In the Devil's Garden: A Sinful History of Forbidden Food (14 page)

In the Green Hour

Jeff and I stared doubtfully at the liquid dripping slowly into the glass.

“Does that look like it’s turning green to you?” I asked.

“Well, no,” Jeffrey drawled, “but maybe if we drank some more, it would.”

“Sounds like a plan.” I looked around. It was New Year’s Eve, 1999, and we had ended up at a party thrown by a painter friend in the East Village of Manhattan. A small affair, good fun, but the libations weren’t flowing with quite the fecundity one associates with the festivity in question, and we’d both become parched, particularly Jeff, who, as leader/singer of the renowned Lefty Jones Band, often suffers from inexplicable bouts of thirst. So we’d taken it upon ourselves to rummage through our host’s personal belongings, and there, toward the back of the top shelf in a remote cupboard, we’d stumbled upon a bottle with its cork half-eaten away.
“Absinthe,”
read the moldy label.
“New
Orleans, 1898.”
I almost shrieked with delight. I’d been trying to get ahold of a bottle of the brew for over a year. The fact that it had been illegal worldwide for almost a century had made it a hard find. And there it was, perhaps one of only a few thousand bottles left in the world.

Absinthe was the cocaine of the fin de siècle and had as many nicknames as the White Lady herself. Opaline.
Le Fée
Vert.
The Green Fairy. The Emerald Hell. Oscar Wilde eulogized it, Vincent van Gogh painted it, Toulouse Lautrec dedicated his liver to it. Absinthe is a 120-proof liqueur steeped with hallucinogenic herbs. Psychedelic vodka. But beautiful. One takes absinthe by suspending a sugar cube over a goblet on a special slotted spoon and then trickling water drop by drop onto the cube. As the sugar water hits the liqueur in the glass, it turns a dreamy opalescent green.

Green changed to white, emerald to opal:
Nothing has changed.
The man let the water trickle gently into his glass,
and as the green clouded, a mist fell from his mind.
Then he drank Opaline . . .
He saw blue vistas of undiscovered countries, high prospects and a
quiet caressing sea.
Green changed to white, emerald to opal; nothing had changed.

Written by Oscar Wilde groupie Ernest Dowson, the poem “Absinthia Taetra” gives a good picture as to why the Impressionists so loved the stuff. But everyone drank it. France went through about 36 million liters a year, and, by the late 1800s, what we now call happy hour was known as
l’heure vert
, “the green hour,” for the top hat–toting
absintheurs
who spent hours in the cafés of Paris lingering over a glass. Then habitués began to develop odd quirks. The poet Paul Verlaine, who once drank a hundred glasses in two days, set his wife’s hair ablaze. The less artistic settled for dementia and spasms. Scientists reported that a few cups transformed a puppy into a monster with “convulsed face and twisted lips covered with foam, its eyes wide open, haggard, convulsive, mad, in which one reads an impulse to kill!” Politicians labeled it madness in a bottle. “Absinthe,” wrote the newspaper
Gazette de Laussane
in a typical editorial from the time, “is the premier cause of bloodthirsty crimes in this country.” Then in 1905 a Swiss peasant named Jean Lanfray brutally murdered his wife and two children. He was dead drunk at the time—like many peasants, Lanfray drank up to five liters of wine a day—but the police blamed his behavior on the two glasses of absinthe he’d taken earlier that day. Three years later the Swiss outlawed the brew. Holland followed suit in 1910 and the United States in 1912. France, the world’s greatest consumer, held out until the beginning of World War I. It’s been illegal worldwide ever since.

