The Great Divide Read online

  He even goes so far as to say that the transition from trb to Corded Ware ‘has certain formal analogies with the Protestant Reformation in the same area 4,500 years later: the shift from a hierarchical model, with a mediating priesthood and elaborate shrines intended to last in perpetuity, to an emphasis on personal salvation, individual responsibility, architectural and liturgical simplification, often with a millenarian perspective of impending cosmic change’.13 No less important, it was also accompanied by a shift from female imagery to an exclusively male imagery, reflecting the strengthening of patriarchal authority in dispersed pastoral societies. In such ways, as we shall see repeatedly, domesticated mammals had a profound effect on the evolution of social/ideological life.

  The increasing amounts of pasture opened up by deforestation, which followed the introduction of the animal-driven plough, brought with it more flexible economic and social arrangements, the most important element of which was a larger role for animal-keeping.14

  These changes were accompanied by others which emphasised how the cultures of the Copper Age (~6000–3500 BC) shared properties not possessed by their predecessors. These include not only the increasing appearance of metal goods in the (much richer) graves, but evidence of flints from further and further away (trade networks were proliferating with the development of the cart, especially carrying copper from the Carpathian Basin, centred on what is now Hungary), the spread of the horse from the Pontic steppes and the emergence of a certain pottery style – similar over vast differences and across cultures – associated with drinking.

  In the east these drinking vessels had two handles, in the west a single handle, a cup or tankard. ‘If material culture is fossilised behaviour, it may be possible to infer the appearance of conventions of hospitality or at least the social dispensing of liquids. It may be no coincidence that the funnel-necked beaker appeared among the northern farmers in an area demonstrably linked by trade to the Carpathian basin, when Atlantic Europe had no such distinctive vessels – they were “bowl cultures”.’15

  Sherratt has in fact traced the spread of drinking vessels (‘a great diaspora’ he calls it), beginning in the Aegean/Anatolian region and extending through Europe in a vast anti-clockwise movement. The vessels are found in graves often laid out with ‘sets’, as we today have sets of decanters and glasses, and they are of such a design that their prototypes must have been metal.

  Thus we have a major cultural block, linked by drinking vessels, with metal prototypes. All this is accompanied by two further changes: graves have a distinctive personal weaponry kit, and the horse is present.

  This is a further aspect to the domestication of ecstasy. Horses were expensive, and needed careful handling – otherwise they were potentially dangerous. In such circumstances, the use of the more intensive psychoactive substances – opium and cannabis – may have become inappropriate. Instead, the milder alcohol was substituted and, as we shall see in just a moment, after its discovery it became far more widely available.

  Moreover, and perhaps more significantly, the overlap between the traction complex and new (alcohol-related) ceramics indicates a common origin and a parallel diaspora out of Anatolia. Similarly, the enlargement of the pastoral sector brought with it a concomitant enhancement of the male role in the system of production. The central fact here was that horses and wool-sheep were brought from the steppes into a Europe that was being cleared of forests. Horses, being expensive, conferred great prestige on their owners, who eventually formed a male warrior elite and it was their subculture which was reflected in the weapons and drinking vessels left in their graves.16 An analysis of these drinking vessels tells us more.

  THE CULT OF ALCOHOL

  Alcohol was most likely discovered at much the same time as the horse was domesticated, the plough was invented, and the woolly sheep became part of the secondary products revolution, with its origins in the south. The naturally occurring sugars available to early man were glucose, fructose, maltose and lactose, available in honey, fruits, sprouting grain and milk, to produce respectively mead, wine, beer and koumish.

