Haoma
The botanical identity of the Indo-Iranian sacred substance and its legacy in religion, language, and folklore...
The year I graduated high school, David Stophlet Flattery and Martin Schwartz published a little read treatise out of the University of California Press on the subject of Soma. Soma is the prime ingredient of a mysterious ritual drink that is mentioned in the revered Rig Veda and at the center of the Eleusinian Mysteries of Greece. The Greeks referred to the ceremonial drink as Kykeon. Homer explains in his hymn to Demeter that Kykeon was made of water, barley, and pennyroyal. But in the Illiad, the Kykeon is described as consisting of Pramnian wine, barley, and grated goat cheese. In the Odyssey, he adds that it also requires honey.
That’s all we know about what Kykeon may have been to the people of antiquity in and around the Mediterranean Sea.
I first came across the most cited work in reference to the identity of what Soma may’ve been in a mythology class at Glendale Community College (California) in 1991. It’s named The Road to Eleusis by R.G. Wasson, A. Hoffman, and Carl A.P. Ruck. A mycologist, a chemist, and a historian (respectively), they argue that the sacred potion given to participants in the course of the ritual in Greece (that occurred each fall and spring for nearly 1,000 years) contained a psychoactive entheogen. The authors then expand the discussion to show that natural botanical agents have been used in spiritual rituals across history and cultures.
What a fabulous anthropological and historical thread to pull on, right?
Although controversial when first published in 1978, The Road to Eleusis hypothesis has become more widely accepted in recent years, as knowledge of ethnobotany has deepened. The book’s themes of the universality of experiential religion, the suppression of that knowledge by exploitative forces, and the use of entheogens to reconcile the human and natural worlds make it an intriguing read.
The festival of the Eleusinian Mysteries (in this case, mystery means secret) took place twice a year, in spring and in autumn. The mysteries’ origins date to the pre-Hellenic era, when the festival became particularly popular as the city of Eleusis came under sovereignty of Athens. In the 5th century BCE, the Telesterion (great hall of the mysteries) was built in Eleusis. It’s in that building, the Telesterion, that the most important part of the transformation ritual is supposed to have occurred: the ingestion of the Kykeon, the mysterious sacrament that caused in participants intensive psychic changes, which cleared their souls, and made them accept death not so much as harm but as a blessing.
In the late Roman period, the ceremonies no longer took place every year, and the cult was finally destroyed in 395 CE when the troops demolished the temple at Eleusis (because, there was this new cult starting up—Christianity).
The organization of the September’s ritual, which lasted nine days, was supervised by two families who passed the performance of their duties from generation to generation. They were forbidden to reveal the essence of the mysteries, the slightest revelation was threatened by death penalty. The secret of the mysteries had been extremely well guarded and, with the rise of Christianity, the knowledge about the essence of the mysteries and especially of the nature of the Eleusinian sacrament was lost forever.
Though I found the topic of the book interesting, I never finished The Road to Eleusis. I was reading it in for a class and really didn’t comprehend the significance of the content. Once I knew enough for the assignment, I was done with the text. Never finished the book.
So now, 30 years later, I finished it. Last week.
You can find plenty of books (even in the mainstream) on the topic of the use of entheogens in many religions. Universities and hospital systems (like Johns Hopkins) now have entire programs dedicated to the science of entheogens. So the taboo topic isn’t taboo anymore. While reading it this time, I was coming to that moment in reading non-fiction when you are pretty sure the author is just padding the book with more context and texture so you’re ready to put it down, a reference jumped out at me. It was a reference to what Soma was referred to—in the Avesta, the primary collection of religious texts of Zoroastrianism (written in Avestan). In the Avesta, Soma was referred to as Haoma (a cognate of Soma).
Zoroastrianism and the Avesta are significant elements of my own heritage which got me thinking—maybe the answer to what Soma was isn’t in Mexico or India or Afghanistan or Peru or Columbia (where most of the field research has been). Maybe it was hidden away with the people of Pars (Iran)?
