Lore 236: Spirited

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In 2018, a group of researchers were excavating an old hunter-gatherer burial site within a cave in Israel when they discovered something strange.

It had settled into the cracks of the floor between stone mortars, a mysterious ancient substance that, I'll be honest, I personally might have overlooked.

After all, I imagine tomb floors aren't the most spotless places, right?

But these researchers were experts, and the anomaly caught their eye right away.

Despite its surroundings, this residue had nothing to do with death.

Rather, what the archaeologists found was a substance long associated with celebrating life.

That is, booze.

Specifically, traces of wheat and barley-based alcohol, or as you and I know it today, beer.

Up until then, it had been believed that beer brewing began around 5,000 years ago.

But here's the thing about this burial site.

It was 13,000 years old.

What the researchers had unearthed was nothing short of the earliest brewery ever discovered.

Scientists believe that humans developed the ability to metabolize alcohol long before we were, well, modern humans, with primates consuming fermented fruit.

Some anthropologists even think that humans invented agriculture itself out of a desire to brew alcohol.

And if that isn't proof that our species has basically had the same priorities since day one, I don't know what is.

It's been known as hooch, sauce, the hard stuff, giggle water.

Call it whatever you want.

Alcohol is one of humankind's most ubiquitous creations, and so it's no surprise that as it evolved, something else evolved right along with it.

Folklore:

I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is lore.

Close your eyes and imagine a scene with me.

You're at a wedding.

The ceremony has ended and waiters in white button downs have begun circling the dining room, delivering food and drink to the guests.

Suddenly, you hear a chime, like a thin bell ringing.

Someone at a nearby table is clinking their butter knife against their glass.

And yes, you know exactly what that sound means.

It's time for a toast.

The practice of giving toasts is so common that we may not recognize it as folklore at all.

But in truth, this ritual comes right out of the realms of superstition.

According to one historian, the explanation for why we clink our glasses is that the bell-like noise would drive off the devil.

And toasting superstition doesn't end there.

The ancient Greeks would toast to the dead with water instead of wine to symbolize their river voyage to the underworld.

And so even to this day, it's considered bad luck to toast with water in your glass, lest you call death to the dinner table.

In Spain and France, it's essential to make eye contact while toasting.

The punishment, if you break it, seven years of bad

intimacy with your partners, if you know what I mean.

In Japan, it's unlucky and poor manners to pour your own cup of sake.

Others must pour it for you, and vice versa.

In other superstitions, two people drinking from the same glass of wine or beer will find their futures forever entangled, so be careful who you offer a sip to.

Oh, and a quick aside, the word toast itself comes from the 17th century, when people would put actual bits of herbed bread into their wine to improve the taste and soak up some of the acidity.

I can't imagine that it was very good, but hey, you can't knock it till you've tried it, right?

Speaking of wine, it's usually considered unlucky to spill wine.

Unless of course you're British and the wine is spilled on you, in which case that is lucky.

Got a sailing voyage ahead?

Well, pouring a glass of wine into the waves can calm an angry sea.

Oh, and if you want to get a person drunk on just one glass of wine, slip a few of their fingernail clippings into the glass.

That should do the trick, according to folklore.

Now, let's be clear though, I'm not endorsing that one.

Yes, it's unethical, but it's also very, very icky.

Now, if the fingernail thing weren't gross enough, in the 17th century, romantic young Englishmen would stab themselves and mix their blood into their own wine before toasting the women they loved.

Then, of course, there's the Catholic transubstantiation, in which wine becomes Christ's literal blood when drunk.

Suddenly, a piece of wet toast doesn't sound so bad, does it?

Of course, not all superstitions celebrated drinking.

Some demonized it.

During the temperance movement of the early 1900s, for example, it was associated with Satan himself.

One propaganda cartoon likened a sip of alcohol to, and I quote, the devil's toboggan, depicting a drunkard on a slide plummeting right into his own grave.

The devil himself was known to partake too.

There are numerous folktales from around the world about people getting the devil drunk in order to defeat him.

Like one in Mexico, where a man selling pulque, a traditional fermented agave drink, wormed his way out of a deal with the devil by getting the devil so drunk that he passed out and burst into flames.

