Soma Pavamanaसोम पवमान

Soma is the only deity in the Rigveda that you could hold in your hand and drink.

He is a plant, gathered on a mountain; the juice pressed from that plant between stones; and a god, addressed with more hymns than anyone except Indra and Agni. The three are not metaphors for each other. The hymns move between them within a single verse — the god is filtered through wool, the god is mixed with milk, the god runs into the vat — and the identification is complete and untroubled.

The whole of the Rigveda's ninth mandala — one hundred and fourteen hymns — is addressed to Soma Pavamana, "Soma being clarified": the juice in the act of running through the filter. With hymns elsewhere in the collection the total is around a hundred and twenty. That is roughly a tenth of the Rigveda devoted to a single substance in the middle of being strained.

Three things about him are worth knowing before anything else.

Nobody knows what the plant was. The identification was already lost in India by the classical period, and substitutes have been used for something like two and a half thousand years. Modern proposals disagree sharply and none is settled.

The ritual survives anyway. The Somayaga is still performed, with substitutes, by a small number of families in Kerala and elsewhere.

And the name went to the moon. Soma in modern Indian usage means the moon — Somvar is Monday, Somnath is the lord of the moon. That transfer happened after the Rigveda and is treated on the Chandra page; this page is about the plant.

Indo-Iranian, not Indian. Soma is older than India. The Avestan haoma is the same word and the same substance: pressed, filtered, mixed, offered and drunk, in a rite whose vocabulary matches the Vedic one point for point. The Hom Yasht of the Avesta is the Iranian counterpart of Mandala 9. Zoroastrian priests press haoma to this day, using ephedra.

That parallel is the strongest single piece of evidence about the original plant, and it is the reason ephedra leads the field.

What the hymns say about it. The plant grows on mountains — Mujavat is named — and is bought, carried, soaked, and pressed. It has stalks (aṃśu) that are crushed; it is tawny or ruddy-brown (hari, babhru); it yields a juice that is sharp and has to be mixed with water and milk to be drinkable; and it produces, in those who drink it, a state the hymns describe as expansion, illumination, loss of fear and closeness to the gods.

The candidates. Four proposals have serious support and none has won.

• Ephedra (Ephedra spp.). Favoured by most Indo-Iranianists on the strength of the haoma parallel, the Central Asian range, the tawny stalks and the stimulant alkaloid. Soviet excavations at Gonur and the Bactria–Margiana sites reported ephedra residues in ritual vessels; the finds have been questioned and re-examined, and are not decisive.
• Amanita muscaria, the fly agaric. Argued at length by R. Gordon Wasson in Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality (1968). It accounts for some striking hymn imagery, notably the passages about soma being passed through and drunk again, but it fits the descriptions of stalks and pressing badly.
• Peganum harmala, Syrian rue. Proposed by Flattery and Schwartz (1989) on Iranian evidence.
• Sarcostemma / Cynanchum — the leafless creeper actually used as a substitute in Indian practice for the last two millennia, and defended by some as the original.

This encyclopedia does not adjudicate. The honest position is that the identification is open, that ephedra is the strongest candidate, and that the loss happened very early.

Why it was lost. The likeliest explanation is geography. If the plant grew in the mountains of Central Asia and the Hindu Kush, then a community moving east and south would have found it progressively harder to obtain, and the ritual literature confirms the pressure: the Brahmanas and the Srauta Sutras discuss substitutes (pūtīka, arjunāni and others) in detail and with evident anxiety, laying down which plant may stand in for which. A religion whose central sacrament had become unobtainable did what such religions do — it legislated a replacement and carried on.

The transfer to the moon. Already under way in the later Vedic texts and complete by the Brahmanas: soma is the drink of the gods, the moon is the cup, and the moon waxes and wanes because it is refilled and drunk. From there comes Chandra, the graha, whose own page carries the story.

Soma has no image, and the ninth mandala instead gives something rarer: a process, described in obsessive and loving detail. The hymns of Mandala 9 are, read as a body, an account of a piece of manufacturing.

The stones. Grāvan and adri — the pressing stones, themselves deified and addressed in their own hymns. Their noise is compared to speech, to thunder, to a chorus.

The filter. Pavitra, a strainer of sheep's wool, through which the juice runs. This is the object the name Pavamāna refers to: the god is being described in the act of passing through it. Almost no other deity in the collection is characterised by an ongoing physical process.

