Persephone's Quest: Entheogens and the Origins of Religion @ richardeward.com

Persephone's Quest: Entheogens and the Origins of Religion
by R. Gordon Wasson, Stella Kramrisch, Carl Ruck, Jonathan Ott
from Yale University Press

Customer Reviews:

• Avg. Customer Rating: 4.0 / 5.0

• A lacking work
  I value Gordon Wasson's work. Without him, who can really say if psilocybin fungi would ever have a respectable category of books. Having stated that, my value of this particular work is a bit low. This book tries even further to continue views already expressed in Wasson's other works: It mainly discussees Soma (what Wasson believed to be Amanita Muscaria).

• A glimpse into our past
  The subtitle to this book is Entheogens and the Origins of Religion. For those not familiar with the term entheogen it literally means `god generated within' and refers to the various psychoactive substances that have been used throughout history in a spiritual context. These include the mushroom cults of rural modern Mexico, the use of a soma by the ancient Indo-European Aryan culture of pre Hindi India, and even in the rites of the Eleusis ceremonies of classical Greece. As can be inferred at this point,... more info

• Meno in the sky with diamonds...
  This is a fascinating topic, but the book is not well-written. First, the authors have a unifying theme, but the book doesn't really work as a survey. The essays are each hyperspecialized and a good editor would have included some introductory material covering the entire field and knitting the text together over any large gaps. Wasson's introductory essay doesn't seem to anticipate the material he is introducing.
  Moreover, Wasson's contributions are written in a perplexing and awkward style. The text... more info

• Brilliant Source and Homage to the Mysteries
  I am a student of Carl A.P. Ruck, who was one of the contributors for this collection. This volume is indeed a collection which covers several sides of the story, touching upon almost every civilization which was influenced by the entheogensis of the mushroom (Amanita and Psylocybe). For those who have read McKenna's work, this is the foundation of it, although the antithesis of his belief that the Psylocybin containing species are the Soma of ancient Aryans. The second part of this book deals with the... more info

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