The evolution of the Indo-Europeans in the Upper Paleolithic, through the "Eye" of Soma

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The evolution of the Indo-Europeans in the Upper Paleolithic,

through the ”Eye” of Soma

Fran¸cois Pontvianne

under the supervision of

F. Graezer Bideau

C. Lutringer

M. Laperrouza

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Abstract

The Rigveda, probably the oldest sacred text still in use today, praises in many of its hymns Soma as both an elixir, a plant and a god. There has been a lot of debate as to the botanical identity of Soma, but if we make the assumption that Amanita Muscaria was the original Soma plant of the Aryans, the composers of the Vedas, who brought it from their original home to India during their migrations southwards; then following the track of the mushroom leads us back into the time when the Vedas began to be composed: the Upper Paleolithic. The identity of Soma helps in understanding what may have happened to the ancestors of the Aryans, the Proto-Indo-Europeans, from whom present day Indo-Europeans inherit their languages and some of the founding myths of their cultures. The red, white-spotted mushroom, and other psychedelics such as Psilocybe Cubensis and Cannabis, may have catalysed the development of language and gnosis which permitted and shaped the development of agriculture, the first civilizations, and eventually our modern day culture. Nevertheless, modern culture has seemingly little to do with its wild origins, but in seeing our ancestors as the ecstatically-inspired people who composed the Vedas, rather than as the savages we often pretend prehistoric people to have been, we can reconnect with our roots and discover what they may still have to reveal us.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank all the writers who contributed with their lives to the subject at hand in this essay, for the enrichment in inspiration and imagination I have enjoyed since reading their writings.

I would also like to thank the EPFL and the personnel of the College of Humanities for allowing the students to choose their topic of research and express themselves freely. I believe that following one’s interest is the best way to learn, the MACS team allowed this to happen for me.

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List of Figures

1 Forms of Amanita Muscaria (fly agaric), note the ”eye”/sun/wheel shape in the top right . . 6

2 Ephedra: an energizing plant . . . 7

3 Peganum Harmala (Syrian Rue): an MAOI . . . 8

4 Psilocybin aka Magic mushrooms: here growing in cow dung . . . 9

5 Worldwide distribution of psilocybin mushrooms . . . 9

6 Nelumbo Nucifera, the sacred lotus . . . 10

7 Cannabis Sativa L. . . 11

8 Human Migrations : 65’000-40’000 . . . 12

9 Human Migrations : 40’000-19’000 . . . 13

10 Chauvet Cave Painting, South of France, around 32’000 BP . . . 14

11 Earth Biomes during the Last glacial Maximum (18000BP) . . . 15

12 Extent of major glaciers at the height of the last ice age (20,000 b.p.), source : anthro.palomar.edu 16 13 Evolution of temperature and snow in the arctic since the last glacial maximum . . . 17

14 Boat with fishermen next to a whale, Pegtymel, Beringia . . . 18

15 Animation from 21000BP to 1000AP by the Zurich University of applied science, source:youtube 18 16 A man drinking psychoactive urine from deers, Siberia (credit:erowid) . . . 19

17 Present day Amanita Muscaria’s territory and shamanic tribes (credit:erowid) . . . 19

18 Petroglyphs next to the Pegtymel River, Northeast Siberia. Note deer like animals and mush-room people. Amanita M. is still traditionally used in the pegtymel region. . . 20

19 Here we have the McKee Springs Petroglyphs, Dinosaur National Monument, Utah and Col-orado. We can see the symbology of the PPIE such as horse riders, deers, wheels, mushroom-headed creatures... There are even creatures half-human, half-animal, like in the symbology of Pan. Visions of such creatures are well known to psychonauts (people who experiment with mind-altering substances). . . 20

20 Moab, Utah, the design is similar to the Swastika, a recognized indo-european symbol. It is similar to the Basque cross as well, suggesting a possibly enduring symbol across the Paleolithic and across continents. . . 21

21 Hyperborea according to Mercator 1595, notice the swastika-like design (source:wikipedia). Could it be that PPIE were mapmakers and that a cartographer from the renaissance inherited the heritage of these maps ? Could it be that this legendary land really existed and that the swastika was a symbol of the PPIE’s urheimat ? . . . 21

22 Suspected area of impact of the meteors at the beginning of the Younger Dryas . . . 22

23 Abstract of Iyengar’s paper (2009) . . . 23

24 Present day distribution of the X2A Haplotype . . . 23

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1 Introduction

When I first conceived this research project, I intended it to be about the ancient plant medicines of China and India. I started making my bibliography, looking at the representation of plants in ancient Eastern mythology. While reading Sigerist (1987), I stumbled upon the plant Soma : ”A whole book of the Rigveda was devoted to Soma, and the sacrifice to him took a central place in Vedic ritual. Drinking of Soma brought ecstasy, protection from disease, and cure of many ailments”.

The Rigveda is the earliest of the four collections of Vedic Sanskrit hymns called the Vedas, which are considered as a repository of orally-transmitted knowledge which is not from human origin). It is one of the oldest documents in any Indo-European language, and is probably the oldest sacred text still in use today. No other mythological plant could equal the status of Soma. but what was it? One of my source (Lehner, 1960 ed.2012) identified the plant as Sarcostemma Acidum but I knew already it may not be the correct identification of Soma.

