Reviews for Athenian Religion

The average rating for Athenian Religion based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-11-24 00:00:00 Isabel Pereira My dear stepbrother gave me, as he has before, a birthday gift card to Roger Park's last remaining bookstore, The Armadillo's Pillow. Planning to make it the gift that will keep on giving for as long as possible, I have made only one purchase so far, and this a good one. I hadn't known of it before, although I was familiar with authors Wasson, Ott and Ruck. While subtitled "Entheogens and the Origins of Religion", most of this collection consists of the essays by Wasson and Ruck. These attempt to substantiate Wasson's hypothesis that Ind0-Europeans descending upon India and Greece from the north about 3000 years ago brought with them religious practices substantially founded upon the shamanic ingestation of amanita muscaria. Ruck does this in a most learned and roundabout way. Wasson, too, is a little difficult as he essays, in three pieces, to explain Indian practices and the meaning of the soma texts. What most fun and most easily accessible, however, is the introductory essay by Wasson which tells the tale of how he and his wife fell into developing the field of ethnomycology. I'd read accounts of this before, but never in his own words. What's missing from this book, missing almost entirely, is any sense of how the use of psychoactive fungi might inspire religious beliefs. It's as if it's assumed that readers are well acquainted with the phenomenology of heavy tripping--not something I'd expect of the readers of the technical journals in which these items (except for the autobiographical one) originally appeared.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-01-01 00:00:00 Janet Hector This is an anthology of mostly papers from the 1960s-1980s on the subject of the use of psychedelic mushrooms in ancient times in ancient Greek and Indo-Iranian religion. The first paper is a summary of Wasson's book _Soma_. Most of the conclusions are pretty speculative and not necessarily backed up by field methods from anthropology. It is mostly based on textual analysis and folklore.