The Identification of the Vedic Soma Plant

This is not one investigation but a long argument, and it has never been concluded. The Rig Veda gives its entire ninth book to soma and describes the plant's mountain habitat, its pressing between stones, the straining of the juice through a woollen filter and the effect of drinking it. It does not describe the plant in the terms a botanist needs, and the living tradition had already lost the identification by the late Vedic period, when the ritual texts prescribe substitutes.

R. Gordon Wasson made the fullest single case in 1968, for the fly agaric, resting on the pressing and straining imagery and on the absence of leaf, root and seed from the hymns. John Brough replied in 1971 that the hymns do mention parts a mushroom does not have, and that the argument depended on selective reading. David Flattery and Martin Schwartz argued in 1989 for Syrian rue, working from the Iranian haoma rather than from the Indian material. Ephedra has been urged for over a century on the strength of Iranian ritual use and of the substitutes later prescribed in India.

Each candidate accounts for some verses and fails on others. None has carried the field, and the atlas records the question as open rather than choosing among them.

The obstacle is evidential rather than interpretive, which is why more argument has not helped. Three kinds of evidence would in principle decide the question, and none is available in usable form.

The first is the rite itself. Srauta performances of the soma sacrifice have continued into the present, but what they press is a prescribed substitute, chosen because the original was already unavailable when the ritual manuals were compiled. The living tradition cannot report a plant it had lost before it began writing the rules down.

The second is the text. The hymns are poetry composed for ritual use, not description composed for identification, and their imagery has been read in support of every candidate proposed. That an argument can be constructed from them for a mushroom, a shrub and a herb alike is a fact about the source rather than about the plant.

The third is the ground. Securely dated botanical residues from a vessel used in the rite would carry the question, and claims that Central Asian temple deposits provide them are contested on both dating and identification. Until material of that kind is recovered and independently confirmed, the identification remains unestablished. The atlas records the study as inconclusive and keeps the fact it supports marked accordingly, because saying who tried and what would close the gap is more useful than a confident answer nobody can check.

Sources Soma: Divine Mushroom of ImmortalityR. Gordon Wasson with Haoma and Harmaline: The Botanical Identity of the Indo-Iranian Sacred Hallucinogen and Its Legacy in Religion, Language, and Middle Eastern FolkloreDavid Stophlet Flattery and Martin Schwartz, Soma and Amanita muscariaJohn Brough