Soma

Read this before anything else

The oldest accounts describe a drink that opens a man to what is outside him.

The modern accounts describe a substance that closes him. It is the same word.

Soma is a colloquial term used on this wiki for all of the things that sever humans from The Dark. That is the modern usage and it is the usage everywhere else in these pages — the chemical arm of Inoculation, the thing that produces the condition described under Hylics. inherited

In the older material it is the exact opposite, and both senses are live. Every other use of the word on this wiki is the modern one, and this entry is where the other is set down. contested

The inversion

In the ancient texts soma is a ritual drink that opens. It is pressed, offered, consumed in ceremony, and it does what the modern preparations are formulated to prevent: it makes a man available to what is outside him. It is a sacrament of contact, and what it actually was — which plant, which preparation — is genuinely lost and has been argued over by scholars with no interest in any of this for a very long time. inherited

Then, within the last century, the word appears attached to a pacifier: a substance distributed to a population to keep it comfortable, incurious and closed. The coinage is a novelist's, it was satire, and it won. Inside two generations the word had reversed and the modern sense is now the only one most readers have. unverified

Three readings, and the wiki holds all three:

Coincidence

Two unrelated things sharing a short word. The dullest reading and the one that requires nothing.

Theft

The name was taken deliberately. Somebody with a severance programme to run gave it the name of the sacrament of opening — as a joke, as cover, or as a claim about what was being replaced. contested

Continuity

It is one substance and one effect, and our categories of open and closed are the error. A thing that removes a man from himself might be described either way depending on what you expected him to find. unverified

The second is the reading this wiki finds hardest to put down, and it should be suspicious of that. A word whose meaning inverted inside a century, travelled fast, and displaced its original is a textbook object of Meme Wars — short, memorable, slightly wrong, and flattering to whoever repeats it. That the inversion happened is documented. That anyone intended it is not. astroturf

Which one you are being given

The practical question, and the wiki cannot answer it in general. ⚠ warning

The modern preparations sever, and the Hylics entry describes what remains. The Vatican holds that severance closes the same aperture through which anything good arrives and calls the result unjudgeable. Inoculation holds that severance is triage and may be defensible. Those three entries disagree about the value of the same act and none of them disputes that the act occurs. contested

What the ancient preparation did, if it existed as described, nobody now living has reported. We have no account of anyone taking an opener. unverified

How this entry was assembled

Drawn from: The inherited line. Ancient material at many removes and in translation. The modern usage, which is everywhere and originates in fiction.

Compiled by: Gershon.

Known weaknesses: We are treating a word as though it were a thing, across a gap of millennia, on the strength of it being the same word. The theft reading is the most attractive and least supported. Every use of soma elsewhere on this wiki predates this entry and means only the modern sense.

Wanted: Any account of the ancient preparation from someone who took it. Any evidence that the modern naming was deliberate rather than literary.