Ephedrine founds a civilisation.

[Wflash]

I discovered today, from the Great Imparter of Knowledge (TV) that the Aryan people, who came from Central Asia through Turkmenistan to settle in India and become the Indian people, who spoke and sang in Sanskrit - the language from which was derived Greek, Latin and eventually English - founded their whole culture on an intoxicating drink called Soma, made from the plant Ehedra.

Basically they were all flying on speed.

Their songs sing of being filled with love, talking too much, getting dizzy, having their minds opened to the wonders of the world. Of "the drink that is faster than thought".

It just brings home to me how central to being human and to human culture the day-to-day use of psychoactive drugs is.

Our culture is one of the few in history to be so terrified of something so crucial to the human experience.

We've become afraid of ourselves and of the world.


Not me though. I'm off to get wasted.

[robertone]

?? SOMA isn't indisputably indentified but thought it was a drink made from the Amanita muscaria, an mushroom!

See also Wikipedia about this.

[Heretic.Ape.]

Nobody really knows what soma was. As an aside note, the theories about the Aryan settling patterns and their taking over India are also a point of contention in the scholarly circles where people contend about such things .