Haoma

← Encyclopedia

Zarathustra was tending the fire at the hour of the pressing, singing the Wise Lord’s own hymns over it, when the plant came and stood beside him. Not a bundle of stalks but a person: the tradition holds that he appeared in the shape of a beautiful man, the fairest in the whole bodily world. The prophet asked him a question — who among mortals had first pressed him, and what reward the presser had won for it — and the plant answered by rolling out its pressers down the ages. Vivanghvant pressed first, and his reward was a son, Yima the splendid, who would reign over a deathless golden age. Athwya pressed second, and his reward was the birth of Thraetaona, who would strike down the three-headed dragon. Thrita pressed third, and to him were born Keresaspa the club-bearing hero and his brother Urvakhshaya. And the fourth to press was Pourushaspa — and the son granted him for it was Zarathustra himself, the questioner, standing at his own fire. The plant had named, as the last and greatest of the gifts it gives, the prophet who was even then asking.

The plant is Haoma, and he is the single strangest figure in the Zoroastrian divine world: the one yazata a worshiper can hold in the hand. Every other being worthy of worship in this religion is a power with no body to pick up — the fire, the heard word, the guardian spirits, victory itself. Haoma alone wears a plant for flesh. He is the herb and he is the god of the herb at once, pressed and offered and shared, the deity who arrives on the altar not as an image or a name but as a substance the priest can crush in water. To worship him is also to handle him, and to handle him is also to worship.

The name and how it reaches the record

The oldest thing about Haoma is the word, and the word is a twin. Avestan haoma is the exact cognate of Vedic soma, the pressed drink at the center of the oldest Indian sacrifice; the two are the same inherited word in the two daughter languages, and both descend from a reconstructed Proto-Indo-Iranian *sauma. The ancestor is built from a verbal root meaning “to press, to pound” — so the name says, at its root, simply the pressed thing, that which is squeezed out. The plant is named for what is done to it. Before there were Iranians and Indians there were speakers of one tongue who already crushed a mountain plant between stones, strained it, and drank it as a god; the shared word is the fossil of that common rite, carried west onto the Iranian plateau by the people who would follow Zarathustra and south into India by the people who would compose the Veda. Haoma is thus one of the oldest strata of the whole Iranian sacred world — older than any temple, and older, by the linguistic reckoning, than the prophet whose religion took him up.

Within the Iranian corpus his praise gathers into one great hymn. The Avesta — the scripture the tradition carried by memory for centuries before the Sasanian church wrote it down — sets the worship of Haoma at the liturgical heart of its central act. The praise is the Hom Yasht, and it fills three chapters, Yasna 9 through 11, recited by the priest at the point in the service where the offering is prepared. The dialogue of the first pressers runs across the opening of the first of these chapters, Yasna 9.3 through 9.11: Zarathustra puts his question, and Haoma answers it presser by presser, each answer a small myth in itself. Vivanghvant’s reward is the birth of Yima Khshaeta — the Jamshid of later Persian legend, the first king, whose reign the tradition remembers as an age without cold or heat, age or death. Athwya’s reward is Thraetaona — Fereydun in the epic — who bound the demon-serpent Azi Dahaka. Thrita’s reward is a pair of heroes, Keresaspa the monster-slayer, remembered later as Garshasp, and Urvakhshaya. And the fourth answer is the one that turns the legend on its axis: where every other tradition of the pressing hands the reward to a king or a hero, the Zoroastrian version makes the fourth and finest gift the prophet himself. Pourushaspa pressed, and Zarathustra was born. The hymn folds the founder of the religion into the plant’s own list of blessings.

The prophet to whom the hymn is addressed stands at one of the most disputed points in the study of ancient Iran — a traditional reckoning would place Zarathustra near the sixth century before the common era, while the archaic grammar of his own hymns, the Gathas, argues for a date many centuries earlier, deep in the second millennium. That argument belongs to the songs themselves. What matters for Haoma is that the plant’s cult reaches back through him and past him: the pressing is older than the prophet who is said to have been its fourth reward, and the corpus that preserves the hymn carries, in the Hom Yasht, one of the tradition’s clearest windows onto a rite it inherited rather than invented.

