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ISAW Papers 18.10 (2020)
Alcohol's Magic in Antiquity: Fermentation, Intoxication, Metamorphosis, and Madness
Lucas Livingston, Art Institute Chicago
In Franziska Naether, ed. 2020. Cult Practices in Ancient Literatures: Egyptian, Near Eastern and Graeco-Roman Narratives in a Cross-Cultural Perspective. Proceedings of a Workshop at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York, May 16-17, 2016. ISAW Papers 18.
URI: http://hdl.handle.net/2333.1/vx0k6qj9
Library of Congress Subjects: Drinking of alcoholic beverages in literature--Religious aspects; Metamorphosis--Mythology--Greece.
She brought them inside and seated them on chairs and benches, and mixed them a potion with barley and cheese and pale honey added to Pramnian wine, but put into the mixture malignant drugs to make them forgetful of their own country. When she had given them this and they had drunk it down, next thing she struck them with her wand and drove them into her pig pens and they took on the look of pigs with the heads and voices and bristles of pigs, but the minds within them stayed as had been before.1
This tale from ancient Greece might bring to mind the polymorphing magicks of Shakespearean witchcraft or the sorcery of Grimm's fairytales. Sung by generations of Greek rhapsodes before putting pen to paper, this spellbinding scene from Homer's Odyssey could have been a favorite among doe-eyed children millennia ago. Here we find Odysseus and his men having crash-landed on the island of the witch-queen Circe. While Odysseus keeps dutiful watch on shore, his men investigate the lair of the witch and are beguiled by Circe to drink of her magical potion, whereby with the touch of her wand, they are transformed into pigs.2
In this paper, I explore the recurring relationships between fermentation, intoxication, metamorphosis, and animalistic behavior in ancient Greek myths, cult practice, art, and literature. We first examine select primary evidence from Greek authors, artists, and society at large celebrating the theme of alcohol's magical effect to induce a transformation of state, whether physical or psychological, boon or bane. We then explore one possible motivation for this association stemming fundamentally from the contemporary understanding of the fermentation process.
A magnificent vessel in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts cleverly captures multiple moments from the Odyssey passage, wherein Odysseus's men are already midway in metamorphosis as Circe hands them the potent potable (Figure 1). Cleverly, the artist has painted this scene on a kylix in the precise shape of the vessel Circe, herself, is using to administer the potion. Does this conspicuous coincidence give the drinker a moment of pause? With each casual glance at his cup and the scene thereon as the wine gradually disappears from the vessel, the drinker is encouraged to consider if he will share the fate of Odysseus's men, transformed into a pig after imbibing his magical alcoholic elixir. I wonder if the threat of Circe's potion loomed in the mind of the comic author Epicharmus when writing: "Drinking leads to wandering the streets drunk, and wandering the streets drunk leads to acting like a pig, and acting like a pig leads to a lawsuit, (and a lawsuit leads to being found guilty), and being found guilty leads to shackles, stocks, and a fine."3
Legends of Dionysus, god of wine, theater, and reverie, are replete with suggestions of alcohol's potent power as a transformative potion. We turn to another kylix, the so-called Dionysus Cup in Munich (Figure 2). The interior of this pièce de résistance by the master painter and potter Exekias depicts a fabulous legend of the god as first told in the Homeric Hymn 7, a hymn to Dionysus. Herein the god, having been mistaken for a wealthy mortal, was kidnapped for ransom by a ruthless band of pirates. In a climactic turn of events, the god unleashed his wrath, flooding the ship's deck in a magically invoked torrent of wine and summoning illusions of ferocious wild beasts. The beasts lunged at the pirates, who promptly jumped into the sea in an effort to escape, but the god enjoyed the last laugh as the scurrilous pirates transformed into dolphins before striking the waves.
As with Boston's "Circe cup," we enjoy another playful visual treat in the Dionysus Cup, where the exterior bears the painted image of large glaring eyes (Figure 3). While the drinker holds the cup aloft to his lips, quaffing the intoxicating concoction, he would seem to don a bestial mask, becoming a pig much like Odysseus's men, transformed again by the potent potion of wine.
The worship of Dionysus may induce a transformative state in his followers, such as the permanently hybridized satyrs skirting the boundary between civilization and the wilds and the mere mortal maenads, whose Dionysian transformation was psychological in nature. Through the divine enthusiasmos (literally "being filled with the god") and certainly plenty of ritualistic drinking,4 maenads would be transformed by the god into animalistic predators of the wilds in mind alone, while their physical form would remain human (so, quite the opposite of Odysseus's men). In the rite known as sparagmos, the cult practitioners would then chase down and dismember live game, consuming their raw flesh and blood.
