A Hundred Jars from a Horse's Hoof: The Rigveda's Other Intoxicant

A Miracle Made of Beer

Somewhere in the Punjab, a poet of the Pajra family named Kakṣīvat is listing the favours the Aśvins have done for people who sang well. They restored an old man’s youth. They fitted an iron leg to a woman who lost hers in battle. They rescued a man from a well. Then, in the seventh verse of RV 1.116, they do something stranger:

Ye poured forth from the hoof of your strong charger a hundred jars of wine as from a strainer.

(RV 1.116.7, trans. Ralph T. H. Griffith, 1896) [1]

Griffith’s “wine” is surā in the Sanskrit: śatáṃ kumbhām̐ asiñcataṃ surā́yāḥ, a hundred pots of it, poured from the hoof of a stallion as though the hoof were a filter. It is one of the more physically peculiar miracles in the corpus, and it is also, quietly, one of the rarest words in it.

The Rigveda has two intoxicating drinks. One of them, sóma, gets the ninth book to itself: 114 hymns, 1,108 verses, an entire liturgical department devoted to pressing a plant, straining the juice through wool, mixing it with milk and watching a god come out the other end. The other one is surā, and outside the hundred jars in Kakṣīvat’s hymn you will find it in five more places. Six hymns. Seven verses. Two of those seven are disputed.

That is a ratio worth sitting with, because on every other kind of evidence surā was the drink of the Vedic world in the way that beer is the drink of most agricultural societies: cheap, grain-based, made at home, drunk by everyone. Soma was a specialist product made from a plant whose identity we have argued about for two hundred years. What we have in the Rigveda, in other words, is not a record of what people drank. It is a record of what could be sung about, and the gap between the two is where this article lives.

The Six Places

Here is the whole dossier. It fits in a table, which is itself the point.

Table 1. Every occurrence of surā in the Rigveda Saṃhitā, with the deity of the hymn and the word Griffith chose in 1896. The last row is the one to watch. [1]

Four of the six are about losing control, and the two that are not are about getting a great deal of the stuff at once. There is no hymn to surā, no verse describing how it is made, no epithet praising its taste. Compare the treatment of soma, where the poets narrate the pressing stones, the wool filter, the mixing bowls and the sound of the juice running, in industrial detail, across more than a thousand verses. The soma workshop is documented. The brewery is not.

Methods note. Counting a word in the Rigveda is less mechanical than it sounds. A plain search of the romanised text for the string surā returns twenty-five hits, of which eighteen are the adjective su-rā́dhas, “of good bounty”, and its relatives: surā́dhasaḥ, surā́dhāḥ, surātáyaḥ. Strip those out and seven remain. The Vedic Concordance, compiled by Maurice Bloomfield in 1906 and still the fastest way to locate a Vedic phrase, sorts such collisions by indexing whole pādas rather than strings. [5] Any count in this article can be checked against it.

Two of the seven deserve a warning label. At RV 8.21.14 the word sits inside the compound surā́śvaḥ, which is transparent in its parts and obscure as a whole: surā plus aśva, “horse”, giving something like “whose horse is liquor”. Translators have guessed variously at drunkards, at people made reckless, at a class of scoffers. Griffith’s “flown with wine” is a guess dressed as an idiom. And at RV 10.131.4-5 the form is surā́mam, which is not simply surā but a derivative whose analysis has been argued over since the nineteenth century. [8] So: five secure attestations, two arguable, and a total that no honest count will pin below five or above seven.

What the Word Is

Surā (Sanskrit: सुरा) is old. Its Younger Avestan cognate is hurā, with the regular Iranian s to h shift that also turns Vedic sóma into Avestan haoma, and the word survives into Middle Persian as hōr. That gives a Proto-Indo-Iranian form, which means that the ancestors of the Vedic and Iranian peoples had a word for an intoxicating drink that was not soma or haoma before the two branches separated. [3][6]

Whether the word has a deeper etymology is a different question. A derivation from the root su or sav, “to press, to extract”, has been proposed, which would make surā and sóma siblings in name as well as in function, both of them named for the act of squeezing something out. It is attractive. It is also not secure, and the standard etymological reference for the Old Indo-Aryan lexicon treats the deeper history with more caution than popular accounts do. [7]

What the comparative evidence does establish is the thing that matters here. Two drinks, two words, both inherited, both in place before the Rigveda. The hymns did not discover surā and decline to describe it because it was new. They knew it perfectly well, and had known it for centuries. The choice was editorial.