Absinthe’s repression helped set the stage for the American Prohibition, but its psychoactive herbs make it something of a separate case. The main villain in the drink appears to be the herb
Artemisia absinthium
, popularly known as wormwood because it supposedly sprouted along the trail left by the serpent as it fled Eden. The Greeks used wormwood to aid in delivering babies (not to mention curing flatulent dogs) but its main fame is as a mild hallucinogen whose active chemical,
thujone,
is said to resemble the THC that gives marijuana its kick. Absinthe’s power, however, is thought to have come from a little-understood interaction between wormwood and herbaceous flavorings like anise, hyssop, mint, coriander, parsley, and chamomile. Sadly, that was not the case with the bottle Jeff and I discovered that night. Once we’d convinced our gracious host, Bill Hudders, to crack open his bottle, we devoted ourselves to a night of intense research. We added sugar. We drank it straight. We injected it. We even added other psychoactive substances to the mix. All in vain. Although its 120 proof did not go unappreciated, there were definitely no hallucinations. It had no more effect than Pernod, the gutless imitation created when absinthe was banned. The only fireworks that night came when Times Square blew itself up at the stroke of the millennial midnight.

Lazy Luscious Land

To get to the country the Dutch call
Luilekkerland
, “Lazy Luscious Land,” you must eat your way through a ten-thousand-foot-tall mountain of rice pudding. The people of
Luilekkerland
live in houses constructed of chocolate cake surrounded by fences made of sausage. The flowers are made of scones— already buttered—and clouds of dreamy fried chicken float in a gravy-colored sky. It rains Chardonnay. Peasants doze under ravioli trees by streams that flow with melted goose fat. Even the shit, they say, is delightful: horses poop poached eggs; donkeys drop figs. But beware! Everywhere are “birds winging south/just gape—they’ll fly into your mouth!”

The Hogs you meet on every street
Are sleek and fat and crisply fried;
They carry knives—it’s very nice!
And stand by while you carve your slice!

Luilekkerland
exists in almost every culture. The French call it
Cockaigne
, the Italians
Chucagna
, and the Germans
Schlaraffenlad
, but they’re all folk utopias in which life is one long luxurious feast. Harmless enough, but when they first became popular in the medieval period, this lifestyle belonged exclusively to Europe’s royalty, and any suggestion that others might deserve a sampling was considered dangerously unpatriotic. So when the German version of
Luilekkerland
was finally put on paper in the 1600s, a surprise ending was added, which read, “To warn my readers this was writ/now go and do the opposite!” The writer was Hans Sachs, Germany’s approved poet-for-the-poor, and his moralizing coda was a way of warning the lower classes to keep their hands out of the rich man’s piggy bank. Peasants, went the subtext, should just forget about the rich and famous lifestyle and get back to work. Mapmakers emphasized the point by publishing maps that placed these utopias next to the Infernal Kingdom and populated them with cities named Dick-head, Incontinence, and
Wank en doff
.

Scholar Hal Rammell believes that Europe’s nobility felt that these fairytale feasts contained “significant subversive implications” because they suggested “that hunger, and all the social constraints that perpetuate it,” should be removed. As the ensuing centuries grew more politically restive, the subversive element of the tales grew. In a seventeenth-century English version, called
An Invitation to Lubberland
, we again read how “. . . hot roasted pigs will meet ye/they in the streets run up and down/all crying out, Come Eat Me!” But Lubberland is now also a place with no “law nor lawyer fees/all men are free . . . without a judge or jury.” There are no landlords, and all men are created equal. The tale has morphed from one about everlasting dinner to one in which everyone has the right to sit at the aristocrats’ dinner table, an idea soon realized when avant-garde London coffeehouses posted rules ending class-segregated seating. The Germans’ get-back-to-work message was replaced with an outright suggestion that the reader should revolt; the last line tells all to hurry and join the ship for Lubberland, which “waits but for a gale” before setting out.

During America’s Great Depression these quasi-socialistic utopias again became popular in songs by artists like Harry “Haywire Mac” McClintock. His famous 1928 “Rock Candy Mountain” sings about a hobo-Heaven where bulldogs have rubber teeth and cops have wooden legs and “there’s a lake of stew and of whisky too/you can paddle all around them in a big canoe.” Even children’s literature of the era was not safe from these subversive influences. In a chapter titled If the Ocean Was Whiskey, Dorothy—of
Wizard of Oz
fame—finds a tree that sprouts tin lunch boxes. In each box, attached to its side with a stem, Dorothy finds a sandwich, an apple, and two pickles. While some believe this kind of “free-lunch” populist imagery may have played a part in the banning of the Oz books from public libraries, America’s moguls should have kept their shirts on. Author Frank Baum had put another shrub sprouting napkins next to the Lunch Box tree so everyone could clean up afterward. You can’t get much more American than that.

