WOLFGANG SCHIVELBUSCH ON DRUGLORE - THE PHYSIOLOGICAL GROUNDS FOR THE MOTIF OF THE POISONED CUP

To visit a pub is to step into another world. For there the abstract law of exchange is suspended, at least in part. It's not that customers don't have to pay for drinks. The barkeeper is in business, after all. But somehow the rules of the outside world don't govern here.

Mass Observation, a sociological study undertaken in England in the 1930s, documents the drinking behavior of twentieth-century pubs and describes a typical scene. On a Sunday afternoon three men sit at a bar, each nursing a drink that he has paid for himself. A fourth man enters, and after ordering a drink and half-emptying his glass, he calls to the bartender to order drinks for all four. They begin a conversation, and after a while one of the other men orders another round. Two of the men who have not yet paid for a round are unemployed, but one of them orders the third round. When the drinks are placed before the group, the second of the two unemployed men leaves the pub, signaling his intent to return by leaving his glass half-empty. When he returns five minutes later, he finishes his drink and orders another four drinks. Now the round is complete. Later he confesses that he really did not want to be part of the round because he was short of money. He had to go home to get money because he felt he couldn't excuse himself from the round. From personal experience everyone recognizes this unspoken obligation to participate in rounds of drinks regardless of whether he's in the mood or not, and even when he can't really afford it. Not to go along with it would be to lose face. Yet this sort of obligation holds true only in bars, pubs, and such locales, and only in connection with alcoholic drinks. The idea of such a thing happening in a restaurant would be absurd. What is natural in a bar or public house is meaningless on the outside.

Drinking, then, is apparently a special human activity, or, to quote from the Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens [Dictionary of German Superstition], article "Trinken", "the superstitious ideas and customs that center around the activity of drinking are to be understood as remnants of older magical, cultic actions and manifestations of belief."

But why should it be drinking to which these primordial notions have remained so strongly attached rather than eating solids, which is certainly as essential to life?

In the first place, archaic magical interpretations saw drinking and eating as equally conflicting processes. On the one hand, a person who consumes and incorporates things becomes their master. But on the other hand, the consumer thereby delivers themself up to them, in a sense succumbs to them. For things have lives of their own. The plants and animals a person eats (aside from cannibalism) continue to have an effect within the consumer, indeed work either with or against them, depending on whether they are well or ill disposed toward the consumer.

What makes drinking more important than eating solids is the fact that here the individual life or soul of a thing is being directly assimilated. In magical thinking every fluid symbolizes blood, and the blood or sap -vital fluid- of an animal or a plant is its soul. This accounts for the taboo against the presence of blood in food of most cultures, our own included. The Christian Eucharist still contains an echo of this identification of blood with the soul.

Because of this direct connection drinking had something menacing about it for primitive humans. As one drinks, one assimilates the soul of something else and one loses their own soul in proportion to their drinking. Wine is the classical instance of this. The person intoxicated by wine no longer possesses their own soul, but is filled by that of the wine, that is, the wine god.

Like most magical conceptions, this one too has a grain of physiological truth to it. Liquid imbibed enters the bloodstream faster than solid foods. The effect for any given drink is more rapid, more immediately observable. And the custom of adding poison to drink has an actual physiological basis as well as the magical one. The poisoned drink is as old as humankind's drinking culture and drinking magic itself. In magical lore every drink is potentially poisoned or, to put it in more general terms, a threat, in that it might embody a soul hostile to the drinker.

Through history drinking rituals have evolved, aimed at neutralizing this menacing aspect. Drinking rituals are communal so that all will feel safe and be able to keep a watchful eye on one another. The king's taster, whose duty it was to test every drink set before his lord for poison, was a variant on this communal drinking, revealing its purpose explicitly.

The oldest and most important drinking ritual is the toast. In making their toasts the drinkers vow reciprocal friendship, goodwill, and good intentions, using traditional stock formulas. One such eleventh-century drinking oath goes: "Let the cups be brought and let us drink to health, drink after me and drink to me, drink to the full, drink half the cup and I shall drink to you." Another toast from the thirteenth century ran: "I drink to you, now drink as much as I do." In a sense, the drink itself was consecrated by these formulas, thus ceasing to be a threat. On the contrary, it became a guarantee and symbol of communality, friendship, and fraternity for those who were drinking. Toasting in archaic societies assumed proportions scarcely imaginable today. Even in the sixteenth century all drinking binges necessarily ended in the total inebriation of all participants, since it would have been an unheard-of breach of drinking etiquette for any member to quit sooner. In drinking etiquette it is taboo not to accept a proffered drink or, for that matter, not to reciprocate.

