The agnistoma, the model soma sacrifice, builds for days toward a single sunrise. The sacrificer and his wife are consecrated and enter a period of restraint; the soma stalks are ceremonially purchased in a rite that dramatises bargaining with a seller who is then, in the ritual's own commentary, beaten for selling the god; the ritual ground is measured and built, carts positioned, fires installed, and the pressing stones and wooden vessels made ready. On the great day the priests press the stalks three times, at morning, midday and evening, crushing them between stones on a bull's hide, straining the juice through a woollen filter into the vats, and offering it into the fire with recitation from the Rig Veda, song from the Sama Veda and the muttered formulas of the adhvaryu, after which the priests and sacrificer drink the remains of the offerings.
The ninth book of the Rig Veda, one hundred fourteen hymns addressed to Soma Pavamana, the self-purifying, was sung to exactly this moment, the juice trickling through the filter imagined as a king, a bull, a poet, a stream of immortality. The evening pressing closes with the final chants and the ritual's unwinding, the avabhritha bath that carries the sacrifice's residues into water. Every larger soma rite, up to twelve-day and year-long sattras, is an expansion of this frame, and admission to it defined the boundaries of the Vedic community: to be among the pressers of soma was to belong.