The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c18.s3.38

v1.c18.s3.38

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.