There has been much speculation as to the original
Sauma plant. Candidates that have been suggested include
honey, mushrooms, psychoactive and other herbal plants. When the ritual of
somayajna is held today in South India by the traditional
Srautas called
Somayajis, the plant used is the
somalatha (Sanskrit: soma creeper,
Sarcostemma acidum) During the colonial British era scholarship,
cannabis was proposed as the soma candidate by Jogesh Chandra Ray,
The Soma Plant (1939) and by B. L. Mukherjee (1921). In the late 1960s, several studies attempted to establish
soma as a
psychoactive substance. A number of proposals were made, including one in 1968 by the American banker
R. Gordon Wasson, an amateur
ethnomycologist, who asserted that
soma was an inebriant but not cannabis, and suggested fly-agaric mushroom,
Amanita muscaria, as the likely candidate. Since its introduction in 1968, this theory has gained both detractors and followers in the anthropological literature. Wasson and his co-author,
Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty, drew parallels between Vedic descriptions and reports of Siberian uses of the fly-agaric in
shamanic ritual. In 1989 Harry Falk noted that, in the texts, both
haoma and
soma were said to enhance alertness and awareness, did not coincide with the consciousness altering effects of an
entheogen, and that "there is nothing shamanistic or visionary either in early Vedic or in Old Iranian texts", Falk also asserted that the three varieties of ephedra that yield ephedrine (
Ephedra gerardiana,
E. major procera and
E. intermedia) also have the properties attributed to
haoma by the texts of the Avesta. At the conclusion of the 1999 Haoma-Soma workshop in Leiden, Jan E. M. Houben writes: "despite strong attempts to do away with ephedra by those who are eager to see sauma as a hallucinogen, its status as a serious candidate for the Rigvedic Soma and Avestan Haoma still stands". The Soviet archeologist
Viktor Sarianidi wrote that he had discovered vessels and mortars used to prepare soma in Zoroastrian temples in the
Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex. He said that the vessels have revealed residues and seed impressions left behind during the preparation of soma. This has not been sustained by subsequent investigations. Alternatively Mark Merlin, who revisited the subject of the identity of soma more than thirty years after originally writing about it stated that there is a need of further study on links between soma and
Papaver somniferum. In
Food of The Gods, Terence McKenna maintained that Soma, at least or in whole part, was a product of
P. cubensis. According to
Michael Wood, the references to immortality and light are characteristics of an
entheogenic experience. ==See also==