The Lecture Series
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“Um, prof? Why the beer lecture? I thought this class was about mythology.”
To that I might be flip and reply, ‘We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams’
[beat]
“Um, Willy Wonka, sir?”
Gene Wilder, actually, though it may be hard to separate actor from character in this case. And I have a suspicion that he was quoting someone else, though I haven't felt compelled to find an original source yet.
You must seek to embody something of the mystic, at least for the run of this course, though obviously you’d be better served if you were able to take some part of that with you throughout your life.
Study the myths, the legends. Take a look at ritual uses of drugs of all sorts-- and then tell me that something basic & simple like a good drunk would have eluded priests and supplicants for six thousand years. According to the available evidence, we've been drinking beer and wine a lot longer than we've been following the laws of Moshe; don’t get all high and mighty on me just because of later societal connotations that alcohol has picked up over the intervening millennia. Alcohol has often been the best recourse—and rightly so, I believe—of ordinary men who have tried to reach for something beyond the ordinary, a small foggy window on the nature of the sublime.
My favorite example would have to be the case of medieval monks. They would regularly fast, often as long as 40 days in a row. During this period they relied on beer, euphemistically referred to as ‘liquid bread’, to keep them going while they voluntarily gave up more solid food. And what do you get when you combine silence, meditation, and about 1400 calories worth of beer on an empty stomach? The occasional sighting of Jesus or the Virgin would be just for starters, me thinks.
“Are you trying to tell me that the piety and faith of 13th century monks relied on them being drunk all the time?”
Hmm. That’s Miss Volsted, is it?
“Yes, professor”
Well, Daphne, I’d say that alcohol was not a chief cause. But these men—and women, the monastic life wasn’t restricted to monks—lived in a different world than we do now. Angels, saints, witches, demons, these we’re all real parts of their perceived existence. Who knows what form their pink elephants would have taken.
Fasting monks are just one example. In Central America, the Mayans and Aztecs, and for all we know the Olmecs before them, used a combination of strong tobacco and chocolate in their religious practices.
“Chocolate?” [giggle] “I
knew it!”
Settle down there, Miss Habersham. Chocolate in combination with nicotine. And I might point out, refined sugar was an addition made by later Europeans. The chocolate of the indigenous peoples was a beverage, actually, and probably much more like coffee than the candy bars we’re used to. And cocoa beans are rich in a number of alkaline compounds...
[snort] “Magic beans, prof?”
Yes, Jake, Magic beans. And you could follow that ladder all the way to heaven. Jack’s beanstalk and Jacob’s ladder both are strong symbols, and can be said to be roughly equivalent. Given your name, I’d think you’d be familiar with at least one of those symbols.
“Fee Fi Fo Fum. Ha ha.”
‘and grind his bones to make my bread.’ The Giant was invoking the same communion ritual that thousands of Catholic priests re-enact everyday. Don’t laugh, Jake, the symbols are all over if you look for them. And you’d be surprised where they turn up.
Celtic, Nordic, Teutonic, Slavic and Jewish traditions have left their fingerprints on all sorts of ‘fairy’ tales. And that’s only considering the western tradition. There’s no need to stop there—we have a global literature to draw from.
“And the beer, sir?”
Yes, Sally, and the beer. The Egyptians and the Babylonians both had beer goddesses. That may be a vital clue, actually, that beer was associated with female powers, but I’m sure this is a detail that we can get back to when we cover the Earth Mother complex that accompanied the use of agriculture in stone-age societies. In fact, these same aspects of Goddess worship can be traced along the tropics all the way from Central America, skipping an ocean, through the Middle East, South Asia, Polynesia, and back again. While it’s hard to say exactly when and where this mythological complex started, it closely follows the adoption of crop cultivation and the domestication of...
[interrupting] “Yes professor, but the beer?”
Yes. Beer.
[beat]
Man got along on just what he could find lying on the ground for millions of years. Available evidence seems to point to a fairly happy existence, actually. You might think of hunter-gathers as leading fairly bleak, grubby lives, not really knowing where the next meal is coming from. And this is true, no doubt, especially in times when food was scarce. But remember, this is the society that gave us the fabulous cave paintings in the south of France, and throughout ice age Europe. These fur-clad cave men invented ceremony, art, religion, and likely are the first to think of burial practices and the afterlife. In their own way, they are very much like the monks who came along 10,000 years later—a simple life of what work was needed to take care of day-to-day needs, combined with a deep spiritual understanding and a mystical existence not well understood by modern man.
Of course, we only have circumstantial evidence of this kind of life—in those caves that have survived. But it isn’t too much of a stretch to imagine a rich spiritual life existing among tribes of all sorts, all over the world. This type of romantic view is of course open to criticism; the concept of the ‘noble savage’ was also held by some in the 19th century, particularly in regards to the Native American populations and other indigenous peoples. And while you might dispute the facts that are used to support this view, many still cling to it...
[interrupting] “Sir, I hate to...”
Yes, Sally, I know I’m not really on point. You’ll have to excuse me, these are fairly broad subjects we’re dealing with, and there is a lot of overlap from one topic to the next.
You were asking about beer. And why I started this lecture series with drink and drunkenness.
If we posit a happy, idyllic life free from care, what would ever compel our stone-age ancestor to give up his ideal life-style in favor of a hard, dirty, labor intensive struggle with the earth, to paraphrase, ‘earning his food by the sweat of his brow’? Well, while basic food needs might have been satisfied by merely collecting wild grain, the brewing of beer is a much more intensive process. You need a lot more grain to make beer than you do to make bread, particularly if you plan on drinking beer everyday.
Brewing itself was magic. You accidentally left a jar of old barley cakes out in the rain, and forgot about it for a week or three. It’d bubble and froth, and if you were brave (or hungry) enough to try it, you might notice that no only did it not kill you, but also that you felt a definite lift after trying this weird barley soup. Magic, mystical, and misunderstood—so of course this was the province of the gods.
My theory is that man only gave up his garden-of-eden-vacation to go to work full time on the farm because—with the discovery of beer—he suddenly found a need not just for a steady supply of grain, but rather, for a literal shit-ton of barley. And all the ancillary crap that has accrued since then: cooperatives, villages, cities, nations, not to put a too fine point on it but civilization itself, is just a side-effect of the brewing industry.
“Bullshit”
Jimmy, you’re welcome to your opinion, and I’m welcome to mine. In fact, my opinion is all that I’ve put forward. But in examining larger societal change, we need to always be cognizant of perhaps-unseen primary causes.
Class, I’d like you all to go home and think on this. Is religion a primary cause of societal development, or are other material factors more important? And if mystical practices and beliefs are having an effect on political and demographic shifts, to what extent do basic needs and wants in turn affect religion?
To over-simplify, and tie the assignment back into the discussion, is beer really a primary cause of both religious belief and our basic political constructs?
[editorial note: you know, I think I could come up with a syllabus for this. Like it was a real class or something. Getting a reading list together would be easy. one sticking point-- I'm not sure what my subject really is yet. ]
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(hmm. of course, with the way my current output has been going, I may end up with some sort of modern-lit thing as my first submittable manuscript, rather than the fantasy novel. But I love that Damn Novel, even when--especially when?--it drives me nuts. it's my own personal creative millstone around my brain's neck, if I can stretch and mix the metaphors that far.)