Which brings me back to that text I mentioned right at the start, by Flattery and Schwartz. The full title of the work is Haoma and Harmaline: The Botanical Identity of the Indo-Iranian Sacred Hallucinogen “Soma” and its Legacy in Religion, Language, and Middle Eastern Folklore. It’s deathly boring and obviously written for academics. But, in it, the authors provide evidence (in the form of linguistic analysis, anthropological analysis, chemical analysis, historical analysis, etc.) to claim that…
…the wild rue, Peganum harmala L., a common weed of the Iranian Plateau and adjacent areas, was the original intoxicant plant represented in pre-Islamic Iranian religious traditions.
Given that the practices of the Zoroastrians of Iran and India diffused into the cultures of the Mediterranean, it may also be the lost ingredient of the Kykeon.
In 1794, Sir William Jones (a philologist), in translating the Laws of Manu (the corner stone text of Hindu law), he refers to Soma as “a species of mountain rue”. The only plant growing in India that could have most accurately characterized “a species of mountain rue” is Peganum harmala. Neither the mountain rue nor any other species of the genus occurs as a wild plant east of the Euphrates. The only genuine rue known in India or Iran is the cultivated garden herb Ruta gravelones L.
In Persian Botany, as I’ve come to learn, Peganum harmala and Ruta gravelones are considered the same genus; and since both plants have become widely known in India, largely through their introduction by way of Iran, this taxonomy prevails in India as well (i.e. Ruta is Peganum). That’s why “Soma” and “Hamoa” sound the same. There is no uncultivated species of Ruta to which “rue” could refer in India: “mountain rue” must represent the Persian “sudab-i kuhi” which is defined in Indo-Persian lexicons and botanical works as….Peganum harmala.
In both the ancient Vedic rites of India and the rites preserved by the surviving representative of the the ancient Iranian religion (Zoroastrianism), Soma/Haoma appears as the central and most important element for ceremonial coming of age experiences; a transformation, maturation, enlightenment, etc.
Soma is described as intoxicating, even though what we know today of the Kykeon’s recipe includes no plants associated with intoxication. The Ninth Book of the Rig Veda indicates that Soma regularly induced a state of ecstasy.
Needless to say, the primary exploration over the ages has been in the Indus Valley region and yet, the Rig Veda doesn’t provide an explanation for why the consumption of Soma took place in ceremonial contexts. It doesn’t provide any of the specific features of the Soma ceremonies (such as the intimate association of Soma drinking and animal sacrifice, as found in other texts). To date, the Indian sources have failed to yield the botanical identity of Soma.
Perhaps the focus of the search should be shifted to the Iranian Plateau (current Iran, Iraq, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan) given that the Avesta provides SO much more detail about Haoma (again, remember, that’s the same thing as Soma).
For example, from the Avesta…
Yasna 9.17
O, Yellowish One (god), I call down they intoxication
Indeed all other intoxicants are accompanied by Violence of the Bloody Club, but the intoxication of Haoma is accompanied by bliss-bringing Rightness.
The intoxication of Haoma goes lightly.
May the intoxications besetting me at their own impulse, not move me about as a cow’s trembling.
May thy intoxications come forth clear(ly).
May they arrive bringing straightness of mind.
To thee, Haoma, righteous, promoting Rightness, do I give this body, which seems to me well formed.
Even MORE explicitly, the Arda Wiraz Namag (“Book of the Just Wiraz” in Middle Persian). It states that in order to dispel doubts about the claims of the Iranian priests to religious knowledge, Wiraz, having been selected as the most righteous of men, is given a drug before a public assembly. He lies in tranquility before the people, he has a vision of the fate of souls after death, which he afterwards dictates to a scribe; which becomes the Arda Wiraz Namag: exactly like the Noah, Abraham, and Moses tales. Or like the Muhammad ibn Abdullah tale.
The point is that the ancient Zoroastrians of Iran believed pharmacologically induced visions were the means to religious knowledge and that they were at the basis of the religion that the Magi (Persian priests; proto-scientist/philosophers) claimed to have received from Zoroaster! The Zoroastrians referred to it as Mang, but it is quite likely that it is the same substance as Haoma.
I’m going to dig a little deeper into this. Stand by…