In the Rig Veda, soma is not a symbol or an abstract spiritual metaphor. It is a plant. An entheogenic plant. And what distinguishes my work from that of most researchers and translators is that I identify this plant as most likely a psilocybe cubensis — a mushroom whose active molecule is a tryptamine, exactly as the Vedic descriptions indicate. Its primary property is not to exalt the warrior’s ego or glorify power: it is to dissolve the ego, open the door to mystical experience, and make aggression disappear.
The ninth Mandala of the Rig Veda is entirely dedicated to soma. That is not a minor detail.
In the hymns describing the preparation of soma, I find only fibers — thin, long filaments that are washed, pressed, and filtered. No flowers. No seeds. No leaves. These are vegetal or fungal fibers. When psilocybe cubensis dries, it becomes very thin and very long. Albert Hofmann himself established in his research that a five-gram dose can contain up to forty-two dried mushrooms reduced to fiber. These are the fibers that the Vedic texts call amshu — and they correspond precisely to what we see in the descriptions of the ritual pressing of soma.
The molecule of psilocybe is a tryptamine. Dimethyltryptamine — DMT — is the best-known form of this chemical family. And it is precisely the family of tryptamines that I identify in the effects described by the hymns. Stanislav Grof, in his research on non-ordinary states of consciousness, documented with LSD — another molecule of this family — what the Vedic people had observed with their soma: a temporary dissolution of the sense of self, an opening to a luminous dimension, a felt brotherhood with all living beings.
Hymn RV 8.48.3 says: « We have drunk the soma. We have become immortal. We have entered the Light, and there we found the gods. » I do not read this as a poetic formula. I read it as the account of a lived experience — an authentic psychedelic experience, translated into the sacred language of its time.
What contemporary neuroscientists call « ego reduction » or ego dissolution — this temporary diminishment of the sense of self, this opening to a wider consciousness — is exactly what the rishis describe in their hymns to soma. The disappearance of aggression. The feeling of brotherhood. The direct mystical experience. None of this is interpretation: it is what the text says, and it is what the pharmacology of tryptamines confirms.
In my view, this is the key to understanding why the Vedic civilization — the one of the Seven Rivers, before the upheavals of the second millennium — left no trace of organized violence in its archaeology. Its leaders practiced the sacrifice with soma. They dissolved their ego. Without an inflated ego, without a desire for domination, without aggression: no war. No fortifications. No arsenal.
When tryptamines disappeared — when soma was lost, forgotten, replaced by inactive substitutes or by ephedra, which belongs to the amphetamine family and sustains duality rather than dissolving it — spirituality began to transform into religion. And with it came back the egos, the hierarchy, the violence, the greed. This is not a moral judgment: it is an observation I draw directly from reading the texts and understanding their pharmacological context.
Soma was not an innocuous drink accompanying a ritual. It was the ritual. And its central property — dissolving the ego — was the very condition of a peaceful civilization.
→ On saptasindhuveda.com: Grid Cultivation: Intensive Agriculture Without Soil Depletion
Laisser un commentaire