Somras is the sixth album by Mahabongo: Swish It’s Everywhere (2008), Minus Ridiculous (2012), Murmuration (2015), The Banyan Tree (2016), Starfish Five (2019).

This album is orientated to India, where I have spent large parts of my life and where these songs were mostly written. Huge thanks to the culture and people of India and to all involved in this project.

Somras
Somras is the Hindi term for the juice (ras) of plants that was the ‘nectar of immortality’ (som/soma) in ancient Asia. Somras is a concoction made from several psychoactive plants that can engender a psychedelic experience, similar to ayahuasca. The formula for somras varies, depending on the availability of plants.

The meaning and myth of soma
The term soma derives, according to most but not all commentators, from the Sanskrit root √su, meaning a juice that has been pressed out or expressed. Likewise, the same derivation applies to the term haoma (from the root √hu) in the Avestan language of the sacred texts (the Avesta) of Zoroastrians. Soma/haoma thus refers to the extracted juice of a plant (or plants) used in Indo-Iranian religious rituals and not to any plant in particular. In the Indian materia medica around twenty plants are referred to as soma.

In the South Asian religion of the Veda—the texts of which date between c.1600 and 800 BCE—soma refers not only to the expressed juice of a plant (or plants) but also to a plant (whichever that may be), and also to the god Soma. The three deities most referred to and invoked in the Vedas are Indra (the king of the gods), Agni (the god of fire) and, thirdly, Soma. In Vedic hymns the god Soma is sometimes paired with either Agni (particularly), Indra, Pūṣan or Rudra. Amongst other character traits, Indra is renowned for his ability to quaff very large amounts of soma; this emboldens him to kill vṛtra, the mythological, cosmic snake of resistance.

All of the 114 hymns of the ninth maṇḍala (book/circle) of the ten maṇḍalas of the Ṛgveda (the oldest and most important of the four Vedas) are devoted to soma. Soma also appears with numerous epithets in the rest of the Ṛgveda and in the other three Vedas (Yajuḥ, Sāma and Atharva). These epithets of soma include various animals, birds, forces of nature, King Soma, indu (the bright drop), andhas (which refers to the plant and also to the soma juice), aṃśu (which likewise refers both to the expressed juice and also to the stem/stalk/section of a stalk of the plant), pitu (juice/drink/food), drapsa (drop), and amṛta (non-death/immortal). Although in the Vedas soma is sometimes identified with the Sun (Sūrya), by the end of the ‘classical’ Vedic era (c.800 BCE) soma is more frequently identified with the Moon.

There are several myths that relate the human acquisition of soma juice. In South Asia the myth of the theft or acquisition of soma has variant forms (and also parallels in European and Middle-Eastern mythology). In the Vedas soma is said to have been brought to earth (or to Indra or to the gods) from either a hundred fortresses, a rock, a mountain top, or heaven by either a falcon (śyena) or an eagle (suparṇa) bearing it/Him; or prized from hiding in nets of iron, or snatched from a cloud by lightning. In one version of the myth, śyena steals soma from Kṛśānu (the footless archer, its guardian), who hurls an arrow at śyena, causing a feather to fall to earth, which becomes the parṇa tree (Butea frondosa/monosperma). In another well-known myth, the ‘churning of the ocean of milk’ (kṣīrābhdimanthana), which appears later in the Purāṇas, Rāmāyaṇa and Mahābhārata, amṛta (the nectar of immortality) is one of fourteen magical gems (ratna) that emerge from the churning of the ocean of milk. It is fought over by the gods (devas) and demons (asuras). This myth of amṛta was further articulated in the late nineteenth century: Garuḍa (the mythological bird) carried away the pot of nectar (amṛta) and four drops fell to earth at the four sites (Haridvār, Prayāg, Ujjain, Tryambakeśvar) of the kumbh melā (the largest festival in the world, held nearly every three years).

The concept of soma/amṛta acquires other connotations in post-Vedic yoga texts, where instead of being the expressed juice of a plant, it becomes an internal ‘nectar’ that can be produced in the head through yogic practices, particularly through the technique of khecarī mudrā, in which the tongue is curled back and the tip inserted into the space above the palate.

For more information about somras, see Botanical Ecstasies: Psychoactive Plant Formulas in India and Beyond, by Matthew Clark (London: Psychedelic Press, 2021).