The stream. The juice runs, and the hymns compare it to a horse released, a bull bellowing, a river, a chariot, a bird, an arrow, a king going to his people. Mandala 9 contains a higher density of simile than any comparable stretch of the Rigveda.

Colour. Hari — tawny, golden-green — is his standing epithet, and the word does double duty for the colour of the juice and for the bay horses of Indra.

The mixing. With water (āpaḥ) and with milk (gavāśir), curds (dadhyāśir) or barley (yavāśir). The milk is described as the cow coming to the calf, and the mixture as a marriage.

The vat and the cup. Droṇa, the trough; camasa, the cup — the cup the Rbhus made into four.

No anthropomorphism to speak of. He is called a king, a bull, a warrior, a poet and a sage, but nothing in the corpus describes his body, because his body is a liquid in a wooden trough.

Soma Pavamana. The juice in the filter — the form to which Mandala 9 is addressed, and the only form in which he is the subject of an entire book of the Rigveda.

Soma Raja. King Soma. The plant is bought at the rite and then treated as a royal guest: received, seated, honoured, and — in the srauta ritual — installed with the ceremonies due to a king.

Vanaspati / lord of plants. In the later Vedic texts Soma is king of the plants and of the herbs, which is the seed of his medical and botanical associations.

Soma the moon. The post-Rigvedic identification, complete by the Brahmanas, from which Chandra descends. Soma as the moon has the twenty-seven nakshatras as wives, favours Rohini, and is cursed to wane — all of which belongs to the Chandra page.

Somanatha. Shiva as "lord of Soma", and the great Jyotirlinga at Somnath in Gujarat, whose name records the moon rather than the plant.

Haoma. The Iranian cognate, still pressed in Zoroastrian ritual.

Amrita. Not the same thing, but continuous with it: the nectar churned from the ocean in the Puranic story occupies the place soma held in the Vedic imagination, and the vocabulary — amṛta, the deathless — is used of soma in the Rigveda first.

Not Soma the Vasu. One of the eight Vasus bears the name; he is a different figure.

The eagle brings it down. The great Soma narrative of the Rigveda (4.26–27, 1.80, 9.77 and elsewhere). Soma was in heaven, guarded. An eagle — śyena — flew up, seized it, and brought it down to earth, or to Indra, pursued by an archer named Krishanu whose arrow struck off a feather. In some verses the eagle is Indra himself; in others it is a separate bird; in one, the falling feather becomes a plant.

The story has close relatives across the Indo-European world — a bird stealing the drink of immortality from a guarded height — and it is among the better comparative cases in the collection.

Indra could not do it sober. The hymns are perfectly direct about this. Before the fight with Vritra, Indra drinks: three lakes of soma in one account, and the Vritrahan deed follows. The Rigveda does not present the drinking as incidental. The soma is what makes the god capable of the act, which puts a pressed plant at the causal centre of the tradition's foundational victory.

"We have drunk soma." RV 8.48.3, the most quoted verse about soma and one of the most quoted in the Rigveda: apāma somam amṛtā abhūma / aganma jyotir avidāma devān — we have drunk the soma, we have become immortal; we have gone to the light, we have found the gods. The verse is a first-person report of an experience, which is unusual in the collection and is why it is so often cited.

The purchase. The srauta ritual includes a soma-purchase (somakrayaṇa): the plant is bought from a seller for a cow, the price is haggled, and the seller is then driven off — in the ritual texts, struck. The scene is prescribed rather than narrated, and it is one of the more uncomfortable pieces of surviving Vedic procedure. It is recorded here because it is part of the rite as the texts have it, and because the ritual literature's own commentators discuss it.

Soma and the Gandharvas. The Gandharva guards soma, and in RV 10.85 — the wedding hymn — Soma is the first husband of the bride, followed by the Gandharva and Agni, before the human husband receives her. Those verses are still recited at Hindu weddings.

The moon that is drunk. In the Brahmanas, the gods and the ancestors drink the moon down over the dark fortnight and it is refilled over the bright. This is the story of the transfer, and it is Chandra's.

The Somayaga. The soma sacrifice is the great rite of the Vedic system, and it is not extinct. Its basic form is the Agnishtoma, a five-day rite with three pressings on the final day; its most elaborate is the Atiratra / Athirathram with the Agnicayana, the building of a fire altar in the shape of a bird from over ten thousand bricks, which takes twelve days.