The Magic Cannibal

The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 was the most important political gathering of the Middle Ages, and representatives from secular and religious powers were packed so tight in the tiny church that one bishop was actually trampled to death. A number of interesting reforms were passed during the monthlong meeting—idiots and incompetents were banned from the priesthood, and Muslims and Jews were obliged to wear funny hats— but perhaps the most bizarre was the council’s interpretation of the Eucharistic bread eaten during the Catholic High Mass. Until then, the eating of the communion wafer had been considered a symbolic breaking of bread between Christ and his followers. The Lateran Council ended that by declaring that in a “true” Christian ceremony, the wafer and wine of the communion were “
truly
changed by divine power into the body, the wine into the blood . . .” of Jesus Christ. Any other view was heresy punishable by death. From then on the Eucharist wafer was the literal and true flesh of Jesus Christ, raw human meat, and the taking of it cannibalism.

The man who convened the Fourth Lateran Council, Pope Innocent III, claimed to be merely taking at face value the passage in the New Testament where Christ says, “Take, eat; this is my body,” while handing out bread to his followers. The reality is that the Pope was a sophisticated Roman who had devoted his life to making the church Europe’s supreme power and not the kind of man to take the Bible literally. He was, however, keenly aware of the psychological power held by the sacred meal that crowned the Catholic High Mass.

Holy Communion is the most sensual of religious ceremonies: the priests in immaculate white robes glowing in the candlelight, the bloodred wine gurgling in massive golden goblets, the paper-thin wafer slipped reverently between the lips of the faithful. Religion as it should be. During Innocent’s time, however, the Eucharist wafer’s relevance was being undermined in every direction. Only 150 years earlier the Church’s Eastern wing had left after a dispute over how to bake the wafer. Heretic cults, like the Albigenese Church, declared that the wafers had no meaning or made their ceremonies more dramatic by claiming to put human embryos into the dough. Considering these challenges to the holiness and authority of the Holy Communion, Innocent’s “fundamentalist” interpretation looks less like a literal take on the Bible and more like an attempt to sensationalize his own Mass.

He was not, however, the first to note Christianity’s man-eating propensities. The following description by the pagan Roman Minicus Felix of this new Jewish cult might even have given the Pope a few ideas.

As for the initiation of a new (Christian) member, the details are as disgusting as they are well known. The novice himself, deceived by the coating of dough (covering a sacrificial infant), thinks the stabs (into the bread) are harmless. Then it’s horrible! They hungrily drink the blood and compete with one another as they divide (the child’s) limbs . . .

That passage was written in the first century A.D., around a thousand years before Innocent came to power. But during the pope’s own time there were huge outbreaks of cannibalism, including a scandal over baby eating among his church’s knights on the First Crusade. Russian Tartars to the north were said to have an insatiable appetite for the succulent meat of young ladies’ breasts, and firsthand accounts of the Egyptian famine of 1201 agreed, “It was not unusual to find people selling little children (their own or others), roasted or boiled.” Early medieval Europe made cannibalism punishable with fines of not more than 200 shillings—the same fine levied if you killed another person’s cow—indicating the act was too common for serious punishment to be practical. Holy Roman emperor Charlemagne soon upped the ante by making cannibalism punishable by death. His law, however, is something of a puzzle, because it bans not only man eating, but also the
belief
in it. Historians have hypothesized that this second clause indicated that Charlemagne wanted to curb superstitious rumors. An equally logical interpretation is that the Christian king was not outlawing belief
in
cannibalism but the beliefs
of
cannibalism, i.e., the rituals and religious ceremonies associated with the act.

Charlemagne might as well have banned prayer itself, at least judging from the writings of some scholars who imply that man eating, or at least sacrifice, was as common a religious practice as saying amen. One of the founders of the Celtic Church in the fifth century appears to have consecrated a church by burying a monk alive in the building’s foundation and the Christian Mass itself is believed by many to have evolved from an ancient rite involving the sacrifice and eating of the firstborn child.

