Syrian Rue

Syrian rue, Peganum harmala, is a low tough shrub of dry ground from Anatolia and the eastern Mediterranean across Iran to Central Asia, and its most widespread use has nothing to do with visions.

The seeds are thrown on charcoal and the smoke is passed around people, doorways, vehicles, shops and newborn children as a protection against the evil eye. In Iran it is esfand, in Turkey uzerlik, and the practice is entirely ordinary: it is done at weddings, on returning from a journey, when someone has been complimented too warmly, and when a business opens. Rhymes are said as the seeds pop.

This is one of the most durable pre-Islamic survivals in the region. It has no basis in Islamic doctrine, it has been objected to by clerics on and off for centuries, and it has continued regardless, protected by being domestic and small rather than by being defended. The seeds are sold everywhere they are used.

The plant is also a longstanding dye source, giving the red of Turkish carpets from its seeds, and a folk medicine for a wide range of complaints. Most of its cultural presence across a very large area rests on those two uses and on the smoke, not on ingestion, and accounts that treat it primarily as an entheogen have the proportions backwards.

Syrian rue's seeds carry harmine and harmaline, beta carboline alkaloids of the same class as those in the ayahuasca vine, which makes it a monoamine oxidase inhibitor and therefore capable of the same enzyme-blocking role in a combination.

On that basis David Flattery and Martin Schwartz argued at length in 1989 that the Avestan haoma, and by extension the Vedic soma, was Peganum harmala. Their case is philological and pharmacological together: they read the Zoroastrian textual descriptions of haoma's effects as matching harmaline intoxication, they trace the plant's names and its persistence in Iranian folk practice, and they argue that the modern Parsi use of ephedra represents a substitution made after the original was lost.

The objections are equally serious. Harmaline alone is unpleasant, producing nausea and a heavy, leaden state rather than the exhilaration and strength the hymns describe. The Vedic descriptions of a plant pressed for juice on mountains do not obviously fit a seed-bearing desert shrub. And the argument depends on reading poetic texts as clinical description, which is the same methodological move that weakens the fly agaric case.

There are at least three live candidates for soma and haoma: ephedra, on grounds of ritual continuity; fly agaric, on Wasson's reading; and Syrian rue, on Flattery and Schwartz's. None is established. The atlas holds this as an open question and records all three plants as candidates rather than picking one.