Or a Scottish folktale, in which a Highlander beats the devil in a wrestling contest after getting him drunk on his finest bottle of whiskey.

But it isn't just the devil who enjoys a well-mixed cocktail.

In fact, the other party animals were the gods.

In ancient Egypt, almost all the gods loved to toss back a stiff drink.

And how do you worship a drunken god?

Well, by drinking, of course.

A lot.

Osiris, the god of death and the afterlife, was even said to have been responsible for teaching humans how to brew beer and wine.

In death, families would often bury their loved ones with the finest brew to try and impress Osiris.

And it wasn't just Egyptians either.

Many cultures believe that intoxication brought you closer to the gods.

Puritans even referred to alcohol as the good creature of God.

And then there's the ancient Maya god of drinking, Akan, whose name literally translates into belch.

His best friend happened to be the god of creativity, which reminds me of Bacchus, the Roman god of wine, who could inspire frenzied fits of passion, religious devotion, and creativity in his drunken followers.

Looking back, it seems that divinity, artistic inspiration, and alcohol have been linked throughout human history.

And no spirit is more tied to creative genius nor more wrapped in folklore than absinthe.

It's a well-worn ritual.

First, the bartender places a glass in front of you containing a crystal clear emerald green liquid.

Atop the glass balances a flat silver spoon slotted with intricate carvings.

There's a sugar cube on the spoon and the bartender pours a stream of water over it so it passes through the sugar, through the spoon, and into the green liquid below.

Your translucent drink goes pale and milky as if by magic.

You take a cautious sip and it tastes of licorice and herbs, like a bitter pinch.

And now, you may as well say hello.

After all, you've just met the green fairy.

Absinthe is a highly alcoholic liquor made from Artemisia absinthium, a type of wormwood.

While there are other herbs in the recipe, like fennel and green anise, wormwood is both a primary ingredient and the most controversial.

The leafy plant grows in Europe, Siberia, and the United States, and it's one of the most bitter plants on earth.

And then there is the fact that wormwood contains thujone, a chemical with hallucinogenic properties.

But absinthe didn't always have the reputation it has now.

It actually began life as a medicine.

As far back as 1552 BC, the ancient Egyptians used medicinal wormwood, which we know because they wrote it down on a papyrus scroll that survives to this day.

The ancient Greeks had a medicine called absinthion, made by soaking wormwood leaves in wine or spirits.

The word absinthion actually meant undrinkable because of how bitter the stuff was, but it must not have been totally undrinkable because they drank plenty of it to treat menstruation pain, jaundice, anemia, and rheumatism, and even to aid in childbirth.

In the 2nd century CE, wormwood tinctures were used for stomach problems and swooning.

In fact, the nickname wormwood came from the fact that it was used to help get rid of stomach worms.

Jumping forward to the 1700s, the first modern absinthe recipe was believed to have been invented by a Frenchman named, and I know this is going to sound like a cartoon character, Dr.

Pierre Ordiner.

The first absinthe distillery opened in 1797 to produce it en masse, but even then, it was still purely medicinal.

That is, until 1840, when France was busy conquering and colonizing Algeria.

And bear with me here.

I swear the Algerian thing is relevant.

You see, French soldiers often got sick in the unfamiliar landscape and were given absinthe medicine for fevers, to prevent dysentery, and even to ward off insects.

They would mix it into their wine to cut the bitterness, and they found that it had quite a fun, boozy kick to it too.

By the time the troops got home, they had developed a taste for what they called leverte, or the green, which then spread to civilians.

Absinthe as an alcoholic beverage was finally in fashion.

See, I told you it would be relevant.

Now, around this time, the French grape vineyards were wiped out by an insect infestation called phylloxera.

Wine became more scarce and more expensive.

But you know what was neither?

Absinthe.

Its popularity boomed, and it wasn't uncommon to start the morning with a glass of absinthe and end the day with Louverte or the green hour where you would have, well, more absinthe.

And it wasn't just French, its popularity spread across Europe and even to America.

Remember, intoxication has been linked to artistic inspiration for thousands of years, and absinthe trickled right into that legacy.

