Soma (drink)

In Vedic tradition, soma (Sanskrit: सोम) is a ritual drink[1] of importance among the early vedic Indians. The Rigveda mentions it, particularly in the Soma Mandala.

The texts describe the preparation of soma by means of extracting the juice from a plant, the identity of which is now unknown and debated among scholars. In both the ancient religions of Historical Vedic religion and Zoroastrianism, the name of the drink and the plant are the same.[2]

There has been much speculation about the most likely identity of the original plant. Traditional accounts with unbroken continuity in India, from Ayurveda and Siddha medicine practitioners and Somayajna ritualists undoubtedly use "Somalata" (Sarcostemma acidum).[3] Non-Indian researchers have proposed candidates including Amanita muscaria, Psilocybe cubensis, Peganum harmala and Ephedra sinica. According to recent philological and archaeological studies, and in addition, direct preparation instructions confirm in the Rig Vedic Hymns (Vedic period)

Etymology

Soma is a Vedic Sanskrit word that literally means "distill, extract, sprinkle", often connected in the context of rituals.[4]

Soma, and its cognate the Avestan haoma. The word is derived from an Indo-Iranian root *sav- (Sanskrit sav-/su) "to press", i.e. *sau-ma- is the drink prepared by pressing the stalks of a plant.[5]

Vedic soma

Further information: Somayajna and Mandala 9

In the Vedas, the same word (soma) is used for the drink, the plant, and its deity. Drinking soma produces immortality (Amrita, Rigveda 8.48.3). Indra and Agni are portrayed as consuming soma in copious quantities. In the vedic mythology, Indra drank large amounts of soma while fighting the serpent demon Vritra. The consumption of soma by human beings is well attested in Vedic ritual.

The Rigveda (8.48.3) says:

ápāma sómam amŕ̥tā abhūma
áganma jyótir ávidāma devā́n
kíṃ nūnám asmā́n kr̥ṇavad árātiḥ
kím u dhūrtír amr̥ta mártiyasya[6]

Ralph T.H. Griffith translates this as:

We have drunk soma and become immortal; we have attained the light, the Gods discovered.
Now what may foeman's malice do to harm us? What, O Immortal, mortal man's deception?

Swami Dayanand Saraswati explains this as:

Good fruit containing food not any intoxicating drink, we drink you
You are elixir of life, achieve physical strength or light of god,
achieve control over senses;
In this situation, what our enemy can do to me?
God, what even violent people can do to me?

The references to immortality and light are characteristics of an entheogenic experience. (Michael Wood (historian))(The Story of India)

Also, consider Rigveda (8.79.2-6)[7] regarding the power of Soma: "...He covers the naked and heals all who are sick. The blind man sees; the lame man steps forth....Let those who seek find what they seek: let them receive the treasure....Let him find what was lost before; let him push forward the man of truth...." Such is indicative of an experience with an entheogen of some source...(Michael Wood (historian)).(The Story of India)

Avestan haoma

Main article: Haoma

The finishing of haoma in Zoroastrianism may be glimpsed from the Avesta (particularly in the Hōm Yast, Yasna 9), and Avestan language *hauma also survived as Middle Persian hōm. The plant haoma yielded the essential ingredient for the ritual drink, parahaoma.

In Yasna 9.22, haoma grants "speed and strength to warriors, excellent and righteous sons to those giving birth, spiritual power and knowledge to those who apply themselves to the study of the nasks". As the religion's chief cult divinity he came to be perceived as its divine priest. In Yasna 9.26, Ahura Mazda is said to have invested him with the sacred girdle, and in Yasna 10.89, to have installed haoma as the "swiftly sacrificing zaotar" (Sanskrit hotar) for himself and the Amesha Spenta.

Candidates for the plant

Main article: Botanical identity of soma–haoma

There has been much speculation as to the original Sauma plant. Candidates that have been suggested include honey, mushrooms, psychoactive and other herbal plants.[8]

When the ritual of somayajna is held today in South India, the plant used is the somalatha (Sanskrit: soma creeper, Sarcostemma acidum)[3] which is procured as a leafless vine.

Since the late 18th century, when Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron and others made portions of the Avesta available to western scholars, several scholars have sought a representative botanical equivalent of the haoma as described in the texts and as used in living Zoroastrian practice. In the late 19th century, the highly conservative Zoroastrians of Yazd (Iran) were found to use ephedra, which was locally known as hum or homa and which they exported to the Indian Zoroastrians.[9]

During the colonial British era scholarship, cannabis was proposed as the soma candidate by Joseph Chandra Ray, The Soma Plant (1939)[10] and by B. L. Mukherjee (1921).[11]

In the late 1960s, several studies attempted to establish soma as a psychoactive substance. A number of proposals were made, including one in 1968 by the American banker R. Gordon Wasson, an amateur ethnomycologist, who asserted that soma was an inebriant but not cannabis, and suggested fly-agaric mushroom, Amanita muscaria, as the likely candidate. Since its introduction in 1968, this theory has gained both detractors and followers in the anthropological literature.[12][13] Wasson and his co-author, Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty, drew parallels between Vedic descriptions and reports of Siberian uses of the fly-agaric in shamanic ritual.[14]

In 1989 Harry Falk noted that, in the texts, both haoma and soma were said to enhance alertness and awareness, did not coincide with the consciousness altering effects of an entheogen, and that "there is nothing shamanistic or visionary either in early Vedic or in Old Iranian texts", (Falk, 1989) Falk also asserted that the three varieties of ephedra that yield ephedrine (Ephedra gerardiana, E. major procera and E. intermedia) also have the properties attributed to haoma by the texts of the Avesta. (Falk, 1989) At the conclusion of the 1999 Haoma-Soma workshop in Leiden, Jan E. M. Houben writes: "despite strong attempts to do away with ephedra by those who are eager to see sauma[sic] as a hallucinogen, its status as a serious candidate for the Rigvedic Soma and Avestan Haoma still stands" (Houben, 2003).

