma, la suya incluida.

«In Mushrooms Russia and History (Pantheon Books, New York, 1957) my wife V. P. Wasson and I explored the folkloric and linguistic background of the fly-agaric throughout Europe, and showed the deep hold that it exerted at one time on the imagination of the north European peoples.» — remite a su libro anterior, escrito con su mujer V. P. Wasson, y declara qué se exploró allí.

«It is not my contention that these far flung analogies in vocabulary have influenced each other; quite the contrary. I believe a mushroom is apt to suggest the navel to the primitive observer, wherever he be, and that the Vedic people, obsessed as they were with the fly-agaric, applied to it the navel analogy, and imbued it with a multitude of transcendental meanings.» — niega que las analogías léxicas se hayan influido entre sí y propone en cambio la analogía del ombligo.

«My wife and I embarked on this our intellectual foray late in August 1927. A little episode started us on our way. Valentina Pavlovna was Russian, a Muscovite by birth» — fecha en agosto de 1927 el comienzo de la indagación y deslinda los dos orígenes, el ruso de ella y el anglosajón de él; el verbatim se corta antes del folio que el troceo mete a media palabra en el cambio de plana.

«If I have established my case that Soma was the fly-agaric - that the amrta of the Aryans was until only yesterday the divine inebriant still currently consumed by the shamans over vast reaches of Siberia, then at once the initial steps by which my wife Valentina Pavlovna and I started out on our inquiries more than forty years ago take on relevance and a cutting edge.» — enuncia la condición de la que hace depender el capítulo europeo de su libro.

«We had been married less than a year and we were now off on our first holiday, at Big Indian in the Catskills. On that first day, as the sun was declining in the West, we set out for a stroll, the forest on our left, a clearing on our right. Though we had known each other for years, it happened that we had never discussed mushrooms together. All of a sudden she darted from my side. With cries of ecstasy she flew to the forest glade, where she had discovered mushrooms of various kinds carpeting the ground» — cuenta el episodio fundador de su viaje de bodas en Big Indian, en los Catskills: nunca habían hablado de hongos y ella corrió al claro del bosque dando gritos de éxtasis.

«Left planted on the mountain trail, I called to her to take care, to come back. They were toadstools she was gathering, poisonous, putrid, disgusting. She only laughed the more» — cuenta su propia reacción en el mismo episodio: las llamó setas venenosas, pútridas y repugnantes, y ella se rió más.

«Little by little my wife and I built up extensive files concerning this modest corner of human behaviour, not only about the Slavs and Anglo-Saxons but about all the peoples of Europe, even to the Basques, the Frisians, the Lapps, and the Albanians.» — describe el archivo que él y su mujer levantaron sobre esa conducta en todos los pueblos de Europa.

«VPW, being a physician, has arrived in Huautla equipped to examine the curandero during the performance with stethoscope, thermometer, blood-pressure gauge, and ophthalmoscope. Now that the moment has come, for many reasons each alone sufficient it seems hardly wise to inject these extraneous and exotic utensils into the proceedings» — la misma convención de iniciales registra el instrumental médico que Valentina Pavlovna Wasson llevaba y la decisión de no usarlo.

«It was then, when the details were erased by night and only the geometric mass persisted, that they suddenly reminded RGW of the pyramids that are the outstanding feature of architecture in pre-Conquest Mexico. Could the pyramids have been originally a geometric stylization of the worshipping Indian seated on his mat, of the gods that were his magnified projection of himself» — el libro de 1957 lo nombra RGW en tercera persona, según su propia convención de iniciales, y registra la pregunta que se le ocurrió ante las siluetas nocturnas.

«I would not be surprised if some classical scholars would even feel that we are guilty of a sacrilegious outrage at now prying open the secret.» — anticipa la acusación que espera de los clasicistas: ultraje sacrílego por forzar el secreto.

«But my wife and I did not think so, and we devoted most of our leisure hours for decades to dissecting it, defining it, and tracing it to its origin.» — defiende la importancia del asunto contra quien lo vea pequeño: décadas de horas libres dedicadas a diseccionar esa diferencia de actitud.

«we are prepared to offer another mushroom, Claviceps purpurea, as holding the secret to the Eleusinian Mysteries.» — enuncia un cuarto de siglo después la tesis del cornezuelo como llave de los misterios eleusinos.