But the most sophisticated religious cannibals were in the New World, a group that inadvertently gave us the word itself when Christopher Columbus mispronounced the tribe
Carib
(Caribbean) as
Canib
(cannibal). The Aztecs of Mexico went through up to two hundred fifty thousand victims each year in their religious feasts. The most vivid descriptions come from the Spanish prisoners taken to what is now Mexico City in 1521, as in this one by soldier Bernal Diaz del Castillo:

Again there was sounded the dismal drum of Huichilobo and many other shells and horns and things like trumpets and the sound of them was terrifying. . . . We all looked towards the lofty
Cue
(temple-pyramid) where they were being sounded and saw that our comrades whom they had captured when they defeated Cortes were being carried by force up the steps, and they were taking them to be sacrificed. When they got them up to a small square in front of the oratory, where their accursed idols are kept, we saw them place plumes on the heads of many of them and with things like fans in their hands they forced them to dance before Huichilobos, and after they had danced they immediately placed them on their backs on some rather narrow stones which had been prepared as places for sacrifice, and with stone knives they sawed open their chests and drew out their palpitating hearts and offered them to the idols that were there, and they kicked the bodies down the steps, and Indian butchers who were waiting below cut off the arms and feet and flayed the skin off the faces, and prepared it afterward like glove leather with the beards on, and kept those for the festivals when they celebrated drunken orgies, and the flesh they ate in
chilmole
.

The Aztecs fed the victims’ hearts, called “precious eagle-cactus fruit,” to the Sun. Mere mortals had to make do with the leftovers in a stew called
Tlacataolli
which, according to Aztec chronicler Fray Bernardino de Sahagun, was considered “something from Heaven, eaten with reverence and ritual.”

Europe’s most avid man eaters appear to have been the Celtic Druids of northern and western Europe. Roman historian Strabo reported in the first century B.C. that the Druids “count it an honorable thing, when their fathers die, to devour them,” being, horror of horrors, “man eaters as well as
herb eaters
.” Imperial Rome was constantly at war with the Celts, so these comments might have been mere war propaganda, but two-thirds of all of Europe’s confirmed cannibal sites are in Celtic/ Druid regions like Normandy, England, and Ireland. The Druids’ recipes are, unfortunately, lost, but we do know that they kept the heads of their deceased leaders (or revered enemies) preserved in oil, an ancient method of conserving meat used today in the making of duck confit. This might have been the source of the “mystic meat” that Druid priests chewed while staring at breaking waves or smoke until they experienced a prophetic vision.

The exact extent to which these ancient practices continued during Innocent’s era is impossible to measure. The Pope would, however, have been acutely aware of the Druid/Celtic belief in hallucinogenic meat thanks to King Arthur and the Holy Grail. This cycle of romantic tales, so popular it verged on a religious cult, essentially tells the story of how a Christlike King Arthur and his crew scoured the Celtic regions in search of a dish called the Grail. The popular belief is that the Grail held the blood of Christ. In fact, it also held his flesh. Arthur and company were essentially a group of Celtic priests actively seeking the body of Christ to consume it in a completely true and unsymbolic feast of cannibalism.

The notion that the Messiah’s body was being gnawed by a group of warrior-priests in the Celtic regions posed a threat to Roman power because, if true, it meant that Christ’s body was in England and therefore that the heretic Celtic churches had a stronger claim to being the center of Christianity than Rome. Catholic chroniclers agree that the Vatican was “very aware” of the threat posed by the Arthur cult but refrained from proclaiming it heresy for fear that doing so would have given it a theological legitimacy it then lacked. The Catholics held this fear with good cause—the tale of the Grail was one of the ecclesiastical arguments used by England’s King Henry VIII when he created his anti-Roman Church of England.

