When pagans party with the pious: dangerous xxxmess food and drinks
by PHILIP WHITE
Without
seeming too curmudgeonly, it's tricky to decide
on the credible Christmas drinks yarn after writing them forty years in a row.
You have a young lass and her carpenter husband on their way to
pay their taxes in Roman-occupied Palestine when she, a virgin, gives birth to
the son of god in a stable out the back of a packed pub in Nazareth.
Or you
have something a touch more credible about Siberians eating fly agaric
toadstools - Amanita muscaria - to
warm up and trip out in the frigid weeks of darkness around the winter
solstice.
The author with a fly agaric, consumption of which is threatening to normal health and well-being, and possession of which is illegal in Australia ... photo Leo Davis
Like all good yarns both these legendary seeds grow mighty branches of nonsense to provide
the polished bullshitter fabulous opportunities for extrapolation.
One can
start presuming that whoever Jesus' father hired as a ghost writer was instructed to endorse the paying of due tax. This is something the incredibly wealthy churches hot-listed in the
Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse should be paying
like everybody else, at least while they insist on maintaining their pious immunity
from the common law and their protection of the money-changers in their extravagant
temples.
Buckle to God by George Grainger Aldridge
As far as the hallucinogenic mushrooms go, it seems reindeer
love the polka-dot ones that grow beneath "Christmas" trees and gave
Santa his red-and-white attire, while their kidneys conveniently remove the fungi's
toxins which make humans feverish and bilious.
So the best way for those old
northerners to enjoy the trip was to drink the reindeers' urine, where the good
bits were concentrated. Reindeer with tell-tale red noses are thought to offer
the highest quality.
The fly agaric made reindeer so frisky the
hallucinating humans thought the beasts were preparing to fly. If there were no tripping reindeer handy, it
is said a shaman type human would risk the sweats and vomiting and eat the mushrooms
so the rest of the group could safely drink his urine.
While there's
not much along the lines of recreational or ritual drinking of your actual piss
going down, the purpose of a
yuletide drinks column is to suggest lists of superior ethanols to replace that
traditional seasonal libation. It's illegal to eat the toadstools, which don't grow in summer anyway. Being the first person to be busted and convicted for possession of psilocybin mushrooms after such adventure was suddenly outlawed here in 1973, I speak with certain experience.
One needs to journey above 60 degrees north to
appreciate how small the Arctic is. The Mercator projection maps my generation
sat beneath in our post-war schoolrooms stretched Greenland to the size of
Africa. The point of geographic north was as long as the Equator. Take a look
down on a globe from above the North Pole and you'll get my drift.
Mercator's ingenious formula for making the spherical world rectangular does this to his head
Those
deep northern communities are really quite close to each other. It's easy to
see how such ancient yarns, and indeed the yuletide rituals, traversed the icy
northern lands with traded furs and fish and were spread by mobs like the
Vikings, to eventually be melded into the Jesus story when the Norsemen adopted
Christianity
We know that at about the time of this gradual conversion the
Vikings were aficionados of four styles of ethanol.
In his Edda, the Icelandic scholar Snorri Sturluson (1179 – 1241) delineated this neatly with his Tilsagt verse.
His book was a primer to teach aspirant writers the arts of addressing kings,
and gives various pristine examples of poems and speeches, using the fading legends
of the time to fill his templates.
Here are his four couplets, followed by the
translations of Anthony Faulkes, who was Professor of Old
Icelandic at the University of Birmingham:
Röst gefr ödlingr iastar
- öl virdi esvá – fyrdum.
The King gives currents of yeast (that is what I
adjudge ale to be) to men.
Thögn fellir brim bragna
- biórr forn er that – horna.
Men’s patience is dispelled by surf (that is old beer)
of horns.
Máls kann mildingr heilsu
- miödr heitir svá – veita.
The Prince knows how speech’s salvation (that is what
mead is called) is to be given.
Strúgs kemr í val veiga
- vín kallak that – galli.
In the choicest of cups comes (this is what I call
wine) dignity’s destruction.
In that brief lesson, Sturluson, who
was eventually executed in his Iceland cellar by order of the King of Norway,
showed the hopeful spindoctor one classic form of Viking verse by explaining
the ethanols of the day.
Hvammur, Dala, West Iceland - memorial pillar at the birthplace of Snorri Sturluson
He covers young frothy ale, then aged lager, honey
mead and finally, the big new hit: wine. One could presume this was the ideal
order in which these things were served at feasts like Yuletide. Warm up on the
ale, grow tetchy on the lager, start talking too much on the mead, and go nuts
on the wine.
As they would have encountered distillation in Byzantium by 900AD,
it's likely the Vikings had introduced alcoholic spirits to Iceland by
Sturluson's time, so his "wine" may well have been fortified, or even
pure brandy. Maybe it was the release of this deep state intelligence that
displeased the distant King.
If you wanted to observe the traditional
solstice feast today, you'd enter a mate's yurt through the hole in its roof
when the snow covered the door, hang a sockful of fly agarics above the fire to
dry, ingest them dried or kidney-filtered, sink a few Cooper's Ales, a few
hornsful of Mismatch Lagers from Hills brewer Ewan Brewerton, then a big pot of
Maxwell's mead - warmed and spiced. Only after that lot would you address the
wine.
To bring the Chrestus into it, have a wine like the one the Italians were
used to making. I imagine the young son of the creator of the universe hanging
about the back of the officers' mess, watching them ferment it; sneaking a
taste. Years later, when his mum whinged about him and the lads arriving at the
wedding so late the wine was gone he called the guests to bring the water pots
out into the sun. Add some dried grapes from the store. Wait for the wild
ferment to kick in.
In those days, a wedding often lasted a week. When Jesus and his boys finally wandered up that dusty hill, exhausted and thirsty after a night on the plonk on Galilee shore, he delivered his notable irritation "Mother, what am I to do with thee?"
The Virgin Spanking the Baby Jesus ... Max Ernst
The Roman
army wouldn't fight without onions and wine. I can think of one former
Australian Prime Minister who seemed inspired by this, but by Jesus, those
troopers musta stank. In case they'd have to fight beyond the realms of wine
culture, they'd make their own with the dried fruit they carried. Today, such
wines are called ripasso or amarone. These are made to this day in Valpolicella
in northern Italy.
The best South Australian examples I know are under the
Koltz brand, made by Mark Day, just over the hill from me in Blewett Springs,
McLaren Vale. Mark loves doing vintage in Valpolicella. His two principal McLaren
Vale glories, The Wizard and The Pagan are made from his grapes dried on racks
for up to seven weeks.
So there. Just in case you can't think of how to spend
the big birthday of the world's most famous winemaker (apart, perhaps, from
Maynard James Keenan, left), there's some inspirational background. Have a lovely day, and guarantee
there are no souls left lost on the tundra. Seek 'em out, bring 'em in, give
ALL the sleigh keys to Santa, then fill everybody with good cheer ... ka-chink!
CODA: This is a tragic example of the pagan filth hallucinogenic fungi can trigger in a clean Christian brain on the occasion of the Saviour's birthday: from my 1973 diary:
