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The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c18.s3: § 3. The God Soma

The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c18.s3

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§ 3. The God Soma

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The poetry of the Rigveda is mainly connected with the Soma sacrifice, and this fact must be borne in mind in estimating the importance of the god Soma. In its present form the whole of the ninth book of the Saṁhitā is devoted to him and he has six hymns in other books: moreover he is invoked in parts of four or five others, and also as a joint deity with Indra, Agni, Pūṣan and Rudra. The number of times his name occurs is incapable of accurate calculation, as the name is constantly mentioned without it being possible to say whether the god is really referred to.

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Soma resembles Agni in the fact that the anthropomorphism of the god is constantly coming into collision with the actual form of the plant and thus is prevented from attaining any clear development. Hence myths of a concrete character cannot spring up around the name, and the deeds which are given to Soma are simply borrowed by him from the other gods, especially Indra and Agni, with whom he is very nearly associated, since the former is the great Soma drinker and the latter for his part is a god of ritual like Soma. But on the other hand the Soma is the great object of priestly interest, and the most elaborate imagery seems to have formed round the simple operations of pressing and straining the juice: the monotony of the ninth book is only equalled by its obscurity in detail, and, it must be admitted, much of the obscurity hides no real depth of thought but merely puerile fancies.

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For the juice pressed from the Soma plant the Rigveda offers various names, such as *andhas*, applied also to the whole plant, *pitu*, and often *mada*, the intoxicating beverage; it is even called food, and very often honey, a term which is applied also to milk and to ghee.

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Frequently it is Amṛta, ‘ambrosia’ the drink of immortality, or milk, or the wave from the stalk, or the juice of honey. A common name of the plant and the drink is Indu, the bright drop. The plant is brown, ruddy or most often tawny, and, in accord with this, it is the rule that the cow, with which in the rite the Soma is purchased, must be brown or ruddy, and that any substitutes used for Soma must be similar to it in colour. The plant is made to yield its juice by being pounded with a stone or pressed with stones, which lie on a skin and seem in contravention to the ritual usage to be placed on the altar.¹ The stones are called *adri* or *grāvan*, the latter usually employed with verbs meaning to speak and therefore more mythical than the word *adri*. It is almost, if not quite certain, that the extraction of the juice by pounding with a pestle in a mortar was known to the Rigveda² as well as the normal pounding with stones which is repeatedly mentioned: the Avestan ritual knows the use of mortar and pestle in connexion with the Haoma. When pounded the juice is strained through a sieve, which is called a skin, hair, wool, filter, or metaphorically perhaps ridge. In this state Soma wins the title Pavamāna, under which, as becoming clear, it is celebrated in the ninth book of the Rigveda. In the purified form it is called Çukra or Çuci, ‘the bright,’ and is offered in this shape to Indra and Vāyu, who is the drinker of the pure Soma *par excellence*, a fact which is confirmed by the ritual where the unmixed Soma is reserved for Indra and Vāyu, while it is mixed with milk for Mitra and Varuṇa and with honey for the Açvins. It is clear that after the purifying process Soma was often mixed with water: so in the ritual the pressing is followed by the mixing of water (*ādhavana*). Water however does not bear the technical name of *āçir*, which is reserved for the milk, fresh or curdled, and the barley with which Soma clothes himself as with a garment. The refreshing of the stalks of the plants with water, which is known in the later ritual as the Āpyāyana, is possibly but not certainly, referred to in the Rigveda. The three offerings of the Rigveda³ correspond in some measure at least to those of later times: Indra is present at both the morning pressing and at the midday pressing which is his alone, whence it later has a Çastra called Niṣkevalya, and the Ṛbhus have a place in the third offering. The term ‘of three abodes’ given to the god may allude to three tubs of the ritual, but this is uncertain, and the same doubt attends the three Soma lakes, of which mention is made, as drunk by Indra. The three backs of the god are probably the three admixtures.

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¹ Cf. RV. v. 31. 12; Hillebrandt, *Ved. Myth.* i. 179 ff.; Oldenberg, *Ṛgveda-Noten*, i. 328.

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² RV. i. 28; Hillebrandt, *op. cit.* i. 158 ff. Oliphant (*Studies in honor of Bloomfield*, pp. 225-50) holds that mortar and pestle were normally used, but does not prove this theory.

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³ Bergaigne (*Rel. Véd.* i. 179) thinks the three tubs mythical, but cf. TS. iii. 2. 1. 2.

