The ninth mandala of the Rig Veda is a unique object in the history of human literature. It is the only mandala entirely devoted to a single deity: Soma Pavāmana — the purified soma, the flowing soma. In the whole history of sacred poetry, I know of nothing comparable to this long succession of hymns celebrating, verse by verse, the flow of a consciousness opening itself.
What strikes me first is the vocabulary. Mandala IX is a mandala of movement. Everything in it flows, rushes, passes through, filters, gushes forth. « The currents have flowed. » « The drops have advanced. » « The brown one runs across the Sky. » « Like rivers descending a slope, killing darkness, soma rushes forward. » There is no rest, no fixity, no frozen abstraction. Light, in these hymns, is not a concept — it is something that arrives, that pours itself out, that enters.
And that is where the poetic genius of these texts lies, to my mind. They do not describe the mystical experience from outside. They make it live from within, mimicking through their very rhythm the movement of the tryptamine through body and mind. The gāyatrī, the dominant meter of Mandala IX — three feet of eight syllables — is one of the shortest meters in the Rig Veda. Its verses are rapid, repetitive, almost hypnotic. Recited as the soma was « rising, » they accompanied the process rather than commenting on it.
Soma is referred to by multiple names throughout the mandala: Indu, the brown one, the purified, the bull, the hero, the sage. Each of these names illuminates a different facet of the same reality. « The pressed soma, standing in the mountains, flows through the filter. In the intoxications, you are the one who contains all. » (RV 9.18) « You the attentive, you the wise, O Sweet One, you were generated by the plant. In the intoxications, you are the one who contains all. » This refrain — « in the intoxications, you are the one who contains all » — is characteristic of the mandala’s style: a formula that returns, slightly varied, like a wave gathering force before breaking again.
What the hymns describe, through their stanzas, is a transformation of consciousness. « You touch all thoughts around you, you purify the mind. Give us, O soma, glory and knowledge. » (RV 9.20) « The soma juices have gushed forth rapidly, bringing all the wisdoms of sweet intoxication. » (RV 9.23) The knowledge referred to here is not intellectual knowledge. It is a direct, immediate knowledge that passes through body and mind united — what the Indians call jñāna, non-discursive knowing, vision.
At the second level of reading, soma is the inner movement of consciousness toward its own source. Filtering soma through wool is refining perception. The soma flowing « like a wave of the Indus » through the filter is the impulse of the mind overcoming its own resistances, passing through what obstructs it to reach clarity. « Like rivers, carrying us and descending a slope, killing darkness, soma rushes forward. » (RV 9.17) The darkness killed is not an external enemy: it is the mental blockages that the hymns symbolize in the cave, where the Light is imprisoned.
This mandala is also a mandala of joy. There is in these hymns an exhilaration, an energy, a zest for life that is not always found in spiritual texts. « The playful drops, playing together at will, stand on the single seat. » (RV 9.21) Vedic spirituality is not a spirituality of mortification. It is a spirituality of fullness. Soma does not tear the practitioner away from life — it installs them more deeply within it, by expanding what they can perceive and feel.
This mandala was composed between the first compilations of the Rig Veda and the addition of the tenth mandala. It corresponds to the apogee of Vedic civilization — before the great drought, before the shortage of soma, before the drift from spirituality toward religion. To my mind, it is the most direct testimony of what this civilization was at its peak: a whole society oriented toward interior experience, where leaders drank soma in spring, where the ritual preparation of the plant was at the heart of collective life, and where sacred poetry was the highest form of knowledge.
And to grasp the material world in which this poetry of ecstasy was rooted — a civilization without war, open to trade, founded on mutual trust — the article on Sarasvatī and artificial intelligence on saptasindhuveda.com offers an unexpected and striking counterpoint.
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