What Was Actually in the Pot

Here the Rigveda gives us almost nothing and the later Vedic texts give us a great deal, which is itself diagnostic of what kind of text the Rigveda is.

The ritual literature that follows it, the Yajurveda saṃhitās and the śrauta manuals, has to specify how to make surā because a rite requires it, and specification means a recipe. The vocabulary that emerges is technical: tokman, sprouted grain; śaṣpa, young shoots; māsara, a preparation involving roasted grain; and nagnahu, a compound starter of plant material whose function is to get the fermentation going. James McHugh’s reconstruction, the most detailed we have, describes a brew made in a thick, semi-solid mash rather than a thin liquid, saccharified with malt and very likely with a mixed microbial starter of the kind still used for rice beers across Asia, then strained. [3][4]

One consequence of that reconstruction is worth stating plainly, because the internet gets it wrong with great confidence: surā was not distilled. Distillation is a later arrival in South Asia, and the Vedic descriptions contain nothing resembling a still. What they describe is beer.

Aside. The reason grain needs malt and honey does not is chemistry, and it explains a real asymmetry in the Vedic evidence. Yeast cannot ferment starch. It has to be handed sugar. Malting, or an amylolytic starter culture, supplies the enzymes that break the long chains down first:

$$(\mathrm{C_6H_{10}O_5})n + n\,\mathrm{H_2O} \longrightarrow n\,\mathrm{C_6H$$}O_6

and only then can the familiar step run:

$$\mathrm{C_6H_{12}O_6} \longrightarrow 2\,\mathrm{C_2H_5OH} + 2\,\mathrm{CO_2}$$

Honey and fruit skip the first equation entirely, which is why a mead or a wine can be made by accident and a beer cannot. Beer is a technology. Somebody has to know the trick, and the trick has to be taught. That is one reason the near-total Rigvedic silence on honey and its possible fermentation is a different kind of silence from the silence about surā.

Table 2. The brewing vocabulary, and the stratum each term belongs to. Only the first and last appear in the Rigveda, and parisrut is contested: in RV 9.1.6 it may simply describe soma flowing round, while later texts use it of a fermented drink. [3][6]

The two Paippalāda Atharvaveda hymns published and analysed by Marianne Oort in 2002 add something the Rigveda never offers: a description of surā as an experience. They treat its preparation and its effects at length, and Oort raises, carefully, the question of whether one passage points to a concentration technique. [9] Whatever one concludes there, the contrast in genre is the finding. The Atharvaveda, which deals with households, illnesses, rivals and desires, has room for beer. The Rigveda, which is a collection of hymns for a public sacrifice, does not.

Where the Surā Went in Translation

Return to RV 10.131, the strangest entry in Table 1. The Sanskrit of verse 5 reads, in part, yát surā́maṃ vy ápibaḥ śácībhiḥ sárasvatī tvā maghavann abhiṣṇak: when you drank the surā-draught by your powers, Sarasvatī healed you, O bountiful one. Griffith renders the first half “When thou, with might, hadst drunk the draught that gladdens”, and in the preceding verse he turns surā́mam into “grateful Soma juice”. [1]

Table 3. Four renderings from the standard nineteenth-century English Rigveda. Griffith was not being dishonest; he was translating a sacred text for a Victorian readership and reaching, repeatedly, for the least disreputable available word. [1]

I do not think this is a scandal, and it is worth saying why. “Wine” was the default English word for any ancient intoxicant in 1896, carrying classical and biblical associations that made it feel appropriate to scripture in a way “beer” did not. But the effect compounds. A reader working through Griffith, which for a century was how most English speakers met the Rigveda, would come away having never encountered the word surā at all, and would find soma in a verse where the Sanskrit does not have it. The later translators restore the distinction, and the ritual tradition itself settles the question beyond argument: the entire rite that grows out of RV 10.131 is named for surā, not for soma.

The Rite That Rehabilitated the Beer

That rite is the Sautrāmaṇī, named for Indra sutrā́man, “good protector”, and it is one of the odder things in the śrauta system: a solemn public sacrifice whose central offering is the drink that every moralising text in the tradition disapproves of.

The myth behind it is already half-present in the Rigvedic verses. Indra has overdone the soma. In the Brāhmaṇa telling, the soma runs back out of him through every opening, and the demon Namuci seizes on his vital energy along with the surā; the Aśvins and Sarasvatī take the energy back from Namuci and restore it, healing Indra. [11] Read RV 10.131.5 again with that in mind:

As parents aid a son, both Aśvins, Indra, aided thee with their wondrous Powers and wisdom. When thou, with might, hadst drunk the draught that gladdens, Sarasvatī, O Maghavan, refreshed thee.

