R. Gordon Wasson > Quotes

“Ecstasy! In common parlance ecstasy is fun. But ecstasy is not fun. Your very soul is seized and shaken until it tingles. After all, who will choose to feel undiluted awe? The unknowing vulgar abuse the word; we must recapture its full and terrifying sense.”
― R. Gordon Wasson

“It is in the nature of a hypothesis when once a man has conceived it, that it assimilates everything to itself, as proper nourishment, and from the first moment of your begetting it, it generally grows stronger by everything you sec, hear or understand.”
― R. Gordon Wasson, Persephone's Quest: Entheogens and the Origins of Religion

“under the Chairmanship of Carl Ruck to devise a new word for the potions that held Antiquity in awe. After trying out a number of words he came up with entheogen, `god generated within', which his committee unaninmously, adopted, not to replace the `Mystery' of the ancients, but to designate those plant substances that were and are at the very core of the Mysteries.”
― R. Gordon Wasson, Persephone's Quest: Entheogens and the Origins of Religion

“The Indian (or more precisely Amerindian!) communities that knew the sacred mushrooms continued to treat them with awe and reverence and to believe in their gift of second sight, - rightly so, as the reader will see when he reads our account of our first velada, pp 33-8. Traditionally they have taken the simple precaution not to speak about them openly, in public places, or in miscellaneous company, only with one or two whom they know well, and usually by night. White people seldom know the Indian languages and seldom live in Indian villages. And so, without planning, the Indian by instinct has built his own wall of immunity against rude interference from without.”
― R. Gordon Wasson, Persephone's Quest: Entheogens and the Origins of Religion

“In the light of our Mexican discoveries, I was now asking myself whether Soma could have been a mushroom. I said to myself that inevitably the poets would introduce into their hymns innumerable hints for the identification of the celebrated Soma, not of course to help us, millennia later and thousands of miles away, but as their poetic inspiration freely dictated.”
― R. Gordon Wasson, Persephone's Quest: Entheogens and the Origins of Religion

“I hold that the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was Soma, was the kakuljd, was Amanita muscaria, was the Nameless Mushroom of the English-speaking people. The Tree was probably a conifer, in Mesopotamia. The serpent, being underground, was the faithful attendant on the fruit. (See my SOMA, p 214) Please read the Biblical story in the light of all I have written on the awe and reverence that A. muscaria evokes, and how the knowing ones speak of it only when alone together, preferably by night. Gradually it will dawn on you that the `fruit' can be no other than Sonia. Everyone mentions the tree but its fruit is nameless.”
― R. Gordon Wasson, Persephone's Quest: Entheogens and the Origins of Religion

“yes. Early Man in Ancient Greece could have worked out a potion with the desired effect from the ergot of wheat or barley cultivated on the famous Rarian plain adjacent to Fleusis; or indeed front the ergot of a grass, called Paspalum distichnnt, that grows around the Mediterranean. If the Greek herbalists had the intelligence and resourcefulness of their \iesoamerican counterparts, they would have had no difficulty in preparing an entheogenic potion: so said Albert Ilofmann and he explained why.”
― R. Gordon Wasson, Persephone's Quest: Entheogens and the Origins of Religion

“We were seeking an answer to the strange fact that a mushroom, one single species, the pucka, was 'animate' in their language, was 'endowed with a soul', like all animals and human beings, but unlike all other vegetation, which is construed grammatically as 'inanimate', as 'without a soul'.”
― R. Gordon Wasson, Persephone's Quest: Entheogens and the Origins of Religion

“the putka was derived from the Sanskrit putika, the name of a plant never theretofore identified that the Aryans had used as the first surrogate for Soma.”
― R. Gordon Wasson, Persephone's Quest: Entheogens and the Origins of Religion

“Some months ago I read the Garden of Eden tale once more, after not having thought of it since childhood. I read it as one who now knew the entheogens. Right away it came over me that the Tree of Knowledge was the tree that has been revered by many tribes of Early Man in Eurasia precisely because there grows under it the mushroom, splendid to look upon, that supplies the entheogenic food to which Early Man attributed miraculous powers. He who composed the tale for us in Genesis was clearly steeped in the lore of this entheogen: he refrained from identifying the `fruit': he was writing for the initiates who would recognize what he was speaking about. I was an initiate. Strangers and also the unworthy would remain in the dark.”
― R. Gordon Wasson, Persephone's Quest: Entheogens and the Origins of Religion