«For the Greeks ekstasis meant the flight of the soul from the body. I am certain that this word came into being to describe the effect of the Mystery of Eleusis.» — ata el vocabulario griego a la experiencia y declara su certeza de que la palabra nació para describir el misterio de Eleusis; la misma fórmula vuelve en su capítulo del volumen de Furst, p. 228.

«In combination with the Greek root gen-, which denotes the action of ‘becoming,’ this word results in the term that we are proposing: entheogen.» — la acuñación misma del término enteógeno, en el capítulo que firma con Carl A. P. Ruck, Jeremy Bigwood, Danny Staples y Jonathan Ott.

«Those who do not know the story will be interested in learning how it came about that my late wife, a pediatrician, and I, a banker, took up the study of mushrooms. She was a Great Russian and, like all of her countrymen, learned at her mother’s knee a solid body of empirical knowledge about the common species and a love for them that is astonishing to us Americans. Like us, the Russians are fond of nature—of the forests and birds and wild flowers. But their love for mushrooms is of a different order, a visceral urge, a passion that passeth understanding» — en el capítulo que firma dentro del volumen de Peter Furst cuenta cómo un banquero y una pediatra se pusieron a estudiar hongos, y de dónde venía el saber de ella.

«Such discoveries as we have made, including the rediscovery of the religious role of the hallucinogenic mushrooms of Mexico, can be laid to our preoccupation with that cultural rift between my wife and me, between our respective peoples, between the mycophilia and mycophobia (words we devised for the two attitudes) that divide the Indo-European peoples into two camps» — atribuye sus hallazgos a la preocupación por la grieta cultural entre él y su mujer, y declara suyo el par de palabras micofilia y micofobia.

«We were amateurs, unencumbered by academic inhibitions, and therefore we felt free to range far and wide, disregarding the frontiers that ordinarily segregate the learned disciplines. What we produced was a pioneering work» — se describe a sí mismo y a su mujer como aficionados sin inhibiciones académicas, libres de cruzar las fronteras entre disciplinas.

«I do not recall which of us, my wife or I, first dared to put into words, back in the ’40’s, the surmise that our own remote ancestors, perhaps 6000 years ago, worshiped a divine mushroom» — data en los años cuarenta la conjetura mayor: que sus propios antepasados remotos, hace unos seis mil años, adoraran un hongo divino.

«Thus it comes about that we are all divided into two classes: those who have taken the mushroom and are disqualified by subjective experience, and those who have not taken the mushroom and are disqualified by total ignorance of the subject!» — describe la trampa del campo profesional: descalificados por subjetivos los que tomaron el hongo y por ignorantes los que no. La misma frase suya vuelve citada en Pharmacotheon de Jonathan Ott, p. 155.

«As for me, a simple layman, I am profoundly grateful to my Indian friends for having initiated me into the tremendous Mystery of the mushroom» — se sitúa como simple lego agradecido a sus amigos indios por haberlo iniciado en el misterio del hongo.

«Let me hasten to warn that I am painfully aware of the inadequacy of my words, any words, to conjure up for you an image of that state» — acota de antemano lo que va a describir: se declara dolorosamente consciente de que ninguna palabra basta.

«When we first went down to Mexico, my wife and I, we felt certain that we were on the trail of an ancient and holy mystery, and we went as pilgrims seeking the Grail. To this attitude of ours I attribute such success as we have had» — atribuye su éxito a la actitud con que fueron a México: peregrinos en busca del Grial.

«The Greeks of the classic period were mycophobes. Was this because their ancestors had felt that the whole fungal tribe was infected “by attraction” with the holiness of some mushrooms, and that they were not for mortal men to eat, at least not every day? Are we not dealing with what was in origin a religious taboo?» — deja planteada la pregunta por un tabú religioso detrás de la micofobia griega clásica; el mismo pasaje lo repite en The Road to Eleusis, p. 28.

«At present I am inclined to think that the potion of Eleusis did not contain the juice of the fly agaric of the forest belt of Eurasia, the Soma of the Aryans» — en 1972 se inclina a excluir la amanita de la poción de Eleusis, seis años antes de la propuesta del cornezuelo.

