Subject: Re: Absinthe makes the heart grow ...
From: [email-masked] (octinomos)
Date: Thu, 04 Jan 1996 12:13:22 -0800

In article <[email-masked]>, [email-masked] wrote:

: Does anyone know the details of making Absinthe?
: 
: Any published instructions? 
: 
: 
there's mention of some herbs that go with it in here:
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ABSINTHE:

The Green Goddess

by Aleister Crowley

I.

   Keep always this dim corner for me, that I may sit while the Green Hour
glides, a proud pavine of Time. For I am no longer in the city accursed,
where Time is horsed on the white gelding Death, his spurs rusted with
blood.
   There is a corner of the United States which he has overlooked. It lies
in New Orleans, between Canal Street and Esplanade Avenue; the Mississippi
for its base. Thence it reaches northward to a most curious desert land,
where is a cemetery lovely beyond dreams. Its walls low and whitewashed,
within which straggles a wilderness of strange and fantastic tombs; and
hard by is that great city of brothels which is so cynically mirthful a
neighbor. As Felicien Rops wrote,--or was it Edmond d'Haraucourt?--"_la
Prostitution et la Mort sont frere et soeur--les fils de Dieu!_"
(_=italic) At least the poet of *Le Legende des Sexes* (*=underline) was
right, and the psycho-analysts after him, in identifying the Mother with
the Tomb. This, then, is only the beginning and end of things, this
"_quartier macabre_" beyond the North Rampart with the Mississippi on the
other side. It is like the space between, our life which flows, and
fertilizes as it flows, muddy and malarious as it may be, to empty itself
into the warm bosom of the Gulf Stream, which (in our allegory) we may
call the Life of God.
   But our business is with the heart of things; we must go beyond the
crude phenomena of nature if we are to dwell in the spirit. Art is the
soul of life and the Old Absinthe House is heart and soul of the old
quarter of New Orleans.
   For here was the headquarters of no common man--no less than a real
pirate--of Captain Lafitte, who not only robbed his neighbors, but
defended them against invasion. Here, too, sat Henry Clay, who lived and
died to give his name to a cigar. Outside this house no man remembers much
more of him than that; but here, authentic and, as I imagine, indignant,
his ghost stalks grimly.
   Here, too are marble basins hollowed--and hallowed!--by the drippings
of the water which creates by baptism the new spirit of absinthe.
   I am only sipping the second glass of that "fascinating, but subtle
poison, whose ravages eat men's heart and brain" that I have ever tasted
in my life; and as I am not an American anxious for quick action, I am not
surprised and disappointed that I do not drop dead upon the spot. But I
can taste souls without the aid of absinthe; and besides, this is magic of
absinthe! The spirit of the house has entered into it; it is an elixir,
the masterpiece of an old alchemist, no common wine.
   And so, as I talk with the patron concerning the vanity of things, I
perceive the secret of the heart of God himself; this, that everything,
even the vilest thing, is so unutterably lovely that it is worthy of the
devotion of a God for all eternity.
   What other excuse could He give man for making him? In substance, that
is my answer to King Solomon.

II.