Indeed, I had heard about the book Soma: Divine mushroom of immortality by Gordon Wasson (1971) which argued for the identification of Amanita Muscaria as the original Soma, and read Food of the Gods: The Search for the original tree of knowledge (1992) in which McKenna suggested that Soma could be the mushroom psilocybe cubsensis. I then read Blue Tide: The search for Soma (Jay, 1999) where the hypoth-esis of Syrian Rue (Peganum Harmala) as Soma was presented. I knew then, without a doubt, that the study of the legendary medicinal plant Soma was a vast subject in and out of itself, so I decided to concen-trate on it, and isolate the other mythological plants from my study. But no field of study is independent, and I was led back to other Ancient Eurasiatic Mythologies than the Vedas, in which Amanita Muscaria or Cannabis are thought to have played a role in. I discovered most of the countries with a tradition of a soma-like plant were part of the same language family : indo-european. Could it be that the myth of Soma was inherited from a time when a Eurasiatic people, the Proto-Indo-Europeans, spoke the same lan-guage? How did the knowledgeable Vedic culture arise out of the melting of the glaciers after the last ice age ?

I had so many questions in my mind, I felt so deeply connected to the subject, that it gave me the motivation to plunge into the vast fields of study which, you will see, surrounds Soma. I wanted to know how the Soma plant had influenced Eurasians in the Upper Paleolithic (50’000-10’000 BCE), and as luck would have it, that is the subject of the present research paper.

To begin, we will study the scholastic history that has been surrounding the subject of Soma for centuries. Knowing the historicity of the ideas presented in this subject will greatly facilitate the understanding of the current scholastic debates, in which we are going to dive into. We will study the different plant candidates for Soma, notably the recent proposal by Chris Bennett from his book Cannabis and the Soma Solution (2010). I will also bring new evidence to support Wasson’s claim that Amanita Muscaria was the original Soma.

But there are some parts of Wasson’s argument which we have to abandon. When he wrote his book in 1970, the Vedic people were said to have had a very different history than the one which is now favored, for instance it is very probable that the Vedic culture is at least 10’000 years old, and not 3’500 as was assumed then.

This new dating pushes us back to the beginning of the Neolithic. What was the history of the Vedic people 10’000 years ago ? Where did they originate from ? Could it be from the circumpolar regions ? Was there the place were the proto-indo-european language was invented ? Was Soma a catalyst for the development of language ? And agriculture ?

Finally we will retrace the most probable narrative for the plant Soma among the Pre-Proto-Indo-europeans and eurasiatic people in general. We will see how it influenced religion, folklore, and the

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de-2

Scholastic History

2.1 Indo-European Studies

After centuries of limited intellectual debate, the Middle Ages ended in Europe with the advent of the Renaissance. A new epoch of enlightenment began, an era in which Europeans began to be interested in far-distant and ancient cultures such as that of India. Travellers came back from this ’Orient’ with incredible stories, and new ideas. Among them was the idea that Eastern languages could be related to European lan-guages, as F. Sassetti pointed out in the 16th century, reporting striking similarities between Sanskrit and Italian (Muller, 1986). This idea got considerable repercussions. It implied that the limits of our supposed European culture stretched much further than Greece and the middle-East. If Indians and Europeans had some deep commonalities in their languages, then they must have shared a common past. This eventually contributed to the cultural movement of Orientalism which emerged a couple of centuries later.

In 1786, Sir William Jones made this observation :

“The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists; there is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and the Celtic, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanscrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same family.”

This common-source came to be named Proto-Indo-European. The study of the Indian culture and Sanskrit continued throughout the 19th and 20th century. Scholars tried to understand where the common ancestors of the Indo-Europeans came from and who they were. Only recently have Indian scholars entered the debate of their origins, and many alternative visions have emerged. There has been a lot of debate around this sometimes thorny subject, which has had the benefit of arousing a considerable amount of research and, with such a variety of views, making the subject ever richer.

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2.2 Sanskrit and Proto-Indo-European

To understand the Aryans is to understand the Sanskrit language, and in particular Vedic Sanskrit; which is not without its delights. Sanskrit is the oldest known indo-european language (probably together with Hittite), some people even argue that it is the original proto-indo-european language, but most scholars agree it traces its history back to Proto-Indo-Iranian and Proto-Indo-European. The pre-classical form of Sanskrit is called Vedic, or Rigvedic Sanskrit. The term refers to the language spoken in the Rigveda, the most ancient sacred text, a collection of hymns constituting a repository of ancient knowledge which was orally transmitted for millenia until it was written down in the second millenium B.C. (around 1700-1500 B.C. according to Doniger (2009, chap.5).

Whatever the root of the matter is, Rigvedic Sanskrit must be very similar to the original indo-european language, and therefore it informs us on our earliest common indo-european culture. Indeed culture and knowledge are fundamentally x from the language associated with them. Without a certain language, you cannot produce certain technologies, or certain ideas. Language is fundamentally interdependent with culture : the proto-indo-european (PIE) language ,or Sanskrit itself , helped shape our technological and cultural development. It was certainly thanks to PIE that Aryans could develop one of the most advanced civiliza-tion known so far back in history, and that eventually our own indo-european-dominated world civilizaciviliza-tion emerged.

Their is a lot of dispute as to the probable age of indo-european languages. For a long time, PIE was believed to have originated around 3500 B.C. before divergence began. However, in 2003, a study published in Science concluded that the common root of the 144 so-called Indo-European languages was spoken around 9800 and 7800 years ago by Neolithic farmers in Anatolia (Balter, 2003), in central Turkey, pushing back the initial divergence much further in the past. Nevertheless, the glottochronological method applied to this research, inspired from models of evolutionary biomolecular sequences, is disputed as being adequate to predict the age of a language. Some PIE is younger, some believe it is older. The proponents of the younger hypothesis have their bases and biases in linguistic and archaeological evidence. These kind of evidence usually belong to an approximate 10000 years time-frame, and so everything which happened in history should happen in that timeframe. The proponents of the older hypothesis often base their dating looking at the available literature. Astronomical events, recorded in old sanskrit texts, can indeed suggest events happening far into the palaeolithic, up to around 20000 B.C. Each dating is fundamentally linked to a scenario of how indo-european languages spread, and therefore to a scenario for the indo-european migrations. In this essay I will discuss a scenario for the Pre-Proto-Indo-Europeans (PPIEs) and the Proto-Indo-Europeans (PIEs). The proposed scenario is not incompatible with the different theories on Indo-European migrations.

