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'You Smell of Goat': A Complete Hiftory of Man According to Hif Divers Delightf ‘Tis better to be a good liver than to have one. Tom Waits When wildebeest and wild beasts roamed the plains thousands of years ago, early man roamed with them ... and often provided them with a good meal. Life for early man for most of those thousands of years was as Thomas Hobbes described it : nasty, brutish and short. Hunting and gathering -- and the threat of imminent starvation – were all that drove men forwards. Their battle for survival was a daily challenge. Man’s mind was of little use in such a primitive struggle: native cunning and primitive tool-making were highly valued; long-range thinking was not. A successful hunt was all such creatures had to celebrate: the high point in such an existence would be roasting a wild beast over an open fire. For a brief moment in their short and brutal lives their bellies were full, their bodies warm, and their thoughts could (at last!) roam to higher things. They had bought themselves time to think. On such nights, and over the course of those thousands of year of struggle, there was one thought, one goal, that drove these men forwards: the idea of beer! That’s right. Beer. The first step away from the caves and that precarious existence of the hunter-gather came with the cultivation in Mesopotamia of grains and cereals. With this important step man had begun thinking long-range; he had begun to plan his life a season … then a year … then several years in advance. Rather than roaming far and wide he could settle down, build a house, raise a family, start a cilvilisation. The planting and harvesting of grains and cereals represented the arrival of man the-rational-animal; for the first time it could be clearly seen that man’s mind was his chief tool of survival. Man had put his mind to work, and for the first time flourishing replaced survival. And what was all that grain and all those cereals for? Why, for beer of course! And bread. If bread was the staff of life, beer was its inspiration. With bread came sustenance; with beer came civilisation. If the mark of that first phase of primitive human development was a wild beast gnawing on the roasted limb of another wild beast, then the mark of the next was several pitchers of beer, and happy people consuming them. Beer was the first example of men expending precious time and effort producing something not just for survival, but for their own pleasure! And with the time bought by cultivation, men could now devise stories to entertain themselves while drinking beer. Curiously, many of these stories involved the pleasures of imbibition. The first of man’s great stories is ‘The Epic of Gilgamesh’ which describes the evolution of man from primitive to cultured. In this, perhaps the first of the creation myths (and our first drinking song), we hear tell of the whore sent by Gilgamesh to the savage Enkidu who teaches him what it is to be human. “She [gave Enkidu] bread to eat, because that’s what humans do, and beer to drink, because that’s what civilised people do”:[1] ‘Drink beer the custom of the land.’ Enkidu drank beer, became hilarious, became glad – and in doing so became human. We see that the epic poem of Gilgamesh is not just the first piece of literature – it is also the first drinking song. The Mesopotamians too had a popular drinking song: Sweet beer is in the Buninu barrel. The only think left to add is a hiccup. And a belch. And to wonder what sort of visions the Mesopotamian liver was conjuring up! African myth includes an early version of the story of Pandora’s Box: in this version at the bottom of the empty casket is found, not hope exactly, but a gourd of beer. ‘Forget the afterlife and redemption by the gods,’ this story seems to say: ‘be happy with your lot, because to you is given beer.’ Beer put the gods in their place for the first time. Where primitive men would fearfully seek to propitiate the cruel and fickle gods for one more day of a brutal existence, civilised men instead called on their gods to assist in the tricky processes of cultivation and fermentation. It is thus no accident that religion quickly associated itself with beer: to this day, beer recipes from Belgian monks are still highly prized. Even the murderous Aztecs were not found wanting: if you weren’t completely cunted at Aztec religious rites your head became forfeit to the priests. After all, as drunkenness was a gift from the gods, it must be so honoured. Now there’s a religious morality you can subscribe to! The Smerians, the Aztecs, the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Romans, the Teutons … all took the happy accident of fermentation and with it made their crops last longer and their short lives better. The Egyptians for example used up to forty percent of their harvests to make beer. Bousa (or bouza) as one type was called (yes, it’s true!) was the staple of the Egyptian diet; the pyramids were paid for with another type known as kash. The urge to go out to work to earn drinking vouchers and then spend them down the boozer is, thus, a long-established mark of Western civilisation. In this way life was made much better for the next few thousands of years, which was important since for many other reasons life – beer and its associated revels aside – was still shit. Aside from a few brief, glorious years in Ancient Greece -- in which philosophy, art and science were very soberly invented -- getting mothered was the only reliable pleasure to be had across most of the Dark Ages and in most of the world. To understand Europe for most of this time, think Nebraska on a slow weekend – you had the choice of either church or beer. The best you could say was that most monks were good brewers! In fact, much of the Dark Ages might well be explained by the fact that most of the people for most of the time were bladdered. In an age when the water was disgusting and food was once again scarce and difficult to keep fresh, beer had become the chief source of daily nutrients. The average Northern European, including women and children, drank three litres of beer a day – and this is real beer, not today’s girly muck, with much higher alcohol content than the lolly-water of Messrs Budweiser and Miller. (Nordics were even harder: the daily ration for Finnish soldiers was the equivalent of forty cans of strong beer.) Try drinking three litres of Tennents Super or Carlsberg Elephant beer every day and see how you feel, and then think about that when you study European history: Almost everything had some liquor in it, especially medicines. Anything not deliberately fermented went off in the summer heat. In winter, beer froze, causing the alcohol to separate into high-proof liquor… To make matters worse, the main non-alcoholic source of nutrition, bread, is now believed to have been plagued with the hallucinogenic fungus ergot, the base ingredient for LSD. Drunk doctors, tipsy politicians, hung-over generals: the plague, famine and war. Add a pope on acid and medieval Christianity begins to make a whole lot of sense.[2] The Eskimos might have twenty-three words to describe snow, but the English language has over one thousand to describe getting hammered.[3] Little wonder. Being bollocksed in fact explains much English history, as for most of their history the English spent most of their time getting trolleyed. Julius Caesar, more used to the pleasures of the grape than the hops, asked in an ode after encountering the arseholed Ancient Britons: Who made you and from what?English King Harold’s much later fall at the Battle of Hastings was ascribed by twelfth-century historian William of Malmesbury to the fact that the boys were still hung-over from celebrating an earlier victory over the Vikings. Echoing the much later charge of the Light Brigade (and the later loutishness of England’s Barmy Army and its football hooligans), Malmesbury describes the English fighting “more with rashness and precipitate fury than with military skill.” But it was from the drunken shambolic English that we got the idea of liberty. Common law and the Magna Carta were early English innovations, but we had to endure half-a-millennia more before the ideas embodied within these could be properly developed and applied. The saviour of Europe came once again from the East: in the twelfth-century European scholars began learning from their Muslim counterparts about the great thinkers forgotten in the European Dark Ages, and so kicked off the Renaissance. In the seventeenth-century Europeans learnt from Islam of another wonder, and this special wonder helped to kick off the Enlightenment … And for knowledge of that pleasure and what came of it you will have to wait for Part Two. To be continued. [1] Man Walks into a Pub: A Sociable History of Beer, Pete Brown; Macmillan, 2003 [2] The Devil’s Cup: Coffee, the Driving Force in History, Stewart Lee Allen; Soho Press, 2000. [3] Yes, it’s true! The fabulous and afore-referenced Man Walks into a Pub includes nearly 250 of these words, and author Pete Brown points out that there are a further 800-odd such words and phrases to be found in Jonathan Green’s Dictionary of Slang. As Brown comments: “It is clearly the work of an insane genius. Just so you know, the only other words that come close to having as many different slang terms as drunkenness are bonking, jobbies, wabs, the front bottom and the old chap. In itself this says more about our culture than most books could ever hope to.”
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