Haoma

Before the sun is high enough to warm the stone, a priest sets a metal mortar on the table in front of him and strikes it against the inner rim: once to the east, once to the south, once to the west, once to the north. The sound is small and flat and does not carry past the walls of the precinct. Inside the mortar lie three dried twigs, pale and jointed and almost weightless, carried from the mountains of Persia and then left alone for thirteen months so that anything picked up on the journey could fall away. He pounds them. He pours consecrated water over the pulp, strains it through a metal sieve pierced with nine holes, and is left with a small quantity of greenish liquid that tastes sharp rather than sweet. Whatever else happens in that room afterwards, this is the oldest thing in it, older than the religion built around it, reaching back to a time before the ancestors of the Iranians and the ancestors of the Indians had gone their separate ways. They pressed the same plant for the same reason, and the word survived the split almost intact: *haoma* in the Avesta, *soma* in the Rigveda.

Iranian religion never troubled to separate the plant from the god. Haoma is both, and the texts slide between them without apology, praising the mountain rains that water him in one line and asking him for victory in the next. He is *zairi*, golden-green, and golden-green-eyed. He is *dūraoša*, the one who drives death far off. And he is the only divinity in the tradition whose worship you can taste.

He introduces himself in the *Hōm Yašt*, the block of the liturgy that runs from Yasna 9 to Yasna 11 and is recited immediately before the priest drinks. Zarathushtra is tending the fire at the hour of pressing, chanting, when someone comes and stands in front of him. He asks who this is, and says plainly that he has never seen anything so beautiful in the flesh. The answer comes back: I am Haoma, the holy one who drives death afar. Pray to me. Prepare me for the taste.

What follows is a genealogy of drinkers. Zarathushtra asks who was the first man ever to press him and what he got for it, and Haoma names four households in order. Vivanghvant pressed first, and his reward was his son Yima, in whose reign there was neither cold nor heat, neither age nor death, and father and son walked out together looking the same age. Athwya pressed second, and his reward was Thraetaona, who killed the three-jawed, six-eyed dragon Azhi Dahaka. Thrita pressed third and got two sons, one a judge and the other Keresaspa, the club-carrier who once built a cooking fire on the back of what he took for a hill, and ran for his life when the poisonous green thing underneath woke up and scattered the boiling pot. Pourushaspa pressed fourth, and his reward was Zarathushtra himself, standing there asking the question.

He is not a gentle figure. Yasna 9 turns halfway through into a war chant, and the refrain is a command: yellow Haoma, hurl thy mace. At the dragon belching poison, hurl thy mace. At the club-carrier drunk on his own fury, at the tyrant throwing weapons at heads, at the man who says all the right words about righteousness and never once acts on them. Elsewhere he is asked to take the speed out of an enemy’s feet, throw a veil of darkness over his mind and wreck his intellect outright. Ahura Mazda girded him with a star-spangled belt on the mountain summits and made him the swiftly sacrificing priest for the gods, and swiftness there was a mercy, because it meant the animal died fast. He is the compassionate sacrificer and the yazata of the plants that animals browse, which is why he ended up protecting cattle and being invoked for rain.

And yet the same liturgy insists on a distinction it clearly thought important. Every other intoxicant, it says, walks hand in hand with Rapine of the bloody spear. Haoma’s walks hand in hand with friendship.

The Turanian king Frangrasyan, the Afrasiab of later Persian epic, had built himself an underground kingdom ringed with metal where no mortal weapon could reach him. Haoma went down and got him. He bound him and dragged him out to be killed, and the story survived into the *Shāh-nāma* with the god shrunk to a mountain hermit of enormous strength who ties the fugitive up with his own sacred girdle and hauls him from a cave. The liturgy uses the episode as a threat to the officiating priest: cut Haoma’s portion quickly, or he may bind you the way he bound Frangrasyan.

That portion is specific. Two jawbones with the tongue and the left eye, cut from every animal sacrificed with full rites.