Communal drinking is, as has already been suggested here, characterized by a remarkable ambivalence. On the one hand, it creates fraternity among drinkers, on the other this relationship is marked by mutual caution, obligation, and competitiveness, which make it seem far less than friendly. In an instant the bond can be broken and turned into its opposite, should the basic rule be violated. Anyone who refuses a drink offered him in a workers' bar may well find themself in the middle of a brawl; if one does not in turn offer a round, one makes a fool of oneself. Once one is a participant in a round of drinks, one cannot suddenly of their own accord back out. As the scene cited at the start of this chapter shows, one must observe certain rules, even if one is not in the mood. Behavioural sociologists determined from actual observation how ironclad these rules are, unwritten though they may be: "Once the proclamation is made that rounds have begun, it is incumbent upon the members of a group to participate regardless of individual preferences. One cannot demand that they pay for one's own drink and one's own drink only. If one of the members of the group must leave immediately after their first drink, they will usually state that they will stand the first round, being unavailable to stand any subsequent round. Although paying for more drinks than he will be consuming during the course of his stay may be economically unfair to him, it is required that either the other participants in the group accept his offer or that some other member volunteer to take the first round and allow the soon-to-be-departing member's drink to be defined as a gift drink. For example, if one member requests the first round because he must leave and his offer is declined, it is typically declined by someone saying, 'No, let me get the first round, and I'll treat you to a drink.' Once rounds have begun, each member of the group in turn is obligated to stand at least one round. Thus, if a group is composed of four members, rounds must continue for at least four drinks, after which another set of rounds may begin or the participants may begin purchasing their drinks on an individual basis. When rounds have started, the original
group members typically remain together, at least until they have purchased their round, since each member of the group is obligated to purchase one round. Sometimes a member of the original group who has stood their round will move to some other part of the bar, but members of the original group who are yet to stand a round must still include that member even though he or she is no longer physically part of the group. And the defector, in turn, must at least by gesture acknowledge each subsequent drink received from the group, thus maintaining social contact at least until the termination of the rounds."

The above-mentioned study Mass Observation notes how far, indeed how deep into realms of the unconscious, the feeling of fraternity within a group of drinkers extends. Members of rounds will empty their glasses almost at the same time, and often the levels of the liquid in the glasses will vary by no more than half an inch. The variations are most marked when the glasses are less than half full. They begin at the same time and finish at the same, or almost the same, time. The study relates an impressive example of this telepathic sense of community by reporting about a group of four men of whom one is blind. All sit at a table and order their beer. As soon as the glasses are served, they all raise them to their lips and drink for about four seconds, each returning his glass to the table at the same time. Each, including the blind man, has emptied exactly a quarter of the glass. The next few times they drink in shorter gulps, sometimes the blind man first, sometimes the other three, without any noticeable pattern. But, at the end, they all finish their drinks with a variation of between a quarter and a half inch of beer remaining.

The rules and rituals that accompany drinking in a bar or pub survive in our modern civilization as relics from a long-forgotten age. The public house or bar, in fact, may be termed a sort of preserve, in which archaic behavior patterns that have all but vanished from other spheres of life are kept alive. To fully understand the meaning of drinking rituals, one must recall these age-old modes of conduct, mechanisms, and rituals, and their social function. This archaic practice which is perpetuated in drinking rituals is known in anthropology as a potlatch. The potlatch is a kind of sacrificial offering, not to the divinity, but to other human beings. In the potlatch valuable objects are either destroyed in the presence of members of another tribe (a destruction potlatch) or given to them (a gift potlatch). From a modern, rationalistic point of view this process seems senseless, but for primitive societies it has, as the French anthropologist and sociologist Marcel Mauss discovered, an absolutely central social importance: "The motive for these excessive gifts and this reckless consumption, the senseless loss and destruction of property is in no way unselfishly motivated. Among chieftains, vassals, and followers a hierarchy is established by means of these gifts. Giving is a way of demonstrating one's superiority, of showing that one is greater, that one stands higher . . .; to accept, without reciprocating or giving more in return, means subordinating oneself, becoming a vassal and follower, sinking deeper."

Even today traces survive of this original sense of gift giving. Anyone who gives a gift, treats, or invites another is the superior and more powerful person. The recipient, of course, has the advantage of receiving something of value without paying for it; but on the other hand the recipient does pay for it, precisely by being left the passive receiver. For this reason it is mostly children, especially young children—those who in our society personify powerlessness and passivity—who are given gifts (by adults, often their parents or guardians). The German expression for reciprocating a gift, sich revanchieren, contains a word closely linked to "revenge," a reminder that every gift basically entails an assault on the autonomy of the receiver. This is exactly what Nietzsche, that great unmasker of fair appearances, meant by calling gratitude a form of revenge: expressing thanks when one has received a favor or a present gives an immaterial counterpresent, so to speak, a formula by which the recipient attempts to neutralize or, more accurately, to avenge, the incursion into their existence the gift represents.

Yet these are only lingering traces of the older meaning that gift giving, gift receiving, and the exchange of presents once had. With the capitalist principle of exchange, this mechanism has generally lost its power in our daily lives.

It is only in the context of alcohol drinking that it still survives with any degree of vigour. In a sense, the bar is a thoroughly archaic place, with more than mere vestiges, hints, or sublimations of what once was clinging to it. Here the genuine article lives on: drinkers sharing rounds are participants in a potlatch. With the instinctive sureness of migratory birds they follow the rules and rituals of offering and reciprocating, without an inkling of their ancient origins. Assisting them in this, of course, is the alcohol itself, around which everything revolves. It washes away the newer, "civilized" levels of consciousness, exposing the archaic level where intoxication, fraternity, and competition merge as spontaneously as they might have in a drinking bout five hundred, a thousand, or three thousand years ago.

(From Chapter 6 of Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants)

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WOLFGANG SCHIVELBUSCH ON DRUGLORE

(From Chapter 6 of Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants)