Soma Sacrifice

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.

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.