Sacred Mysteries

Some have claimed that distilled spirits had their origins in religious rites. Do you agree with this?

It has been suggested that the distillation of wine began with the cult of Dionysus and its associated secret rituals. Although this is impossible to prove, the circumstantial evidence is worth noting.

Dionysus (named Bacchus by the Romans) was the god of wine and wine-making, fertility, theatre, ritual madness and religious ecstasy. He was the son of Zeus and the brother of Apollo, and may have been worshipped by Mycenaean Greeks as early as 1500BC. The cult was firmly established by the 7th Century BC.

The female followers of the god were the maenads (literally ‘the raving ones’), inspired during their rituals into a state of ecstatic frenzy through dancing and intoxication. In their frenzies they also practised sparagmos (tearing animals and humans apart with their bare hands) and omophagia (eating the raw and bloody flesh) in order to become possessed by the spirit of Dionysus.

The maenads are central characters in Euripedes’ play The Bacchae (405BC), in which they tear King Pentheus of Thebes to pieces and eat him raw because he had banned the worship of Dionysus. They were led by Pentheus’ mother, who was also a maenad…

There is no suggestion that the maenads were frenzied by distilled wine, but there is a more than a suggestion that their arcane induction rituals employed it. In The Bacchae the maenads are described as: “carrying fire blazing upon their curls, and it did not burn them”, and they are often depicted in Greek pottery as having ‘flaming curls’.

Earlier Dionysian rituals involved the display of a bronze mask of the god quivering with live flames; later cults flamed distillate of wine - low strength, so it did not consume the hair - on the heads of celebrants during their initiation ceremony, and this practice may date from 5th Century (BC) Macedonia.

The Greeks were familiar with creating sweet water from salt water by boiling and condensing - Greek sailors boiled seawater on board ship in cauldrons with lids – and they were familiar with boiling must (young wine containing the seeds and skins of grapes) to produce, a sweeter long-keeping concentrate valued as an ingredient in cookery. They will soon have discovered that the active, fiery component in wine (the alcohol) disappeared when the wine was boiled in an open vessel, and it is not too far-fetched to imagine them seeking to save this by attaching a receptacle to the top of the pot.

Many cults sprang up in the Greco-Roman world, with participation being allowed only to initiates, named mystai – hence ‘mystery’ – and some were followers of Dionysus, including the use of fire in their initiation rites.

They are collectively known as ‘Gnostics’, a 17th century name for a variety of esoteric religious ideas originating in Manicheism, Hellenic Judaism and early Christianity during the first two centuries AD. The word gnostikos simply means ‘learned, intellectual’ and was used by Plato and other 5th century writers in comparison with praktikos (‘practical’).

The largest cache of Gnostic texts was discovered by Egyptian farmers in 1945. Known as the Nag Hammadi library, it comprises over a thousand written pages of papyrus, now held by the Coptic Museum in Cairo. Among them is the Gospel of Philip, probably written early in the 3rd century, which hints at a special type of ‘water’ with which the initiate is baptised: “There is water hidden in water, there is fire in an anointing…For this reason it is fitting to baptise in the two, in the light and the water”.

It is certain that some Gnostic sects used low strength distilled wine as part of their secret initiation rites, during which initiates heads were set alight – and yet, magically their hair was not consumed.

This gave rise to baptism by water, chrism (holy oil) and fire, and also might account for the haloes with which holy persons are depicted.

Edessa [now Urfa, in south-eastern Turkey] was home to many Gnostic cults and early Christian communities, some of which built a shrine to ‘St. Thomas of the ever-living hand’. Better known as ‘Thomas the Doubter’, he it was who was invited by the risen Jesus to: “Reach your hand here and put it into my side. Be unbelieving no longer, but believe.” (John 20: 27).

There is a strong tradition that St. Thomas travelled widely outside the Roman Empire to preach the gospel, including to Kerala in Southern India. After his death. He was martyred at St. Thomas Mount, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, in 72AD and according to tradition ‘the greater part of his relics’ were sent to Edessa in 232AD, including ‘the living hand’ which did not decay – presumably because it was pickled in spirit, which was certainly a common form of embalming fluid by the early medieval period.