One of these sites, Gonur South, consists of a fortified complex of buildings, a number of private dwellings and a fort. In this area, known to the ancients as Margiana, the Russians uncovered a number of sites of monumental architecture dating from the second millennium BC. However, just as Syrian rue seemed to be taking the place of the fly-agaric mushroom as the most likely candidate for soma, archaeological evidence emerged from Russian excavations in the Kara Kum desert of Turkmenistan that set the cat once more among the pigeons. Their arguments are highly persuasive and convincing. They suggest that Syrian rue ( Peganum harmala) was far more likely a candidate since its hallucinogenic effects are well-known in the Indo-Iranian homeland even today. Unlike Wasson, who had largely concerned himself with the Indian sources, they concentrated on the Iranian evidence. In the late 1980s another highly plausible candidate was proposed by David Flattery and Martin Schwartz. The arguments he put forward are complex suffice it to say that many distinguished orientalists and other scholars accepted his thesis. Gordon Wasson during the late 1960s when he proposed a new candidate for soma - the fly-agaric mushroom. However, the whole debate was rekindled by R. Scholars had become rather bored with the whole question as it seemed to many of them an unanswerable one. Most of these suggestions have been summarily rejected for reasons I will not go into here. Among the suggestions of more or less convincing candidates have been cannabis, Ephedra, a fermented alcoholic drink, Syrian rue, rhubarb, ginseng, opium and wild chicory. In addition to the various non-psychoactive plants that have been used as soma substituted in both the Zoroastrian and Hindu traditions, a great number of candidates for soma have been put forward by Western investigators over the last two hundred years.

Although some of the descendants of these peoples still perform their rituals, the identity of the sacred entheogenic plant has been lost and non-psychoactive substitutes are now used in place of the mysterious soma/haoma.

The plant was called soma by the Indians and haoma by the Iranians. Both works describe rituals in which a plant with hallucinogenic properties was consumed. These scriptures are the Rig Veda and the Avesta, of the Indians and Iranians respectively. Both preserved a vast body of religious oral literature which was only later written down. One group, the Indo-Aryans, moved south to the Indus Valley the other became the ancient Iranian peoples. About 4,000 years ago they split into two distinct groups. Little, Brown and Company (1998) The Indo-Iranians were an ancient people who had their homeland somewhere in Central Asia. The Encyclopedia of Psychoactive Substances

Soma by R. Gordon Wasson