The Nomadic Alternative – Page 188

a deathless death. Such a 'chariot to enlightenment' was the Soma

plant the chariot-riding Aryans gathered on the mountainsides of the Hindu Kush and accorded the status of a divinity. With little room for doubt R. Gordon Wasson has identified Soma as the hallu- cinatory Fly Agaric (Amanita muscaria) - the scarlet and white mushroom parasitic to the roots of beech and pine, common to high altitudes or northern latitudes, and employed alike by Siberian shamans for magical flights and by the ancient Vikings to resurrect the martial fury of Wodan. Mr. Wasson has astutely noticed that the Sanskrit word for mushroom shared its origin with a verbal root GHRB meaning "to go away, to leave one's country, to go West, to be remote, to run swiftly, to go to a far land or to set (of celestial bodies)". Conversely, at the risk of a very broad

generalization, narcotics are the peculiar speciality of those peoples whose social framework is geared to a life of intense activity, but whose 'ways' are blocked.

Scavenging is a holy occupation. Vagrant ecstatics have wandered throughout Indian religious life. Mentioned in the Rigveda is the Muni, detached from possessions, dressed in dirty yellow rags, his long hair matted, "following the swift path of the wind where the gods passed by before". Among the ascetic contemporaries of the Buddha were the Theravadins, "those who roam like wild beasts" and the Hamsas, or Swans, whose code inhibited them from spending more than a day and a night in the same village; they ate cow dung and urine. Their extremist cousins, the Paramahamsas, or Ultimate Swans, were tree-fetichists who foraged for berries and wild roots, and believed "there is neither good nor bad, holiness nor wickedness". The man 'freed in life' was perfect and everything he did was perfect.

Sects such as the Aghoris and Kapalikas, whose practices foreshadowed those of Tantrism, showed their ultimate disregard for human inhi- bitions by flaunting what they believed to be the demonic side of human nature. Incest was desirable. Vampirism joyous. The taste of the human corpse intoxicated. They ate pulped human flesh and brains from skull cups. "As human excrement fertilizes a sterile soil, so