(RV 10.131.5, trans. Griffith 1896; the “draught” is surā́mam, and abhiṣṇak is specifically “healed”) [1]

The hymn has the drink, the Aśvins, Sarasvatī, the healing and the word abhiṣṇak from the root meaning “to heal”. The Brāhmaṇa has not invented a story to justify a ritual. It has expanded one already sitting in the text, and the ritual follows the myth’s logic exactly: in the Sautrāmaṇī, cups of surā go alongside cups of milk to the Aśvins, to Sarasvatī and to Indra, the three parties named in the hymn. [11][12] The residue is poured into a perforated vessel so that it trickles down as an offering to the Fathers. [11]

graph TD
    A["RV 10.131.4-5: Indra, surā, Namuci"] --> B["Aśvins and Sarasvatī heal Indra"]
    B --> C["Brāhmaṇa myth expands the episode"]
    C --> D["Sautrāmaṇī: surā cups to three deities"]
    D --> E["Residue offered to the Fathers"]
    C --> F["Vājapeya: soma and surā paired"]
    F --> G["Soma to the patron, surā to the vaiśya"]

Figure 2. How seven obscure verses became a ritual. The Sautrāmaṇī is the only śrauta rite with surā at its centre, and its authority runs directly back to the Rigvedic passage.

Soma Is Truth, Surā Is Darkness

The Vājapeya, a soma sacrifice in the fifth book of the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa, sets the two drinks side by side and then says out loud what the Rigveda only implies. The sacrificer receives the soma. A vaiśya, a commoner, receives the surā. And the text explains the arrangement without a flicker of embarrassment: the soma is truth, prosperity and light, and the surā is untruth, misery and darkness. [10]

It would be hard to find a cleaner statement of what is going on. The distinction between the two drinks is not pharmacological. Both are intoxicants; the tradition says so. It is social. Soma belongs to the ritual class and to the patron who funds the sacrifice; surā belongs to the producer class, and the ritual is constructed so that each receives what corresponds to his rank. The hierarchy of drinks is a hierarchy of people wearing a hierarchy of drinks as a costume.

Table 4. The two drinks compared. The right-hand column is the one nobody writes books about, and it is the one nearly everybody was drinking. [3][10][15]

Aside. The comparison with the Iranian branch is instructive and slightly deflating for anyone hoping for symmetry. Avestan has haoma as its central ritual drink and hurā as a word for an ordinary intoxicant, which suggests that the two-tier arrangement, a sacred pressed drink and a profane brewed one, is older than either tradition. Harry Falk’s argument that soma was a stimulant rather than a hallucinogen, and that the ecstatic readings of Maṇḍala 9 have been overdrawn, bears on this too: if soma’s effect was closer to caffeine than to a vision quest, then its status was never really about the strength of the experience. [15] For the botanical side of that long argument, see the soma identification problem.

What the Silence Is Evidence Of

Three readings of the Rigvedic near-silence are worth distinguishing, since they are often blurred together.

The first is generic. The Rigveda is a liturgical anthology, not a description of life. It sings about what is offered to gods in a public rite, and surā was not, until the Sautrāmaṇī made an exception of it. On this reading the silence tells us nothing at all about how much beer was drunk in a Vedic village, only about what the poets were commissioned to write. This is the most conservative position and probably the most nearly correct one.

The second is social. Surā is the drink of the household and the commoner, and the poets were employed by, and often were, the people at the top of that arrangement. The Vājapeya’s assignment of soma to the patron and surā to the vaiśya would then be a formalisation of an attitude that the Rigveda already holds silently. The evidence for this is real but circumstantial, and it rests heavily on texts several centuries younger than the hymns. [19]

The third is moral, and it is the weakest. On this reading the poets disapproved of surā and left it out. The problem is that the Rigveda is not squeamish. It has a hymn in the voice of a ruined gambler, it has frank sexual bargaining, it has poets complaining about their fees. [20] A tradition willing to publish the gambler’s confession is not a tradition that suppresses a beverage out of delicacy. What RV 7.86.6 gives us is not disapproval so much as diagnosis:

Not our own will betrayed us, but seduction, thoughtlessness, Varuṇa, wine, dice, or anger. The old is near to lead astray the younger: even sleep removeth not all evil-doing.

