Lecture Five: Seers 5.3

5.3 Expansiveness

In its broader sense, brahman is a sort of prayer, a way of establishing a form of communication between a human being and other agents. In this communication, brahman is articulated in speech and language, but this language is a poietic one, is a visionary language, a word that evokes images and forms. Name is also visual shape (nāmarūpa). Achieving this state of vision is a soteriological turning point, since it is through vision that humans can not only eventually keep at bay the uncertainties of life, but also reach the same condition as the gods.

Some of the elements we have discussed so far show a clear connection with the shamanism we encountered in Lecture Three. A general communitarian model of agency seems to be assumed at the basis of the world described in the hymns, and the seer is a master in the poietic practice that is also common to the shaman of other cultures. And like shamans, Vedic seers are concerned with seemingly wordly issues that are relevant for their own communities: ensuring health (or fighting disease), propitiating good birth and abundance of children, accompanying the deceased kin to the otherworld, and negotiating with the gods (for instance).

For present purposes, we shall focus on three specific domains in which the connection between the Vedic seer and other shamanic cultures emerges quite clearly: (i) possession and the use of psychotropic substances; (ii) visions about birth and death; and (iii) visions about the afterlife. In discussing these elements, we shall illustrate how the paradox of mastery sketched in the introduction of this lecture emerges among the Vedic seers and expresses itself as a longing for ‘liberation’ that is often framed in terms of ‘becoming immortal’ (like the gods).

Perhaps the most obvious and apparent shamanic feature of the Vedic world is the use of a specific psychotropic vegetal substance, called Soma. According to one relatively widespread hypothesis, this could have been derived from a common mushroom, amanita muscaria (DuBois 2009, 163), which was ritually pressed with stones, filtered through wool, and mixed with milk. The Sanskrit root mad of the word Soma refers to intoxication, exhilaration, expansiveness, an effect that seems pervasive in many hymns, although it does not necessarily entail hallucinations. However, the way Soma is presented in the hymns defies reductionist interpretations of the seer’s vision as simply a drug-induced effect. On the one hand, the Vedic Soma is not only the juice distilled from the actual vegetable, but it is also a powerful god (an agent), and it is variously associated with the element of water in general. These overlayers of meaning cannot simply be dismissed as contingent upon the more material nature of a particular substance, since they are interwoven in the experience of the Soma ritual as pervasively described in the Ṛg-Veda and profoundly shape its meaning.

One of the most vocal hymns that extols the effects of drinking Soma goes as follows:

Several features stand out in this hymn. First, as it often happens, the hymn is associated with a specific individual (in this case, Pragātha Kaṇva), who speaks here in first person about his experience of drinking Soma (and this use of the first person might also be regarded as one of the ‘special effects’ used by the seer’s poietic art). The hymn describes some of the effects of Soma on the seer’s perception: a sense of expansiveness, even boundlessness. When the poet says ‘you will know no limits,’ there is a pun in the fact that ‘no limits’ is expressed by the word aditi, who is also a goddess (also associated with right social behavior, as aditi can mean both ‘boundlessness’ and ‘offencelessness’). Perhaps the most enthusiastic verse is the exclamation: ‘we have drunk the Soma; we have become immortal; we have gone to the light; we have found the gods.’ Notice that this exclamation entails a number of equations: light, gods, immortality, Soma, they all converge towards the same sort of experience, thus entailing that achieving one means achieving them all (homology). The seer also acknowledges that Soma has a power that could potentially entail dangers and thus seeks to propitiate Soma in order to receive only desirable fruits, most notably strength and long-life. God Soma is thus invoked and requested to behave as a good friend, a compassionate protector, who will shelter the seer and his community from enemies and support their thriving. There is no perceived contradiction between immortality and the seemingly worldly ideal of a long and happy lifespan. Immortality is to some extent conceived as an enhanced, perfected, and prolonged life. Moreover, death is often conceived in the Vedic and subsequent Indian thought as a bond, thus immortality is associated with a sense of boundlessness (i.e., freedom from the supreme bond represented by death), which ties in with the picture of a powerful affirmation of a perfect and divine life.

The seer sings: ‘weaknesses and diseases have gone; the forces of darkness have fled in terror.’ Very bodily emblems of physical discomfort and trouble (weakness and disease) are associated with the broad and potentially more encompassing ‘forces of darkness.’ The reverse is also true, the forces of light can be associated with great health and power, both physical and spiritual. This is just an instance of how the metaphorical and homological construction of the hymn allows for a merging of multiple semantic plans and meanings. And by the end of the hymn this multiplicity of levels takes on a cosmological value: ‘uniting in agreement with the fathers, O drop of Soma, you have extended yourself through sky and earth.’ Soma expands and makes one boundless, by enhancing the forces of life (health, power, long-life) over darkness. This creates agreement with ‘the fathers’ (both the otherworld where the deceased live and more generally the whole community that lives on and keeps the fathers’ tradition), and quickly extends to ‘sky and earth,’ which are also two gods that represent the fundamental duality of the living space in which humans operate.

Throughout the hymn, the seer refers to Soma as both a substance that can be drunk and as a supreme god, bestower of this extraordinary experience of boundlessness and expansion. The physical act of drinking Soma is a way of being pervaded not only by a physical substance but also by a genuine and most powerful agent. Drinking Soma can be associated in all likelihood to an experience of possession, in which part of the meaning, significance and euphoria that result from drinking the juice are also due to the symbolic and hermeneutic framework in which the ritual is carried out. To put it negatively, if today a layperson who knows nothing of the Vedic world picked up an amanita muscaria, extract a juice out of it, drink it, and perhaps have some visions as a result, this would count as a completely different form of experience from the one described here by the seer, because the broad hermeneutic coordinates that contribute to the meaning of the experience in the two cases (the Vedic and the non-Vedic) are entirely different.