It's no shock that the cheap, readily available, and very strong alcohol became popular among artists.

Some were so inspired by the drink that it even leaked into their art.

Painters like Edouard Manet, Vincent van Gogh, Henri du Toulouse-Lutrecht, and Pablo Picasso all made paintings depicting people drinking absinthe.

In fact, one of Toulouse-Lutrecht's paintings was a portrait of Van Gogh drinking absinthe.

Writers like Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Charles Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde, and many others were vocal absinthe fans.

A glass of absinthe, Oscar Wilde said, is as poetical as anything in the world.

What difference is there between a glass of absinthe and a sunset?

The artists, drawn to myth and whimsy, referred to the drink as the green fairy.

They idealized being drunk, and just like the ancient Mayans and Greeks, they too associated drunkenness with a sort of muse figure who would bring inspiration and brilliance to their work.

In the words of Arthur Rimbaud, the poet makes himself a seer through a long, prodigious, and rational disordering of all the senses.

In other words, to be a poet, a good poet, even a great poet, you had to be drunk first.

The Green Fairy herself was personified in art as a beautiful emerald-winged woman, bearing a tall, swirling glass.

The whole culture around absinthe had developed a sort of magic attached to it, with the belief that it had the ability to alter the mind and heighten creativity.

Before long, absinthe had become synonymous with bohemianism.

But as much as artists idealized it, the public was less convinced.

Actually, absinthe was beginning to gain a reputation of rotting the mind and even being responsible for the decline of French culture.

Addiction to absinthe even earned its own ominous name: absintheism.

And it got darker too.

More and more doctors and citizens had begun to come forward, condemning the drink for causing violent personalities, addiction, and lunacy, and even murder.

It was a sweltering day in Communist, Switzerland, and Jean Luffray awoke hot and thirsty.

He dragged himself out of bed, pulled on his clothes, and spent the morning of August 28th, 1905, as he always did, with a glass of pre-work absinthe.

Luffray was a 31-year-old French laborer living in Switzerland.

A big, burly man, he was no stranger to hard work.

In his youth, he spent three years as a soldier for the French army, but now he was a family man, with a wife, two young daughters, and another kid on the way.

As his wife cooked breakfast, he had a second glass of absinthe.

Why not?

After all, it would be a long day.

There was the family farm to tend to, and then hours of grueling manual labor at the job site where he, his father, and his brother all worked.

And when that was done, he planned to go mushroom foraging before heading home.

But his boots needed waxing before he could forage in the muddy woods, so he told his wife to do it.

She ignored him, though, so he shouted at her, but eventually gave up and went out to tend the cows.

Soon, Luffrey, his father, and his brother all headed off to work, stopping for a creme de mont, a cognac, and a soda on the way.

It was only 5.30 in the morning.

At lunch, he drank six glasses of paquette, a local wine, and then he had another glass around 4.15 when work got out.

After that, the men left and decompressed from their long day of labor.

Where?

At a bar, of course, to drink brandy-laced coffee.

When Luffrey and his father finally made it home, they sat at the table and downed another liter of piquette.

Not between them, mind you.

A liter each.

Meanwhile, Luffray's pregnant wife looked on, shaking her head.

Stop drinking and go milk the cows, she said.

Milk them yourself, he replied, pouring himself a hearty cup of coffee, laced with homemade brandy, of course.

And that is when Luffray noticed his boots, still sitting under the sink, dull and unwaxed.

A shouting match broke out between Loufray and his wife.

She accused him and his father of being lazy drunks.

Loufray didn't take kindly to that and yelled at her to shut up, but she refused, yelling back the words, try and make me.

Now, I want to give you a bit of warning here, because what happens next is pretty grisly.

Jean-Luffray stumbled to the closet and pulled out his long-barreled bolt-action Verteli rifle.

Then he shot his wife in the face.

His father, watching horrified, fled for help.

For a moment, all was silent, and then there was a rustle by the door.

Luffray's four and a half-year-old daughter Rose had heard the gunshot and come to the kitchen, only to gape in shock at her mother dead on the floor.