(RV 7.86.6, trans. Griffith 1896; “wine” is surā, “dice” the vibhī́daka nuts, “anger” manyú) [1]

That is a list of the four standard ways a Vedic man loses hold of himself, and it is a remarkably modern list: drink, gambling, rage and simple inattention. The poet is not condemning surā. He is explaining to Varuṇa that a man is not identical with his worst evening. The same verse is one of the very few places where manyú, anger personified, stands in a list of ordinary human failings rather than as a battlefield force.

Aside. Arguments from silence are the most abused instrument in Vedic studies, and the discipline knows it. The rule of thumb that survives scrutiny is this: silence is evidence only when you can show that the text had both the occasion and the vocabulary to speak. For surā both conditions hold. The word existed, inherited from Indo-Iranian, and hymns that catalogue a patron’s wealth or a god’s miracles had every opportunity to mention beer among the goods. One hymn does exactly that, at RV 10.107.9, where the generous man wins a fragrant house, a well-dressed bride and the drinking of surā, in that order. So the silence elsewhere is real and not an artefact of our sample.

The Long Afterlife

Follow the drink forward and it acquires everything the Rigveda withheld: description, classification, regulation and sin.

The Mānava Dharmaśāstra distinguishes three kinds by their raw material: gauḍī from molasses, paiṣṭī from ground grain, and mādhvī from the flowers of the madhūka tree. All three are forbidden to the twice-born, and the reasoning is given in a single vivid sentence: surā is the dirty refuse of grain, and sin is also called dirt. [13] Drinking it becomes one of the gravest offences a brahmin can commit, with elaborate penance attached.

Meanwhile, in an entirely different register, Kauṭilya’s Arthaśāstra devotes a chapter to the superintendent of liquor: licensing, taxation, quality, the layout of drinking houses, the staff who watch for customers spending beyond their means. [14] The state has no theological opinion about surā whatsoever. It has a revenue interest.

graph LR
    A["Rigveda: 7 verses, no recipe"] --> B["Yajurveda and Śrautasūtras: a recipe"]
    B --> C["Sautrāmaṇī: a rite"]
    C --> D["Dharmaśāstra: a sin"]
    D --> E["Arthaśāstra: a tax base"]

Figure 4. The same drink, seen through four genres over roughly a millennium. Each genre sees exactly what its purpose requires it to see, and none of them sees the whole thing.

Set the four stages next to each other and a pattern emerges that has nothing to do with alcohol. A liturgical text records what is offered. A ritual manual records what is done. A legal text records what is forbidden. An administrative text records what can be taxed. Every one of them is a partial view, and the Rigveda’s partiality is the easiest to mistake for completeness, because it came first and because we have been trained to read it as the foundation of everything.

Reading the Gap

The most human verse in the whole dossier is the simile at RV 8.2.12, and it is human precisely because the poet is not thinking about surā at all. He is trying to describe what soma does inside the body:

hṛtsú pītā́so yudhyante durmadā́so ná surā́yām

“Drunk into the hearts, they do battle, like men badly drunk on surā.”

RV 8.2.12. Translation after Griffith (1896), with the Sanskrit restored. [1][2]

To make a simile work, you reach for what your audience knows. This poet reached for a scene of men who have had too much beer and started fighting, and he reached for it so casually that the picture must have been entirely ordinary. Notice the grammatical shape as well: durmadā́so ná, using the particle ná in its comparative sense, the same small word that elsewhere means “not” and that Vedic poets exploited with deliberate ambiguity.

One verse of comparison, thrown away in the middle of a hymn to Indra, tells us more about ordinary Vedic drinking than the 1,108 verses of Maṇḍala 9 tell us about ordinary Vedic anything. The hymns are not a window onto a society. They are a highly polished surface with a few scratches in it, and the scratches are where the light gets through.

What I find genuinely interesting about surā is not that it was ignored but how precisely the ignoring was calibrated. The word was never banned from the text; it appears when a miracle needs quantifying, when a sin needs listing, when a simile needs grounding, when a demon needs a plot device. It was simply never the subject. Three thousand years later we manage something structurally identical every time we distinguish a natural wine from a cheap lager, or a ceremonial cup from a can: the chemistry is the same molecule, and the distinction we are actually drawing is about who we are when we drink it. The Vedic poets were doing that first, and with less self-consciousness, and they left the evidence in the shape of the gap rather than in anything they said.

Open RV 1.116 and read the whole list of Aśvin rescues in order: the rejuvenated old man, the iron leg, the man in the well, the hundred jars. Then ask why, in a catalogue of miracles addressed to the gods who heal, the miracle involving beer is the only one nobody quotes.