This point can be made even more apparent by considering how the effects of drinking Soma are epitomized in the myths of the god Indra.^[1] Indra is sometimes presented as the first who discovered and drank Soma, and thanks to Soma acquired superhuman powers and became a god. While associated with the thunderbolt, Indra is also often represented as the one who slaughtered Vṛtra, the dragon (making perhaps Indra an Indian analogue of the Greek Kadmos). Vṛtra literally means ‘Obstacle’ and it is represented as a cobra, who protects a mountain in which waters are kept from flowing outside. The flowing of waters has obvious physical connotations, as the flowing of the several rivers upon which the Vedic culture depends (the poet here below mentions the ‘seven streams,’ which can be considered as a reference to the seven rivers associated with the now extinguished Sarasvati River, perhaps the early cradle of the Vedic culture). But the flowing of waters quickly takes on a broader meaning, entailing the flowing of life and its thriving, but also the flowing of knowledge and vision. Waters are often associated with cows, and cows in turn are a metaphor for both riches and knowledge. The myth of Indra killing Vṛtra is thus at the same time a foundational myth that shows how the conditions for the survival of the Vedic civilization were secured, and a blueprint for thinking about the very experience of removing the cognitive obstacles that keep one confined and imprisoned (like the waters imprisoned by Vṛtra in the cave in the mountain). The success of Indra is again an assertion of expansiveness and boundlessness, absence of obstacles. In this whole narrative, Soma has a crucial role, since it is under the guidance of Soma (both as a substance and a god) that Indra can achieve his enterprise (in a previous myth, Soma has been given to Indra by the eagle, who took it from the gods, but following Soma’s own will).

In one powerful hymn, the seer Hiraṇyastūpa Āṅgirasa sings:

Some mystery surrounds the ending of this hymn since it is not clear what made Indra afraid after having succeeded in killing Vṛtra. Perhaps, this might be a resurgence of the latently double nature of Soma itself, which can be empowering, but also potentially threatening. Be that as it may, the hymn provides a vivid illustration of the transformative power of Soma and its potential to overcome the forces of darkness.

Soma is also strongly associated with another god, who is pervasively present in the hymns and in Vedic ritual, namely, Agni, the god of fire. As we shall see, the Vedic ritual turns around the use of fire to purify offerings and transfer them to the gods. But fire is also a symbol of life, activity, and knowledge. In this respect, Agni is a natural counterpart of Soma, not only because of the obvious duality between dry (fire, Agni) and wet (watery, Soma), but also because Agni’s agency can be seen as the fulfilment of the sort of power bestowed by Soma. Simplifying perhaps the complex interplay of interlocked metaphors and connections that run through the hymns, one might say that Soma triggers a process of transformation through a form of possession. This process results in the removal of obstacles (as shown by Indra’s myth), and eventually in reaching full light, the light of fire, the light of vision and inspiration.

Another hymn sings:

In this dense hymn, Bharadvāja Bārhaspatya presents Agni as both the ritual fire (kindled from darkness and hence a symbol of the transition from ignorance to knowledge) and the source of poietic inspiration and vision. In the second verse, the poet alludes to the struggle to compete with his own father and doubts his ability to find poetic inspiration. Being son of a seer is no guarantee of being able to see or to see better. This worry is resolved by the poet’s giving up of his own concern and instead opening himself to Angi’s revelation (indirectly alluded to in the third verse, using the third person masculine, ‘he is the one who knows,’ namely, Agni). Agni is also presented as a unifying element since all gods come to it as to their source. But notice how this allusion to a form of encompassing and embracing unity symbolized by Agni-fire does not entail an ontological or metaphysical view of some hidden and ineffable unity in which all differences are dissolved. Agni can be a unified source of knowledge while also remaining the source for multifarious and diverse visions and experiences. Unity, here, is not conceived as entailing simplicity or indeterminacy. And in a striking verse, the seer that has now kindled his own visionary power, can capture the moment in which this takes off and start flying: ‘My ears fly open, my eye opens, as does this light that is fixed in my heart. My mind flies up, straining into the distance. What shall I say? What shall I think?’ Agni takes the poet beyond the condition of darkness (night, bondage, the waters in the cave, the obstacle, the dragon), into light (health, power, vision, freedom, immortality), and perhaps even farther than the poet’s own father.

Before moving on, it might be interesting to compare these elements with current research on psychedelic states. Preller and Vollenweider provide a review of current studies and show how the use of hallucinogens (especially psilocybin, a naturally occurring hallucinogen) is correlated with recurrent altered states of consciousness, which include experiences of ‘oceanic boundlessness’ and ‘ego-dissolution.’ While the sense of self might be dissolved in both states, different subjects can have different reactions to it, ranging from bliss to anxiety and dread, depending on various factors and circumstances. They also observe that the use of psychedelics can ‘be linked to reductions in arousal and attentional functions […], deficit of response inhibition and difficulties in disengaging attention from previously attended locations […], [and] a failure to use contextual information’ (Katrin H. Preller and Franz X. Vollenweider, ‘Phenomenology, Structure, and Dynamic of Psychedelic States,’ 2018, 237–238). These cognitive impairments might help explain one core difference between psychedelics-induced altered states of consciousness, and meditation-induced states (in which cognitive functions and attention are usually sharpened). The authors also summarize a sequential model in which various altered states unfold progressively:

In shamanic experience, it seems that it is especially the ‘symbolic existential level’ that receives prominence during the séance, while different elements in the Vedic hymns might be connected with both this level and the ‘deep integral level of self-transcendence.’ However, as Preller and Vollenweider remark, the unfolding of these states is not uniform and purely mechanic, but depends on age, personality, mood, expectations, environment and previous experience of the subjects themselves.