“‘Gods Love the Hidden’: Soma, Sāmaveda, and the Cross-cultural Aesthetics of Pyschedelic Traditions”

Botanical candidates proposed for the authentic soma of ancient India have all too neatly followed modern drug trends—soma has become a sort of floating signifier of the Urpsychedelic. Aiming to disrupt the paradigm of soma scholarship, this paper shifts our gaze away from botany back towards soma’s primary domain: ritual. My focus is the Sāmaveda, a corpus of chants performed during the soma sacrifice, which attest many “non-lexical vocables,” sounds and phonemes with no semantic meaning. Does the high incidence of non-semantic speech in Sāmaveda correlate with the psychoactive profile of soma? This inquiry also provides a rich basis for cross-cultural comparison with the aesthetics of other psychedelic traditions. Nonlexical vocables occur in both the peyote songs of the Native American Church and the ayahuasca prayer songs of Amazonian shamanism; and traditional practitioners throughout the Americas report non-semantic phonemes in the speech of otherworldly entities they encounter.