The Rising of the God, and the Moon

What began as a sacred drink became, in the developed tradition, a god of the first rank and then the moon. In the Vedic hymns Soma is already deified, the divine draught personified, lord of plants, a god who inspires and immortalises, and over time Soma came to be identified with the moon, so that the name Soma and the name Chandra refer to the same lunar deity in classical Hinduism. Several explanations were offered for the link: the moon was imagined as the cup or reservoir of the celestial soma, waxing as it fills and waning as the gods (or the ancestors) drink it down, so that the monthly cycle of the moon became a cycle of the divine drink being replenished and consumed.

The identification also drew the ritual substance into the great cosmic scheme, connecting the sacrifice on earth with the visible turning of the heavens. Soma is thus a remarkable case of a single sacred reality understood on three levels at once, a physical plant handled by the priests, an experience of inspired exaltation, and a god who is also the moon in the sky, and it lies close to the ritual heart of the oldest layer of Indian religion.