  The prime candidate for producing the very first alcohol is the date-palm, since it is one of the most concentrated natural sources of sugar. Early Mediterranean cultures contain some of the earliest known drinking vessels.17

  The religious overtones of wine in later European and Near Eastern societies suggests that its use in prehistoric times would have been accompanied by cult and by ceremony. The diaspora of drinking vessels across Europe suggests the spread of an ‘alcohol cult’, though in many areas it was beyond the limits of viticulture, and beyond the limits of technology for metal-working. Sherratt therefore suggests that we are seeing here a substitution, most probably of beer for wine.18

  The third millennium drinking sets comprise the origin of a tradition of ‘alcohol-based hospitality’ that in the much later classical world we know as the symposium. This tradition began as a feast of merit, a gathering of warrior-companions. As kinship networks increased in size and spatial layout, owing to pastoralism and the horse, they became less linked to immediate communities. This meant that from time to time the need for armed bodies became greater and so warrior-feasting and hospitality became the preferred form of solidarity and interaction, when people came together intermittently to counter threats or mount raids on more settled communities.

  There was most likely a variety of early alcoholic drinks. Koumish is unlikely – it needs too great a surplus of milk. Bee-keeping was a later technology, so mead is unlikely also. Fruit and sap in temperate zones are too low in sugar and, generally speaking, very few cereal-cultivators convert their grain into beer. (In temperate North America no alcohol was produced in pre-Conquest times, even though grain was used further south, in tropical Mexico and Peru, to make beer.)19 Early man may have chewed certain substances, having discovered that the enzyme in spittle can ferment fruits in the mouth. But then drinking vessels would not have been needed.

  Barley and emmer wheat were used in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, the beer being drunk through straws – as shown in illustrations dated to 3200 BC. (Herodotus found it sufficiently unfamiliar that he described it in detail.) The Latin word for beer, cervisia (Spanish cerveza), is a compound of the Latin for cereal and a Celtic element for water, suggesting a later, separate, invention.

  ‘The best guide to the nature of Bronze Age brews is still the famous birch-bark container from an oak-coffin burial in the tumulus at Egtved in Denmark, where the residue had three components: honey, indicated by pollen of lime, meadowsweet and clover; fruits and leaves used for flavouring, including cranberry; and cereal grains, most probably emmer wheat.’20

  THE ADVENT OF WINE

  As time went by, therefore, and as societies grew more complex, especially where they handled livestock, the availability of grain, and the vine, for the production of alcohol – more moderate intoxicants than opium or cannabis – came to loom larger in the lives of populations. ‘Powerful hallucinogens of “magic mushroom” type may thus be prominent in the early stages of social evolution, less so thereafter, though they may continue to have contextually appropriate uses, for instance employment in battle. Mild (and euphoriant) intoxicants, such as kava or alcoholic drinks (or tobacco) are more appropriate for ceremonies at which larger numbers participate and are occasions for male-bonding, entertainment, speeches and negotiation. Since the psychological experience of these substances is itself culturally constructed to a large extent, they may come to be used in a more “moderate” way, even if initially employed to induce trance-like states. This moderation of orthodox usage allows the wilder, ecstatic employment of psychoactive substance in the context of cult.’21

  Certainly, wine in the Mediterranean region became practically ‘synonymous with civilisation’. The spread of urban life was invariably associated with wine consumption, as we know from the widespread use of amphorae: thousands of these ordinary containers have been recovered from Mediterranean wrecks.
Wine metaphors pervade Mediterranean traditions.22

  The domestication of ecstasy continued when wine, as an elite drink, replaced beer in Mesopotamia in the early first millennium (the Neo-Assyrian period). Extensive vineyards were laid out, a practice paralleled in the Aegean and the Minoan and Mycenaean palace-centres in the second millennium, from where wine-drinking probably passed to Italy. In the works of Homer, warrior bands held bonding feasts, though wine was nowhere near as widely available as it would become by the second century BC, when Cato allowed seven amphorae of wine a year for his slaves, ‘a bottle a day’. By the time that the armed aristocrat gave way to the hoplite phalanx, the symposion had become ‘an all-male institution devoted to harmony and conviviality associated with civic life’. The symposium itself was a ritual of sorts, held under the sign of Dionysos, ‘who had tamed the madness-inducing drug by teaching humankind to mix it with water’. Later these drinking clubs became notorious for political conspiracy and famous for philosophical discourse.23

  Wine-drinking was propagated eastward when grape-wine production reached Tang China from Persia along the Silk Route in Sassanian times (~225 bc–AD 650). Silver cups of sheet metal made the same journey and revolutionised traditional Chinese metalworking practices, until then based on bronze casting.24 This produced a range of knock-on effects, notably the ‘lotus-petal’ form of goblet, reflected later in Chinese ceramics; also attempts to imitate fine sheet-metal forms led eventually to the invention of white-wares and, ultimately, porcelain. The domestication of ecstasy had far-reaching consequences and we are not done yet.

