Blue Tide

In the beginning, there was soma. The Rig Veda, the earliest sacred text of the ancient Indo-Europeans, includes dozens of hymns in praise of this hallucinogenic plant which, when drunk, takes its subjects to the realm of the gods on its ‘blue tide’. But in the Hindu tradition that followed it, soma is declared to have been ‘lost’, and its use abandoned. Blue Tide combines history and botany, drug rituals in Brazilian churches and a journey to the Himalayas in search of one of the great unsolved mysteries of the ancient world.

“Blue Tide is an extremely well-written account of the author’s exhaustive and tenacious attempts to identify and/or explain soma, the plant of the gods, history’s first mind-bending substance…Read it before you get high. Read it before you die.”
Howard Marks

“An excellent book…delineates the evidence with great skill, with a prose that is both riveting and enlightening”
Psychedelic Press UK

“A fascinating and edifying excursion into the mystery of soma…Blue Tide is much more than a botanical detective story. This is scholarship at its exhilarating, page-turning best”
Fortean Times

“Fascinating and instructive” .. Time Out

More on plant hallucinogens and ancient religions: Enter the Jaguar

Cover art by Nicholas Roerich. For more on him, see The Rites of Roerich