“Each of us had harbored a nascent thought that we had been too shy to express even to each other: religion possibly underlay the myco-,phobia contrast that marked the peoples of Europe.”
― R. Gordon Wasson, Persephone's Quest: Entheogens and the Origins of Religion

“The priestly redactor who set down the Genesis tale, an initiate and a believer, attributed to the `fruit' the gift of self-consciousness, a remarkable observation because self-consciousness is one of the major traits that distinguish humankind from all other creatures. Is it not surprising that the composer of the story gave credit for this particular gift to our mushroom? It is unlikely that he was alone in doing so.”
― R. Gordon Wasson, Persephone's Quest: Entheogens and the Origins of Religion

“Throughout Siberia, indeed Asia, wherever grow the trees that serve as hosts to A. muscaria, - the birch, the pine, the cedar, the larch, others - that tree is revered as giving birth to the Marvelous Herb. The entheogen at the foot of the tree is the explanation of the reverence paid to the tree by the natives round about. How has the world overlooked for so long a time this key to the mystery of the Tree of Life?”
― R. Gordon Wasson, Persephone's Quest: Entheogens and the Origins of Religion

“Soma - as I will call it hereafter - was common everywhere in the woodlands of the temperate zone. All in all, Sonia was the entheogen of choice, until grains came to he cultivated in prehistory and then ergot emerged as a major alternative, also thoroughly safe to those who knew how to use it. No genuine entheogen is, so far as I know, an addictive under any circumstances. All entheogens inspire awe and reverence and possess power for good.”
― R. Gordon Wasson, Persephone's Quest: Entheogens and the Origins of Religion

“At the point in his evolutionary progress where we first call him `Man' beyond a doubt - Homo sapiens sapiens - and when he came to know, also beyond a doubt, what awe and reverence were, he clearly felt that Soma was conferring on him ntvsterious sensations and powers, which seemed to him more than normal: at that point Religion was horn, Religion pure and simple, free of Theology, free of Dogmatics, expressing itself in awe and reverence and in lowered voices, mostly at night, when people would gather together to consume the Sacred Element. The first entheogenic experience could have been the first, and an authentic, perhaps the only authentic miracle. This was the beginning of the Age of the Entheogens, long, long ago.”
― R. Gordon Wasson, Persephone's Quest: Entheogens and the Origins of Religion

“Over centuries and in different centers they composed a collection of to28 hymns in their Sanskrit language and as they had no method of writing, of course they learned to sing them by heart. The collection was called the Rig Veda and the Rig Veda was permeated by Sonia. From the hymns it was clear that the Soma was pressed, then mixed with other ordinary potable fluids such as milk but not alcohol, and drunk by the Brahmans and perhaps a few- others, who thereupon passed some hours in what we now call the bliss of an entheogenic experience.”
― R. Gordon Wasson, Persephone's Quest: Entheogens and the Origins of Religion

“A prodigious expansion in Man's memory must have been the gift that differentiated mankind from his predecessors, and I surmise that this expansion in memory led to a simultaneous growth in the gift of language, these two powers generating in man that self-consciousness which is the third of the triune traits that alone make man unique. Those three gifts - memory, language, and self-consciousness - so interlock that they seem inseparable, the aspects of a quality that permitted us to achieve all the wonders we now know. With our cour- puters we seem bent on dispensing with human memory as we have known it in prehistory, and even in the modest degree that our parents knew it. I am asking myself whether Sorna could have possessed the power to spark what I have called these triune traits.”
― R. Gordon Wasson, Persephone's Quest: Entheogens and the Origins of Religion

“One well known English professor of Greek burst out in anger at our saving that a potent potion was drunk at Fleusis: we had touched him at a sensitive spot. He seemed to wish to join the class of those pastors in our Bible Belt who, when Prohibition was flying high, seriously pretended that Jesus served grape juice, not wine, at his Last Supper!”
― R. Gordon Wasson, Persephone's Quest: Entheogens and the Origins of Religion

“Ergot, growing millennia later on certain cultivated grains, seems to have coincided in its arrival on the human stage with the discovery by Man of agriculture.”
― R. Gordon Wasson, Persephone's Quest: Entheogens and the Origins of Religion

“Three millennia ago Soma was known to the Brahmans, who composed many hymns exalting it. The hymns to Soma are still being sung, yet no one, not even among the Brahmans, knows what it was.”
― R. Gordon Wasson, Persephone's Quest: Entheogens and the Origins of Religion