Ephedra

Ephedra is a genus of jointed, almost leafless shrubs of dry Asian uplands, green-stemmed and broom-like, and it has two quite separate histories.

In Chinese medicine it is ma huang, in continuous use for around two thousand years, prescribed for cold, wheezing and fever and named in the classical materia medica. Its action is stimulant and bronchodilating, and it is one of the few traditional plants whose active principle, ephedrine, became a standard pharmaceutical in its own right.

Its religious role is Zoroastrian. Ephedra is used as hom in the modern Parsi and Irani Yasna, the central Zoroastrian ritual, in which the plant is pounded in a mortar with water and pomegranate twigs and the juice is consecrated and drunk. This is a living ceremony with an unbroken liturgical tradition, and the plant used in it is ephedra.

That is the strongest argument for ephedra as the historical haoma: not what it does, but that the ritual never stopped. Ephedra twigs have also been recovered from ritual contexts at Bronze Age sites in Central Asia, in association with vessels, which supports antiquity independently of the liturgy.

The plant is included in this atlas primarily as a candidate rather than as an entheogen, because its own effects are not visionary and the atlas needs to be able to name the contenders in a dispute it does not resolve.

The ephedra hypothesis for soma and haoma has the strongest historical thread and the weakest experiential fit, and holding both facts together is the honest position.

In its favour: the ritual is continuous. Zoroastrian priests have performed the Yasna with ephedra without a recorded break, and a tradition that never lapsed is a better guide to what was originally used than a reconstruction from poetry. The Central Asian archaeology adds independent support. And the linguistic connection between Avestan haoma and Vedic soma is secure, so whatever one was, the other was closely related.

Against it: ephedra is a stimulant. It produces alertness, a raised heart rate and appetite suppression. The Vedic hymns to soma describe expansion, illumination, immortality and a god entering the body, and while poets exaggerate, the gap between that and a decongestant is large. Critics argue that ephedra is a substitute, adopted after the original plant became unavailable when the Indo-Iranians moved out of its range, and that substitution is well documented in ritual practice generally.

The counter-argument is that the Vedic descriptions may be liturgical rather than pharmacological, praising the ritual and the god rather than reporting a drug effect, in which case a mild plant is entirely sufficient and the whole search for a potent one is misconceived.

That last possibility is the one most often left out, and it may be the strongest.