lcoholic
beverages and other intoxicating substances, it seems, are a gift to humans
rather like fire: a power for both great good and great evil, a crucial ingredient
in both the making of civilization and its undoing.
The "black wine" that helps
Odysseus blind the cave-dwelling, flesh-eating, one-eyed giant Polyphemus,
notes UMass classics professor Marios Philippides, stands for a victory
of the humanist culture, of the vine and olive, over the uncultivated,
uncouth and inhuman. Yet in the very same chapter of Homer's Odyssey,
Odysseus' crewmen must be dragged away from the enticements of another
inebriating substancethe "flowering food" of the lotus, which
makes them "forget the way home."
The drinking of intoxicating beverages
may be among just a
handful of things that distinguish us
not only from one-eyed monsters, but from the rest of the animal kingdom.
Reasoned argument, symbolic language, music-making are a few more that
come to mindand that are often closely associated both with each other
and with drink.
Drinking, at least healthy drinking, is
preeminently a social act the anthropologists remind us. And about this
act, anthropology may have the most of any of the disciplines to say. As
a sacrament in the secular meaning of the wordas sign, token, symbol, oath,
pledgethe sharing of drink, especially drink fermented from indigenous
grains or fruits, has had wide use and significance in almost every agricultural
and post-agricultural culture on the planet. As holy sacrament, drink and
other intoxicating substances have been long and variously employed both
symbolically and as vehicles for expanding consciousness. There are also
medicinal functions to consider. These different uses are not always easily
separable.
Some of the richness, antiquity, and continuity
of the salutary side of the story of drink is evoked for meWASP that I
amin the antique word "wassail," as in that favorite old Christmastime
carol that goes, "Here we come a-wassailing, among the leaves so green/
here we come a-wandering, so fair to be seen; / love and joy come to you,
/ and to you your wassail too, / and God bless you and send you a happy
New Year."
The word "Wassail" comes to
us through Old Norse and Old English. Etymologically, notes emeritus professor
of English Robert Creed, "wassail" derives from Old English ":waes
hal," meaning "be whole." From "hal," of course,
we also have the word "health," as in the classic toast, "To
your health."
As a noun, wassail is a spicy ale traditionally
imbibed as part of Yuletide and Twelfth Night celebrations. It is also
a verb meaning to make merry or carouse. A third definition is the song
or carol that the merrymakers"the Waits" in ancient Englandsing
as they go visiting from house to house in the village. It is a custom
still carried on with great gusto in my little neighborhood in Western
Massachusetts. Perhaps some version of it still survives in yours.
In medieval and Renaissance England, the
churches were the main purveyors of wassails, as well as of myriad other
types of ales that were brewed up and retailed for just about every special
occasion, seasonal or sacramental. Arthur Kinney, Copeland Professor of
English and director of the university's Renaissance Center, describes
the practice in some detail in his 1987 book on John Skelton, a poet and
priest who lived at the turn of the 16th century.
There were christening ales and bride's
ales, clerk, wake, and Whitsun ales. The sale of these "church ales"
was a major means of fund-raising for churches, Kinney notes. The echoing
of holy mysteries in secular settings is also noted by Kinney in his discussion
of Skelton's poem "Tunnyng of Elynour Rumming," in which holy
communion is parodied through a ribald portrait of a Tudor alehouse, with
its bawdy proprietress lavishly dispensing a "noppy ale" and
its parade of colorful patrons: "Come whoso wyll/ To Elynour on the
hill,/ With 'Fyll the cup, fyll!' "
"The ceremonial atmosphere surrounding
Elynour's alehouse," writes Kinney, "is also meant to remind
us of the ale celebrations connected with Holy Mother Church. This fundamental
connection had existed since early medieval times, when monastic houses
served as accommodations for pilgrims and gave them food and drink."
The deliberate fermenting and distilling
of grains or fruits to make intoxicating liquors begins in the shadows
of prehistoric time. In Consuming Passions, an anthropological study
of eating and drinking that was published while one of its authors, George
Armelagos, was a member of the faculty here, it is noted that "No
one knows for certain how far back in history fermented liquors go, but
Sumerian tablets dating to nearly 5,000 years ago mention nineteen kinds
of beer." Alcohol in its plethora of forms has so many symbolic implications
that it's easy to overlook the fact that it also is a food; in many societies,
the authors point out beer is a critical source of indispensable vitamins,
minerals, and carbohydrates. They cite the Bombay people of Zambia who
depend on a beer made from sorghum for B vitamins otherwise lacking in
their diet. And heavy drinking in Ireland can be largely attributed, they
say, "to a long history of uncertain food supply and occasional severe
famines. . . . . Alcohol, in these circumstances, provided the social and
psychological satisfaction, as well as the caloric energy, that people
elsewhere obtain from food."