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So much of the mythology of Soma is clear enough: the actual plant lies immediately behind the god, and explains his characteristics. But there are other traits which show that the plant is a very powerful one. The waters which are mixed with the Soma give rise to many metaphors, and Soma is said to be the producer of the waters, and to be born of the waters: he streams rain from the sky, and he flows clearly with a stream of honey like the cloud full of rain. He is the father of the waters as well as their son, and the Soma seems in some cases to be deemed to be rain. The Çatapatha Brāhmaṇa ¹ directly identifies the ambrosia with the water. The sound of the pouring of the Soma is likened to thunder, and lightning is associated with the process. Again, as a thunderer and a loud-sounding god, Soma is a bull and the waters are his cows: he fertilizes the waters. He is a sharp-horned bull. But he is also for his swift flow a steed or bird, and again he is identified for his bright colour with the sun, and made to dispel the darkness and defeat it. In all this there is clearly evident the fact that Soma is no mere plant on earth, but is in addition a great celestial deity.

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¹ xi. 5. 4. 5.

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The same double side of Soma appears in the legends which make him drunk by the gods as well as by men. He is for both the drink of immortality, which makes them live for ever. In less exalted phrase he is of high value in healing, he makes the blind to see, and the lame to walk. He even destroys sin and promotes truth: *in vino veritas*. He inspires speech and so Soma is lord of speech: he has all wisdom and knowledge. He surveys all things with his thousand eyes. A votary declares ² ‘We have drunk the Soma, we have become immortal, we have attained the light, we have known the gods.’ The Fathers too love the Soma with whom they sometimes go, and who in their life excited them to their great deeds.

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² RV. viii. 48. 3.

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The god who is most closely united with Soma is Indra, who needs the drink to strengthen him to perform the slaying of Vṛtra: hence the drink is called the bolt, and Soma even takes the title of Vṛtra-slayer. Again Indra makes the sun to rise when he has drunk Soma, so that Soma is credited with this feat also. From this it is a short step to becoming a great cosmic power, who generates the two worlds and wields universal sway. He rides in a chariot with Indra, and is connected with the Maruts. He becomes a great and terrible warrior with a bow and shaft: he (alone of Vedic gods ³) is described as killing the wicked and he also kills the demons. The Yajurveda ⁴ says that Brahmans who drink the Soma can slay their foes by their mere look. Through Indra he is associated with Vāyu, and, more superficially, he is connected with Pūṣan and Rudra.

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³ RV. ix. 28. 6.

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⁴ MS. iv. 8. 2.

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The dualism in the character of Soma appears in the two quite different accounts of his birth, in heaven and on the mountains. The mountain birth of Soma is made more precise by the epithet Maujavata, which seems to point to mount Muñjavant, and the Avesta declares that Haoma grows in the mountains. But it is by no means certain that the rock, from which the eagle brought Soma, is to be so taken; it seems rather to refer to the clouds and to point to his celestial form. Of the celestial abode of Soma there is abundant evidence of all kinds: he is the bird in the heaven, his home is in the highest heaven, but the contact with the terrestrial is clear in the fact that Soma going over the filter is also Soma on the summit (*sānu*) of the sky.

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The bringing of Soma from the mountains was no doubt a physical act, performed regularly by the priests or on their behalf: the ritual shows that the tradition of using Soma was kept up, when the priests had long left the place where the Soma grew, and when it had to be brought from afar off. The sacred character of the plant, however, vindicated itself in a curious manner. It had come to be necessary to purchase the drink, or rather the plants whence the juice could be extracted, but the ritual shows the Soma seller¹ regarded as a disgraceful creature from whom is taken away, with blows, the price, a cow, paid to him for the stalks. On the celestial side there stands the Rigvedic myth of the descent of Soma which is brought down by an eagle to the earth. The myth is told at some length in two hymns of the Rigveda² and referred to in others. The eagle was restrained by a hundred iron castles, but it none the less secured the Soma and fled with it from the sky: the archer Kṛçānu, however, who saw the bird as it fled away shot at it and severed one feather: the Brāhmaṇas³ add that the feather or claw or the leaf of the shoot became a tree, the Parṇa or Palāça, or a porcupine. The eagle is in the legend represented as bringing down the Soma for Indra, and Indra is once⁴ directly called an eagle, when seated at the Soma offering, but not in immediate connexion with the myth. On the other hand Agni is called the eagle of heaven once⁵ and often a bird; the term eagle is applied in a Brāhmaṇa⁶ to Agni as lightning, and from these data Bloomfield⁷ derives the conclusion that the whole origin of the myth of the descent of Soma is the lightning flash, which comes forth from the cloud, the castle of iron, and which brings down to the earth the refreshing rain. With this accords the fact that in one passage of the Rigveda⁸ the descents of the lightning and of Soma are combined. It is not, it should however be noted, of much importance whether the eagle be treated as Agni or as Indra, since an essential feature of Indra is the lightning which breaks forth while the rain falls, and it is probable that, when he is hailed as an eagle at the Soma sacrifice, he is regarded as the bringer of the Soma.

