What Was Soma?

The sacrifice's central substance is a mystery the tradition itself preserved. The Rig Veda describes soma as a mountain plant with stalks that yield a tawny juice when pressed, a drink that banishes sleep, exalts the mind and makes the drinker feel immortal; the poets say we have drunk soma, we have become immortal, we have seen the gods. Yet already in the later Vedic literature the true plant is treated as unavailable, and the ritual texts prescribe substitutes with the frank admission that the original cannot be had. Whatever soma was, the living tradition lost it while keeping the rite.

The identification has been one of Indology's celebrated open questions for two centuries. Candidates have included ephedra, whose stimulant alkaloids and mountain habitat fit much of the description and whose cognate haoma is used in Zoroastrian ritual to this day; the fly agaric mushroom, argued at book length by R. Gordon Wasson in 1968; Syrian rue; and fermented preparations of other plants. Each candidate explains some verses and fails others, and the scholarly literature has settled into a careful agnosticism: the Iranian parallel makes a stimulant plant of the ephedra type the most economical hypothesis for the late period, while what the earliest poets pressed remains unproven. The Nambudiri performances of modern times use locally prescribed substitutes without claiming identity with the original. The atlas treats the question as open, which is exactly how the sources leave it: the most praised substance in the oldest Indian scripture is, botanically, an unknown.