«There is a verse, IX 74.4d, where the priests “with full bladders piss Soma quick with movement.” Now this is a translation of Renou and also in essence of Geldner, both of them Vedic scholars of the highest eminence. They agree on the peculiar meaning of this verse. I believe other scholars dispute such a reading, but if Geldner and Renou are right, this verse alone is sufficient to clinch my case» — da por decisivo un verso del Rig-Veda en las traducciones de Renou y Geldner y consigna en la misma frase que otros estudiosos disputan esa lectura.

«The engine behind the myth and ritual of the Rig-Veda is this “enthusiasm.” If I am right, here is where we are arrived, this is the secret of our discovery. We have identified a plant understandably considered as miraculous by the people of long ago, and in so doing we have swung open the portals to ecstasy» — reclama para su hallazgo haber identificado una planta tenida por milagrosa y haber abierto de par en par las puertas del éxtasis.

«It was R. Gordon Wasson, that remarkable banker-turned-ethnobotanist, represented in these pages by two fascinating and very personal contributions (Chapters 6 and 7), who provided the seminal event that impelled ethnology toward in-depth studies of the place of ritual hallucinogens in shamanism and the religions of Native peoples» — Peter Furst le adjudica el acontecimiento seminal que empujó a la etnología hacia el estudio de los alucinógenos rituales, y declara que dos capítulos del volumen son suyos.

«Of the ten chapters in this book seven were first presented as public lectures at UCLA and subsequently expanded and refined for publication. These are the essays by William A. Emboden, James W. Fernandez, Weston La Barre, Richard Evans Schultes, and R. Gordon Wasson, as well as my own chapter on peyote» — Furst deslinda el origen de los capítulos: siete salen de conferencias públicas en la UCLA, el suyo entre ellas.

«Here I wish to single out only one especially memorable achievement, that of R. Gordon Wasson on narcotic mushrooms in both the Old World and the New, because it bears so directly on my own hypothesis of the very great antiquity of man’s ritual utilization of plants with psychotomimetic properties» — Weston La Barre, en el mismo volumen, le reconoce el logro más memorable del campo y dice por qué le toca de cerca.

«R. Gordon Wasson, who died in 1986 at age 88, was a prolific self-taught ethnomycologist whose researches into the historical and cultural roles of hallucinogenic mushrooms in Mexico and the Old World have brought him international scholarly recognition. A former vice-president of J. P. Morgan and Company, he began his studies as an avocation in 1927. They culminated in such well-known books as Mushrooms Russia and History (1957), written with his wife, the late Valentina P. Wasson; Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality (1968, 1971); Maria Sabina and her Mazatec MushroomVelada (1974) and The Wondrous Mushroom: Mycolatry in Mesoamerica (1980)» — la nota biográfica del volumen de Peter Furst da la muerte en 1986 a los ochenta y ocho años, el cargo en J. P. Morgan y el arranque de sus estudios como afición en 1927.

«After seeing active First World War, he graduated from Harvard with a bach: in literature and began his career as a journalist, eventually wo the financial news department of the Herald Tribune. ' across into banking, at first with Guaranty Company of: J and then with J. P. Morgan & Co., where he was vice-pre 1943 until his retirement twenty years later.» — Andy Letcher traza la carrera: Harvard, periodismo financiero en el Herald Tribune y luego la banca, con la vicepresidencia de J. P. Morgan desde 1943; el troceo entrevera las dos columnas de esta plana y el tramo sale con huecos.

«They coined the terms my mushroom-loving, and mycophobic, or mushroom-hatin rated the nations of the world accordingly, placing Rus ple, in the former category, and Britain in the latter.» — Letcher le atribuye, con su mujer, los dos términos, y la clasificación de las naciones; el troceo entrevera las columnas y el tramo sale mutilado.

«the very premise that prompted Wasson’s investigation — the Tm peoples are either mycophilic or mycophobic — now too problematic to be of use.» — Letcher objeta la premisa misma: la división de los pueblos en micófilos y micófobos le resulta ya demasiado problemática para servir.

«This is a far more complex s can ever be encompassed by Wasson’s blanket designation as a mycophobic nation.» — Letcher enmienda la etiqueta de nación micófoba aplicada a Britania.

«His subsequently formed ideas concerning tl religion and the division of peoples into mycophobes an are unfeasible, and should be rejected.» — el dictamen de Letcher sobre sus ideas acerca del origen de la religión y la división entre micófobos y micófilos: las declara inviables y a rechazar.