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2.3 The RigVeda

As mentionned earlier, the Rigveda is the most ancient sacred text in any indo-european language, and in fact it could be the world’s oldest religious text with some of its passages being said to refer to a time 10’000 years into the past, or even earlier. Vartaka argues that the earliest portions of Rig Veda were composed in 23720 BCE (1999). The Rigveda is the earliest of the four books that constitute the Vedas, a collection of hymns that are still at the center of Hinduism. The Rigveda is also the World’s largest religious text with a bit more than a thousand hymns, ten thousand verses and ten books. These hymns are supposed to be chanted, and in fact have been so for several thousands of years until the present (some spiritual schools still maintain the oral-tradition today) (Crowley, 1993). They began being written down, often on birch bark sheets and ink (it is relevant as we will see later), probably in the second or first millennium BC (Teeter, 2007) .

The Rigveda is composed of two roots: Rig meaning ”praise” and Veda meaning ”knowledge”. Indeed the Rigveda is considered a repository of ancient knowledge, where the knowledge has been encoded in stories. The style of writing is both poetic and very precise. Sanskrit itself has been said to be the most scientific language (Brown, before 2003, pub.2011). As time passed on, the stories became myths, and some of the original meanings associated with the story were lost, bound, perhaps, to be rediscovered later. One element which was lost in time was the identity of Soma. Solving this riddle opens up vast vistas of possibility concerning the indo-european heritage, which will constitute the purpose of this paper.

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2.4 What is Soma in the Rig Veda?

In the Rigveda, Soma is considered to be both a god (deva), an entheogenic plant (entheogen being a term coined by Wasson to describe mind-altering plants or chemicals which provide a divine experience) (Williams, 2009), and the juice from that plant (the nectar, amrita, being the food of the Gods (Jansen, 2007). As a God, Soma can be considered as inter-related with the Gods Indra (the lord of the thunderbolt), and Agni (righteousness) (Mahdihassan, 1991). According to Turner and Coulter (2000, p.438), the deity Soma is a moon god, a god of plants, a god of the flowing waters, a god of ecstasy and inspiration. ”It was widely worshipped during the Vedic and Puranic periods. He is often refered to as the eye of Varuna (the moon) and Mitra (the sun).” Soma is immortal and bestows immortality to those who drink it. According to Williams, Soma was used by Brahmin priests in order to be deeply connected with the Gods during Vedic Rituals, such as the fire ceremony. Soma offered sustenance and energy to the Gods and ecstasy to the user.

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2.5 The mystery of soma

Besides being considered the father of comparative linguistics and Indo-European studies, Sir W. Jones was also the initiator of the debate on the identity of Soma (sanskrit), when he suggested in 1794 that haoma (Avestan for Soma) was a species of Mountain rue (Peganum Harmala) (Bedrosian, 2000). This was only the first suggestion in a long list of pretenders that came afterwards. Indeed the mystery of Soma lies in its biological identity. Was it henbane ? Alcohol ? Or even rhubarb ? None of the plants the Western scholars thought of really fitted the description of Soma.

2.5.1 Amanita Muscaria

Nevertheless, in 1957, Gordon Wasson, showed that magical foods were not figments of our imaginations (revealed in our mythologies, which are magical stories) but really existed, when he published an article in Life Magazine where he described the first experience of magic mushrooms by a westerner in centuries. This was the first milestone of the field of study of ethnomycology: the study of the relationships between humans and fungi. In 1970, Wasson entered the debate by proposing the original soma of the Rigveda was the mushroom Amanita Muscaria (commonly known as fly agaric), and that its origins could be traced back to the ”sacred element” of many northern siberian shamanic tribes (Wasson, 1971). Wasson’s thesis quickly became the most solid one when it came out, and the Amanita Muscaria is still considered today by many scholars as the most probable original soma plant. But Wasson wasn’t unrivaled too long, and soon after, many scholars of ethnobotamy and ethnomycology came to challenge his idea.

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Figure 2: Ephedra: an energizing plant

2.5.2 Ephedra

The same year, indeed, John Brough came to remind the community that it wasn’t proven (yet) that Soma was a psychedelic drink. Instead he believed Soma to have been Ephedra : ”[it] is a powerful stimulant, and would thus be a more plausible preparation for warriors about to go into battle than the fly-agaric, which is a depressant” (Brough, 1971). Brough was wrong saying it was a depressant, he did not know the entheogenic effects of Amanita Muscaria due to the lack of psychopharmacological knowledge on the mushroom at his time. Today we know that the preparation of Soma, which is refered to at length in the Rigveda, plays an important role on the effects of Amanita Muscaria (Feeney, 2010). Moreover, Ilya Greshevitch, an iranolo-gist, showed than in small doses amanita muscaria was indeed a stimulant (1974).

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Figure 3: Peganum Harmala (Syrian Rue): an MAOI

2.5.3 Syrian Rue aka Peganum Harmala

In 1989, Flattery and Schwartz proposed Syrian Rue, a semi-desertic shrub, as the identity of Soma. Their argument involved a lot of linguistic evidence and evidence of ancestral use. Nevertheless the trip reports of Peganum Harmala (erowid.org, 2014) fail to account for the effects described in the rigveda. Peganum har-mala contains Mono-Amine-Oxydase inhibitors, such proteins are found in the ayahuasca brew of the amazon where it is brewed with a plant containing Di-methyl-tryptamine (DMT), an hormone similar to serotonin. It could be that syrian rue was used in conjunction with a DMT-containing plant that remains unknown, or with psilocybin, from magic mushrooms, which resemble serotonin too. This idea called ”pharmahuasca” or ”Somahuasca” has been given support by Hromada (2012), showing a co-occurrence of Peganum Harmala and Phalaris Aquatica plants.