   The barrier between divine and human things is frail but inviolable;
the artist and the bourgeois are only divided by a point of view--"A hair
divided the false and true."
   I am watching the opalescence of my absinthe, and it leads me to ponder
upon a certain very curious mystery, persistent in legend. We may call it
the mystery of the rainbow.
   Originally in the fantastic but significant legend of the Hebrews, the
rainbow is mentioned as the sign of salvation. The world has been purified
by water, and was ready for the revelation of Wine. God would never again
destroy His work, but ultimately seal its perfection by a baptism of fire.
   Now, in this analogue also falls the coat of many colors which was made
for Joseph, a legend which was regarded as so important that it was
subsequently borrowed for the romance of Jesus. The veil of the Temple,
too, was of many colors. We find, further east, that the _Manipura
Cakkra_--the Lotus of the City of Jewels--which is an important centre in
Hindu anatomy, and apparently identical with the solar plexus, is the
central point of the nervous system of the human body, dividing the sacred
from the profane, or the lower from the higher.
   In western Mysticism, once more we learn that the middle grade
initiation is called _Hodos Camelioniis_, the Path of the Chameleon. There
is here evidently an illusion to this same mystery. We also learn that the
middle stage in Alchemy is when the liquor becomes opalescent.
   Finally, we note among the visions of the Saints one called the
Universal Peacock, in which the totality is perceived thus royally
appareled.
   Would it were possible to assemble in this place the cohorts of
quotation; for indeed they are beautiful with banners, flashing their
myriad rays from _cothurn_ and _habergeon_, gay and gallant in the light
of that Sun which knows no fall from Zenith of high noon!
   Yet I must needs already have written so much to make clear one pitiful
conceit: can it be that in the opalescence of absinthe is some occult link
with this mystery of the Rainbow? For undoubtedly one does indefinably and
subtly insinuate the drinker in the secret chamber of Beauty, does kindle
his thoughts to rapture, adjust his point of view to that of the artists,
at least to that degree of which he is originally capable, weave for his
fancy a gala dress of stuff as many-colored as the mind of Aphrodite.
   Oh Beauty! Long did I love thee, long did I pursue thee, thee elusive,
thee intangible! And lo! thou enfoldest me by night and day in the arms of
gracious, of luxurious, of shimmering silence.

III.

   The Prohibitionist must always be a person of no moral character; for
he cannot even conceive of the possibility of a man capable of resisting
temptation. Still more, he is so obsessed, like the savage, by the fear of
the unknown, that he regards alcohol as a fetish, necessarily alluring and
tyrannical.
   With this ignorance of human nature goes an ever grosser ignorance of
the divine nature. He does not understand that the universe has only one
possible purpose; that, the business of life being happily completed by
the production of the necessities and luxuries incidental to comfort, the
_residuum_ of human energy needs an outlet. The surplus of Will must find
issue in the elevation of the individual towards the Godhead; and the
method of such elevation is by religion, love, and art. These three things
are indissolubly bound up with wine, for they are species of intoxication.
   Yet against all these things we find the prohibitionist, logically
enough. It is true that he usually pretends to admit religion as a proper
pursuit for humanity; but what a religion! He has removed from it every
element of ecstasy or even of devotion; in his hands it has become cold,
fanatical, cruel, and stupid, a thing merciless and formal, without
sympathy or humanity. Love and art he rejects altogether; for him the only
meaning of love is a mechanical--hardly even physiological!--process
necessary for the perpetuation of the human race. (But why perpetuate it?)
Art is for him the parasite and pimp of love. He cannot distinguish
between the Apollo Belvedere and the crude bestialities of certain
Pompeian frescoes, or between Rabelais and Elenor Glyn.
   What then is his ideal of human life? one cannot say. So crass a
creature can have no true ideal. There have been ascetic philosophers; but
the prohibitionist would be as offended by their doctrine as by ours,
which, indeed, are not so dissimilar as appears. Wage-slavery and boredom
seem to complete his outlook on the world.
   There are species which survive because of the feeling of disgust
inspired by them: one is reluctant to set the heel firmly upon them,
however thick may be one's boots. But when they are recognized as utterly
noxious to humanity--the more so that they ape its form--then courage must
be found, or, rather, nausea must be swallowed. May God send us a Saint
George!

IV.