These are still performed, principally by Nambudiri families in Kerala, and by a small number of srauta lineages in Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra. The 1975 Agnicayana at Panjal, filmed and documented by Frits Staal and his colleagues, is the best-recorded Vedic ritual performance in existence and is the reason a great deal is known about how the rite actually runs.

With a substitute. No performance today uses the original plant, because nobody knows what it was. Sarcostemma and other prescribed substitutes are used, on the authority of the Srauta Sutras, which anticipated the problem.

The Pavamana hymns in the Samaveda. Mandala 9's verses are the core of the Samaveda, set to melody and sung at the pressings. Anyone who has heard Samavedic chant has heard Soma hymns; the Samaveda is very largely a songbook for this ritual.

Pavamana Sukta in daily use. The verse pavamānaḥ suvarjanaḥ and the Pavamana section are recited in punyahavachana and purificatory rites in ordinary domestic ritual, far outside any soma context.

In the wedding. RV 10.85's Soma verses are said at Hindu marriages.

A necessary statement. Soma was a psychoactive preparation consumed in a ritual context in the second millennium BCE, and this page describes it historically. DharmSetu makes no claim about the effects of any substance and does not identify, recommend or endorse any plant or preparation. Several plants proposed as soma are toxic, and some are controlled substances in India and elsewhere.

Soma has no temples, and could not have: the deity was a substance consumed in a fire ritual, and the substance ran out.

Where the tradition can be encountered:

Kerala srauta sites. Panjal (Thrissur district), Kundoor, Aluva and the Nambudiri illams that maintain the tradition. Athirathram performances are periodic, publicly announced, and attended in very large numbers.

Srauta lineages in Andhra Pradesh (notably around Kadapa and Guntur), Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra, and the Vaidika Samsodhana Mandala in Pune, which has documented and supported them.

Somnath Temple (Gir Somnath district, Gujarat) — the first of the twelve Jyotirlingas, whose name means "lord of Soma" and refers to the moon, not the plant. Included here to prevent the confusion, and covered in this repository's temple articles.

Museum and manuscript collections. The pressing stones, the droṇa and the wooden vessels of the soma rite survive in ritual use rather than in museums, but the Samavedic manuscript traditions of Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Gujarat preserve the melodies.

The recitation schools. As with every deity in this Vedic tranche, the pathashala is where the hymns live.

See the Chandra page for the moon, the Rbhus page for the cup, and the Navagraha page for the graha Soma became.

A sacrament that was a substance. Indian religion later becomes overwhelmingly a religion of image, name and inner discipline. Its oldest central act was drinking something. The ninth mandala does not describe a symbol; it describes a liquid being made, and it addresses that liquid as a god. Whatever one concludes about the plant, the fact that the Rigveda's third most-hymned deity was a preparation with a recipe is the single most important thing to hold on to about early Vedic religion, and it is regularly written out of accounts of it.

Immortality as an experience, not a doctrine. Apāma somam amṛtā abhūma is a report, in the perfect tense, of something that has happened. The Vedic amṛta is not primarily a metaphysical state to be attained after death; it is a condition the poets describe themselves as having entered, in the rite, that afternoon. The later transformation of amṛta into the nectar of the churning story, and of liberation into a post-mortem or contemplative achievement, is a very long way from this.

A religion that outlived its sacrament. The plant became unobtainable, and the tradition responded by codifying substitutes rather than abandoning the rite. That decision — recorded in the Srauta Sutras, argued over in the Brahmanas — is one of the most consequential in Indian religious history, and it establishes a pattern the tradition uses repeatedly afterwards: when the original is lost, preserve the form and legislate a replacement. The temple image that stands in for a presence, the substitute offering, the mental puja performed without materials, and the shaligrama that needs no consecration are all descendants of that logic.

And the name outlived both. The plant is unidentified, the rite is rare, and Soma is a word every Indian knows — because it means the moon, because Monday is named for it, and because one of the most famous temples in the country is called after it. What survives of the Rigveda's great sacrament is a weekday.

On not romanticising it. A good deal of writing about soma is really writing about the author's interest in psychedelics, and a good deal more assumes that identifying the plant would explain the religion. Neither is likely to be true. The hymns are not a trip report; they are liturgy, composed by professionals, for a rite with a fixed order, in which the drinking is one act among many. The interesting question is not what was in the cup but what a tradition does when the cup can no longer be filled — and to that, the answer is on record.