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Soft Secrets
report
Stephen Harrod Buhner’s amazing book for further information on these (see below).
Alcohol Genie or Demon in a bottle? Alcohol is possibly the most widely used intoxicant in the world. Booze, electric soup, batter, swally, hooch, bevvy…the list of names we have for the world’s favourite (legal) drug is endless. It’s been glamorised endlessly, is the source of innumerable jokes and anecdotes, and has arguably been the creative font for writers and artists in Western Civilization for thousands of years. Now we’re told we’re doing far too much of it and that it’s bad for us. Drink every day and you’re an alcoholic, drink at the weekend and you’re a binger. So what’s the story with alcohol? Dr John Dee takes a look. By dr. John Dee
A History Lesson: People have been using alcohol for a long time, possibly as long as they’ve been using cannabis. Certainly it’s been noted that animals in the wild eat fermented fruit, apparently with the intention of getting drunk. Elephants, particularly young male elephants, have a tendency to get aggressive and are therefore ostracised by the rest of the herd until they sober up. Maybe humans did this as well through imitation of the animals. If they did it before they had access to fire, then this would date alcohol consumption as older than cannabis. The ancients made wine, but not really anything like we would consider as wine today. Prior to the discovery of viniculture, wines were made from fermented fruit and plants. These would range in potency, depending on the plants used, but were usually fairly low in alcohol content. However, other plants could be added to bump up the
The process of wine making has been modified and improved over the years, resulting in a more standardised product in terms of strength and quality. Scientific discoveries have also resulted in better fermentation methods. The whole process has become ever more mechanised over the past century or so, but the basic principles of squashing the grapes and letting them ferment remains unchanged. For the majority of the population, wine was one of those expensive commodities and therefore had to be used rather sparingly and on special occasions. One of its functions was to act as a digestif when drunk with or after meals: the various herbs and plant extracts in the brew operated benignly on the digestive tract. It was also regarded as having medicinal qualities (in moderation) so what one would find would be that fruit wines, for example, would be seen as retaining the beneficial properties of the basic components (apples, blackberries, plums etc). Incidentally, there was probably rather too much credence put on this aspect of consumption; while fruit
The Mesopotamians apparently had something like nineteen different types of beer around 3000BC. psychoactive properties of the wine, so known “magical” plants would be added, such as mandrake, belladonna, henbane and very probably hemp and fly agaric mushrooms. So the alcohol would interact with the active ingredients of the magical plants (atropine, THC or whatever). When it was discovered that grapes arguably made a better product, the use of psychoactive plants as admixtures continued. And of course, there were Gods of Wine; Dionysus in Greece and Bacchus in Rome. One of the problems with this was that the wine didn’t keep for very long (particularly in the hot Mediterranean countries) and so something had to be added to prolong its freshness. The Greeks added tree resin for this purpose, and again there’s some evidence that the resin may have interacted with the other contents and increased the potency of the drink. Incidentally, they still do this in Greece, and call the wine Retsina.
wines do indeed retain some of these properties (vitamin C as an example), when drunk in quantity the alcohol tends to negate any positive gain. However, fruit wines in moderate amounts would probably be therapeutic in certain ailments. Wine was used for ritual purposes (much in the way it’s still used by some factions of the Christian church) but also in a more immoderate fashion (again linked with religion) where it was used to fuel what appear to have basically been freefor-all orgies (again, the Christians were pretty good at this, though they called them Agapes as opposed to orgies, which were regarded as strictly heathen Roman affairs). As mentioned above, there’s also some evidence to indicate that a number of the other religions (older than Christianity and later: some of them survive even now) added psychoactive plants to the mix. It looks like these were used for rituals involving trances, out-of-body and near-death experiences, presumably as a way of connecting with the other world,
or the world of the dead. It’s not known for certain, but presumably use of these would be restricted to initiates and wise people. Brewing started a little later than winemaking, and again, the strength of these beers appears to have ranged from fairly mild to moderate as the beer making process at this point was pretty simple and the beer was fermented only for a couple of days. The idea was not so much about getting drunk as getting nourishment from the drink. And of course, to some extent one got the beneficial parts of the plants used. The Mesopotamians apparently had something like nineteen different types of beer around 3000BC. Beer making from hops appeared around 1000AD, and this has been the predominant technique since that point. The science of production has changed radically in the time from then to now – more efficient methods of mass production, for example – but as with wine making, the basic principles have remained pretty constant. Up to this point in time, the main point of beer really wasn’t about intoxication. Where wine was pretty much a rich person’s tipple, particularly as it became more “refined”, so beer was for the working man and woman (and child! The younger element were given smaller amounts of the milder stuff, hence the expression, “small beer”). However, as with wine, there were recipes for beer made from plants that get the drinker totally inebriated, probably on a fairly small amount. Some of the plants used for these were Mandrake, Wormwood and Henbane, all of which are pretty wild and potent plants even before they’ve been turned into alcohol. I refer the curious to
The real revolution in alcohol came with the re-discovery of the distillation process. Again, this was a process known to the Ancients (the Chinese, Egyptians, Greeks and the Romans all knew about it) and the liquids produced were used in medicine. The Arabs inherited a lot of the knowledge of the ancient cultures and introduced distillation to Europe around the 7th century AD. Alchemists and monks (the only people with enough time on their hands to pursue such matters) developed and improved the process over the next few hundred years until someone in the 13th century had the bright idea of distilling some wine. The resulting product was called “eau-de-vie” and was regarded as having life-prolonging and generally beneficial properties. This is possibly the point in history where the rot begins to set in as what has been achieved here is getting to “the essence” or “spirit” of the plants, the wines or whatever. This is total purification of the original product and so all the other – non alcoholic – parts are discarded. And this is where it begins to get dangerous; if one cares to think about other “pure” products derived from plant originators, you’ll get the picture. With distillation we’re talking about ethyl alcohol as the end product. Fine in small amounts and possibly even beneficial, but ultimately highly toxic and very dangerous to the uninitiated (and let’s be honest, to some of the initiated as well). With opium, we’re talking about heroin, with coca we’re talking about cocaine (and with cocaine, we’re talking about Crack). It’s probably one of the inevitable outcomes of the inventiveness of the human mind that this is how things would go. The equation is quite simple: people like to alter their consciousness and so there are always going to be people there who will provide a means to do this. Mechanization together with breakthroughs in the chemists’ lab meant that more and more alcohol could be produced to slake the seemingly endless demand of the population, and provided a tipple to suit pretty much every income. It’s hard to argue that, given the almost universally back-breaking toil of the working person until fairly recently, they should be denied a way of “losing” themselves and forgetting about how grim their lives were.
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