   It is notorious that all genius is accompanied by vice. Almost always
this takes the form of sexual extravagance. It is to be observed that
deficiency, as in the cases of Carlyle and Ruskin, is to be reckoned as
extravagance. At least the word abnormalcy will fit all cases. Farther, we
see that in a very large number of great men there has also been
indulgence in drink or drugs. There are whole periods when practically
every great man has been thus marked, and these periods are those during
which the heroic spirit has died out of their nation, and the _burgeois_
is apparently triumphant.
   In this case the cause is evidently the horror of life induced in the
artist by the contemplation of his surroundings. He must find another
world, no matter at what cost.
   Consider the end of the eighteenth century. In France the men of genius
are made, so to speak, possible, by the Revolution. In England, under
Castlereagh, we find Blake lost to humanity in mysticism, Shelley and
Byron exiles, Coleridge taking refuge in opium, Keats sinking under the
weight of circumstance, Wordsworth forced to sell his soul, while the
enemy, in the persons of Southey and Moore, triumphantly holds sway.
   The poetically similar period in France is 1850 to 1870. Hugo is in
exile, and all his brethren are given to absinthe or to hashish or to
opium.
   There is however another consideration more important. There are some
men who possess the understanding of the City of God, and know not the
keys; or, if they possess them, have not force to turn them in the wards.
Such men often seek to win heaven by forged credentials. Just so a youth
who desires love is too often deceived by simulacra, embraces Lydia
thinking her to be Lalage.
   But the greatest men of all suffer neither the limitations of the
former class nor the illusions of the latter. Yet we find them equally
given to what is apparently indulgence. Lombroso has foolishly sought to
find the source of this in madness--as if insanity could scale the peaks
of Progress while Reason recoiled from the _bergschrund_. The explanation
is far otherwise. Imagine to yourself the mental state of him who inherits
or attains the full consciousness of the artist, that is to say, the
divine consciousness.
   He finds himself unutterably lonely, and he must steel himself to
endure it. All his peers are dead long since! Even if he find an equal
upon earth, there can scarcely be companionship, hardly more than the far
courtesy of king to king. There are no twin souls in genius.
   Good--he can reconcile himself to the scorn of the world. But yet he
feels with anguish his duty towards it. It is therefore essential to him
to be human.
   Now the divine consciousness is not full flowered in youth. The newness
of the objective world preoccupies the soul for many years. It is only as
each illusion vanishes before the magic of the master that he gains more
and more the power to dwell in the world of Reality. And with this comes
the terrible temptation--the desire to enter and enjoy rather than remain
among men and suffer their illusions. Yet, since the sole purpose of the
incarnation of such a Master was to help humanity, they must make the
supreme renunciation. It is the problem of the dreadful bridge of Islam,
_Al Sirak_--the razor-edge will cut the unwary foot, yet it must be
trodden firmly, or the traveler will fall to the abyss. I dare not sit in
the Old Absinthe House forever, wrapped in the ineffable delight of the
Beatific Vision. I must write this essay, that men may thereby come at
last to understand true things. But the operation of the creative godhead
is not enough. Art is itself too near the reality which must be renounced
for a season.
   Therefore his work is also part of his temptation; the genius feels
himself slipping constantly heavenward. The gravitation of eternity draws
him. He is like a ship torn by the tempest from the harbor where the
master must needs take on new passengers to the Happy Isles. So he must
throw out anchors and the only holding is the mire! Thus in order to
maintain the equilibrium of sanity, the artist is obliged to seek
fellowship with the grossest of mankind. Like Lord Dunsany or Augustus
John, today, or like Teniers or old, he may love to sit in taverns where
sailors frequent; or he may wander the country with Gypsies, or he may
form liaisons with the vilest men and women. Edward Fitzgerald would seek
an illiterate fisherman and spend weeks in his company. Verlaine made
associates of Rimbaud and Bibi la Puree. Shakespeare consorted with the
Earls of Pembroke and Southampton. Marlowe was actually killed during a
brawl in a low tavern. And when we consider the sex-relation, it is hard
to mention a genius who had a wife or mistress of even tolerable good
character. If he had one, he would be sure to neglect her for a Vampire or
a Shrew. A good woman is too near that heaven of Reality which he is sworn
to renounce!
   And this, I suppose, is why I am interested in the woman who has come
to sit at the nearest table. Let us find out her story; let us try to see
with the eyes of her soul!

V.