«effort in networking, entertaining and pressing palms, up alliances with supporters and potential supporters — with Dick Schultes, Roger Heim and Albert Hofmann, (A time, he was a little too quick to dismiss detractors Pritchard out of hand as inherently mycophobic.» — Letcher describe su estrategia: alianzas con Schultes, Heim y Hofmann, y despacho rápido de los detractores tildándolos de micófobos.

«Somewhat piqued that a middleed banker had succeeded where they had so spectacularly failed, the CIA attempted to bring Wasson on board, approaching him in 1955- After some consideration, Wasson politely demurred, believing that intelligence work would compromise his own researches.» — Letcher reporta el acercamiento de la CIA en 1955 y su negativa cortés por temor a comprometer su investigación.

«But they were both amateurs, operating outside the confines of academia, and were equally enthused by the enigmas of the ancient past.» — lo que Letcher declara común a él y a Robert Graves: aficionados fuera de la academia.

«In September 1952, he forwarded Wasson an article from a pharmaceutical journal, Ciba Symposia, detailing Schultes’s identification of teonanacatl,* with the result that the delighted ethnomycologist immediately set about organising his first trip to Oaxaca.» — Letcher fecha en septiembre de 1952 el recorte que Graves le remitió con la identificación del teonanácatl por Schultes, y de ahí el primer viaje a Oaxaca.

«In 1955, twelve years after Albert Hofmann’s discovery of LSD, a Manhattan banker and amateur mycologist named R. Gordon Wasson sampled the magic mushroom in the town of Huautla de Jiménez in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca.» — Michael Pollan lo llama banquero de Manhattan y micólogo aficionado, y data en 1955 la ingestión del hongo en Huautla de Jiménez.

«Two years later, he published a fifteen-page account of the “mushrooms that cause strange visions” in Life magazine, marking the moment when news of a new form of consciousness first reached the general public.» — Pollan fija en su reportaje de quince planas en Life el momento en que la noticia llega al público general.

«Life gave him a generous contract that, in addition to the princely sum of eighty-five hundred dollars, granted him final approval on the editing of his article, as well as the wording of headlines and captions.» — Pollan da las condiciones de su contrato con Life, incluida la aprobación final de titulares.

«The story begins in 1927, during Wasson’s honeymoon in the Catskills. During an afternoon stroll in the autumn woods, his bride, a Russian physician named Valentina, spotted a patch of wild mushrooms, before which “she knelt in poses of adoration.”» — Pollan data en 1927 el origen del interés y describe la reacción de Valentina ante un corro de hongos silvestres.

«They hoped to obtain evidence for the audacious theory that Wasson had developed and that would occupy him until his death: that the religious impulse in humankind had been first kindled by the visions inspired by a psychoactive mushroom.» — Pollan enuncia la tesis que le atribuye y que dice haberlo ocupado hasta su muerte.

«As a prominent financier, R. Gordon Wasson had the resources and the connections to enlist all manner of experts and scholars in his quest.» — Pollan explica por su posición de financiero la capacidad de reclutar expertos.

«Up to this point, the Wassons had been looking toward Asia for their divine mushroom; Schultes reoriented their quest, pointing them toward the Americas, where there were scattered reports, from missionaries and anthropologists, suggesting that an ancient mushroom cult might yet survive in the remote mountain villages of southern Mexico.» — Pollan adjudica a Richard Evans Schultes el giro de la búsqueda hacia América.

«In 1953, Wasson made the first of ten trips to Mexico and Central America, several of them to the village of Huautla de Jiménez, deep in the mountains of Oaxaca, where one of his informants—a missionary —had told him healers were using mushrooms.» — Pollan cifra en diez los viajes a México y Centroamérica y data el primero en 1953.

«ON THE NIGHT OF JUNE 29–30, 1955, R. Gordon Wasson experienced the sacred mushrooms firsthand. On his third trip to Huautla, he had persuaded María Sabina, a sixty-one-year-old Mazatec and a respected curandera in the village, to let him and his photographer not only observe but take part in a ceremony in which no outsider had ever participated.» — Pollan fecha la noche de la velada y nombra a María Sabina.

