Chandra and Soma: the Moon in India, from the Vedas to the Puranas
Chandra and Soma in Hindu tradition: the Vedic drink, the twenty-seven lunar wives, Daksha's curse, the crescent of Shiva and the Lunar Dynasty.
In Indian tradition the Moon bears several names, and each tells a different story. Chandra means «shining», Soma recalls the mysterious sacred drink of the Vedic rites, Indu evokes the drop. Over the centuries these figures overlapped until they formed a single lunar deity, who in the later texts drives a chariot across the night sky and stands at the origin of one of the great royal lineages of Indian epic.
The drink of the gods
In the Rigveda, India's oldest collection of sacred hymns, composed during the second millennium BC, Soma is first of all a plant and the drink made from it, offered to the gods during sacrifices and drunk by the priests. The ninth book of the work is entirely devoted to Soma Pavamana, the Soma that purifies itself as it flows through the filter. The botanical identity of the plant remains unknown and has been debated for more than a century.
Already in the Brahmanas, ritual texts later than the Vedas, Soma is identified with the Moon. The resulting idea is evocative: the Moon is the heavenly cup that holds the ambrosia, drunk by the gods during the waning phase and filled again during the waxing phase. The lunar cycle thus becomes the very rhythm of the cosmic sacrifice.
The twenty-seven wives and the curse
The Puranas, mythological collections composed during the first millennium AD, relate that Chandra married twenty-seven daughters of the sage Daksha, who correspond to the twenty-seven lunar mansions, the nakshatras, through which the Moon passes in its sidereal month. The god, however, favoured only one of them, Rohini, and neglected the others. Offended, Daksha cursed him, condemning him to waste slowly away.
According to the tale, the intervention of Shiva softened the curse: the Moon would not vanish for ever, but would alternate periods of decline and growth. This is the mythical explanation of the lunar phases. Tradition links the episode with the shrine of Somnath, on the coast of Gujarat, one of Shiva's twelve jyotirlingas. Shiva himself wears a crescent moon in his hair, and is therefore called Chandrashekhara, «he who has the Moon as his diadem».
A god among planets and kings
Chandra is also one of the nine celestial bodies, the navagrahas, worshipped in Indian temples and important in traditional astrology, jyotisha. Monday, Somavara, is his day. In iconography he drives a chariot drawn by an antelope or by white horses and holds a lotus flower in his hand. Another myth tells that the god carried off Tara, wife of Brihaspati, teacher of the gods, and that from their union Budha, the planet Mercury, was born.
From Budha, according to the genealogies of the Puranas, descends the Chandravamsha, the Lunar Dynasty, to which belong the heroes of the Mahabharata, Pandavas and Kauravas, and the line of the Yadavas, from which Krishna is born. Alongside it tradition places the Solar Dynasty, that of Rama. In India the Moon is therefore not just a heavenly body: it is an ancestor, and its light runs in the blood of the kings of epic.