The Secret Of The Veda Aurobindo - HolyBooks.com

354 Selected Hymns
thou makest of one mind the Lord of the house and his consort.
For the glory of thee, O Rudra, the Maruts brighten by their
pressure that which is the brilliant and varied birth of thee.
That which is the highest seat of Vishnu, by that thou protectest
the secret Name of the radiances (the cows, gonām). By thy
glory, O Deva, the gods attain to right vision and holding
in themselves all the multiplicity (of the vast manifestation)
taste Immortality. Men set Agni in them as the priest of the
sacrifice when desiring (the Immortality) they distribute (to
the Gods) the self-expression of the being. . . . Do thou in
thy knowledge extricate the Father and drive away (sin and
darkness), he who is borne in us as thy Son, O Child of Force”
(V.3). Indra is similarly hymned by Vamadeva and in this
eighty-third Sukta of the ninth Mandala, as in several others,
Soma too emerges from his special functions as the supreme
Deity.
Soma is the Lord of the wine of delight, the wine of immortality.
Like Agni he is found in the plants, the growths of
earth, and in the waters. The Soma-wine used in the external
sacrifice is the symbol of this wine of delight. It is pressed out
by the pressing-stone (adri, grāvan) which has a close symbolic
connection with the thunderbolt, the formed electric force of
Indra also called adri. The Vedic hymns speak of the luminous
thunders of this stone as they speak of the light and sound
of Indra’s weapon. Once pressed out as the delight of existence
Soma has to be purified through a strainer (pavitra) and through
the strainer he streams in his purity into the wine bowl (camū)in
which he is brought to the sacrifice, or he is kept in jars (kala´sa)
for Indra’s drinking. Or, sometimes, the symbol of the bowl or
the jar is neglected and Soma is simply described as flowing
in a river of delight to the seat of the Gods, to the home of
Immortality. That these things are symbols is very clear in most
of the hymns of the ninth Mandala which are all devoted to the
God Soma. Here, for instance, the physical system of the human
being is imaged as the jar of the Soma-wine and the strainer
through which it is purified is said to be spread out in the seat
of Heaven, divas pade.