Soma Ain’t Amanita Galactica But Cynanchum acidum

More about Soma Ain’t Amanita Galactica But Cynanchum acidum

When I first saw a picture of Amanita galactica, I thought it was fake—an AI-generated dream of a mushroom that never grew in any forest. Too perfect, too cinematic, the kind of thing you’d expect to find at the bottom of a neural net, not at the root of a myth. But that’s the problem with the modern imagination: we want our sacraments to look supernatural. We crave red caps, white spots, glowing galaxies of spores. The ancient mind, though, was subtler. The Vedic seers didn’t need neon hallucination—they wanted something that spoke the language of form itself.

The hymns of the Rigveda never describe madness or mirage. They speak of light pouring through the body, of rhythm, of speech made divine. That’s not Amanita muscaria. That’s a different kind of intelligence—earthier, more disciplined, more precise. So I started looking elsewhere and found Cynanchum acidum, a modest climbing milkweed, with sap like milk and bitterness like memory. When you cut it, it bleeds. When you press it, it yields a translucent essence that could easily be mistaken for the “liquid sun” sung about in the old hymns.

Now, yes, the glycosides in Cynanchum are dangerous. They don’t lend themselves to casual mysticism. They build up in the heart until the heart stops—a terrible, sacred limit. But that edge is exactly where the ancient rites lived: the razor line between life and dissolution. Soma wasn’t meant to be safe. It was meant to transform. To drink Soma was to risk returning the body to the pattern of the cosmos, to let the heart become a metronome for the universe itself.

So maybe Soma wasn’t about intoxication or cardiotoxicity at all. Maybe it was about the act of pressing—the gesture of drawing vitality from the vine, of coaxing essence from structure. The ceremony itself was the pharmacology. The priests weren’t tripping; they were tuning.

Amanita galactica is a digital fantasy of what the sacred might look like in an age of pixels and filters. Cynanchum acidum is what it actually feels like—bitter, risky, luminous, alive. The difference is that one is a hallucination, and the other is a conversation between the plant and the planet. Soma wasn’t an escape; it was a return—a remembering that the milk of the vine and the blood of the heart are one and the same song.