Once again the entheogen theory was challenged by the supporters of ephedra, this time in the person of Harry Falk who argued there was no evidence Soma was a psychedelic brew in the first place (1989). He later also argued against urine drinking of soma, a strong key to Wasson’s argument (2002).

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2.5.4 Psilocybe Cubensis

In 1992, McKenna showed in his book ”Food of the Gods: the search for the original tree of knowledge” the importance psilocybin mushrooms played in prehistory, he suggested they would have given us better vision; psychopharmacologically moderated value systems that worked to feminize values while the masculine values began to take the upper hand with the advent of the neolithic around 12000 years ago; and that they helped develop language. Considering Soma in an Indian context, he believed psilocybin containing mushrooms could explain the cow worship of India, these mushrooms being dung-lovers. What’s more, psilocybin’s effects are similar to those inferred from the rigveda.

Figure 4: Psilocybin aka Magic mushrooms: here growing in cow dung

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Figure 6: Nelumbo Nucifera, the sacred lotus

2.5.5 Nelumbo nucifera

In 2000, Spess added Nelumbo Nucifera (aka the Sacred Lotus) to the list of Soma candidates, showing a detailed botanical and iconographical analysis. He reinforced his argument in 2011 showing that the plant could be psychoactive, producing feelings of euphoria when ingested.

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Figure 7: Cannabis Sativa L.

2.5.6 Cannabis

Although it was proposed quite early, in the 1895th edition of folklore (jacobs et al.) in the article ”Argument that the Soma plant was bhang (a preparation of hemp)”, the theory of Cannabis as Soma seems to have been overlooked by most scholars for much of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, many scholars notably Indians such as Mukherjee (1921), Ray (1939), Chandra Chakraberty (1944-52-63-67) and others. There is a recent scholarly book, ”Cannabis and the Soma solution” by Chris Bennett (2010), that sums up the arguments gathered through the twentieth century around the idea that Soma was cannabis (sometimes called hemp, bhang in hindi). Providing archaeological and linguistic evidence, Bennett’s compilation is in my view convincing.

2.6 Soma as a function rather than a specific plant

If we look at the debate surrounding the identity of Soma, we see many candidates, sometimes far-fetched arguments, sometimes very likely ones. In all the plants I have researched the most: psilocybe cubensis, peganum Harmala, ephedra, Amanita Muscaria and cannabis; I have not found any of these theories to be totally unlikely, and my belief is that they are all true, although their truth depends on the time and location of the study. That Soma came to be known as a function, as a category of plants that induced changes in consciousness (of which I count ephedra which is a stimulant even if not hallucinogenic). There is some evidence that these plants/mushrooms may have been use in combination : ”So, for the first time in the world archaeological practice, monumental temples were found in which intoxicating beverages of the soma-haoma type were prepared for cult ceremonies. ... the excavations documentally proved that poppy, cannabis and ephedra were used for making the soma-haoma drinks, and thickets of these plants were found in excess in the vicinity of the excavated temples of Margiana” (Sarianidi, 2003). Rudgley, who studied the archaeological site cited that ”clealy both these psychoactive substances [cannabis and ephedra] had been used in conjunction in the making of hallucinogenic drinks” (Bennett, 2010).

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3 Soma through Indo-European migrations and exchanges

The different identities of Soma must have depended on where the people were. If the Vedic people originated in India, it is unlikely that it would have been the fly agaric, as it is quite uncommon there. Peganum harmala would have been consumed next to semi-desertic regions. We are looking for the original Soma(s). This question should help us: What was the original home of the proto-indo europeans ? We should go back in time into the early roots of man in Europe around 40000 BP to find out who were the pre-proto-indo-europeans. Their spiritual practices could show a continuity of culture until the beginning of the neolithic, and, in a way, until the present day. I will try to show that different hypotheses for the original home (urheimat) of the Indo-Europeans are not mutually exclusive but rather can be seen as successive events.

3.1 Let’s go back in time

It is funny to think that every individual on the planet today originate from common ancestors, individual people who far back in time were born with a mutation, had sex, and passed it down through generations of successfully surviving humans moving through different parts of the planet. The genetic prevalence of certain haplotypes today can help us understand who our ancestors were and where they came from. This is called DNA evidence, and it is more foolproof than linguistics while it enlightens archaeology. In this part I will guide you through a simple introduction to human migrations beginning 40’000 years ago.

