Thinkingfingers said:
Laura said:
SlavaOn said:
There is a large list of natural stimulants known to men for millenia: Ma Huang (Ephedra spp.), Coffee, Tea (Thea sinesis), Chocolate (Theobroma cacao), Guarana (Ilex spp)., Kola (Cola nitida), Betel (Areca catechu), Khat (Erythroxylum coca). They were cultivated and propagated over the world. No devastations, famines or wars were able to rob the mankind off these plants.
Somehow, soma (as a stimulant) is not on that list. Since there is a plenty of alternatives, Gods would have been able to pick and choose. Why would the hymns were sang ten millenias ago while describing in details the manufacturing process of some stimulant drink? And compared the active element in it to Immortal God? I think it was for a reason. That drink should had had some unique properties that would put it into a category of its own. Is it the same plant as the one called 'The Old Man Becomes a Young Man" by Noah? It could be. I can speculate that the knowledge of the plant would be very restricted, its cultivation would be very protected and only managed by selected few. Thus, in case of a global disaster, the plant could have survived but the knowledge of it may have perished.
Here you are falling into wishful thinking. There are many reasons that hymns would talk about some sort of magical substance that has magical properties because it happens rather often in myths and legends. People do just "make stuff up".
Or they could have been singing about some recreational drug the used to celebrate and get high off of.
In this case, that is not the case. There is a fairly extensive literature that tracks and examines ancient texts and this idea of immortality being possible goes way back. Going forward, various ways of achieving it were dreamed up, the plant of immortality being one of them. The interested reader might want to delve into Zoroastrian studies and Enochian studies for some really interesting info and speculations. Also, ancient Babylonian studies are furiously interesting. I believe I mentioned one book elsewhere that is a definitive account of the world's oldest known religion and is entitled "Religion in Ancient Mesopotamia" (Jean Bottéro and Teresa Lavender Fagan). You'll find there the foundational ideas of just about everything you encounter in any other religion or myth or superstition or magical practice.
If you decide to go the direction of Enochian studies, I'm not going to list the books because there are tons of them. I've read a couple dozen already (or more). Vanderkam is pretty reliable and you can jump off from his recommendations and bibliography. Enochian works were, apparently, based on a combination of Zoroastrianism and Mesopotamian ideas. I actually think that the Zoroastrian ideas preserved in Enochian works may have been older that the Mesopotamian ideas; it may be, in fact, that the Mesopotamians got a lot from the Central Asian steppes!
The Northern versions generally talk about a first creation that was perfect and the first human(s) were immortal. The cow was very important in these stories. Then one way or another, everything was destroyed and had to be re-created only now humans were no longer immortal and they yearned for their former estate of perfection. This type of story is generally made up by oppressed peoples who are suffering evils and want to go back to the 'golden age'.
The Southern version is that gods existed and were immortal and created humans to serve them and mortality was an initial condition. Their whole focus was on trying to figure out how to please the gods so that they wouldn't suffer. It has been suggested - with good argument - that this religious perspective was created by elites and thrust upon the masses to keep them in line.
Meanwhile, there is also "Minds and Gods: The Cognitive Foundations of Religion" (Todd Tremlin) counterposed by "Information and the Nature of Reality: From Physics to Metaphysics" (Paul Davies and Niels Henrik Gregersen). The first argues that concepts of gods emerge from the evolutionary nature of the human brain. The second argues that non-material information, the set of all possible universes, had to pre-exist the material universe and that evolution is merely the working out and working toward at least one of those universes. You really ought not to read the first without the antidote of the second here.
In short, there is way, way more to all of this than one might initially suppose. It takes deep and wide research to gather enough data to even formulate a proposition that might probably be true. In the case of the soma/haoma, all of this data is in my head and I gave the shortest answer possible without going into endless "disco ball consciousness" digressions.
