There is a question that one ends up asking inevitably when reading the Rig Veda carefully and cross-referencing its data with what archaeology has taught us over recent decades about the Indus-Sarasvati civilisation: how could a society so developed, so dense, so organised have functioned for nearly two millennia without the pathologies we consider today as almost inevitable once a civilisation reaches a certain complexity? No palaces. No army. No monumental temples. No display of individual wealth. No traces of conquest, brutal domination, or slavery. Archaeology is unambiguous on all these points, and has been for long enough now that doubt is no longer in order. This civilisation existed, it endured, it prospered, and it did all of this without the structures we instinctively associate with power and social organisation. The question is therefore not whether this is true. The question is to understand how it was possible.
The answer is in the Rig Veda, and it comes down to a single word we have already encountered in other articles: soma. But to fully understand what soma made possible at the scale of an entire civilisation, we need to return to what the ego does to a society when it is not regularly dissolved, and to what a society becomes when it is.
The ego, in the sense we mean here, is not simply self-awareness. It is the mental structure that perceives itself as separate from everything else, that operates on the basis of the fear of scarcity, the need to distinguish itself, accumulation as protection against the fundamental insecurity generated by this perception of separation. An untreated individual ego produces predictable behaviours: it accumulates, it competes, it dominates when it can, it submits when it must, it builds hierarchies to locate itself and reassure itself. Multiply this across an entire society, and you obtain the structures we know: the palaces that proclaim the greatness of the chief, the armies that protect accumulation against those who would take it, the temples that institutionalise the relationship with the divine and place it under priestly control, the castes that freeze hierarchies to make them permanent and unassailable.
None of this in the civilisation of the 7 Rivers. And not because its inhabitants were saints or because human nature there was different from what it is elsewhere. It is because they had a collective, ritualised and regular tool for preventing the ego from taking up all the space. That tool was soma, consumed within the framework of the sacrifice by all those responsible for society, from the raja to the head of household, several times a year at minimum, within a precise ceremonial context that maximised its beneficial effects and minimised any potential risks.
What soma did, we now know with a precision that researchers in neuroscience and clinical psychology have begun to document seriously over the past twenty years. It temporarily dissolved the activity of the brain’s default mode network, the network that is the seat of the permanent egotistic narrative we construct about ourselves. It produced an experience of unity, of dissolution of the boundaries between self and the rest of the universe, of the disappearance of the fundamental fear linked to the perception of separation. It generated a profound sense of fraternity and shared belonging. And it left, after the experience, a lasting trace: a modification of the way participants perceived their relationship to others and to the world, which persisted well beyond the duration of the experience itself.
Leaders who regularly live this experience cannot govern in the same way as leaders who do not. This is not a question of goodwill or personal virtue. It is a question of fundamental perception. A raja who has had the repeated experience of the dissolution of his ego into something greater cannot sincerely believe in the necessity of imposing himself by force, of accumulating disproportionate wealth, of building monuments to his own glory. These behaviours rest on a deep conviction of separation and lack that the soma experience dismantles at the root. It is not that he chooses not to do these things. It is that he no longer feels them as necessary or desirable.
The text of the Rig Veda confirms this repeatedly and precisely. The sacrifice is not presented as a moral obligation, a law imposed from outside, a divine commandment to be obeyed under pain of sanction. It is presented as the natural path of whoever seeks the Truth, the Light, immortality. No moral instruction in the first nine mandalas, no prohibitions, no judgements. The only implicit rule is: participate in the sacrifice, drink soma, seek Brahman. Everything else follows naturally.
The civilisation of the 7 Rivers, that territory stretching from the Sarasvati to the Indus and beyond, between 4000 and 1900 BCE, was organised around this principle. The great cities of Harappa, Mohenjo-daro and Rakhi Garhi had water supply and sanitation systems of a sophistication that Europe would not match until the Roman period. Every house, even a modest one, had its washroom. Public granaries were built outside the cities, accessible to all, not guarded as private treasures. Craftsmen’s workshops were organised collectively. There were no wealthy districts separated from poor ones by walls or unbridgeable distances. All of this is consistent with a society in which individualistic accumulation and hierarchical domination were not the primary drivers of social organisation.
It is also worth mentioning what archaeology tells us about women in this civilisation, because it is a powerful indicator of the level of collective ego in a society. Wherever the dominant ego takes control of a society, the first thing that happens is the marginalisation of the feminine: women are relegated to subordinate roles, their autonomy is reduced, their access to spiritual practices is limited or suppressed. In the civilisation of the 7 Rivers, women drank soma, participated in the sacrifices, some were rishis who composed hymns of the sacred corpus. In neighbouring regions sharing the same spirituality, notably in Turkmenistan and Afghanistan, excavations have shown that women occupied leadership roles. This is not a coincidence. It is the logical result of a society in which the collective masculine ego had not taken control.
The disappearance of soma between 2200 and 2100 BCE changes all of this in a mechanical and irreversible way. Without the regular and collective dissolution of the ego, egotistic structures progressively reclaim their natural place in social organisation. Castes appear in the tenth mandala, that same mandala where one also finds the first moral lessons, the first prohibitions, the first traces of an institutional religion that needs rules because it no longer has direct experience to guide behaviour. The rajas begin to divinise themselves. The priests begin to monopolise access to the sacred. Public granaries become private storehouses. Walls appear. The fine horizontal organisation of the civilisation of the 7 Rivers progressively becomes vertical, exactly as one might have predicted.
What this history tells us about ourselves is uncomfortable but necessary. We live in societies that have inherited six thousand years of unregulated egotistic domination. Our institutions, our economies, our international relations are built on the same mechanisms that the rishis of the tenth mandala saw appear when soma disappeared. This is not an inevitability of human nature. It is the result of the absence of a collective and regular tool for dissolving the ego. The civilisation of the 7 Rivers demonstrates that another form of organisation is possible, that it existed, that it endured, and that it was not a utopia but an archaeologically documented reality. What it does not tell us is how to recover that tool in the world as it is today. But it tells us at least that the question deserves to be asked seriously.
Le Rig Veda 
Laisser un commentaire