Some Greek rulers did not wholeheartedly greet the untamed practices and licentious pageantry of Dionysus's cult with open arms, which generally culminated in disaster. Recalled most famously in Euripides's Bacchae, Theban king Pentheus prohibited worship of the god. Ultimately Dionysus induces the maenads during their wild wooded ritual to perceive the spying Pentheus as a wild animal. Believing him to be a giant boar, they descend on the unsuspecting king and tear him limb from limb in ritual sparagmos (Figure 4). The Thracian king Lycurgus encounters a somewhat similar fate replete with intoxication, psychological transformation, and physical dismemberment. Hyginus offers a fairly succinct synopsis:
Lycurgus, son of Dryas, drove Liber [Dionysus] from his kingdom. When he denied that Liber was a god, and had drunk wine, and in drunkenness tried to violate his mother, he then tried to cut down the vines, because he said wine was a bad medicine in that it affected the mind. Under madness sent by Liber he killed his wife and son. Liber threw Lycurgus himself to his panthers on Rhodope, a mountain of Thrace, over which he ruled. He is said to have cut off one foot thinking it was a vine.5
The immediate metaphor explored herein of alcohol and intoxication engendering animalistic transformation is surely not lost on the reader. Its recurring expression in ancient Greek religion, art, literature, and lore as literal metamorphosis and madness, however, may find a link in an early attempt to understand the fermentation process. While the microbiological intricacies of fermentation were not fully understood until the 19th century, Classical intellectuals certainly recognized the profound transformation process through fermentation, though largely in reference to bread and beer. Plutarch informs us that:
Yeast is itself also the product of corruption, and produces corruption in the dough with which it is mixed; for the dough becomes flabby and inert, and altogether the process of leavening seems to be one of putrefaction; at any rate if it goes too far, it completely sours and spoils the flour.6
The "father of botany," Theophrastus, tells us in his On the Causes of Plants that "They even turn into drinkable juices some [products] which they have caused to depart from their nature and have somewhat rotted, such as those who make wines from barley and wheat and the so-called zuthos in Egypt."7 It is unclear to what extent Classical intellectuals likened the fermentation process of beer to that of wine, but to a superstitious mind the yield of such delicious and intoxicating elixirs as beer from barley and wine from grapes could seem nothing short of magic.8 Just as yeast was thought to induce corruption in dough and alcoholic fermentation was believed to cause a fundamental departure from the liquid's original nature, so too would it seem that the drinker of intoxicating liquid was thought to inherit that corruption and departure from nature through some form of sympathetic magic. Such corruption and departure from nature would ultimately manifest itself in the drinker as a physical or psychological transformation into the baser beasts of nature.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Dr. Franziska Naether, Dr. Marc LeBlanc, and ISAW for their organization of the workshop and providing the opportunity to participate. I also thank Jeff Nigro of the Art Institute of Chicago for his assistance with this paper. Thanks are also due to the Art Institute of Chicago and Kimbell Art Museum for granting permission to reproduce their imagery and to the other individuals, institutions, and organizations credited herein for providing their imagery through Creative Commons license.
Bibliography
Grant, Mary. 1960. The Myths of Hyginus. University of Kansas Publications in Humanistic Studies 34. Lawrence.
Homer. 1991. The Odyssey of Homer. Translated by Richmond Lattimore. New York.
Nelson, Max. 2005. The Barbarian's Beverage: A History of Beer in Ancient Europe. London.
Plutarch. 1936. Quaestiones Romanae. Translated by Frank Cole Babbitt. Cambridge, MA/London.
Rosso, Ana María. 2012. "Beer and Wine in Antiquity: Beneficial Remedy or Punishment Imposed by the Gods?" Acta medico-historica Adriatica, 10.2 (December): 259–260.
Notes
1 Homer, Odyssey 10.229–243.
2 On female practitioners of magic, see also the contribution of Lucarelli.
3 Epicharmus, fragment 146, quoted by Athenaeus 2.36 c-d. Translated by S. Douglas Olson. My thanks to the poster session Heather F. Sharpe and Andrew Snyder for leading me to this fragment by way of their poster session: "Experimental Archaeology with the Kylix: Drinking and Playing Kottabos," Department of Art + Design, West Chester University of PA.
4 On this, see the contribution of Warren.
5 Gaius Julius Hyginus, Fabulae 132 in Grant 1960.
6 Plutarch, Quaestiones Romanae 109.
7 Theophrastus, On the Causes of Plants 6.11.2 in Nelson 2005: 36.