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¹ Hillebrandt, *Ved. Myth.* i. 69–82.

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² iv. 26 and 27.

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³ Kuhn, *Herabkunft des Feuers*, pp. 195 ff. Cf. Charpentier, *Die Suparṇasage*, chap. v.

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⁴ RV. x. 99. 8.

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⁵ RV. vii. 15. 4.

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⁶ TB. iii. 10. 5. 1.

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⁷ *JAOS.* xvi. 1–24.

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⁸ i. 93. 6.

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Soma is a plant, and the most lordly of all the plants, and therefore he is king of the plants : he is also the king of the gods, of the whole earth and of men, but the Yajurveda¹ shows that the Brahmans had asserted that he was the only king of the Brahmans : at the royal consecration the other men might recognize the king, but to the Brahmans he was not announced as their king, who was Soma alone. Doubtless at this most sacred and trying moment of their inauguration kings had to accept theoretical claims of immunity from their control, which they knew how to value at their true worth for practical affairs.

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¹ Weber, *Rājasūya*, p. 31.

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The connexion of Soma with the plants was, however, of high importance for his future as a god : the connexion of the moon with plant life seems to have been often noted by early peoples, and was very probably recognized by the Aryans in India; moreover the growth of the moon and its decline was significant of the same progress as the swelling up of the Soma shoots : the fiery clear drops of the Soma, as it fell from the plant, were likened to the rays of the moon reflected upon the water : the Soma had come to be held to be a bright deity. Hence it may be there rose the idea that the Soma was really at the same time the moon : it is asserted in the Chāndogya Upaniṣad² in so many words that the Soma is the moon and is the food of the gods and is drunk by them. The Brāhmaṇas regularly identify Soma and the moon; thus the Nakṣatras are said to have been the wives of king Soma, who, however, preferred to stay with Rohiṇī only, wherefore the other ladies went to their father, and, as a result, disease seized the king, who was fain to agree to live loyally with all his wives each in turn.³ The phases of the moon are explained by the fact that the gods and the Fathers eat the substance of the Soma which is ambrosia. In the Atharvaveda⁴ we find that Soma is several times certainly the moon. In the Rigveda itself by far the most certain case is the wedding hymn,⁵ which is, however, by its confused character not an early hymn. There Soma is the husband of Sūryā, who is far more often connected with the Açvins, or occasionally with Pūṣan, and both these two gods and Pūṣan also are introduced into the hymn, as if in recognition of their claim to have share in the wedding. Here Soma is said to be in the lap of the stars, and a distinction is drawn between the Soma which the priests know and that which they crush. That the identification was priestly and late is here asserted as clearly as anything of the sort can be expected to be asserted. It is possible that there are some other references to the moon character of the Soma in the Rigveda, as when it is spoken of as a drop going to the ocean, looking with the eye of a vulture,⁶ but the effort of deciding what are these passages is quite out of all proportion to the value of the results which can be obtained. In the chaos of the ideas of the ninth book of the Rigveda there are passages which may be referred to Soma as the moon, or at least to comparison of Soma and the moon, but it is a very significant fact that the commentators on the Rigveda, despite their familiarity with the moon theory of Soma, never identify the Soma there with the moon.

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² v. 10. 1; cf. ÇB. ii. 4. 2. 7; BAU. vi. 2. 16.

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³ Weber, *Naxatra*, ii. 274 ff.

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⁴ vii. 91. 3, 4; xi. 6. 7.

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⁵ RV. x. 85.

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⁶ RV. x. 123. 8.

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In opposition to this theory Hillebrandt¹ insists that the moon nature of Soma exists throughout: that the deity is the moon *sans phrase*, but that in the moon there is an ambrosia which is eaten by the gods in heaven and in the form of the Soma plant is eaten by the men on earth, who in eating it thus, like the gods, partake of the substance of the moon. This god, he argues, was the greatest and most popular of all Vedic gods, and ranked even above Indra and far above the sun gods. He therefore treats, among others, Bṛhaspati as a moon god. The most serious objection to this view is the fact that, while in the later literature² the nature of Soma as the moon is apparent on every hand, in the Rigveda it can only be restored by conjecture, and there is a definite assertion in one hymn that the conception of Soma as the moon is mythic and known to the Brahmans only. Again, in the vast majority of passages, it is perfectly plain that the Soma plant and its qualities are referred to. If we could show *ab extra* that the plant is also the moon, this would not be a fatal objection to the theory of Hillebrandt, but, as this cannot be done, and as the ordinary view that the plant is deified and made into a great god is adequate to account for the facts, it is an offence against sound principles of method to adopt any other theory.