The one healer with a plant-body

In the settled theology Haoma is a yazata, a “being worthy of worship,” one of the beneficent divinities who serve Ahura Mazda, the Wise Lord, and uphold the good creation. But he is a yazata of a wholly particular kind. Where Atar the fire is the visible sign of the truth called Asha, where Sraosha is the heard divine word that keeps the night-watch, where Verethragna is the force of victory — powers faced and invoked but never held — Haoma is the consecrated gift itself. He is the offering that is also a god, the substance poured out that is counted among the divinities to whom it is poured. The tradition calls him, in the hymn, the juice pressed for the sustaining of the living world.

His epithets fix his character in two words. He is zairi-gaona — “golden-green,” or literally “yellow-haired,” named for the color of the growing herb and the color of the strained juice. And he is duraosha, the standing title that clings to him through the whole tradition: “the death-averting,” the one who keeps death at a distance, holds it off, sets it far away. The name is a promise. Haoma is hailed as a healer, chief among the plants of healing, a giver of strength to the body, of alert and wakeful awareness to the mind, of long life to the old and of illustrious children to those who ask him. He is the plant petitioned for wholeness — for a sound body, a clear head, and offspring worth the name. To press him is to ask, through the substance in the hand, for exactly the goods the substance is said to carry.

His consecrated preparation is the parahaoma, and it stands at the very center of the priestly act of worship, the Yasna — the seventy-two-chapter liturgy whose whole architecture the pressing anchors, and whose longer extensions, the Visperad and the Vendidad, are built out from the same core. The parahaoma is prepared and offered, and a portion consumed, within the service, so that the god in his plant-body passes through the rite at its climax. In the account of the Encyclopaedia Iranica’s article on the haoma rituals, this consecrated liquid is the essential offering the whole Yasna is arranged around — the medium through which the worshiper and the Wise Lord’s good creation are drawn together. The particulars of the priest’s work belong to the priests; what the public record holds is the shape of the thing, not its operation. Haoma is the still point at the center of the worship, the gift that makes the act of giving.

Above the earthly herb the tradition sets its cosmic archetype, and here the plant becomes a tree at the root of the world. This is the White Haoma, called the Gaokerena — the Gokard of the Pahlavi books — the king of all healing plants, growing not on any mountain but in the deep of the mythic sea Vourukasha, the great heavenly ocean at the center of creation. Near it stands the Tree of All Seeds, which holds the germ of every plant in the world; the White Haoma grows among the waters beside it, the mightiest of the healing herbs. This developed cosmology is drawn chiefly from the Pahlavi compendium the tradition calls the Bundahishn, “the Creation,” with the Selections of Zadspram alongside it, elaborating older Avestan material. In the Bundahishn’s account, the White Haoma is guarded in the deep because the whole promise of the world’s end depends on it. Its life-giving essence is the source of the immortality — the ambrosia — that will be conferred on the resurrected at the Frashokereti, the “making wonderful,” the final renovation when the Lie is undone, the dead are raised, and the world is remade wholesome and deathless. Everyone who partakes of it, the text says, becomes immortal; at the renovation of the universe its deathlessness is prepared from it. So the plant reaches, in a single arc, from the priest’s hand in the present service all the way to the last day: the same power that is pressed for health this morning is the power that will abolish death at the end of time. Haoma the death-averter averts, in his highest form, the last death of all.

The lost plant, and the argument over it

What plant, exactly, is pressed — this is the long question, and it is genuinely unsettled scholarship rather than settled fact. It is a question about botany and philology, and about a rite whose original ingredient may have dropped out of reliable use while the words that praised it stayed in the liturgy. The modern communities have a firm answer for their own practice. Iranian and Indian Zoroastrians today press a species of ephedra, the jointed, effectively leafless mountain shrub valued across Central Asia for the stimulant alkaloid it carries; the companion Iranica article on the botany records that Parsi priests use Ephedra procera, imported from the Hari River valley in western Afghanistan, where the ephedrine-bearing species grow in the borderlands between Iran and India. In Yazd, in Iran, the plant is known locally as hum or hom. Because ephedra does not thrive on the Indian subcontinent, the priests of Mumbai and Gujarat import the twigs, and the rite is worked with very small quantities of them.