Nobody knows for certain what the plant was. The Zoroastrians of Yazd use a species of ephedra they call *hum* and have long shipped it to their coreligionists in India, where it does not grow, and across a scatter of living Iranian languages the same word still means ephedra. Robert Gordon Wasson argued in 1968 for the fly-agaric mushroom. David Flattery and Martin Schwartz argued in 1989 for Syrian rue, on the grounds that ephedrine does not produce visions. Harry Falk answered in the same year that visions were never the point, and that alertness was, which is exactly what ephedrine gives. The Avestan descriptions do not settle it. They give a tall, fragrant, golden-green plant with pliant twigs that grows high on the mountains and has to be pounded, which narrows the field to almost every fibrous shrub in Central Asia.

Mary Boyce suspected that Zarathushtra himself had a problem with the drink, denouncing it in one bitter Gathic line, and restricted its old use to a libation poured into running water. If so, his own converts would not let it go, and the pressing came back as a preliminary to the rite he had built. Two separate preparations of the liquid are still made in a single service, and the second one is poured into a stream or a well at the end while Anahita is invoked over it.

His limits are the plant’s limits. The pressing may only be done between sunrise and noon, the hour that gives the ritual its name. The potent species grow in a narrow band of mountains and nowhere else, so an entire priesthood in India depends on a package arriving from Persia. Modern reformists have quietly dropped his observances altogether. But at the end of the world, when everything is renewed, the blessed are to drink one last cup pressed from the White Hōm, the Gaokerena, which grows at the source of the waters near the many-seeded tree in the middle of the sea, and whoever eats of it does not die. Until the 1960s, in the village of Sharifabad near Yazd, the whole community drank a share of the consecrated liquid at the New Year as a rehearsal.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Haoma in Zoroastrianism?

Haoma is the yazata, or divine being worthy of worship, who embodies the sacred plant pressed and drunk in Zoroastrian ritual. He is both the plant itself and its divinity, and Ahura Mazda installed him as the swift sacrificing priest for the other beneficent gods. The hymn known as the Hōm Yasht, occupying Yasna 9 to 11, is dedicated to him.

What plant is haoma?

No one has established it with certainty. Zoroastrians in Yazd use a species of ephedra called hum and supply it to Parsi communities in India where the plant does not grow, and this identification has the best linguistic support, though Robert Gordon Wasson proposed the fly-agaric mushroom in 1968 and David Flattery and Martin Schwartz proposed Syrian rue in 1989. The Avestan texts describe only a tall, fragrant, golden-green mountain plant with pliant twigs that must be pounded.

Is Haoma the same as the Hindu god Soma?

They are the same word and the same inherited ritual, but they developed into two separate divinities in two separate traditions. Haoma and Soma both derive from a Proto-Indo-Iranian root meaning “to press”, and Zoroastrian and Brahmanic pressing rites share enough technical vocabulary to confirm a common origin. What each tradition built on top of that shared foundation is distinct.

What does Haoma do for people who worship him?

He grants healing, bodily strength, victory in battle, long life, mental sharpness and children. The Hōm Yasht has him give speed to racehorses, bright and righteous offspring to women in labour, and greater wisdom to those who have spent long hours over books. He is also asked to strike enemies with his mace and to cripple the mind of anyone who means the worshipper harm.

Why does Haoma get the tongue and left eye of a sacrifice?

That portion is his by right under Zoroastrian ritual law, and Yasna 11 has him curse anyone who withholds it with childlessness and a bad name. Behind the rule sits a belief that domestic animals killed without full rites would not have their spirits properly released, and that either the animals or Haoma himself would testify against the killer at the judgement of his soul.

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Ahura Mazda, Angra Mainyu, Anahita, Mithra, Amesha Spenta, Vohu Manah, Zoroaster, Zahhak, Kaveh the Blacksmith, Rostam, Simurgh, Homa, Div, Soma, Indra