The Soviet archeologist Viktor Sarianidi wrote that he had discovered vessels and mortars used to prepare soma in Zoroastrian temples in the Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex. He said that the vessels have revealed residues and seed impressions left behind during the preparation of soma. This has not been sustained by subsequent investigations.[15] Alternatively Mark Merlin, who revisited the subject of the identity of soma more than thirty years after originally writing about it[16] stated that there is a need of further study on links between soma and Papaver somniferum. (Merlin, 2008)[17]

In his book Food of the Gods, ethnobotanist Terence McKenna postulates that the most likely candidate for soma is the mushroom Psilocybe cubensis, a hallucinogenic mushroom that grows in cow dung in certain climates. McKenna cites both Wasson's and his own unsuccessful attempts using Amanita muscaria to reach a psychedelic state as evidence that it could not have inspired the worship and praise of soma. McKenna further points out that the 9th mandala of the Rig Veda makes extensive references to the cow as the embodiment of soma.

Transcendental Meditation movement

See also: Chandra

The Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's Transcendental Meditation-Sidhi Program involves a notion of "soma", said to be based on the Rigveda.[18][19]

See also

• Mead
• Sima (mead)

References

1. soma. CollinsDictionary.com. Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 11th Edition. Retrieved 2 December 2012.
2. Victor Sarianidi, Viktor Sarianidi in The PBS Documentary The Story of India
3. Singh, N. P. (1988). Flora of Eastern Karnataka, Volume 1. Mittal Publications. p. 416. ISBN 9788170990673.
4. Monier Monier-Williams (1872). A Sanskrit-English Dictionary. Oxford University Press (Reprint: 2001). pp. 1136–1137.
5. K.F.Geldner, Der Rig-Veda. Cambridge MA, 1951, Vol. III: 1-9
6. "UT College of Liberal Arts: UT College of Liberal Arts". Liberalarts.utexas.edu. Retrieved 2018-10-04.
7. O'Flaherty, Wendy Doniger (Translator). The Rig Veda. Penguin Books, London 1981, page 121.
8. Oldenberg, Hermann (1988). The Religion of the Veda. ISBN 978-81-208-0392-3.
9. Aitchison, 1888
10. Ray, Joseph, Chandra, Soma Plant, Indian Historical Quarterly, vol. 15, no. 2, June, 1939, Calcutta
11. Mukherjee, B. L., The Soma Plant, JRAS, (1921), Idem, The Soma Plant, Calcutta, (1922), The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain & Ireland (Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 1921)
12. Furst, Peter T. (1976). Hallucinogens and Culture. Chandler & Sharp. pp. 96–108. ISBN 0-88316-517-1.
13. John Brough (1971). "Soma and "Amanita muscaria"". Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies (BSOAS). 34 (2): 331–362. doi:10.1017/S0041977X0012957X. JSTOR 612695.
14. (Wasson, Robert Gordon (1968). "Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality". Ethno-Mycological Studies. New York. 1. ISBN 0-15-683800-1.)
15. C.C. Bakels (2003). "Report concerning the contents of a ceramic vessel found in the "white room" of the Gonur Temenos, Merv Oasis, Turkmenistan". EJVS. 9.
16. Merlin, Mark, Man and Marijuana, (Barnes and Co, 1972)
17. Merlin, M., Archaeological Record for Ancient Old World Use of Psychoactive Plants, Economic Botany, 57(3): (2008)
18. Williamson, Lola (January 2010). Transcendent in America. ISBN 9780814794708. Retrieved 23 February 2015.
19. Hendel v World Plan Executive Council, 124 WLR 957 (January 2, 1996); affd 705 A.2d 656, 667 (DC, 1997)

Sources

• Anthony, David W. (2007), The Horse The Wheel And Language. How Bronze-Age Riders From the Eurasian Steppes Shaped The Modern World, Princeton University Press
• Bakels, C.C. 2003. “The contents of ceramic vessels in the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex, Turkmenistan.” in Electronic Journal of Vedic Studies, Vol. 9. Issue 1c (May 2003)
• Beckwith, Christopher I. (2009), Empires of the Silk Road, Princeton University Press
• Jay, Mike. Blue Tide: The Search for Soma. Autonomedia, 1999.
• Lamborn Wilson, Peter. Ploughing the clouds:The search for Irish Soma, City Lights,1999.
• McDonald, A. "A botanical perspective on the identity of soma (Nelumbo nucifera Gaertn.) based on scriptural and iconographic records" in Economic Botany 2004;58