«To protect her identity, Wasson called Sabina “Eva Mendez,” discerning “a spirituality in her expression that struck us at once.”» — Pollan consigna el seudónimo con que protegió a María Sabina.

«Wasson’s original field notebooks are in the botanical library at Harvard. In a neat but somewhat idiosyncratic hand, he kept meticulous track of the time that night, from arrival (8:15) to ingestion (10:40) to the snuffing out of the last candle (10:45).» — Pollan declara haber consultado sus cuadernos de campo en Harvard y da los tiempos que anotó aquella noche.

«The term entheogen was first suggested by classical scholars Carl A.P. Ruck and Danny Staples, pioneering entheogen researcher R. Gordon Wasson, ethnobotanist Jeremy Bigwood and me.» — Jonathan Ott da el acta del término y nombra a los cinco que lo propusieron.

«The essence of the experience conferred by entheogenic drugs is ecstasy, in the original sense of that overused word—ek-stasis, the “withdrawal of the soul from the body” (Oxford English Dictionary, Compact Edition, p. 831), what R. Gordon Wasson called the “disembodied” state» — Ott toma de él el nombre del estado, el descorporizado.

«it is largely as a result of the modern rediscovery of the shamanic cult of teonandcatl (see Chapter 5) by R. Gordon Wasson in México in 1955 that the modern use of entheogens, in many respects a revival of ecstatic religion, began.» — Ott pone en su redescubrimiento del culto del teonanácatl en México en 1955 el arranque del uso moderno de los enteógenos.

«I have dedicated it to my late teacher Gordon Wasson, who more than anyone catalyzed the contemporary revival of ecstatic, shamanic religion, and who wrote beautifully about the “bemushroomed” state.» — Ott lo llama su maestro y le atribuye haber catalizado más que nadie el renacer contemporáneo de la religión extática y chamánica.

«In 1979, Carl A.P. Ruck, Jeremy Bigwood, Danny Staples, R. Gordon Wasson and I proposed entheogen(ic) as an etymologically and culturally appropriate, non-prejudicial term to describe shamanic inebriants and replace those terms discussed above» — Ott fecha en 1979 la propuesta del término y declara qué se buscaba con él.

«Prior to his pioneering mushroom velada with the Mazatec shaman Maria Sabina in 1955 (see Chapter 5), ethnomycologist R. Gordon Wasson was told it would be inappropriate for his companion A. Richardson to take photographs “mientras que la fuerza le agarrara” (“while the force seized her”), reflecting similar ideas in contemporary México» — Ott data la velada con María Sabina en 1955 y trae el detalle de la prohibición de fotografiar.

«An ethnomycologist by the name of R. Gordon Wasson was mentioned in the first line of the article—the inspiration behind the opening salvo of the psychedelic renaissance that would culminate in the fifty peer-reviewed papers from the Johns Hopkins Psychedelic Research Unit.» — Brian Muraresku lo nombra el eslabón entre aquel artículo y el renacimiento psicodélico de laboratorio.

«Wasson was a J.P. Morgan banker turned amateur mushroom hunter. Or ethnomycologist, as he would prefer to be called—one who studies the relationship between people and fungi. His global anthropological fieldwork had convinced him that magic mushrooms played a pivotal role in the origin and development of humanity’s spiritual awareness.» — Muraresku lo presenta y resume su tesis general: los hongos tuvieron papel central en el origen de la consciencia espiritual humana.

«Instead of a plant, however, Wasson suggested the visionary Amanita muscaria mushroom as the grandmother of all psychedelic rituals. Before he teamed up with Hofmann and Ruck, the ethnomycologist published his own breakout study in 1968, Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality.» — Muraresku consigna la identificación que propuso para el soma en su libro de 1968.

«For a long time the existence of these magic mushrooms had remained an enigma. The history of their rediscovery is presented at first hand in the magnificent two-volume standard work of ethnomycology, Mushrooms, Russia and History (Pantheon Books, New York, 1957), for the authors, the American researchers Valentina Pavlovna Wasson and her husband, R. Gordon Wasson, played a decisive role in this rediscovery. The following descriptions of the fascinating history of these mushrooms are taken from the Wassons’ book.» — Hofmann adjudica al matrimonio Wasson un papel decisivo en el redescubrimiento y declara tomar de su libro lo que va a contar.

