Blue Tide: The Search for Soma

by Mike Jay

Cultural Writing. In the beginning there was soma. 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 subject to the realm of the gods on its blue tide. 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. In doing so, it sheds light not just on the identity of soma, but on the broader mystery of the original relationship between psychedelic drugs and religion. BLUE TIDE, more than any other book I've read, satisfactorily answers the plethora of queries concerning the history of drugs as a means to soul searching, attaining spiritual enlightenment, and getting off one's face. Read it before you get high. Read it before you die -- Howard Marks, author of MR. NICE.

182 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

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Reviews

[Ellis Amdur · Rating 3 out of 5]

In the Rig Veda, the earliest sacred text of the Indo-Europeans, there are dozens of hymns to soma, an unknown, apparently psychedelic plant which took the user "to the realm of the gods on its 'blue tide.'  Mike Jay searches for the roots of soma within literature, travel and imbibing the herbs themselves, coming to the very likely conclusion that soma was derived from Syrian Rue, the seeds of which contain a potent MAO inhibiter called harmaline.  This substance, combined with various other plants containing DMT is at the core of the most powerful psychoactive ritual plants used in the New World. However, harmaline alone, although it has psychoactive effects, will not induce the absolutely overwhelming psycho-spiritual experience that it does when it potentiates DMT (the latter substance is broken down in the digestive system, but harmaline, inhibiting MAO, allows it into the body unaltered. However, there are a startling number of plants, otherwise unrelated, that have DMT. At any rate, the book is suggestive in this area rather than definitive.

Quite entertaining, the book is most interesting in tracing the roots of religion through shamanistic practices in which psychoactive plants play a substantial part, to their abandonment which religions assume a organized structure under a priest class to a third stage in which, within the framework of some religion and doctrine, the worshiper finds his or her own way.  Wandering around the line where prehistory meets history, touching on such cultures as the Scythians and Zoroastrians, one gets a sense of a hidden history in which our direct ancestors first apprehended the both the concept and the actual face of divinity through the aid of psychoactive plants.