SOMA

SOMA is a Vedic god; a drink offered to the gods and shared among ritual participants; and the plant that yields the juice for this drink. Middle and late Vedic literature describe the classical Vedic rituals in detail, and among these rituals, the soma rites are among the most prestigious and complex. In these rites, stalks of the soma plant are soaked in water and then crushed. The extracted liquid is poured through a filter into vessels. Left plain, or mixed with milk and various oblations, it is then offered into the fire for the gods and drunk by the priests and by the sacrificer of the rite. During the principal day of a soma sacrifice, there are three rounds of soma preparation and offering, one each in the morning, midday, and evening.

The later Vedic literature and the rites they describe often continue traditions already well established in the Ṛgveda. Indeed, although it contains hymns created for various rites, the core Ṛgveda is primarily a liturgical collection for soma rites. The principal collection of hymns dedicated to Soma in the Ṛgveda is book 9, which contains 114 hymns to the Soma Pavamāna ("Soma purifying himself"). These hymns were chanted as the soma was pressed and poured through the filter into vessels.

In the early tradition, participation in the soma rite was essential for both gods and men—Goddesses and women were both excluded from drinking the liquid. Among the gods, the principal recipient, Indra, is the dominant divinity in the soma rite and therefore in the Ṛgveda itself. Receiving the soma strengthens Indra and enables him to perform the deeds that have made, and continue to make, life possible. Indra drinks the soma —three lakes of soma according to Ṛgveda 5.29.7—in order to strike down Vṛtra, the paragon and paradigm of all obstacles. "Sharpened by soma " (Ṛgveda 10.108.8), Indra, together with a band of priests, releases the cattle, the symbol of dawn and substance of prosperity in Vedic India, by breaking open the cave in which they had been imprisoned. Offered soma, Indra defeats the human and semi-demonic enemies of his worshippers.

Because men participate in the soma rite as both offerers and drinkers of soma, they too are transformed by it. A family lord, clanlord, or king legitimately rules because he possesses the soma, and together with Indra, he too overcomes obstacles and gains cattle and other forms of wealth. By performing the soma rite he becomes truly an Ārya, a full participant in the elite culture of Vedic India, and he enlists the help of the gods in overcoming all those who do not sacrifice, those who are not Āryas. By drinking soma, he extends his lifetime. Soma "knots me together in my joints," says the poet of Ṛgveda 8.48.5. "Let the soma -drops guard me from my foot slipping, and let them keep me from lameness." Soma himself is the "deathless" (amṛta ), and therefore those who drink the liquid become "deathless." In the core Ṛgveda, this "deathlessness" is the prevention of premature death, although, in later hymns and in the succeeding tradition, deathlessness becomes "immortality," and soma becomes the drink that sustains the life of ancestors in heaven.

Soma the god is a warrior who is victorious in battle. The Pavamāna hymns describe Soma's descent through the filter as an assault or a raid. Soma overcomes all obstacles and thereby wins freedom of movement. Mixing soma with milk signifies the capture of cattle, and after Soma has won all such good things, he becomes the generous king who distributes them. In another image of a victorious soma, these hymns depict soma as a racehorse, which wins rich stakes for those who prepare the drink.

In the Ṛgveda, soma is also compared to the sun or even kindles it. According to various descriptions, Soma illuminates the sun (Ṛgveda 9.37.4), begets the sun in the waters (9.42.1), stands above like the sun (9.54.3), makes the sun shine (9.63.7), and harnesses the steed of the sun (9.63.8). Soma 's association with the sun reinforces its connection with kingship and with life, for the sun rules in heaven and represents life and freedom. At the end of the Ṛgvedic period, this association of soma and the sun began to shift in favor of an identification of soma and the moon. According to the later Veda, as the moon fills with soma, it waxes; and as the soma is depleted, it wanes. The soma in the moon sustains gods and ancestors, and even drips down to earth where it gives birth to plants and animals.

The roots of Vedic soma and the soma rite extend beyond the Veda itself. Like Indian soma, the haoma —its equivalent in the Zoroastrian ritual—is both a drink and a deity associated with well-being and deathlessness. Beyond the Indo-Iranian tradition, soma likely inherits Indo-European traditions of the drink of deathlessness—"ambrosia," a word etymologically corresponding to amṛta "deathless"—and replaces Indo-European rit/es of offering and drinking mead. In the Ṛgveda, soma is termed madhu (honey), which is etymologically equivalent to "mead." There may be a mythological link between mead and soma as well. According to one Ṛgvedic narrative, the soma plant grew on a mountain, protected by a hundred concentric fortress walls and guarded by an archer. Manu, the first sacrificer, sends a falcon to steal the soma and bring it back to him, so that he can offer it to Indra. The story evolved in the later Vedic and Epic traditions, according to which the eagle Garuḍa steals the soma from heaven and from Indra, although he eventually returns it to Indra. This narrative of the theft of soma may share a common ancestor with a myth of the Snorra Edda, according to which Odin, taking the form of an eagle, flies away with the mead of Suttung, hidden in the mountain Hnitbjorg.

