Soma

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Soma is the pressed plant-juice at the heart of the oldest Indian ritual, and at once the plant it comes from and the god who is that juice. In the hymns of the Rigveda it is all three without contradiction: a stalk gathered in the mountains, crushed between stones and strained through a fleece, mixed with milk or water, and poured out to the gods — and a deity addressed directly, praised, and asked for vigor, healing, and long life. The whole ninth book of the Rigveda is given over to Soma as it runs through the filter, the act of pressing and clarifying narrated as if the god were purifying himself.

What the drink did is reported plainly in the texts. It exhilarated. The poets describe a quickening, a sense of swelling beyond the body and of touching the gods; one celebrated hymn has the speaker declare, in the surge of it, that he has drunk and become immortal, reached the light, found the gods. The drink was above all the food of Indra, who is said to have drained it before slaying the dragon Vritra and releasing the waters — so that the cosmic deed and the priestly offering mirror each other, the god’s strength and the strength in the cup being told as one thing.

The plant’s identity is the long-standing puzzle, and it is genuinely unsettled. The Soma of the high Vedic age seems to have been lost early; later Indian tradition was already substituting other plants in the rite, which suggests the original was no longer obtainable. Modern proposals have ranged widely — the ephedra shrub, valued for its stimulant alkaloids; various mountain plants; and, in a much-discussed twentieth-century argument, the fly-agaric mushroom, on the strength of certain images read as describing an intoxicant taken without ordinary roots or leaves. None of these has won consensus, and whether Soma was a stimulant, a hallucinogen, or something milder remains an open scholarly question rather than a settled one.

The Iranian branch of the same heritage preserves a close cognate: haoma, the pressed sacred drink of Zoroastrian ritual, named with the same word and pressed in much the same way, evidence that the cult reaches back before the Indian and Iranian traditions parted. Within India the figure drifted upward over time. Soma the drink and god came to be identified with the moon — the waxing and waning vessel from which the gods were thought to drink — so that a word that began as the name of an earthly plant ended as the name of a body in the sky. What the rite once tasted of, the texts no longer say.

→ Related: Indra · Ritual Purification