Soma, the Drink of the Gods

The Rigveda is the oldest surviving sacred text of Hinduism, and one of its ten books — the entire ninth Mandala — is a 114-hymn love letter to a single substance. Its name is Soma. The priests press it from a plant, strain it through wool, mix it with milk, and drink. The hymns that follow are not metaphors. They are ecstatic, dazzled, often disoriented descriptions of touching the divine.

And then, sometime after the Indo-Aryan migration into the Indian subcontinent, the original plant was lost. Substitutes were used. The hymns continued, but the experience faded into ritual. For a thousand years, scholars have been trying to identify what the priests of the Rigveda were actually drinking.

Wasson's red candidate

In 1968, R. Gordon Wasson — the same banker-mycologist who would later co-author The Road to Eleusis — proposed that Soma was Amanita muscaria, the red-and-white fly agaric. The mushroom fit the geography of the Indo-Aryans' Central Asian homeland. It matched the hymns' praise of a 'single eye' and the strange descriptions of Soma being drunk twice — once directly, then again from urine, a known practice in Siberian Amanita rituals.

“We have drunk the Soma; we have become immortal; we have gone to the light; we have found the gods.”

Or maybe a stimulant. Or maybe a mushroom.

Other scholars have argued for ephedra (a powerful stimulant native to the same region), for Syrian rue, for Psilocybe cubensis, for blue lotus. None has won the argument. Soma may have been a blend, regional, or genuinely lost. What is clear is that for the Vedic priests, the line between getting high and meeting God was not a line at all. It was the same door.