Mandala 9 is organized on a completely different principle from every other book of the Rig Veda: rather than gathering the output of one poetic family across many deities, as Mandalas 2 through 7 do, or ranging broadly across many families and deities at once, as Mandalas 1, 8 and 10 do, it collects 114 hymns from many different rishi families united by a single subject, Soma Pavamana, the psychoactive ritual drink in the specific moment of its purification, pressed from a plant, filtered through wool, and readied for offering and consumption at the sacrifice.
The hymns describe this purifying flow in intensely physical, sensory language, Soma "roaring like a bull," flowing "tawny" and "bright" through the woolen filter, praised as itself a god, capable of granting inspired poetic vision, strength and even a kind of ecstatic immortality to those who drink it in the ritual context. Because its hymns are drawn from poets otherwise associated with the family books and with Mandala 1, Mandala 9 functions as a kind of thematic anthology extracted and gathered from across the wider Rig Vedic tradition specifically for use during the Soma-pressing portion of the sacrificial ritual, giving officiating priests a single, complete collection of exactly the hymns that particular ritual moment required without having to search across the whole scattered corpus.