Stirring the Cauldron

New Moon Newsletters from Jessica Prentice

New Mead Moon

June moondark kitchen notes
from Jessica Prentice

The moon is new! We have entered the new lunar month, one known as the Mead Moon in 16th Century England. Mead is a very old beverage, an alcoholic fermentation made from honey. This is the time of year when the beehives are heavy with honey, as the bees have been busy collecting pollen from the spring and summer flowers.

Mead and the Moon are intimately connected in an old Scandinavian legend. The story goes that the god Odin sent a younger god named Mani to drive a chariot with the Moon to light up the night sky. Into the chariot also went all the things that were wasted on Earth: misspent time, squandered wealth, broken vows, unanswered prayers, and abandoned friends.

At the same time that Mani was collecting his burden of wasted things in the chariot, a man on Earth named Vidfinner was sending his two children out into the cold night. Vidfinner had a secret well of mead -- a magic elixir that he had stolen from the gods -- that made him powerful. He could never get enough of his beloved mead, and boasted that it made him more powerful even than the gods.

This night he was craving the drink and sent his son Hyuki and daughter Bil up the mountain with a big bucket and orders to fill it full of mead and bring it back. The children were afraid to go out in the cold dark night but he ignored their fears and sent them anyway.

The two children made their laborious way up the mountain and filled the bucket. It was so heavy that they spilled some mead on the grass. The grass grew tall and strong, and the children began to suspect that the mead was magic, and had come from the gods. They decided to be very careful not to spill another drop of the precious drink, but also worried that their father had stolen it.

When Odin saw that the wisdom and kindness of these children was wasted on their father, he told Mani to scoop them off the mountain into his chariot along with their bucket of mead, so that they could live on the moon forever. The dark spots on the moon are said to be the children's shadows, and on the full moon people would call out to Bil, asking her to drop a little mead on their lips so that they could gain a little of the strength that only the magical mead of the moon could impart.

This story survives today in a changed and diluted form in a common nursery rhyme, where Hyuki and Bil have become "Jack and Jill," and the magical mead is water.

I like this story because it reflects my own ambivalence about alcohol. Last year on the Mead Moon, I wrote about my love affair with honey, but this year it is the other part of 'mead' that is on my mind: fermentation and intoxication.

I must admit that I was never particularly interested in alcoholic fermentation, especially beer-brewing. Beer always evoked an image of keg parties at frat houses, a kind of modern day equivalent of medieval mead halls filled with drunken Vikings back from the battlefield groping after women. Or even worse, alcohol reminds me of abusive, addicted, pompous figures like Vidfinner in the Norse myth. There are many modern-day versions of that character, and the damage that they do to their families is a common (and truly tragic) theme.

Thinking of alcohol as a kind of necessary evil, I avoided learning too much or thinking too much about it. Like many people, I have a kind of running list in my head of 'good foods' and 'bad foods.' Though I find drinking pleasurable, I tended to condemn alcohol to the 'bad list' because of all the bad things I have seen it do. But if you've been reading my newsletters for a while, you might have noticed that my ability to keep a a strict 'good list' and 'bad list' has been seriously impaired by the understanding that it is not so much the "what's" of things that matter, but the "how's". We can't look at foods in a vacuum. Each food has its own context, its own set of issues, and is embedded in our society and culture in specific and fascinating ways.

And so it is, especially, with alcohol.

I first started to shift my feelings about beer and alcohol when I read the wonderful book, Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers by Stephen Harrod Buhner a few years ago. In it, he chronicles the history of beer and alcoholic fermentation from a world perspective, with a particular emphasis on the herbal and healing origins of beer making. He begins the book with mead, explains all about yeasts, and then devotes a chapter to what he calls "Sacred Indigenous Beers," and goes on to explore beer from the perspective of the sacredness of grains, and the long history of making beers from medicinal plants and trees. The book inspired me enough to try my own hand at brewing, and I made a nettle beer which was quite delicious.

Buhner talks about how beer went from being a medicinal and healing drink made primarily by women on a small scale to being a centralized, highly-regulated commodity industry in which the use of herbs other than hops was outlawed. This transformation meant that alcohol became increasingly removed from its origins of ritual, communal use and began to be abused. Buhner writes,

Perhaps Buhner overstates the case somewhat, I don't know. But I'll never forget watching the cult-classic movie Fitzcarraldo recently, and the scene where the Amazonian Indians engage in an evening of drug-induced, alcoholic ritual. It is not escapism they are seeking, nor celebration. Rather, they are becoming increasingly attuned to what they believe to be their sacred duty, moving beyond the first level of reality into another level where the meanings of things are mythic, and cannot easily be either codified or commodified.

Europeans have this legacy too. The Norse myth of Hyuki and Bil is obvious evidence: the mead was magic, was mythic, was of the gods. When the human stole it, abused it, and claimed it as his own, the gods stepped in and returned it to a place of reverence and wisdom. Another example of the sacredness of alcohol in European culture is the Greek mythology of the Maenads, or Bacchantes. According to legend, the Maenads lived in the woods and performed sacred rituals in honor of Dionysus, the god of wine. They are sometimes portrayed as wild, dangerous women, but they are also described as priestesses and as holders of ancient, sacred knowledge. One description reads:

Omnipotent is the god: one either is his votary or victim.

In one story, the maenads fall asleep in a public square after their night of rituals. The townswomen discover them in the morning and worry that their vulnerability might be taken advantage of by the men of the town, and so form a circle around them to protect their sacred sleep until they awake. I think it is a lovely image, showing that even those women who choose to live more conventional lives can honor those who embrace the spiritual power of Dionysian release. It speaks to a culture that is wise and mythologically literate, and still connected to the wilderness and nature. I must admit I am drawn to the image of these wild women -- and one year I was a Maenad for Halloween. I had lots of fun decorating my dress with ivy and faux-fur pelts, and drinking plenty of red wine. It was a small but wonderful taste of the ritualized release and the Dionysiac ecstasy that my human spirit demands...

I don't know when, or how, or if, our 'advanced civilization' will be able to remember and reclaim a relationship to alcohol that is sacred: one that is as much about creation as it is about consumption; one that is about enlightenment and ecstasy and not just escape; one that is about acknowledgment and not abuse; one that is as much about wisdom as it is about power.

If nothing else, the current frenzy over the latest Harry Potter release (I am on page 270 of the deluxe edition) shows how desperate we are -- and our children are -- for magic and myth. We crave owls and cauldrons and goblins. We crave the ability to see things others miss, to ride on trains that others can't; we crave the knowledge that there are layers to reality, that there are mysteries to be lived; that there is more to life than meets the eye. Alcoholic fermentation was a way that human beings could experience all this, could be brought closer to each other and to the divine. What a shame that for so many it has become a thing of pain.

Meanwhile, I have a bottle of mead that I have been saving. Some friends brought it back for me from the Czech Republic last year. It is an "almond mead," and it says on the label that "whole bitter almonds are macerated in a quality Mead with 18 other herbs to produce and aromatic smooth drink..." Just reading the label evokes the timeless allure of Bohemian meadows and a simpler life. Maybe I'll have some friends over on the full moon and we'll drink it together, in a ritual of community life and in memory of the Maenads, and of Bil up on the moon, doling out the magic mead to those who remember to give thanks to the gods.