Soma: The Pressed God of Mandala 9

One whole book of the Rig Veda is given over to a single subject, and that subject is a drink. Mandala 9, the ninth book, contains 114 hymns, and nearly all of them address Soma Pavamana, ‘Soma the purifying,’ as the pressed juice streams through a woollen filter into the vats. Across the rest of the collection Soma draws well over a hundred more references. Few things in the text are praised so relentlessly. Browse the book at Mandala 9.

What makes Soma fascinating, and frustrating, is that it is three things at once: a plant, the drink pressed from it, and a god.

The ritual, in motion

The Mandala 9 hymns are unusually concrete about process. Stalks are pounded between pressing stones; the juice is strained through sheep’s wool; it is mixed with water and milk and poured for the gods, above all for Indra, who is said to drink Soma before his great deeds. The recurring word pavamana, ‘flowing clear,’ is the action the entire book celebrates.

The Mandala 9 problem: what was the plant?

The hymns describe the ritual in detail but never give a botany lesson, and the plant itself fell out of use early. So scholars have argued for more than a century over its identity. The leading candidates:

R. Gordon Wasson’s 1968 book Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality made the fly-agaric theory famous. The Sanskritist John Brough attacked it hard, pointing out that the texts describe a plant with stalks pressed for juice, not a mushroom, and Harry Falk’s 1989 study marshalled evidence for Ephedra, a view many now treat as the most defensible.

The honest position is that we do not know. The Rig Veda preserves the rite in extraordinary detail and the plant in almost none.

A shared Indo-Iranian inheritance

Soma is not only an Indian puzzle. Its Iranian cousin is Haoma, central to Zoroastrian ritual, and both descend from a single Proto-Indo-Iranian drink, reconstructed as sauma. The match of name, ritual and divine status across the two traditions is strong evidence that the Soma cult predates the split of the Indo-Iranian peoples. Whatever the plant was, the practice is older than the Rig Veda itself.

When the plant was already lost

One striking piece of evidence is that the later Vedic tradition itself seems unsure what Soma was. The ritual manuals of the Brahmana and Srautasutra period provide rules for substitutes: if the true Soma cannot be obtained, certain other plants may stand in for it, with prescribed procedures. A tradition does not write rules for substitutes while the original is still common to hand. This suggests that within a few centuries of the Rig Veda the Vedic people had moved away from the mountainous regions where the plant grew, and the memory of the plant began to fade even as the hymns that praise it were preserved word for word. The poetry outlasted the botany, which is exactly the situation that makes the modern detective work both possible and necessary.

What the experience may have been

The hymns leave little doubt that Soma did something. Verses describe a sense of expansion and exhilaration, most famously the late and unusual RV 10.119, the so-called ‘self-praise of the drinker,’ in which the speaker boasts, ‘I have drunk Soma, I have become immortal, I have reached the light.’ Indra’s mythology is bound up with Soma too: he is said to drink it before slaying the serpent Vritra and releasing the waters. Whether the effect was chiefly stimulant, as Ephedra would suggest, or something stronger, the texts present Soma as a substance that lifts both gods and poets above their ordinary limits.

It is worth being careful here. The Rig Veda is ritual poetry, not a pharmacological report, and ‘immortality’ in these hymns is a religious claim about the sacrifice as much as a description of a felt state. The honest summary is that Soma was a real prepared drink with real effects, embedded in a rite the poets considered world-sustaining, and that the gap between what they describe and what we can identify botanically remains one of the most durable open questions in Vedic studies.