Review: 'Blue Tide - The Search for Soma' by Mike Jay

Originally published in 1999 'Blue Tide: The Search for Soma' by Mike Jay is the story of the author's search for the potentially psychedelic plant soma. In attempting to unravel its mysteries, Jay is tackling, what is felt by many, as one of the most important, unanswered historical questions in psychedelic studies. A blend of travel and adventure, research and experiment, the book displays the classic motifs of a psychedelic text and utilises a broad range of approaches to great effect.

Soma is first mentioned in the Rig Veda, a vast collection of hymns that began life as oral poetry and were then written down in Sanskrit; the earliest extant texts are thought to date to the fifth century AD. The Vedic peoples, travelled from some unknown place in the West and settled in North India and Jay describes the Rig Veda as "the great surviving text of the lost civilisation before civilisation" (Jay 2). Soma is a God, representing a great many things in opposition to Agni, water and sun respectively for example, but whilst Agni is incarnated on Earth as fire, Soma becomes a plant: the "Plant of the Gods".