Ploughing the Clouds: The Search for Irish Soma Book

Gosh, this was a weird one, even for a random library self grab. I don't really understand why it's a book -- it should be an academic monograph. The cover is entirely accurate and yet so misleading simultaneously.

First of all, if you don't have recent working knowledge of The Rig Veda and more generally Vedic cosmology extending into the The Brahmanas of the Vedas you will be absolutely fucking lost. Similarly, you need a solid grounding in Irish myth and legend, because Wilson does outline some aspects of story but only the parts that are useful to his thesis. If you don't have both, seriously, don't even bother with this book. It was sheer luck that I happened to have read the Rig Veda and some of the Brahmanas in 2017, and of course my great familiarity with Irish/Celtic story is why I picked up the book in the first place.

Here's the whole concept: Indo-Europeans broadly had a cultural ritual involving the consumption of a psychotropic substance as an entheogen to get wicked high and connect with Deity/the Universe. Literary analysis of Irish story suggests the presence of a similar ritual that has been "masked" or hidden in legend and myth and folk tales based on significant elements of similarity to the "soma" psychotropic ritual as articulated in the Rig Veda.

It's definitely speculative, wildly broad in its analysis, ultimately inconclusive because there is no archaeological record nor, of course, a literate record. And it was originally published in 1996, so who knows if Wilson's thesis has since gained traction or generally been shrugged at.

Psychotropics hold little interest for me, academically and personally, so in all honesty, I found Wilson's footnotes and bibliography of more interest over the topic itself. I'm pretty solidly accepting of the idea that Celtic pre-history likely involved any number of shamanic ritual practices including entheogens and trance-induction and spiritual journeying, so I didn't really need a hard sell on the idea.

This really read more like it should have been in a journal, or a special academic publication, rather than a general publication -- by City Lights Books, no less.