Upanishads Part I · 60 of 237

Third Prapāthaka: KHÂNDOGYA-UPANISHAD: EIGHTH KHANDA.

EIGHTH KHANDA. 1. On the third of these nectars the Âdityas live, with Varuna at their head. True, the Devas do not eat or drink, but they enjoy by seeing the nectar.

Insight

On the fourth nectar, the very dark color, the Atharva-veda's essence, the Maruts live, with Soma at their head. Notice the choice of Soma here. Soma is the mood-altering libation at the heart of Vedic sacrifice, and is also the moon, and is also in later layers the inner draught of immortality the realized soul tastes. To place Soma as the chief at the fourth quadrant of the honey-doctrine is to nod toward what every later Indian tradition will work out as amrita, the nectar of immortality drawn from within. The Christian eucharistic chalice as a draught of immortal life that one drinks while still mortal is a structural cousin. The Khandogya is sketching the architecture two thousand years before the chalice gets named.Khandogya 3.9; cf. Ignatius of Antioch, Ephesians 20 (the eucharist as pharmakon athanasias)

2. They enter into that (dark) colour, and they rise from that colour.

3. He who thus knows this nectar, becomes one of the Âdityas, with Varuna at their head, he sees the nectar and rejoices. And he, having entered that colour, rises again from that colour.

4. So long as the sun rises in the south and sets in the north, twice as long does it rise in the west and set in the east; and so long does he follow the sovereign supremacy of the Âdityas.