1. The problem
Note: This paper is based upon the author's "SOMA, Divine Mushroom of Immortality ", published in 1969 in New York by Harcourt Brace & World Inc., and in The Hague by Mouton. This work is referred to in the following pages as " Soma".
Some 3,500 years ago, in the middle of the second millennium before Christ, a people that called themselves Aryans swept down from the north through Afghanistan and occupied the valleys of the Indus. They spoke an Indo-European language. They were hard fighters driving horse-drawn chariots. They sowed grain and bred cattle, horses, and sheep. They arrived on the scene with a fully developed religion, elaborate rituals performed by a tightly organized priesthood, a well-rounded complement of gods and goddesses in their pantheon, and a rich mythology telling of the doings of these divinities. They were closely related to the people who at or about the same time occupied what came to be known as the Iranian plateau, this name - Iran - being cognate with "Aryan ". Together these peoples are called today the Indo-Iranians. One of their important gods, Soma (or "Haoma" among the Iranians), was different from all the others: it was a plant as well as a god - the only plant that has been deified in human history, so far as we know-and the juice of that plant is also sometimes called Soma. The plant was mixed with water, then beaten out with stones in the course of the liturgy, the liquor filtered off and mixed with more water as well as honey or barley, and drunk right away by the priests before the end of the liturgy. According to the poet-priests the drink was inebriating and sublime.
All that we know about the Aryans at this stage of their history comes to us from a collection of 1,028 hymns that they composed after arriving in the Indus Valley and sang in the course of their worship. These hymns are what is known as the RigVeda Words and music, they were passed down to succeeding generations by the human memory, the art of disciplining the memory for this purpose having reached a refinement never equalled by any other known human society. We have no reason to think that writing was known to the Aryans at that time, although to the West of the Indo-Iranians, in Mesopotamia and the Near East, we possess numerous elaborate cuneiform texts inscribed over the preceding thousand years and more.[1] Chief reliance for perpetuating the hymns was placed on the human memory for thousands of years until in the middle of the last century Western scholars took them down from the mouths of Hindu priests and published them. The text is settled and has been available for study for the past 120 years, but the meanings of the verses are often obscure, and, as is natural in hymns impregnated with religious terminology and beliefs strange to us, filled with allusions that evade and challenge the Vedic scholar. The language that these priests spoke is known as "Vedic", which a thousand years later developed into the Sanskrit tongue.
What was this plant that was called "Soma" ? No one knows. Apparently its identity was lost some 3,000 years ago, when its use was abandoned by the priests. The Indians were a people singularly devoid of an interest in history and seem not to have been curious about the identity of Soma. The earliest liturgical compositions of the Indo-Aryans, called the Brahmanas and put together after the hymns had been assembled, discuss the surrogates to be used for Soma in the ritual but fail to describe the original plant. The preferred surrogates were to be red, as Dr. Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty, my collaborator, has shown.[2] There is a tradition among the Brahmans that the surrogates had to be small, leafless, and possessed of fleshy stems. Throughout the ages the surrogates have been chiefly leafless plants, species of the genera Ephedra, Periploca, and Sarcostemma. The inner circle of Brahmans have always known that these replaced the original Soma, but when Western scholars arrived on the scene these plants were among those actually considered in the quest for Soma, although they had no palatable juice. Some inquirers felt that Soma, if not one of them, must have resembled them closely. Because of the West's obsession with alcohol, all sorts of fermented drinks were also considered - barley beer, grape wine, etc. - but the fermentation process lasts too long for the juice to be squeezed out and to develop inebriating virtues before the end of the liturgy, a liturgy by the way that could be performed three times in a day. Some students have even suggested a distilled potion, forgetting that the distillation process had not yet been invented. There have been many other suggestions - rhubarb, hemp, etc. - that need not detain us because they have been advanced without conviction and fly in the face of the wording of the RigVeda hymns themselves.