The Pavamana Parva — to the Purified Soma

After the Agneya and the Aindra in the Purvarchika comes the Pavamana Parva, the section of hymns to the purified soma itself. Roughly 120 verses, almost entirely drawn from the Rig Veda’s ninth mandala — the only mandala in the Rig Veda dedicated to a single deity. That deity is Soma Pavamana, “the soma being purified,” and the Pavamana Parva is its musical home.

We have already met the pavamana chants in their own chapter — the hymns sung during the actual pressing of the soma juice. The Pavamana Parva is where those chants live in the Purvarchika’s verse-collection, grouped together so that a student could learn them as a body. The Uttararchika later distributes them across the three daily pressings of the rite. The same verses, two arrangements: one for learning, one for performing.

What distinguishes the Pavamana hymns from the Agneya and the Aindra is the strange grammatical and rhetorical situation they put the singer in. The other two address external gods — Agni in the altar, Indra in the sky. The Pavamana addresses the substance the priest is producing. The soma is being crushed; the juice is running; the chant is to that juice. The boundary between worshipper and worshipped collapses in a way that is unusual in Vedic poetry. The priest is praising the work of his own hands as it is happening.

The hymns are also unusually concerned with transformation — the soma is changing state, from plant to liquid, from raw juice to clarified drink, from unfiltered to filtered, from earthbound material to the food of the gods. The Pavamana verses watch this transformation closely. He runs through the filter, one says, bright, golden, the eye of the sacrifice. He becomes Indra’s drink — he becomes the gods’ food — he becomes the sweet that fills the cup. The hymn is tracking, in real time, a substance becoming fit for divine consumption.

There is also a long-standing question — fascinating, unresolved — about what the soma actually was. The Rig Vedic descriptions are detailed: a mountain-growing plant, with stalks that produced juice when pressed between stones, golden when filtered, exhilarating to drink. Various plants have been proposed — Ephedra sinica, the hallucinogenic mushroom Amanita muscaria, Sarcostemma acidum, the Persian haoma (which was the Avesta’s parallel rite, with the same word). No consensus exists. The Vedic tradition itself lost the plant relatively early, and substitutes have been used for many centuries. The Pavamana hymns describe the soma as if from immediate sensory experience — the colour, the brightness, the runs of juice — but they do not give us the botany. What they give us is the music. We know exactly how the chants went, and what they were sung over, but we do not know what was in the cup.

For the Sama Veda’s purposes, this is not a problem. The chant is the chant whether the soma in the press is the original plant or a substitute; the music holds either way. And what the music preserves is the relationship — the priest praising what he is making, the rite watching its own substance come into being. The Pavamana Parva is the strangest of the three main sections of the Purvarchika, and the one a careful reader returns to once the more familiar Agneya and Aindra are absorbed. It is here that the Sama Veda becomes a music about the work it is in the middle of.