   She is a woman of no more than thirty years of age, though she looks
older. She comes here at irregular intervals, once a week or once a month,
but when she comes she sits down to get solidly drunk on that alternation
of beer and gin which the best authorities in England deem so efficacious.
   As to her story, it is simplicity itself. She was kept in luxury for
some years by a wealthy cotton broker, crossed to Europe with him, and
lived in London and Paris like a Queen. Then she got the idea of
"respectability" and "settling down in life"; so she married a man who
could keep her in mere comfort. Result: repentance, and a periodical need
to forget her sorrows. She is still "respectable"; she never tires of
repeating that she is not one of "those girls" but "a married woman living
far uptown," and that she "never runs about with men."
   It is not the failure of marriage; it is the failure of men to
recognize what marriage was ordained to be. By a singular paradox it is
the triumph of the _bourgeois_. Only the hero is capable of marriage as
the church understands it; for the marriage oath is a compact of appalling
solemnity, an alliance of two souls against the world and against fate,
with invocation of the great blessing of the Most High. Death is not the
most beautiful of adventures, as Frohman said, for death is unavoidable;
marriage is a voluntary heroism. That marriage has today become a matter
of convenience is the last word of the commercial spirit. It is as if one
should take a vow of knighthood to combat dragons--until the dragons
appeared.
   So this poor woman, because she did not understand that respectability
is a lie, that it is love that makes marriage sacred and not the sanction
of church or state, because she took marriage as an asylum instead of as a
crusade, has failed in life, and now seeks alcohol under the same fatal
error.
   Wine is the ripe gladness which accompanies valor and rewards toil; it
is the plume on a man's lancehead, a fluttering gallantry--not good to
lean upon. Therefore her eyes are glassed with horror as she gazes
uncomprehending upon her fate. That which she did all to avoid confronts
her: she does not realize that, had she faced it, it would have fled with
all the other phantoms. For the sole reality of this universe is God.
   The Old Absinthe House is not a place. It is not bounded by four walls.
It is headquarters to an army of philosophies. From this dim corner let me
range, wafting thought through every air, salient against every problem of
mankind: for it will always return like Noah's dove to this ark, this
strange little sanctuary of the Green Goddess which has been set down not
upon Ararat, but by the banks of the "Father of Waters."

VI.

   Ah! the Green Goddess! What is the fascination that makes her so
adorable and so terrible? Do you know that French sonnet "La legende de
l'absinthe?" He must have loved it well, that poet. Here are his
witnesses.

    _Apollon, qui pleurait le trepas d'Hyacinthe,
    Ne voulait pas ceder la victoire a la mort.
    Il fallait que son ame, adepte de l'essor,
    Trouvat pour la beaute une alchemie plus sainte.
    Donc de sa main celeste il epuise, il ereinte
    Les dons les plus subtils de la divine Flore.
    Leurs corps brises souspirent une exhalaison d'or
    Dont il nous recueillait la goutte de--l'Absinthe!

    Aux cavernes blotties, aux palis petillants,
    Par un, par deux, buvez ce breuvage d'aimant!
    Car c'est un sortilege, un propos de dictame,
    Ce vin d'opale pale avortit la misere,
    Ouvre de la beaute l'intime sanctuaire
    --Ensorcelle mon coeur, extasie mort ame!_

   What is there in absinthe that makes it a separate cult? The effects of
its abuse are totally distinct from those of other stimulants. Even in
ruin and in degradation it remains a thing apart: its victims wear a
ghastly aureole all their own, and in their peculiar hell yet gloat with a
sinister perversion of pride that they are not as other men.
   But we are not to reckon up the uses of a thing by contemplating the
wreckage of its abuse. We do not curse the sea because of occasional
disasters to our marines, or refuse axes to our woodsmen because we
sympathize with Charles the First or Louis the Sixteenth. So therefore as
special vices and dangers pertinent to absinthe, so also do graces and
virtues that adorn no other liquor.
   The word is from the Greek _apsinthion_. It means "undrinkable" or,
according to some authorities, "undelightful." In either case, strange
paradox! No: for the wormwood draught itself were bitter beyond human
endurance; it must be aromatized and mellowed with other herbs.
   Chief among these is the gracious Melissa, of which the great
Paracelsus thought so highly that he incorporated it as the preparation of
his _Ens Melissa Vitae_, which he expected to be an elixir of life and a
cure for all diseases, but which in his hands never came to perfection.
   Then also there are added mint, anise, fennel and hyssop, all holy
herbs familiar to all from the Treasury of Hebrew Scripture. And there is
even the sacred marjoram which renders man both chaste and passionate; the
tender green angelica stalks also infused in this most mystic of
concoctions; for like the _artemisia absinthium_ itself it is a plant of
Diana, and gives the purity and lucidity, with a touch of the madness, of
the Moon; and above all there is the Dittany of Crete of which the eastern
Sages say that one flower hath more puissance in high magic than all the
other gifts of all the gardens of the world. It is as if the first diviner
of absinthe had been indeed a magician intent upon a combination of sacred
drugs which should cleanse, fortify and perfume the human soul.
   And it is no doubt that in the due employment of this liquor such
effects are easy to obtain. A single glass seems to render the breathing
freer, the spirit lighter, the heart more ardent, soul and mind alike more
capable of executing the great task of doing that particular work in the
world which the Father may have sent them to perform. Food itself loses
its gross qualities in the presence of absinthe and becomes even as
_manna_, operating the sacrament of nutrition without bodily disturbance.
   Let then the pilgrim enter reverently the shrine, and drink his
absinthe as a stirrup-cup; for in the right conception of this life as an
ordeal of chivalry lies the foundation of every perfection of philosophy.
"Whatsoever ye do, whether ye eat or drink, do all to the glory of God!"
applies with singular force to the _absintheur_. So may he come victorious
from the battle of life to be received with tender kisses by some
green-robed archangel, and crowned with mystic vervain in the Emerald
Gateway of the Golden City of God.