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¹ *Ved. Myth.* i. 274, 309, 326, 340, 450; ii. 209–45; (Kl. Ausg.), pp. 76 ff. Cf. von Schroeder, *Arische Religion*, ii. 462, 656; Henry, *Sôma et Haoma* (1907); Gray, *Spiegel Memorial Vol.*, pp. 160 ff.

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² E. g. KB. iv. 4; xii. 5; TB. i. 4. 10. 7; Hillebrandt, *Ved. Myth.* iii. 38, n. 2.

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That the Soma cult goes back to the Avesta³ is notorious: it is there said to grow on a mountain watered by the rains of heaven: as Varuṇa is said to place it on rock, so a god places it on Mount Haraiti: it is brought by an eagle in the Rigveda from the sky: in the Avesta it is taken from its mountain by skilled birds. It is in both India and Iran the king of plants, it gives long life and removes death: it grows in the waters. It was pressed twice a day according to the Avesta: its yellow juice was mixed with milk. But the plant had also a celestial character, and that character distinguished it from the mere terrestrial plant. It is brought down from heaven and is a mighty king. Even the epithet ‘slayer of Verethra’ has been found applied to the Haoma. Beside minor similarities, which attach to any divine natures, there are found the most striking similarities in the legend of the preparers of the Soma: they are in the Avesta Vīvaṅhvant, Āthwya, and Thrita, while those of the Rigveda are Vivasvant and Trita Āptya.

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³ W. W. Wilson (AJP. xxx. 184 ff.) sees a Soma offering in a fragment of Alkman, but this is fanciful.

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Soma is derived from the root *su*, and means merely the pressed drink, and there is no parallel word in the other Indo-European languages, so that it must be recognized that the Soma cult was a special Indo-Iranian innovation, presumably produced by the discovery of some plant which when pressed produced a juice pleasant to drink or at least intoxicating. It is also most probable that the plant grew only in some area which was far from the homes of the Vedic Indians : substitutes came freely to be used for it, and all efforts to decide precisely what the plant was have failed to achieve more than probable results.¹ But the word *madhu*, 'honey,' is cognate with the Greek *methu* and the Anglo-Saxon *medu*, and the parallelism of the legends of the eagle and Soma, the nectar-bringing eagle of Zeus, and the eagle, which fetched the mead and which was really Odin, is obvious and undeniable. The question, therefore, arises what was the mead which is thus conceived to have been brought down, and it seems difficult to deny that it was originally simply the water of the rain or the dew. This is certainly the natural way of interpreting the myth of Soma and the eagle, and the change made in the conception in the Indo-Iranian period would be merely that this rain would have been identified with the Soma drink, thus transforming the old myth into something very important and real. If, as has been suggested, the old myth made the home of the mead in the moon,² the identification of Soma and the moon would be at once explained, but this is not at all clearly made out.

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¹ Hillebrandt, *Ved. Myth.* i. 3 ff. ; Macdonell and Keith, *Vedic Index*, ii. 475 ; Havell (JRAS. 1920, pp. 349 ff.) suggests the millet of the eastern Himālayas ; B. L. Mukherjee (*ibid.* 1921, pp. 239 ff.) bhāng, but without proof.

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² Roscher, *Nektar und Ambrosia*, pp. 79 ff. ; Oldenberg, *Rel. des Veda*², pp. 170 ff. ; Henry, *L'Agniṣṭoma*, pp. 470 ff. The fig-tree that drops Soma has a possible parallel in the Germanic ash, Yggdrasill ; E. H. Meyer, *Germ. Myth.*, p. 81. For further speculations see G. Dumézil, *Le Festin d'Immortalité* (AMG. xxxiv), esp. Pt. II, chap. i ; below, App. D.

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Oldenberg, however, does not accept the view that the legend of the descent of Soma can be explained in this simple and satisfactory way, and he does not, therefore, adopt the same view as is here taken of the process by which the Soma came to be sacred. He would seem to hold that the rise of the Soma cult was independent at first of the older belief in the mead, and it is true that the Avesta does not actually apply the term mead to Haoma ; it seems, however, much simpler to adopt the view that the mead was an Indo-European view, and that the identification of Soma with it, and, therefore the application to it of the Soma legend, were the immediate outcome of the discovery of the intoxicating drink.

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