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3.2 Art and The first hu-mans: the Eurasiatic people before the Last Glacial

Maximum (LGM)

Figure 9: Human Migrations : 40’000-19’000

Beginning 40’000 years ago, humans began to invade the northern latitudes of Eurasia, including the arctic circle. These people were hunters and gatherers, and probably moved slowly northwards following big game, which itself was moving according to the changing climates, going in zig zag directions between east and west. Dr. Fu and al., in an article published in nature, state, after recovering and sequencing the DNA from a thighbone of a male hunter-gatherer who lived 45,000 years ago in what is now Siberia that “The ancient Siberian was related equally to West European hunter-gatherers, North Asian hunter-gatherers, East

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Figure 10: Chauvet Cave Painting, South of France, around 32’000 BP

into the paleolithic all across Eurasia. I will follow their suggestion to reinterpret key dates in history. 50’000 years ago, it was a time of great change for the human species. For the first time in the archeao-logical record we see the birth of Art, in no other site than the masterpiece of the cave of Chauvet in France (as portrayed in Erzog’s movie ”Cave of Forgotten Dreams”). This artwork reveals self-awareness from the painters. Perhaps self-awareness, which we think makes humans so special, occurred between 45000 and 30000 BP (it could have been a worldwide phenomenon as Rupert Sheldrake’s research in morphogenetic fields suggests (1988)). McKenna argues that in the process of discovering new food sources to survive, it was very likely that humans encountered entheogens. If they were psilocybin mushrooms, they would have provided survival advantages to the users who would have included it in their diets. Psychedelics would have been a catalyst for the development of self-awareness, language and spirituality. The cave of Chauvet, despite being in a region rich in psilocybe mushrooms as the figure 5 shows, doesn’t describe any psychedelic plants but majestic animals which once inhabited the land : mammoths, deers, cows, rhinos and horses, which are all animals which were described in the Vedas (Doniger, p.54).

It was a sign of a deep desire to communicate with other humans. Perhaps, just as they tried to depict animals with simple sketches, they may have begun to speak a simple language based on the sounds which the objects inspired them; just like we often do when we forget a word and imitate the sound of the object (Bakshi, 2006).

This is where we get the earliest roots of indo-european words, such as the ones described in the study by Pagel et al. (2013) which found that Indo-European languages came from a common root, a proto-Eurasian, about 15,000 years ago.

I suppose Pagel is wrong in his timing and that these roots are thousands of years older, language does not give indications of time despite all the efforts of the linguists to make us believe so (Gray and al., 2011). We cannot define a constant rate of change for a language for instance, it is an unjustified assumption. This was not restricted to France of course, but was a pan-eurasiatic phenomenon (Panshin).

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3.3 The first transport revolution

3.3.1 Domestication of the horse and dogs

Somewhere close to or in the Eurasian steppe, humans began to domesticate horses. According to the wikipedia article on the domestication of the horse :

”The true horse, which ranged from western Europe to eastern Beringia, included prehistoric horses and the Przewalski’s Horse, as well as what is now the modern domestic horse, belonged to a single Holarctic species. A more detailed analysis of the true horses grouped them into two major clades. One of these clades, which seemed to have been restricted to North America, is now extinct. The other clade was broadly distributed from North America to central Europe, north and south of Pleistocene ice sheets (Weinstock, 2005). It became extinct in Beringia around 14,200 years ago, and in the rest of the Americas around 10,000 years ago (Luis et al., 2006). This clade survived in Eurasia, however, and it is from these horses which all domestic horses appear to have descended.(Buck et al., 2007)”

Figure 11: Earth Biomes during the Last glacial Maximum (18000BP)

Between 35000 and 15000 years ago was also the timeframe in which Eurasiatic people domesticated the dog (Freedman and al.,2014). Hopkins in ”The Dog in the Rig-Veda” (1894) showed how intimate dogs were to the proto-indo-europeans. With horses to travel, dogs to protect them, and a vast and game-abundant Eurasian steppe, the Paleolithic saw the first transport revolution in history and took advantage of it. Men were probably following game, wherever it may lead them, while women, children and elders would be less nomadic (Wilson, 1999). If we take the hunter’s point of view, he is nearly constantly in a state of alertness, to pray or not be prayed upon. If the words were very simple, it would suggest that syntactic thinking was very limited. Instead, due to the circumstances, the Paleolithic people had a natural tendency to be in a meditative state. In that spirit they may have had little awareness of time, no idea of a future or a past. Bakshi speaks of this as the time of anomalous cognition : ”Recent research seems to suggest that there was perhaps a basic biological mechanism, a basic psi function that occurred early in the process of human evolution. A sort of a generalized, intuitive instinct emerged, which was possibly an excellent tool for

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3.3.2 Movements and Migrations

By 25000 BP, these Eurasians had colonized much of the continent from arctic Beringia all the way down to Spain. Worsley and al. showed that arctic climates had been favourable during the pleistocene, with the arctic being intermittently free of ice (1980). Elias confirmed this thesis with Paleoecology (2001).

In between 40’000 and 25000BP, a land bridge opened in Beringia, which provided a passage into America through Alaska. For three thousands years, Eurasian people sharing similar ways of life would have evolved side by side, and side by side with the entheogens Cannabis and Amanita Muscaria. The generally accepted view considering the origins of cannabis is in Central, West and Northwest China, although it could also be in the Hindu Kush Mountains of India. Amanita Muscaria, on the other hand seems to originate in Beringia (Geml and al., 2006). I don’t know when these plants and fungi originated, but by the time of the Paleo-eurasians they may have already conquered Eurasia via natural ways (although the movement of seeds caused by humans could have been a contributing factor to the spread).

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3.3.3 The Ice Age until the end of the last glacial maximum

Beginning 26500 years, the Last Glacial Maximum pointed its nose : a period of unusual cold, even for an ice-age. Suddenly the northern lands and routes closed, the game began to migrate southwards, and eventually so did the humans. They settle in ”refuges”, places where the climate was tolerable and where the wildlife had taken refuge too. This climatic event compressed human movement, and eventually led them to live closer together than they had been before. I believe this was a time of great development for the Eurasiatic language. In winter, some of these eurasians, enjoying the leisure time, might have partaken in their favorite treats: mind-altering substances. For the purposes of simplicity, we will assume that Amanita Muscaria had a central place in the lives of these Eurasian people during the Last Glacial Maximum, so much so that it contributed to the development of a strong culture : that of the pre-proto-indo-europeans (PPIE) : a mammoth-hunting, horse riding, deer/elk(bull) herding mushroom-worshipping culture.

