TABLE OF CONTENTS -- PART ONE Entheogens and the Origins of Religion -- Prelude -- Chapter 1 Persephone's Quest -- Interlude -- Our discoveries: -- 1. Soma and the Vedic Culture -- 2. The Mystery of Eleusis -- 3. Our first Velada -- 4. The Grecas -- 5. The New World and the Thunderbolt -- 6. The Meaning of Kakuljá Huracan -- 7. A Glimpse of the Domestic Use of Soma -- 8. The Chinese and the Nivkhi -- 9. Greece and Soma -- 10. Soma among the Mediaeval 'Monsters' -- 11. The Chukotka -- 12. The Fool's Mushroom -- 13. 'Happiness Mushroom' -- 14. The British and the 'Nameless Mushroom' -- 15. The Vikings and Soma -- 16. The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil -- Epilogue: the Age of the Entheogens -- Unfinished Business -- Chapter 2 Lightningbolt and Mushrooms -- Chapter 3 The Mahavira Vessel and the Plant Putika -- The Secret of the cut-off Heads -- The Elixir of Life: Soma and Putika -- Putka and the Santal of Eastern Bihar -- The Mahavira Vessel -- The later and separate Lives of Mahavira and Putika -- Chapter 4 The Last Meal of the Buddha -- What was Sukara-Maddava? -- The Santal and the Putka -- The Buddha's Last Meal -- The Indus Valley and Kashmir -- Memorandum by Walpola Rahula on the early Sources for the Meaning of Sukaramaddava -- Epilogue -- Chapter 5 Carved 'Disembodied Eyes' of Teotihuacan -- PART TWO Poets, Philosophers, Priests: Entheogens in the Formation of the Classical Tradition -- Chapter 6 Mushrooms and Philosophers -- Shade-foots -- The Scene of Necromancy -- Peisander and the Affair of the Profanations -- The Swamp of Dionysus -- Tongue-in-Bellies and Revealers -- Socrates as Profaner of the Mysteries -- Mushrooms -- Aja Ekapad -- Prometheus as Shade-foot and the Theft of Fire -- Philosophers -- Chapter 7 The Wild and the Cultivated: Wine in Euripides' Bacchae -- The Discovery of Wine -- The Reconciliation with Primitivism.

The Making of Wine -- The mad Ring and the God -- Double Birth and the God's Surrogate -- The first Birth -- The second Birth -- The Paradigm of Actaeon -- The Regression of Cadmean Thebes -- From Pollution to Fertility -- Toward an Understanding of Tragedy -- Chapter 8 The Offerings from the Hyperboreans -- Introduction -- The Route for the Offerings -- Hyperboreans -- The Garden of Apollo -- Lycians -- Apollo -- Sacrifice -- Thargelia -- Soma -- Daphnephoria -- The Secret Offering -- Notes on the Essays in this Book.