Haoma-Soma in the world of ancient Greece
Wohlberg, J.
This historical analysis (1990) examines the cultural development of sacramental worship in ancient Greece whose ritual practices were marked by inebriation, hallucinatory visions, and ecstatic behavior. It is theorized that the Haoma-Soma of its predecessor cultures from Iran and India, which Gordon Wasson theorized to be Amanita Muscaria (Fly Agaric), became substituted by an alcoholic version of the beverage known as Dionysos.
Abstract
Evidence of the worship of (nonalcoholic) Haoma-Soma in Iran and India (identified by Wasson as Amanita muscaria) can be found in Greece and its neighboring lands. While Iranian and Indic peoples preserved their original worship in their final settlements, Indo-European tribes, including the Thracians, the Phrygians, and the Greeks, after settling in Europe and Asia Minor, abandoned their ancestral worship of Soma (Sabazios) and substituted the Semitic (alcoholic) Dionysos. However, they retained traces of the original Soma worship in Dionysiac rituals. This modified Dionysiac worship spread throughout the Western world. Six formal criteria are used to establish the identity of Soma with Dionysos (Sabazios): both cults had the same aim (to cause ecstatic behavior); both cults required the attainment of the same spiritual state (purity); both cults had an idiosyncratic myth in common; both cults showed the identical word root in the name of the worshiped god; both cults had identical zoological and botanical associations with their god; and the alcoholic god (Dionysos) was depicted as having the same physical effects on human beings as that of the ancient nonalcoholic god (Soma).