With glazed eyes, Lufray shot her too, and then he stepped into the next room and shot his two-year-old daughter Blanche in her crib.

Finally, in perhaps the most terrible moment of clarity, he turned the rifle on himself, but the barrel was too long.

He tried to rig it up with string, but it wouldn't work.

And when he fired, all he did was shoot himself in the jaw.

It wasn't long before his father returned, police in tow.

Word traveled fast about Luffray's case, and specifically the fact that he'd consumed absinthe at the day's start.

It would be another six months before Luffray's case finally made it to trial, though.

On February 23rd of 1906, Jean Jean Luffray was shuffled into the courtroom, his fate shadowing along behind.

The defense pleaded insanity on account of Luffray's intoxication, of course.

But surprisingly, they weren't mentioning the fact that he'd drunk enough wine and cordials to straight up embalm himself.

No, the defense relied solely on the absinthe.

They brought in psychologist Dr.

Albert Mayhem, who testified that Luffray had, and I quote, absinthe madness.

Without a doubt, he testified, it is the absinthe he drank daily and for a long time that gave Loufray the ferociousness of temper and blind rages that made him shoot his wife for nothing and his two poor children whom he loved.

It seemed that Loufre's lawyers were using absinthe's degenerate reputation to try and absolve their clients.

That defense didn't hold though.

After all, Loufray had only two tiny glasses of this stuff and at the very beginning of the day.

And thankfully, the judge didn't think getting blackout drunk was a very good excuse to murder your whole family.

He was convicted of quadruple homicide for his wife, his two daughters, and his unborn child.

Louffray was sentenced to 30 years, but three days later, he hanged himself in his cell.

The defense of absinthe madness may not have held up in the court of law, but it did hold up in the court of public opinion.

Word of Luffre's trial traveled fast, and its connection to the Green Fairy went with it, and other God knows how many drinks Loufray consumed were forgotten, but memory of the absinthe remained.

It was no longer just a cheap drink for vagabond artists.

This stuff was dangerous.

Less than three months later, the region of Switzerland where Jean Lefray had lived banned absinthe entirely.

Over the next few years, more bans swept across Europe and then around the world.

The days of the Green Fairy and its light-hearted bohemian branding were over.

Absinthe had transformed from medicine to muse, and from there it had become a monster.

History is like dominoes.

An ancient Egyptian doctor created an herbal tincture to treat sickness, and nearly 3,000 years later, the poet Charles Baudelaire was writing Flowers of Evil, a glass of that same tincture in his hand.

One small action rippled through time, affecting untold future generations.

And because a drunken, abusive husband in 1905 killed his family, bars in the year 2000 were still prohibited from carrying that man's drink of choice.

I'm always amazed at these links, like invisible webbing tying humanity together across space and time and memory.

Absinthe may have been banned, but its tale isn't over just yet.

And like all the best stories, this one has a twist ending.

Enter the contemporary New Orleans chemist and absinthe maker, Ted Brow.

In the 1990s, Ted acquired two bottles of pre-ban absinthe, that is, absinthe that had been made before the drink was made illegal, and he chemically tested them.

What he discovered was that they contained barely any thujone.

Remember, thujone is the chemical in wormwood that supposedly causes hallucination, or in other words, the chemical that would be responsible for the so-called absinthe madness.

And yet, these bottles only contained traces of thujone, certainly not enough to cause lunacy.

But maybe it had just degraded with time.

After all, the absinthe in these bottles had sat unopened for decades.

Luckily, Tedbrow was a thorough scientist, and he was going to get to the bottom of the mystery.

He started distilling his own absinth using pre-banned recipes and pre-ban equipment, recreating it exactly as it would have been made in Jean-Lefray's day.

In 2008, along with a group of other scientists, he conducted further tests on both his own and the pre-bottled absinthe, only to find the same results, barely any thujone.

apparently the distillation process strips almost all of the thujone out long before it's ready to drink it's easy to get caught up in a story myths are powerful and magic is alluring who wouldn't be enticed by a cursed cocktail with the power to inspire great art or drive a person to madness but here's the thing What Tedbro discovered is that absinthe was always just alcohol.

