Haoma

The Yasna is the principal act of Zoroastrian worship, and the preparation and consecration of haoma is its centre. The ceremony is performed by ordained priests in a consecrated space, and the whole seventy two chapter liturgy that gives the Yasna its name is recited over it. This is living practice, carried out in Zoroastrian communities today, and it is described here rather than set out as a procedure.

Yasna 9 to 11 form the Hom Yasht, the hymn to Haoma, and they are unusual in the Avesta for being a dialogue. Haoma comes to Zarathushtra at the hour of the morning ritual, in the shape of a beautiful man, and asks to be pressed. Zarathushtra asks who first pressed him and what reward it brought, and the answers run back through a line of legendary fathers, each of whom pressed haoma and each of whom was given a famous son. The hymn is therefore also a genealogy of Iranian legend told from the point of view of the plant.

What Haoma is praised for is specific. He heals; he drives off sickness and death; he grants strength to the body and insight to the mind; he gives good and righteous children. He is called the golden, and he is asked for the reward of the best existence. Set against that, he is also the one being in the Avesta who is both the object of the sacrifice and its recipient, since the juice is offered to him and is him.

A future pressing carries the largest claim of all. At the renovation of the world, a haoma described as white and drawn from a plant of the sea is to be prepared, and those raised from the dead will drink it and become immortal.

Avestan haoma and Vedic soma are the same word. Both come from an Indo-Iranian form built on a root meaning to press or to extract, so the name describes what is done to the plant rather than what the plant is, which is a large part of why identifying it has proved so hard: the ancestors of both traditions named the substance after the act.

The correspondence is not confined to the noun. Both traditions press a plant for juice, filter it, mix it with milk or water, and both make the resulting drink the centre of their principal sacrifice. Both personify it as a divinity who is also the offering. Both attach immortality to it. Avestan and Vedic are close enough that whole lines can be transposed between the Gathas and the Rigveda by regular sound correspondence, and the haoma and soma passages are among the clearest cases. The reasonable conclusion, and the one most Indo-Iranianists draw, is that the ritual is inherited rather than borrowed: there was a pressing rite before there was an Iran or an India.

That makes the identification question a single question with two sets of evidence. Whatever the Indo-Iranian plant was, it should account for both bodies of description, and any candidate that explains the Vedic material but not the Avestan is doing only half the work. It also means the living Zoroastrian use of ephedra is the strongest single piece of evidence anyone has, because it is an unbroken practice rather than a reconstruction, which is why ephedra is taken seriously for soma by scholars who find nothing in the Rigveda itself to suggest it.

What continuity cannot establish is that the plant never changed. Substitution is documented on the Indian side, and nothing rules it out on the Iranian side.