One of the perennial questions in the study of soma has been the identity of the Ṛgvedic and Indo-Iranian soma plant. Already in the later Vedic period, sacrificers were using various plants to perform the soma rite. Such substitutions were possible because soma is as much the product of the words, chants, and acts of the ritual as it is the juice of a plant. The Ṛgveda, however, does mention a particular soma plant (perhaps called aṃśu ) that grows on mountains. Of the various identifications of this soma plant, ephedra has been an enduring candidate and has dominated much of the recent discussion. It is a stimulant, whose effect might be suggested by the description of soma as jāgṛvi (wakeful). Other scholars, however, have argued that soma was a hallucinogen in part because of soma 's connection with light and possibly with visionary experience. Numerous other possibilities have also been suggested. Fortunately, the precise identification of the soma plant, while interesting and significant, is not critical for the interpretation of most soma hymns and of the soma rite.

See Also

Haoma.

Bibliography

Essential to the study of soma is Thomas Oberlies, Die Religion des Ṛgveda (Vienna, 1999), which focuses particularly on the role of soma in Vedic religion. Two volumes have appeared, with one more yet to come. Volume 2 is a compositional analysis of soma hymns. A very helpful study of the meaning of soma is Tat'iana Elizarenkova, "The Problem of Soma in the Light of Language and Style of the Ṛgveda " in Langue, style et structure dans le monde indien: Centenaire de Louis Renou, edited by Nalini Balbir and Georges-Jean Pinault (Paris, 1996): 13–31. There is much of value in older discussions of soma, and, in particular, apart from an implausible interpretation of Ṛgvedic soma as the moon, in Alfred Hillebrandt, Vedic Mythology, vol. 1 (Delhi, 1980): 121–266 (a translation of the second revised edition of Vedische Mythologie [Breslau, 1927]). On the narrative of the theft of soma, see Ulrich Schneider, Der Somaraub des Manu (Wiesbaden, 1971), and on the later development of the story, Jarl Charpentier, Die Suparṇasage (Uppsala, 1920).

S. S. Bhawe has published an English translation of more than half the hymns of the Soma Pavamāna book in The Soma-Hymns of the Ṛgveda, parts 1-3 (Baroda, 1957–1962). Karl F. Geldner, Der Rig-Veda, 4 volumes (Harvard Oriental Series, vols. 33–36: Cambridge, 1951-1957) gives German translations of all the soma hymns, and Louis Renou, Études védiques et pāṇinéennes, vols. 8–9 (Paris, 1961), gives French translations.

For the soma ritual, Willem Caland and Victor Henry, L'Agniṣṭoma: Description complète de la forme normale du sacrifice de Soma dans le culte védique, 2 vols. (Paris, 1906–1907), details the model Vedic soma rite, and Ramachandra Narayan Dandekar, Śrautakośa, vol. 2 (English section), parts 1 and 2 (Poona, 1973–1982), provides translations of Vedic ritual texts' descriptions of that rite. For recent performances of the Agnicayana, an elaborate form of the soma ritual, see Frits Staal, Agni: The Vedic Ritual of the Fire Altar, 2 vols. (Berkeley, 1983) and T. M. P. Mahadevan and Frits Staal, "The Turning-Point in a Living Tradition: Somayāgam 2003" in the Electronic Journal of Vedic Studies 10, no. 1 (2003), available from http://users.primushost.com/~india/ejvs/.

On the various possibilities for the identification of the soma plant, a good analysis is Jan E. M. Houben, "The Soma-Haoma Problem: Introductory Overview and Observations on the Discussions," in the Electronic Journal of Vedic Studies 9, no. 1 (2003). A judicious botanical appraisal of various possibilities is Harri Nyberg, "The Problem of the Aryans and the Soma: The Botanical Evidence," in The Indo-Aryans of Ancient South Asia, edited by George Erdosy (Berlin, 1995): 382–406.

Joel P. Brereton (2005)