HAOMA. Both a "being worthy of worship" (yazata), or deified personification, and a substance ingested during Zoroastrian ritual sacrifices, haoma has an exact parallel in the soma of ancient India: *sauma, from the verb sav ("to press, to crush"), is the reconstructed Indo-Iranian form. What the substance was originally—a plant or its sap, or a hallucinogenic mushroom such as Amanita muscaria (Wasson, 1968)—is not certain. What is certain, however, is that the Indo-Iranian form serves as evidence of a common ritual background in Iran and India. We also know that in both countries the original substance has been substituted with another; for centuries Zoroastrians have continued to use a species of Ephedra in their ritual sacrifices. This plant grows in many regions of Central Asia and Iran and yields a juice with hallucinogenic properties. Haoma must have been both a hallucinogen and a stimulant: it was reported...