  What we see in the Old World, overall then, is a gradual replacement of strong, smoked or infused hallucinogens by more moderate (and mainly euphoriant and liquid) intoxicants associated, one might say, with a less hierarchical, less shamanistic form of religious experience, and marking instead a turn to a more domestic, even democratic form of worship, in which female deities are replaced by male ones, paralleling the growth of pastoral communities where animal-keeping, ploughing, driving, milking and riding were the characteristic activities and much more male-dominated than arable-farming villages. This interaction of animal-keeping activities and religious forms could not take place in the New World, where a different trajectory was followed, as we shall see.

  It was of course not always quite as neat as this ideal picture implies. Mark Merlin argues that, after its early use in the Neolithic and early Bronze Age in and around Switzerland, opium travelled south and east, on the coattails of the tin, amber and gold trade, being widely used subsequently in Greece, Crete and Egypt from the late Bronze Age on (in Egypt necklaces of poppy capsules, made of faience, were very popular).25 Opium was very valuable as a ‘famine food’, he says, but he also points out, for example, that the Greek classical religion owed much to the poppy and therefore retained many shamanistic features. These were reinforced by the incursions of the Scythians (see chapter sixteen), so that the caduceus or staff of Hermes had a soporific quality that made it a symbol of the shaman’s trance; and the poppy had sacred associations with Nyx, goddess of the night, often shown distributing poppy capsules, with Hypnos, god of sleep, and his son, Morpheus, god of dreams. Demeter, the Greek Earth Mother Goddess was associated with the poppy – she is shown holding an ear of wheat and a poppy capsule on the Agora in Athens, and so is Persephone, who is shown holding sheaves of grain, bunches of lilies and poppy capsules.26 Opium also plays a role in the Eleusian mysteries. Despite the general replacement of narcotics by alcohol, elements of shamanism hung on until the advent of Christianity (as we shall see) and it is possible to see shamanistic elements in later times.

  Finally, on the subject of Old World intoxicants, we may note a similar process of the domestication of ecstasy further east, and for much the same reasons.

  FIRE SHRINES AND FLYING CARPETS

  Among the oases of the Upper Oxus and other northward-flowing rivers in Turkmenistan and Tadjikistan, at the western limit of what would later be called the Silk Route, a range of fortified citadel-like sites, in mud-brick and dating to the second millennium, have been shown to enclose temple complexes with both ash repositories from sacred fires, and ‘preparation rooms’ where ‘vats and strainers’ for liquids were found. Pollen analysis shows traces of Ephedra, Cannabis and Papaver. Cannabis and Papaver we have already encountered. Ephedra is a shrub which produces the euphoriant norpseudoephedrine and the stimulant ephedrine. These substances were prepared by grating with stone graters, also found at the sites, and were pounded with fine imported stone pestles. These ground products were consumed as liquids, though to begin with they may have been smoked, as bone pipes were also found, some depicting ‘wild-eyed faces’. Cylinder seals also found on the sites show animal-masked figures playing a drum or leaping over a pole (shamans?).

  Fig. 8 Early Greek bronze artefact found at Kozani, which appears to represent an inverted opium poppy, supporting a human figure whose gesture emphasises the psychoactive effects of the narcotic.