Figure 13: Evolution of temperature and snow in the arctic since the last glacial maximum

By the way, hunting huge game like mammoths would have needed the development of planification and cooperation, a pre-requisite of which is communication. Mammoth would have been a great source of meat, fur for clothing and housing, and bones for shelters. Herding could have been the charge of the women, as is still visible in the Sami Culture of Sweden and Norway (Kuokkanen, 2009), while hunting was the task of men. It seems unlikely that, in the harsh conditions which we describe, gathering would have been prevalent. Most of the food would have come from hunting, therefore, unlike other more warmer regions of the globe where humans would have relied prevalently on gathering, men in Northern Eurasia would have been the main providers of food for the tribe. This could suggest these PPIE developed patriarchal societies, such as the one described in the Rigveda (Wilson, 1999). PPIEs could also have been sailors and fishermen. There is no evidence for it in the Rig Veda, yet it does not mean these people weren’t the ancestors of the PIE. Indeed, unless the word is used in rituals, or other means which can show great continuity through time, words for fishing practices would have disappeared if the populations lived for a long time away from seashores (Bennett, 1962). In this fashion, many words could have appeared and disappeared, bound to be reinvented again later.

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Figure 14: Boat with fishermen next to a whale, Pegtymel, Beringia

3.3.4 Arctic roots and routes

15’000 years ago the climate warmed up and the glaciers started to melt. The PPIE re-deployed in their vast garden ranging from the Arctic circle to Western Europe, with some people exploiting the beringian land bridge to get in and out of America.

Figure 15: Animation from 21000BP to 1000AP by the Zurich University of applied science, source:youtube

By 14000BP onwards, plants began to reconquer the land which was previously buried under the ice. The first ones to do so were the pioneer species, the birch tree being the most common in high latitudes. The amanita muscaria is actually a mycorrhizae mushroom whose favorite trees are birch and pine trees,

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Indeed raw mushrooms are toxic, but the urine of the user, while still containing the psychoactivity, doesn’t have as many toxic compounds, which is advantageous for human consumption. One major argu-ment of Wasson in favor of the Amanita Muscaria as Soma was that there were references to urine drinking in the Rig Veda, with priests eating the mushroom first while the rest of the people had their urine to drink. Urine drinking is contested by Falk and Bennett (2010), among other scholars, who believe Wasson to have made a misinterpretation of the original text.

Figure 16: A man drinking psychoactive urine from deers, Siberia (credit:erowid)

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3.3.5 Rock Art Traces

There are many cave and rock paintings/engravings/sculptures in Eurasia, the Beringian region and North America. They suggest the presence of a similar culture on both sides of the strait as we shall see in the symbol analysis.

Different studies have recently shown that psychoactive use had been common in the Paleolithic in the Old World (Merlin, 2003). Altered states of consciousness have been associated with the development of biology and consciousness, which can be inferred from the creation of art in the Paleolithic (Froese and al., 2013), corroborating Abraham’s argument that Geometric Thinking was born in the Paleolithic (2011). In the next images, there are easy to interpret symbols. I would suggest that the symbol of the wheel (including circles and swastikas) was associated with the circular motion of the stars above the arctic circle, the cap of the Amanita mushroom, which might have eventually inspired them the invention of the wheel.

Figure 18: Petroglyphs next to the Pegtymel River, Northeast Siberia. Note deer like animals and mushroom people. Amanita M. is still tradition-ally used in the pegtymel region.

Figure 19: Here we have the McKee Springs Petroglyphs, Dinosaur National Monument, Utah and Colorado. We can see the symbology of the PPIE such as horse riders, deers, wheels, mushroom-headed creatures... There are even creatures half-human, half-animal, like in the symbology of Pan. Visions of such creatures are well known to psy-chonauts (people who experiment with mind-altering substances).

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Figure 20: Moab, Utah, the design is similar to the Swastika, a recognized indo-european symbol. It is similar to the Basque cross as well, suggesting a possibly enduring symbol across the Paleolithic and across continents.

Figure 21: Hyperborea according to Mercator 1595, notice the swastika-like design (source:wikipedia). Could it be that PPIE were mapmakers and that a cartographer from the renais-sance inherited the heritage of these maps ? Could it be that this leg-endary land really existed and that the swastika was a symbol of the PPIE’s urheimat ?

There is a myth in the ancient greek culture of some legendary people who lived in hyper-borea (”beyond the north wind”). J.G.Bennett (1962) proposed that the original indo-europeans lived in Hyperborea and that they were the legendary people Herodotus referred to. Bennett was building on Tilak’s idea of an Arctic home described in the Vedas (1906). Even though the idea could have seemed far-fetched, there is now a consensus building in the scholastic community that if they did not live in the arctic, Indo-Europeans must have had at least some presence in the subarctic regions. Concerning soma, Ruck (1983) argued that the offerings of the hyperboreans referred to in Greek mythology were mushrooms coming from the North-East, probably Amanita Muscaria.

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3.4 Catastrophical events, The Younger Dryas and the South-Eastward

migra-tions to refuges

Eventually, this inter-continental, culturally related people who had been thriving due to the improving climate, saw a great catastrophe that would inhabit their minds until the present day (Petaev, 2013). There was suddenly an abrupt climate change (see figure 13) which led to the extinction of many humans but also big animals such as the mammoth and the saber-tooth tiger (Nogu´es-Bravo and al., 2008).