Whether that modern ephedra is the ancient *sauma is another matter, and the twentieth century argued it hard. The most widely publicized proposal came from R. Gordon Wasson, whose Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality (1968) identified the ancestral plant with the fly-agaric mushroom, Amanita muscaria, reading certain images in the texts against the documented shamanic use of the mushroom in Siberia. The philologists answered. John Brough, in a closely argued 1971 paper in the Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, dismantled the mushroom case on the ground that a stimulant suited to warriors before battle fits the texts far better than a mushroom that does not press or strain as the liturgy describes. Harry Falk carried the counter-argument furthest in a 1989 paper in the same journal, holding that the Vedic and Old Iranian evidence describes enhanced alertness and wakefulness rather than any vision — that, in his reading, there is nothing shamanistic or visionary in the early texts at all — and that ephedra, the stimulant of the right mountains, is the best candidate. A rival line ran the other way: in the same year, David Flattery and Martin Schwartz, in Haoma and Harmaline (University of California Press, 1989), made the β-carboline-bearing Syrian rue, Peganum harmala, the primary ingredient, with ephedra secondary. The identification of the ancestral plant is not closed, and it is worth marking what the debate is not. It is a philological and botanical puzzle over a lost sacrament, argued from the vocabulary of pressing and the pharmacology of mountain herbs. Whether the ancient plant was ever “hallucinogenic” is itself in dispute — Falk reads the whole early record as un-visionary — and the question turns on how a few dozen liturgical verses describe a state, not on any recoverable recipe.

The living pressing

Haoma is not an antiquarian figure recovered from a dead book. The parahaoma is prepared and offered by the priests within the Yasna, present tense, in the fire temples of Yazd and Kerman in Iran and among the Parsis of Mumbai and Gujarat — the descendants of Zoroastrians who carried their faith to the west coast of India after the fall of the old empire. These are small communities now, and aging, their numbers recorded by their own institutions without consolation; but the worship goes on, and at its center, as it has been for as long as the rite can be traced, is the golden-green plant crushed in water and offered to the Wise Lord. That the Indian priests must import their ephedra from the Afghan mountains, twig by careful twig, is itself a measure of the continuity: a rite that has outlasted empires still reaches back to the same borderlands for the same herb.

The hymn that praises Haoma was fixed in its transmitted shape under the Sasanians, the last great Iranian empire before Islam, whose state church gathered and canonized the scattered Avesta and gave the Hom Yasht its place in the written Yasna. The Arab conquest of the mid-seventh century ended that patronage, and the long attrition that followed — the shrinking of the community, the exile that carried one portion of the faithful to Gujarat — belongs to the history of the Zoroastrians as a whole. What survived that history, wherever the fire was kept, was the pressing. Two priesthoods separated by three thousand years of divergent theology, the Iranian and the Indian who were once one people, are still each doing at the heart of their highest rite what their common ancestors did: crushing the same-named plant and offering the god who is the plant.

There is, in the end, no relic of Haoma to display in a case, because the god is not a thing that is kept but a thing that is done — pressed fresh each time, consumed, and gone, and pressed again. He is the yazata who has to be remade at every service, the divinity that lasts precisely by not lasting, renewed in the hand of a priest at dawn. The Wise Lord’s fire burns without extinction; the heard word is spoken once and stands; but the death-averter must be pounded again this morning, and tomorrow, a small green sacrament reaching from the priest’s hand in Yazd or Mumbai to the deep waters where the White Haoma waits to abolish death for good. The prophet’s own hymn had already said what the plant was for. It is the one, Haoma answered him at the fire, that keeps death away.

→ Related: Atar · Verethragna · Sraosha · Fravashi · Yazd Atash Behram · Udvada Atash Behram · Ka Ba Ye Zartosht · Pir E Naraki · The Zoroastrians · The Sasanians · Gathas