  This association, of fire shrines and the consumption of psychoactive drinks, suggested to the (Russian) excavator that these citadels were where the tradition of Iranian fire rituals began, rituals that were famously reformed by the prophet Zarathustra in the early first millennium BC. ‘The genesis of the tradition that gave rise to Zoroastrianism would thus have taken place in the context of interaction between oasis communities – probably familiar with alcohol, since wine had been prepared in western Iran since the fourth millennium – and steppe and desert tribes which were part of the expanding pastoralist complex’.27 In other words, says Sherratt, the ritual plants traditionally smoked or infused on the steppes in braziers ‘would now have been prepared as euphoriants or inebriating drinks – including the substance later known as haoma [or soma]’.

  And so it was out of this area, during the second millennium, that Aryan-speaking groups migrated to northern India, to assimilate the Dravidian-speaking people who had hitherto comprised the collapsed Indus civilisation, and introduced the religious ideas described in the Rig Veda. On this reckoning, the drink described as soma comprised an infusion of several plant products known earlier on the steppes. Soma, then, was not a mushroom, as some have suggested, but a mix of Ephedra, Cannabis and Papaver, plus, perhaps, one further plant which fits well into this complex: harmel or Syrian rue (Peganum harmela). This plant was originally identified as soma by Sir William Jones in 1794. Archaeologically, its use has been dated to the fifth millennium BC, in the Caucasus, and it is burned in Central Asia as an intoxicant as well as being used medicinally.28 It is in fact a more powerful hallucinogenic than Ephedra et al., since it contains harmine. Not only was this used in World War Two as a ‘truth’ drug by the Nazis, it also forms the chief ingredient of Banisteriopsis caapi, the South American vine used to prepare yagé (see chapter 12). Given these properties and the fact that Peganum is a source of red dye used in Persian carpets, the possibility arises that (a) the entoptic images produced by harmine are reflected in the geometric designs characteristic of traditional Persian and central Asian carpets; and (b) did the hallucinogenic properties of this drug, and the flying sensation it has been known to induce, give rise to the tradition of the ‘flying carpet’?*

  What also follows from this analysis, if correct, is that soma would have been of variable strength, depending on its constituents. Here too, alcohol, after it was invented, may have formed a more modest – and therefore more appropriate – substitute in a highly mobile society that depended on the potentially dangerous horse. Certainly, Ayurvedic texts recommend alcohol as an element of diet. Alcohol was only proscribed from the sixth century BC on, as Hinduism became more strict. Brahmins have turned to cannabis, widely smoked and, again, as a milder euphoriant.

  A final aspect of all this is that different groups may use different intoxicants, or euphoriants, or different methods of consumption, as ways to define the group. This may be why the Chinese initially used rice and millet, then grapes, to make wine.
Steppe influences there were constantly resisted as alien.30

  Parallels between what happened in the Mediterranean and Europe, and on the steppes, and in Persia, India and China, can be found in South East Asia and Melanesia, where the most widespread and perhaps the oldest indigenous psychoactive substance is the betel nut. Traditionally chewed, this nut (Areca catechu) is mixed with lime (like coca) and a leaf of the vine Piper betel. Residues of betel nuts have been found at Spirit Cave, Thailand, dating to ~6000 BC. This plant, related to Piper methysticum, used in Oceania to produce kava, was probably smoked or chewed at first but then it too became a drink after alcohol was introduced and knowledge about fermentation spreAD. This background throws a suggestive light on the spread of the distinctively decorated pottery type known as Lapita Ware, which extended into Melanesia around 1500 BC, and is ethnographically associated with kava.

  Across the Old World, psychoactive substances – poppy, henbane, belladonna, aconite and mandrake – continued to be used, as aspects of folk medicine and in fringe cults for many thousands of years. But, more generally and more forcefully, alcohol, a relative latecomer, gradually displaced earlier psychoactive substances that were infused or smoked. This was surely related to its milder properties, in more technologically complex contexts, and to its ever-wider availability. Its association had as much to do with conviviality as with the exploration of other worlds (which could sometimes be frightening), and with the increasing masculinisation of pastoral societies (it is now known that men are more tolerant of alcohol than are women).