The song of canaries fills the room, a hint of the smell of stables is in the air. These sensory impressions, which are truly unexpected for a museum, come from the fantastic scenario that unfolds over the course of a winter in the Hamburger Bahnhof – Contemporary Museum – Berlin. In search of Soma, a mythical potion, the internationally acclaimed German artist Carsten Höller (born 1961 in Brussels) created his most complex and elaborate installation to date.
“We drank the soma; we have become immortal, we have seen the light; We have found the gods.” This line of verse comes from the Rigveda, the oldest of the four founding scriptures of the Hindu religions, and it is one of many in which a miraculous potion is sung. Like us in the 2nd millennium BC. According to a scripture written in the 1st century BC, this drink promised knowledge, access to the divine sphere, happiness, wealth and victorious power. It was a drink enjoyed by gods and men alike.
The Rigveda is the basis of the scientific search that began in the 20th century for the composition of the soma and the identity of its central ingredient. Knowledge of the latter has been lost over the past millennia. In addition to linguists, botanists and ethnologists also based their search for the omnipotent substance on the poetically encoded verses of the ancient script written in Sanskrit. In doing so, they endeavored to bring the clues contained therein into line with findings from their respective disciplines. To date, however, there is no consensus about the identity of the soma plant.
The American Gordon R. Wasson, a banker by profession and mycologist by passion, published a comprehensive compendium in 1968 in which he discussed the fly agaric (Amanita muscaria) as the sought-after soma plant and combined a linguistic study of the Rigvedic verses with reports of the customs of Siberian nomads. From this connection, Wasson developed the thesis that the crucial substance could be found in the fly agaric. He also assumes that the mushroom was consumed during the Somar ritual through direct consumption - presumably mixed with milk and other substances - as well as through the urine of a person or animal that had previously consumed fly agarics. Carsten Höller further develops this theory to the effect that it could have been the urine of reindeer, whose natural diet includes fly agaric. The loss of the soma and the knowledge of its composition would logically be explained by the fact that the nomadic tribes of Central Asia left the habitat of fly agarics and reindeer behind when they left the area between 2000 and 1000 BC. BC migrated from the north towards the Indus Valley.