Pavamana Hymns — Singing the Flowing Soma

The single largest body of chant in the Sama Veda is the Pavamana hymns — the chants sung while the soma juice was being pressed and filtered. The name pavamana means “flowing, being purified” — and the hymns are addressed to the juice itself as it ran from the pressing-stones, through the woollen sieve, into the wooden vessel below.

Almost every Pavamana chant in the Sama Veda is taken from the ninth mandala of the Rig Veda. The ninth mandala is unique in the Rig Veda in being dedicated to a single deity — Soma Pavamana, the flowing soma — and its 114 hymns are essentially a body of pressing-songs. The Sama Veda took these hymns, arranged them in the order required by the three daily pressings of the soma rite, set them to elaborate melodies, and gave the resulting collection to the Udgatri to sing.

The atmosphere of these hymns is unusual in the Vedic literature. They are not addressing a distant warrior god or a sky-father; they are addressing a substance being processed, in the present moment, in front of the singer’s eyes. The pressing was a slow operation — the stalks being crushed by repeated blows of stone on stone, the juice gathering, running through the wool, dripping down into the container — and the chants are the music of that operation. Sun-like he flows, one verse says of the soma. Like a horse let loose, he runs to the goal. Streaming forth, he is purified for Indra to drink. The imagery is one of motion, brightness, sweetness, a continuous flowing toward the awaiting cup.

There is also a quality of praise in the Pavamana hymns that is distinct from other Vedic praise-poetry. The hymn is praising the soma not for past deeds (as one praises Indra for killing Vrtra) but for what it is doing right now — clarifying itself, becoming the drink the gods can take. It is the praise of a process unfolding, not of a past event recalled. This gives the Pavamana corpus its characteristic immediacy. The singer and the substance are doing their work at the same time.

The Pavamana chants are also the ones in the Sama Veda where the stobhas are most lavishly deployed. The verses are short, the pressing is slow, and the chant has to be extended to fill the time. Long stretches of huv and hau and ho-yi sustain the melody while the juice runs. A single Rig Vedic verse of two or three lines can become, as a Pavamana chant, a song of several minutes. The non-lexical sound carries what the words cannot.

Within the Sama Veda’s printed text, the Pavamana hymns occupy their own section — the Pavamana Parva — within the Purvarchika, the verses arranged for learning. We will look at the Pavamana Parva more closely in its own chapter. For now, the thing to register is that the entire flow-sequence of the soma rite, from the first crushing of the stalks to the final draining of the press, was underlaid with these chants — the music of a substance being made ready for the gods. The Sama Veda is, in a real sense, the song of the press.

When the Atiratra-Agnicayana was performed in Panjal in 1975 and again in subsequent decades, the longest and most distinctive musical passages in the recordings are the Pavamana chants of the midday pressing. They go on for hours. They are the most ancient piece of continuously performed religious music in the world. The verses come from three thousand years ago. The melodies come from nearly as long. And what they are singing about, when you stop to think about it, is liquid running through a piece of wool. The Sama Veda’s whole strange beauty is contained in that pairing.