Professor Creed, a specialist in Old English
with a strong side interest in archeology, reports that residues on fragments
from ancient drinking vessels suggest that humankind may have been brewing
beer longer than it has been baking bread. "Mankind," says a
wise old Teirisias in Euripides's The Bacchae, "possesses two
supreme blessings." The first is grain, the gift of Demeter; the second
is wine, the gift of Dionysus, in the drinking of which "suffering
mankind forgets its grief. . . . There is no other medicine for misery."
The line between medicine and poison,
of course, has always been a slender and tenuous one, as Euripides' tragedy
vividly illustrates. The "gladness of the grape" that the chorus
celebrates in the early scenes of the drama ultimately turns to madness,
as the intoxicated Maenads mistake the puritanical prince Pentheus, dressed
up in drag, for a hairy beast, and rip him stem from stern, strewing his
body parts all over the wild wastes of Mount Cithaeron.
Wholeness or dismemberment: intoxicating
drink seems to lead either to one or the other, though sometimes to both.
David Lenson, a UMass professor of comparative literature, says that depending
largely on what he calls "set and setting"the drinker's purposes
and the context in which drinking takes placealcohol, "with its self-contradictory
capacity to to heighten and deaden feeling at the same time," may
lead to violence, an overflowing affability, or an anesthetized elation.
Lenson's book On Drugs is an inquiry
into the experience of mind-altering substances combined with a critique
of society's failure to effectively regulate their use. Alcohol, Lenson
writes, "can be described only in a web of contradictions. It is a
depressant, but also a stimulant; it encourages sexual behavior but depresses
sexual performance; it promotes an atmosphere of relaxation and friendliness
but leads to tension and violence.
"Alcohol is protean," Lenson
continues, "the perfect example of a drug whose effects are intertwined
with the personality of the user and the social arena where that user's
character is exercised." Alcohol is "a theater of appearances."
Among privileged young men of ancient
Greece, it was also a theater of ideas. Plato's Symposiumthe template
for the classical Platonic academy from which universities were to evolveliterally
means "drinking party," notes Lisa Maurizio of the classics faculty.
At these "learned banquets," as one ancient writer called the
gatherings, wine provided an indispensable social lubricant. The relaxation
of inhibitions induced by the wine itself, combined with the elaborate
and careful ritual for diluting, pouring, and serving, created an atmosphere
of ease, intimacy, and decorum conducive to the spirited fomenting and
exchange of ideas.
Early on in the Symposium, Plato
paints a picture of the perfection of pedagogy, of frictionless flow between
teacher and pupil: the flow of wine from krater to cup is his analogy.
In their self-conscious ceremoniousness, the symposia were akin to the
Japanese tea ceremony where "the process was more important than the
actual drinking," notes Philippides. Drinking was but a pretext for
the really important businessthe talk, the stream of spoken language that
was the source of all knowledge and all understanding.
As the Symposium ends, Socrates
has not only once again demonstrated that he is "in conversation the
conqueror of all mankind," he's also proven himself worthy of the
title of "Silenus, King of the Satyrs" by drinking all of his
companions under the table. At daybreak only Socrates and two others are
still awake, passing a large goblet between them; he is brilliantly driving
home a point about the essential likeness of tragedy and comedy as his
listeners slowly succumb to exhaustion.
Socrates' "natural temperance"
is a positive marvel to Alcibiades, who, despite his inebriated state,
or maybe because of it ("in vino" being "veritas")
is able to express better than anyone else at the party what makes the
master teacher the master teacher. "He makes me confess," Alcibiades
says in a beautiful line,"that I ought not to live as I do, neglecting
the wants of my own soul."
Socrates trod what the Romans would call
the "heroic middle way"a concept not to be confused, says professor
of history Carlin Barton, with puritanical abstemiousness. The Romans would
regard a person who abstained from strong drink as "having no backbone,"
says Barton. Like the Greeks, Romans were a passionate people, impatient
with "mediocritus" in the sense of timid avoidance of extremes.
What earned the "knight of the middle way" his garland was his
ability to indulge his impulses and appetites, even to excess, but to do
so in the appointed time and placethe designated Saturnaliaswhile always
maintaining decorum.
"It took all their energy to maintain
that balance," says Barton, who has written on the emotional life
of the Romans in her Sorrows of the Ancient Romans. It was the Romans'
highly evolved sense of shame"pudor" in Latinthat ensured that
they stayed within bounds. That sense of shame began to weaken with the
decline of the Republic and the growth of the Empire, says Barton; the
further Romans drifted from Rome, the less self-restraint they showed.
With changes in topography, climate, cultivation
patterns, language, culture, race, politics, and economics come changes
in the role of drink and other intoxicants. At the farthest frontier of
the Roman Empire, within the ancient Celtic warrior cultures in the wastes
of ancient Britain, we move well away from the theater of ideas and into
the theater of the most vivid action.
There, meadfermented honey and waterhas
replaced the fruit of the vine as the elixir of choice. Versatile little
word, mead: it can mean the beverage, or a meadow (presumably humming with
bees), and (sometimes spelled meed) it can mean a form of payment or pledge,
as between the lord who supplies mead in great flagons and the troops who
guzzle it in preparation for battle.