140 proof alcohol, sure, but still just alcohol.

Absintheism was nothing more than alcoholism, with a preference for the green fairy.

In the end, it seems, what gave absinthe its power all along, like so many other things throughout history, had been something both enticing and dangerous:

folklore

Like so many things in this world, absinthe is one of those substances that is dangerous at the extremes.

For most people, it was a special drink, just a beverage with personality and nothing more.

Too much of it, though, was thought to cause madness, and as society hell-bent on the opposite end, banning it entirely, found themselves victim to the fear-inducing powers of folklore.

But it's not the only beverage with a story.

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On this show, when we say the word spirit, we're usually talking about ghosts.

But as we all know, the word has another meaning, alcohol.

If you're like me, you've probably wondered why we use the same word to mean both a human soul and a glass of scotch.

Now, while I wish I could distill it down into a single answer, no pun intended, I swear.

The truth is a little more complicated.

While we don't know for certain where the link began, there are plenty of theories.

Now, one idea is that Aristotle gave distilled alcohol the name spirit in 327 BC, because drinking it filled you with, well, a strange spirit.

Now, he wouldn't have used the English word spirit, of course, but the ancient Greek equivalent pneuma, which then could have later been translated to spirit as we know it today.

Similarly, in the New Testament of the Christian Bible, being filled with the Holy Spirit is likened to being drunk, which could have created an association between liquor and spirit.

In the words of drink historian Elizabeth Pierce, the word spirit initially meant breath or life, and that's where we get respiration or expiration if you die, and even inspiration, that means the breath of God coming to you to give you ideas.

Since breath and wind are invisible, Pierce claims that the word evolved to refer to other invisible things too, like ghosts.

This next theory takes a whole different approach, but hey, etymology is a crazy fun thing.

We'll start with the word alcohol, which is thought to come from the Middle East.

Originally, it was either alcohol or algal, both of which are very different words.

Algal in the Quran is a spirit or devil that causes intoxication.

So therefore, when people became intoxicated on liquor, some etymologists think it was given the same title as the intoxicating devil.

So far, same idea, right?

Being drunk makes you feel like you're possessed, either by demonic or holy forces.

Therefore, spirits, the drink, and spirits, the ghosts, aren't that different.

It's the same basic idea Aristotle and the New Testament were working with.

But then there's al-coal, or as you might have heard, just kol, spelled K-O-H-L.

That's That's right, the charcoal black eyeliner, famous for giving flappers their smoky look.

Coal has been a beauty product for thousands of years, and it's created through a process called sublimation, very similar to distillation.

So some linguists believe that the name for the cosmetic ended up being used to refer to, well, anything distilled.

You know, like how some people say the brand name Kleenex when they just mean a tissue.

Kleenex, Xerox, Hoover, alcohol.

Now, think about the process of distillation itself.

You evaporate a liquid and collect the vapor.

And what is vapor?

It's the misty, incorporeal essence of a thing.

Sounds quite a bit like, that's right, a spirit.

Perhaps this is why other alcohol, like wine and beer, isn't called a spirit.

It's only distilled liquor that is, liquor made by creating a ghost-like vapor.

I know it's a lot.

While liquor itself may be clear, history rarely is.

When you think about it, there's so much overlap between spirits the drink and spirits the entity, it's hard to pin down just one point of origin.

There's distillation and its vaporous nature.

There are religious links to the Holy Spirit and gods and the devils alike.

And then of course, drinking this stuff fills a person with a sort of uncanny spirit, changing their personality, almost being possessed.

Surely, Jean-Louffray could attest to that.

So the next time you come across a ghost in a dusty Victorian mansion or haunted hotel, listen closely.

Is it really saying Boo?

Or could it be Booze?

Now let you be the judge.

This episode of Lore was produced by me, Aaron Mankey, and was both written and researched by the amazing Jenna Rose Nethercott with music by Chad Lawson.

Lore is much more than just the podcast.

There is a book series available in bookstores and online, and two seasons of the television show on Amazon Prime Video.

Check them both out if you want more lore in your life.

Information about all of that and more is available over at lorepodcast.com.

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And as always, thanks for listening.

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