“‘Gods Love the Hidden’: Soma, Sāmaveda, and the Cross-cultural Aesthetics of Pyschedelic Traditions”

The scholarly quest to botanically identify Vedic soma, a ritual drink pressed from a plant of the same name, has foundered. In the twentieth century, the array of candidates proposed for the authentic soma of ancient India has all too neatly followed modern drug trends. Cannabis, magic mushrooms, ephedra, DMT—soma has become nothing less than a floating signifier of the Urpsychedelic. “Every age,” observes the cultural historian James McHugh, “has the soma it deserves—or desires.” Yet the word soma, derived from the Sanskrit verb ‘to press’, designates not a plant per se but a ritual preparation. After soaking it in water, straining its juice, and mixing it with milk, honey, and barley, Brahmin priests drank the soma potion in rounds, punctuated by mantra recitation, chanting, and offerings into fire. Accordingly, this paper shifts our gaze away from botany back towards soma’s primary domain: ritual. The aim is to disrupt the existing scholarly paradigm by reconstructing the aesthetics of language, chanting, and performance in the soma sacrifice. Moreover, the paper aims to shed light on the contested “psychedelic” character of soma by comparing the aesthetics of Vedic ritual to acknowledged psychedelic traditions in the Americas.

The Ṛgveda (“Knowledge of Verse”), the oldest Vedic text, has been exhaustively (but inconclusively) mined for its poetic descriptions of the plant, the drink, and its effects on consciousness. I suggest that we take up instead a neglected Vedic source from a century or two later: the Sāmaveda (“Knowledge of Melody”), consisting of chants performed exclusively during the pressing and drinking of soma. Some Sāmavedic chants incorporate Ṛgvedic verses by breaking up, extending, repeating, and distorting their words—transforming meaningful poetry into non-verbal sequences of vocal sound. But many of these chants do not use Ṛgvedic material at all—rather, they consist of what musicologists call “non-lexical vocables”: phonemes and utterances with no semantic meaning. Analyzing a selection of such chants, both as historical texts and as oral traditions preserved in modernity, I suggest that we take seriously that Sāmavedic chanting has shaped—and been shaped by—the soma sacrifice. Sāmaveda was the soundscape of the soma experience, sung while the priests were drinking soma and feeling its effects. We might speculate further that these chants were not just performed but composed under the influence of soma. Can the high incidence of non-lexical vocables in Sāmaveda, which is without parallel in other Vedic texts, be correlated with the profile of the psychoactive drink these chants accompany? Could such linguistic distortions and vocal patterning even be caused by soma’s effects? And where do such unconventional forms of ritual speech fit into the Vedic ideology of language?

 To conclude the paper, I argue that the soma question, seen through the lens of Sāmavedic traditions, provides a rich basis for cross-cultural comparison with the aesthetics of other psychedelic traditions. Ethnographies show that linguistic epistemologies are central to the construction of psychedelic experiences in many cultures. Indeed, language different from everyday language is one of the primary conduits for the knowledge, revelation, and power psychedelic experiences are said to afford. The instrumentality and performativity of language are foundational to rituals using psychoactice plants and fungi—and, just as in traditions of magic and sorcery, distorted, esoteric, and non-semantic forms of speech are said to possess special potency. Practitioners of psychedelic rites in the Americas frequently incorporate nonsemantic syllables into their chants and songs: for instance, non-lexical vocables occur in both the peyote songs of the Native American Church and the prayer songs of Amazonian ayahuasca shamanism. Practitioners throughout the Americas also report that the speech of otherworldly entities they encounter is replete with non-lexical vocables and phonemic sequences without conventional linguistic meaning. Mestizo shamans in the Amazon, for example, report the strange utterances of outer-space entities who speak like computers, or the non-human languages of plants and animals—all of which may be heard in their direct interactions with supernatural beings and then embedded in the lyrics of songs. According to Vedic texts, when it comes to ritual speech, “the gods love the hidden”—that is, divine language is unintelligible to most humans, save sages and initiated practitioners. With this in mind, we may ask: are the non-lexical chants of Sāmaveda a special kind of sacred or divine language? How does this register of ritual and musical speech correlate with the soma pressing and drinking it always accompanies? Is this soma language a special mode of communication between gods and human practitioners, accessible only through psychedelic states? We may never be able to conclusively answer the question, “what is soma?” in botanical terms. Nonetheless, we should continue to find new ways to engage with the texts, culture, and experiences this immortal plant has engendered.