There are different hypotheses for what led to this event which is thought to have occurred around 13’000 years ago. There is the comets or meteorites hypothesis (Cohen, 2014).These celestial objects would have brought devastation in the Northern hemisphere, perhaps leading to huge wildfires that if they didn’t kill everyone on their path, left an inhabitable landscape. There is the Pole Shift hypothesis, which says that, during a Pole shift, the geomagnetic field shielding life from radiation is disturbed, leading to mutations and disease. Some proponents of that theory, such as Hapgood and his friend Einstein (Hapgood, 1958), go further saying that the stress of a polar shift could be so dramatic as to make the earth crust drifts over the magma that supports it, generating fast changing climates (with ecosystems drifting in different latitude than the ones they evolved into). There is also the possibility of another major cosmological event such as the explosion of a Supernova not too far from Earth (relatively of course). The last thesis is that of volcanic activity (Oppenheimer, 2011). These theses are not mutually exclusive.

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I believe all these theories could be true. Earth crustal displacement caused by a polar shift and/or impacts would have led to volcanic activity. Mostly I believe in the meteorites theory, based on an analysis of the Rig Veda by Iyengar (2009) stating :

Figure 23: Abstract of Iyengar’s paper (2009)

So let’s sum up, there was a catastrophic event, which gave rise to what could be called ”hell on earth”. I believe this is the reason for the fall of mankind that world myths including the bible and shamanism talk about. Eventually the younger dryas cooling that followed the event was just as much of a stress on species, who had been used to warmer temperatures for a while.

Humans were not finished with unfavourable conditions because the Continental Ice then began to melt producing great floods due to rapid warming (an important topic in the Rig Veda). The PPIE had to flee the most disastered places on earth after the impacts. They began moving to the South-West in the direction of the refuge in Ukraine/Anatolia (Mallory, 2001).

Figure 24: Present day distribution of the X2A Haplotype

The distribution of the Haplotype X2A shows that at one point in history, some of what are now Euro-peans and Native Americans would have been the same people. The (apparent) absence of Indo-European languages in America suggests that Proto-Indo-European was developed after that split.

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On their way to the Western refuge, the PPIEs would have passed through present-day China and the Eurasian steppe. There they could have encountered Cannabis, growing wild in this part of the world. Indeed, Cannabis is a very resilient plant, it can adapt to rapidly changing climates and seasons. Cannabis can adapt its growth cycle to the place where it grows. It is possible for instance to grow cannabis in Alaska or Finland. PPIEs could have transported the very nutritious seeds of that plant all the way back to Europe/Anatolia. The use of Cannabis by the PPIEs or PIEs is suggested by the ubiquity and similarity in the plant name in different PIE languages today.

Figure 25: Extract from Bennett, 2010

What’s more, as Bennett underlines, the ability of phytocannabinoids to improve smell, night vision and discern edges would have enhanced the fitness of a hunter-gatherer society (Bennett, 2010, p.74/856)

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3.5 Birth of the Proto-Indo-Europeans in the European refuge

Eventually, the PPIEs who were composed of many different tribes reached the Ural, possibily installing themselves in Ukraine or Anatolia, or both, which are located in between the meteorites crash sites of West-ern Europe and America (and possibly Beringia). Extreme climatic events would have restrained the PPIEs mobility. In this place and era (between 12’000 and 9’000 years ago), humans were perhaps more concentrated than they ever had been before. The situation may have been like this : Western Europeans, Eurasians, and perhaps previous-Americans were cohabiting next to each other. As was pointed out before, they may have had similarities in the languages they spoke. The multi-cultural environment would have fostered the development of culture, that is language (as McKenna said, culture is an operating system coded in language).

The people we are talking about could be considered to be the Proto-Indo-Europeans. Using the psychedelics at their disposal (Amanita Muscaria, Cannabis, and possibly psilocybe mushrooms) they would have developped new words. In teh words of McKenna :

”This is what we’re talking about here– psychedelics as a catalyst to the human imagination, psychedelics as a catalyst for language, because what cannot be said, cannot be created by the community. So that we need then, is the forced evolution of language, and the way to do that is to go back to agents that created language in the very first place. And that means, the psychedelic plants, the Gaian Logos, and the mysteri-ous beckoning extraterrestrial minds beyond. Hooking ourselves back up, into the chakras of the hierarchy of nature, turning ourselves over to the mind of the Totally Other that created us and brought us forth out of animal organization. ” (McKenna, Alien Dreamtime, 1993).

McKenna’s assertions that psychedelics are catalysts for the development of language are based in early psychedelic research (before they were banned worldwide) like Aaronson and al.’s paper which compiled what was known in 1970 on the effects of psychedelic experience on language functioning. New findings have been exposed by Slattery (2005) who talks about the noetic connection between synaesthesia, psychedelics and language. Tupper (2002) linked entheogens to existential intelligence (which is an obvious feature of the people who composed the Vedas) showing that ”plant teachers” could be used as cognitive tools.

The limited space available to the PIEs around 12’000 years ago would have created a stress for hunter-gatherer societies, who would have turned to agriculture and pastoralism (with Cannabis and barley being some of the cultivated plants, and cattle/deer and horse herding), reinforcing exchanges and the creation of the first societies. Astronomy would have been developed a lot during that time as well, to understand the catastrophes of the past and predict the future ones, and to develop agriculture (which depends on astronomical cycles). The devastation of the last Ice Age would also have encouraged the PPIEs to join together. As society would have complexified, humans became more and more disconnected from nature, and Soma became part of a ritual (Staal, 2001).