«R. G. Wasson was a banker, vice-president of the J. P. Morgan Co. in New York. His wife, who died in 1958, was a pediatrician.» — Albert Hofmann da los oficios del matrimonio y la fecha de la muerte de ella.

«I have read a delightful essay by Wasson about mushrooms; he divides mankind into mycophobes and mycophiles» — la distinción que recoge Evans Vogt en una carta que Hofmann reproduce.

«In using the experiences gained with LSD as the foundation, the problem of the so-called Mexican magic mushrooms, which has been studied ethnomycologically by Gordon Wasson and botanically by Roger Heim, was solved from a chemical point of view.» — Hofmann, en el simposio de Efron, reparte el crédito del asunto de los hongos mexicanos: la etnomicología a Wasson, la botánica a Roger Heim y la química a su laboratorio.

«I recalled that mushroom maven Gordon Wasson and his wife had been accompanied by an undercover CIA agent during their second journey to the mushroom village of Huatla de Jimenez in the remote uplands of Mazatecan, Mexico.» — Terence McKenna trae el caso del agente encubierto de la CIA en el segundo viaje a Huautla.

«Psychedelic history would have been different if Wasson had detected that clumsy effort at co-option. Then the CIA's absurd notion that psilocybin might forever remain what it termed an "in-house prerogative" could never have been entertained.» — McKenna sostiene que la historia psicodélica habría sido otra si él hubiera detectado aquella maniobra.

«Shamanic ecstasy in Siberia was known to be attained through the use of the mushroom Amanita muscaria, and Gordon Wasson has made a good case for the use of the same mushroom in Vedic India.» — McKenna llama bueno, sin discutirlo, el caso que le atribuye sobre la India védica.

«Thus, some of the most significant contributions have been made not by anthropologists, but by pharmacologists such as Lewin (1964 forig. 1924]), and botanists such as Schultes (e.g., 1940, 1955) and Wasson (e.g., 1961, and Wasson and Wasson, 1957).» — Harner lo cuenta entre los no antropólogos a quienes adjudica las contribuciones más significativas, y lo llama botánico.

«It is necessary to express one's debt to R. Gordon Wasson, whose writings, the most authoritative work on the mushrooms, informed me of their existence and told me much about them. "We suspect," he wrote, "that, in its integral sense, the creative power, the most serious quality distinctive of man and one of the clearest participations in the Divine . . . is in some sort connected with an area of the spirit that the mushrooms are capable of opening." R. Gordon Wasson and Roger Heim, Les Champignons haJJucinog£nes du Mex/que (Paris: Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle, 1958). From my own experience, I have found that contention to be particularly true.» — Michael Harner declara la deuda de ese capítulo con él y lo llama la obra más autorizada sobre los hongos.

«But even if the Rharıan plaın at Eleusis might have been infected by this pest, as Wasson and his adherents surmise, one may wonder about the quantities needed for thousands of participants in order to provide happy visions for all; in addition, ergot poisoning is normally described as quite an unpleasant and not at all a euphoric state» — Walter Burkert le opone dos objeciones sobre las cantidades necesarias y sobre el carácter del envenenamiento por cornezuelo.

«Εοτ the origin of Vedic soma, the fly agaric hypothesis may be taken seriously; see R. G. Wasson, Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality (New York 1968); criticism: J. Brough» — Burkert declara que para el soma védico la hipótesis del agárico puede tomarse en serio, y registra la crítica de John Brough; el troceo imprime la inicial en caracteres griegos.

«In the 19605, R. Gordon Wasson, a retired banker, and Wendy Doniger, a scholar of Indology, assembled a great wealth of data in order to show that the soma plant was fly agaric (Amanita muscaria), a Widespread Eurasian mushroom possibly used in the past by Siberian shamans in order to enter a state of trance.» — Ioan Couliano le atribuye, con Wendy Doniger, la identificación del soma con la amanita.

«The account of Wasson’s journey was published in Life magazine in 1957; see Wasson 1957. His travelogue probably achieved greater fame because it dealt with hallucinogens than with Mazatec shamanism: Wasson’s story was published only a few years after Huxley’s Doors of Perception, which publicized the psychedelic experience.» — Olav Hammer da en nota el detalle editorial y su propia conjetura sobre por qué el relato tuvo más fama.