The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c27.s4.63

v1.c27.s4.63

The offering produces also another sense of communion, in the divine ecstasy produced by the Soma drink. The Vedic poets have not the gift of imaginative description of a Euripides, and we find but little expression of the state of mind produced by imbibing the powerful potion. Still it is clear that those who drink can say, ‘We have found the light, we have become immortal,’ and that they truly feel the joy they asserted, even if they cannot claim, like the partaker of the sacred rite at Eleusis, ‘to have escaped evil and found what is better’. The classical expression of this ecstatic state is found in the hymn³ which tradition, in all probability with justice, holds to be the expression of Indra’s mind after he has drunk the Soma. The worlds are his plaything, he rises aloft in his joy, he speeds on the wings of the wind. Ecstasy, naturally enough, is specially the product of drinking the Soma, who is hailed as the kind friend and father, who grants length of days, for this boon is eagerly desired by the Vedic mystic, as it is by the later Yogin. But similar powers are ascribed by the Atharvaveda⁴ to the remains of the sacrificial offering, full of the divine power, and to the porridge (*odana*),⁵ which, eaten, gives the worshipper the feeling of attaining the heaven, and in the Agni worship there are fainter traces of the development of a more refined form of mystic speculative activity.