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3.6 Warming up and Leaking Out

When passages out of the Ukrainian/Anatolian refuge became safe to travel again, the PIEs would have spread in all directions : to the West, repopulating Western Europe (where a few human groups, like the Basque people, would have survived), to the North towards Poland, Germany, Finland and more, and to the East towards Iran, Afghanistan and India (from where we inherit the Vedas). It could be that Gobekli Tepe (in present day Turkey, dated to 10’000 BP or even earlier) was one of, or the first temple/city to be built by the Proto-Indo-Europeans (Schoch, 2013) as it fits genetic and linguistic evidence (Bouckaert and al, 2012). Soma has long been paralleled with the Haoma of Zoroastrianism. Zoroastrianism is considered by modern scholars to have lived between 3800 and 2600 years ago, but classical writers like Plutarch, Diogenes or Pliny (citing Eudoxus and Aristotle), who lived around 2400 years ago, considered Zoroaster to have died 6000 years before Plato (Jenny Rose, Zoroastrianism : an introduction). It is strange to think these scholars would have made such a huge mistake in dating despite living only a few centuries after the present dating of Zoroastrianism. I therefore prefer to assume Zoroastrianism to be 8000-85000 years old, which would coincide with the diaspora of the PIEs out of their refuge. Zoroastrianism may be contemporaneous with the Vedas (which Frawley dates around 8’000 or even 8’500 years ago (Frawley, 2000)). In that view, Indians would have indeed been the originators of the later Vedas. The Vedic people may have actually been or coexisted with the Harappan culture as Frawley argues (1991).

In India, fly agaric (which in my view should be considered the original soma of the PIEs, together perhaps with Psilocybe Cubensis, which would possibly be of Western European import) would have become less and less available, forcing the appearance of substitutes : cannabis, ephedra, nelumbo nucifera, etc.... Meditative practices would have also been developed as substitutes to Soma, or more generally to recreate the mind of the Paleolithic people. According to McKenna and Wilson, there was indeed a need to reconnect to the mind of the Goddess, as the link to it was fading as agricultural societies (more masculine in nature than hunter-gatherer societies) developed :

”In the absence of a partnership community and with the loss of the psychoactive plants that catalyze and maintain partnership, nostalgia for paradise appears quite naturally in a dominator society. The aban-donment of the original catalyst for the emergence of self- reflection and language, the Stropharia cubensis psilocybin-containing mushroom, has been a process with four distinct stages. Each stage represents a fur-ther dilution of awareness of the power and the numinous meaning resident in the mystery. The first step away from the symbiosis of the human-fungal partnership that characterized the early pastoral societies was the introduction of other psychoactive plant substitutes for the original mushroom. This psycho-activity can range from being equal in the depths of its profundity to the Stropharia cubensis psilocybin intoxication, as in the case with the classical hallucinogens of the New World tropics, to being relatively trivial. Examples of the latter are the use of Ephedra, a stimulant, and fermented honey as Soma substitutes. ” (McKenna, 1992)

In the millenia that succeeded, shamanic spirituality and its myths continued to be transmitted (at least partly) until they ended up in some of the major religions of today (Wasson, 1986): such as Christianity (Allegro (2009), Bennett (2010), and others...) or Buddhism (Crowley, 1996). It is awe-inspiring to think our modern day spirituality traces some of its elements back into prehistory. Soma is such an element, but apart from a few religious schools, the use of entheogens has been abandoned by major religions. Not only have they been abandoned, their use has sometimes been condemned or became a taboo.

” The impact of hallucinogens in the diet has been more than psychological; hallucinogenic plants may have been the catalysts for everything about us that distinguishes us from other higher primates, for all

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4 Conclusion

I would like to present what I consider to be an interesting thought. As McKenna points out, there seems to be a link between psychedelics and humanness. I believe this link can be seen etymologically between the words human, aum (the eternal sound of the universe in Vedic philosophy) and soma. Brown asserted that the word human came from the Sanskrit words aum and Manu. The syllable -man can be seen today in words such as manual, or manifest. In that sense, human would mean being a manifestation of the eternal sound of the universe (which is in fact reflected in Hinduism today under the metaphysical equation Atman = Brahman, ie. the totality and the self are one and the same). As I pointed out earlier Haoma could be a more ancestral word than Soma. What’s more hom is the word for Haoma in Old and Present-day Persian (according to the wikipedia article on Haoma). Could it be that Haoma came from the root ”aum” or ”ohm” ? That Soma came from S-Aum-A, with S perhaps having to do with the fact that Indo-Aryan languages are Satem languages? Could it be that our word for human comes from a time when PIEs studied sound and developed language under the influence of psychedelics?

Whatever the case may be, there is enough evidence to show psychedelics had an important part in human pre-history. The ongoing pharmacratic inquisition, which persecutes psychedelic users worldwide (Arthur, 2000), is very paradoxical considering our roots (Ott, 1976). Nevertheless, science and medicine (which corroborate the beliefs of the ancestors that, rightfully used, these substances could be beneficial) may be the doorway to a more rational and less dogmatic relationship to mind-altering plants and fungi.

In writing this paper, I wanted to explore how entheogens could have played a role in the appearance of culture. I think it is obvious they had a central role, what is not obvious is my narrative. There are many ifs in this essay, enough to take the narrative I built with a pinch of salt. But even if this narrative is not absolutely true and could never hope to be, I trust it has the merit of shining some light on the common past of the indo-europeans and their relationship to nature. I loved the process of research for this essay for I plunged in my favorite part of human history : the Upper Paleolithic. A time when humans were deeply connected to nature and yet were ”fully human”. A time when humans hadn’t yet built fictional frontiers and still considered themselves as part of the same family (which we are as genetics shows). Just like humans now, they must not have been perfect, for sure, and we should not indulge too much in portraying them as ideal people (which I have sometimes been tempted to do). Nevertheless, I reckon it would not hurt us to get some inspiration from them. I know I was inspired, perhaps you were too. That’s all I could hope for.

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The evolution of the Indo-Europeans in the Upper Paleolithic, through the "Eye" of Soma