![]() Gordon Wasson is the first Westerner to have set out to find the soma plant not in his library but in the field. They have suggested hashish, hops, datura, ephedra, sacrostemma, and rhubarb. Western Sanskritists have been less willing to admit ignorance. Those Indians who still perform the Vedic rites say simply that the identity of the plant has been last, that what they use in their rites is only a substitute. Soma certainly gave strength and brilliance to the poetic imagination. One has only to read the Soma hymns of the Rigveda to grant some truth to the claim. To humans, we are told, soma imparted the same properties that it was supposed to give to the gods: strength, magnitude, brilliance. Finally it was to be drunk, not by the gods only, but by sacrificers and priests. ![]() The extract was to be mixed with additives and forced through a woolen filter. The stems of the plant were to be steeped in water and pounded with stones on a wooden board. ![]() For it was not a mythical substance we are given, in Sanskrit ritual texts of about 1000 B.C., elaborate directions on just how the soma was to be prepared. The identity of this soma has been one of the great puzzles of ancient literature. Haoma was offered up by Yima, the first worshipper of Ahura Mazda. Across the mountains to the west, in ancient Iran, we find records of the same substance, there known as haoma. ![]() ![]() So we are told by the most ancient literary monument of India, the Rigveda. It was by drinking soma that the god Indra gained strength to slay the dragon of drought. ![]()
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