The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c41.s4.7

v2.c41.s4.7

Dumézil further¹ deduces as the basis of the legends the existence of an Indo-European festival in the spring, at which was drunk in communion the sacred drink, originally a kind of beer derived from barley, which was replaced by wine in Greece, and by Soma among the Indo-Iranians. With this drink the Indo-Europeans associated the idea of life without end, and the success of the gods over the demons their rivals; but in the rites of which we have historical information many other elements of vegetation ritual have intruded themselves. He negatives² the idea that the mead was primitively the ambrosia; nothing in the legends recalls either the special characteristics nor the mode of preparation of the hydromel. If in Greece the ideas of ἀμβροσία and μέθυ were confused, it was because both lost their precise sense, and similarly in India the distinction between Amṛta and Madhu was obliterated by reason of the attraction of the idea of Soma. A trace of the old pre-eminence of beer is to be seen in a legend of the Çatapatha Brāhmaṇa,³ where the barley is declared to have alone remained faithful to the gods in their demon contests, while the episode in the epic of the poison which arose in the churning of the ocean is held to be a distant echo of the process of fermentation of the beer which is apt to go too far, as in the narrative of the Kalevala.⁴ In these details again it is clearly impossible to find any cogent proof of the existence of an Indo-European rite.