"Celtic art owes much to Celtic thirst."
Maria Tymoczko, professor of comparative literature and an authority on
Irish and Celtic literature, quotes this famous line by Celtic scholar
Stewart Piggott when asked for a comment on the role of alcoholic beverages
in ancient Britain. Piggott was referring, Tymoczko explains, to the high
level of artistic expression with which the wandering Celts fashioned all
manner of cauldrons, pitchers, cups, and other drinking vessels.
But the observation also is applicable
to Celtic literature. In the earliest poems of the great Welsh bardic tradition,
which memorialize one extravagantly gory battle after another, the mead
flows as copiously as the blood. Tymoczko cites particularly vivid instances
in the ancient Celtic poem "The Gododdin," which was written
sometime in the early seventh century and which she describes as a series
of elegies to warriors felled in bloody raids against the intruding Angles
near Catterick in Yorkshire.
"Because of wine-feast and mead-feast
they charged," one verse reads, "Men famed in fighting, heedless
of life." Another verse begins, "In the great hall, I drank wine
and mead . . . Many were his spears; / In the clash of men / he fashioned
a feast for eagles."
My favorite is this: "Worthy of sweet
ensnaring mead, / A champion's charge at dawn."
A bucolic strand in the history of drinkan
ethos equally removed from that of mead-guzzling warriors and wine-sipping
epicuresspans millions of folk, centuries of time, and much of the world's
land mass. It is the great folk tradition of drink, and it is captured
in a small but exquisiteand surprisingly contemporary study by now retired
UMass professor of anthropology Barbara Kerewski Halpern.
Entitled "Rakija as Ritual in Rural
Serbia" and published in 1985, it was based on three decades of field
work in rural Serbia. In it, Halpern evokes a richly detailed and nuanced
picture of a traditional peasant societyfrom its poetry to its belief system
to its social tiesby examining the multifarious uses of indigenous plum
brandy. This brandy, she writes, is remarkable for having been "imbued.
. . . with attributes that augment a sense of community and collectivity."
The opening paragraph suggests the charming
and intriguing flavor of the whole: "'Eh, so it goes with the Serbswith
rakija (rahk-ya) we are born, with rakija we marry, and with rakija we
bury.' Uncle Bogdan and I were sitting on a grassy rise near the newly
filled-in grave of a village neighbor. Other mourners, many of them with
red noses and tearing eyes, were beginning to disperse. He surveyed the
graveyard scene and remarked, 'Just look. With us, you can't tell who has
been drinking and who's been crying.'"
The Serbs have a saying: "Without
rakija there is no conversation." A glass of Rakija is sometimes referred
to as "a glass of chat." Halpern writes,"Serbs drink, `To
life,' clinking glasses and downing the contents in one go."
Similar rich catalogues of generally benign
and beneficial drinking customs could no doubt be produced for many traditional,
agrarian folk cultures the world over. R. Brooke Thomas, a faculty member
whose specialty is medical anthropology, has traveled widely among the
high mountain cultures of Latin America and can tell many stories of how
the descendants of the Incas in the high Andes of Peru use cheecha (a corn
beer) and the descendants of the Maya in Mexico use pulque (made from a
mash of the agave plant, the name for which means "noble" ) to
cement social bonds, mark festivals and occasions, and propitiate the gods.
But Thomas is quick to point out that,
as these cultures have suffered crushing social and economic dislocation
in recent times, drinkingnow mostly of factory-produced liquorshas become
more of a problem for them. He cites a recent paper published in the journal
World Watch describing the growing economic and social costs of
alcoholism in Third World countries.
One of the reasons for the phenomenal
success of fundamentalist Pentecostal religious groups in Latin America,
according to Thomas, is their strict stance against alcohol, and the immediately
regenerating effect that abstemousness has had on the families and villages
that have embraced it.
Some observations on the role of alcohol,
and drugs in general, in the United States bring us to the end of our little
survey. Several theories as to why America became "such a hard-drinking
culture," says history professor Ronald Story, have to do with geography
and the great demographic story of the push to the frontier. One theory
is that drink provided an aid to socializing among strangers. A related
conjecture is that the predominantly male society of frontier towns lacked
the constraints that the presence of women would have enforced.
There are echoes back and forth, Story
notes, between the two great political movements of temperance and women's
suffragewhich, perhaps more than coincidentally, climaxed nearly synchronously
with passage of two great constitutional amendments: the Eighteenth Amendment,
instituting prohibition, in 1919, and the Nineteenth Amendment, in 1920,
giving women the right to vote.
History professor Bruce Laurie, whose
specialty is nineteenth century labor history, warns against using the
over-simple lens of gender to interpret the great temperance struggle.
The changing nature of work did much to convert many working men to the
goals of temperance, he says.
Work in midcentury factories was becoming both more cooperative and more technically demanding; the consequences of heavy drinking were becoming ever more costly. As wages increased, and the middle class grew, so did the social value of "respectability," for men as well as women. "Respectability": If anything could, that sobering word might spell the end of the glorious history of drink.