Faced with so many threats centered on the dining rituals of the Holy Mass, Innocent’s transubstantiation doctrine simply closed the circle and returned his church to its ancient roots of sacrifice and violence. It also made his Mass the wildest show in town. Declining church attendance soon revived, and the concept proved so popular that the Church established the Feast of Corpus Christi, literally the “Feast on the Body of Christ,” which became one of the most popular of the medieval festivals. Some churches put up murals showing Christ being sliced into cookies and served up by the Pope. A more appropriate image would have shown Europe being consumed by the Pope; thanks to empire-building tactics like this, Innocent’s successors soon controlled an estimated one-third of all the wealth in Europe.

By beatifying one of civilization’s deepest taboos, however, Innocent also flamed the passions of a society addicted to morbid fantasies. Peasants began reporting that consecrated hosts screamed in agony when bitten into. Some bled profusely, supposedly leaving permanent bloodstains on the faces of the faithful. Disbelieving prelates pulling a wafer out of a bag found their hands in a mass of raw, bleeding flesh, and according to the
X-Files
of the time, Caesarius’s
Miraculorum
, a family who had put a wafer in their beehive to ensure sweeter honey returned to find thousands of bees gathered about the wafer on bended knee. The church made taking a host from a church a capital crime. Innocent himself barred Christian girls from working as nursemaids in Jewish homes, because “when such nurses accept the body and blood of Jesus [during High Mass], their employers force them for three days thereafter to spill their [now sanctified] milk into a latrine before again breast-feeding the [Jewish] children.”

Then a Parisian Jew named Jonathan stole a consecrated host with the intent of proving how ridiculous the whole thing was by serving it to some Christian friends for breakfast. According to court documents, however, the bread refused to be cut by a knife. After a fruitless struggle, Jonathan attacked it with a small ax. The wafer then magically divided into three parts representing the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. A piece tossed into boiling water turned to cooked flesh. The pot began overflowing with blood. The horrified Christians handed Jonathan over to the authorities, and his death at the stake became an annual Parisian festival for the next six hundred years. Similar accusations against a wealthy Belgium family—apparently part of a plot to gain their wealth—resulted in the burning of every Jew in Brussels, a massacre again celebrated with a holiday until the late 1800s. These slaughters continued sporadically until 1510, when thirty-eight people were burned alive in Berlin and Jews were banned from the city for two hundred years.

The most perverse of these pogroms was led by an obscure German nobleman with the unusual name of Rindfleisch (“Beef Man”), who, after another incident of Jews allegedly abusing the Christian wafer, gathered a small army of drunken peasants and in 1298 set out to eliminate “the accursed race” from Germany. For six months Rindfleisch and his henchmen ravaged the countryside. They stormed major cities and threw all Jews into the flames. Christians who tried to protect their Hebrew neighbors were overrun, and many Jews burned their own children alive rather than let them fall into the hands of the psychotic mob. In all, Rindfleisch destroyed 146 towns and killed an estimated one hundred thousand people, only ending his campaign when the weather grew inclement. Or perhaps it was only put on hiatus; almost a thousand years later, in nearby Lublin, Poland, a presumed descendant of Rindfleisch, camp doctor Untersturmführer SS Rindfleisch, oversaw the asphyxiation of Jewish children in the Nazi Majdanek extermination camp.

Scientists now believe these bleeding hosts were caused by the fungus
Prodigious microccous
, which grows on stale bread and secretes a red dye that could have been mistaken for drops of blood. Some were created by greedy priests who dipped wafers in blood to create miracles that gullible pilgrims would pay good money to see. But whatever the causes of these bizarre apparitions, the Pope had succeeded in manipulating the strong emotions tied to cannibalism to help make himself the world’s wealthiest human being. His magic cannibalism had bound Christians together both as criminals and as God’s Chosen, a brilliant merging of humanity’s two most binding social contracts, while simultaneously driving a stake into the heart of the older religions by appropriating their most powerful rite into a ceremony that was exalted, refined, cruel, and forgiving. Men need no longer hide in darkened groves to eat mystic meats, for God had sacrificed His only Son and given us the body to feast upon in a ritual glittering with gold and white cloth, incense, music, and wine; the ultimate forbidden food was now divine, fulfilling the prophesy of the apostles who wrote that all shall be eaten and found delicious.