VII.

   And now the cafe is beginning to fill up. This little room with its
dark green woodwork, its boarded ceiling, its sanded floor, its old
pictures, its whole air of sympathy with time, is beginning to exert its
magic spell. Here comes a curious child, short and sturdy, with a long
blonde pigtail, with a jolly little old man who looks as if he had stepped
straight out of the pages of Balzac.
   Handsome and diminutive, with a fierce mustache almost as big as the
rest of him, like a regular little Spanish fighting cock--Frank, the
waiter, in his long white apron, struts to them with the glasses of
ice-cold pleasure, green as the glaciers themselves. He will stand up
bravely with the musicians bye and bye, and sing us a jolly song of old
Catalonia.
   The door swings open again. A tall dark girl, exquisitely slim and
snaky, with masses of black hair knotted about her head, comes in. On her
arm is a plump woman with hungry eyes, and a mass of Titian red hair. They
seem distracted from the outer world, absorbed in some subject of
enthralling interest and they drink their aperitif as if in a dream. I ask
the mulatto boy who waits at my table (the sleek and lithe black panther!)
who they are; but he knows only that one is a cabaret dancer, the other
the owner of a cotton plantation up river. At a round table in the middle
of the room sits one of the proprietors with a group of friends; he is
burly, rubicund, and jolly, the very type of the Shakespearean "Mine
host." Now a party of a dozen merry boys and girls comes in. The old
pianist begins to play a dance, and in a moment the whole cafe is caught
up in the music of harmonious motion. Yet still the invisible line is
drawn about each soul; the dance does not conflict with the absorption of
the two strange women, or with my own mood of detachment.
   Then there is a "little laughing lewd gamine" dressed all in black save
for a square white collar. Her smile is broad and free as the sun and her
gaze as clean and wholesome and inspiring. There is the big jolly blonde
Irish girl in the black velvet beret and coat, and the white boots,
chatting with two boys in khaki from the border. There is the Creole girl
in pure white cap-a-pie, with her small piquant face and its round button
of a nose, and its curious deep rose flush, and its red little mouth,
impudently smiling. Around these islands seems to flow as a general tide
the more stable life of the quarter. Here are honest good-wives seriously
discussing their affairs, and heaven only knows if it be love or the price
of sugar which engages them so wholly. There are but a few commonplace and
uninteresting elements in the cafe; and these are without exception men.
The giant Big Business is a great tyrant! He seizes all the men for
slaves, and leaves the women to make shift as best they can for--all that
makes life worth living. Candies and American Beauty Roses are of no use
in an emergency. So, even in this most favored corner, there is dearth of
the kind of men that women need.
   At the table next to me sits an old, old man. He has done great things
in his day, they tell me, an engineer, who first found it possible to dig
Artesian wells in the Sahara desert. The Legion of Honor glows red in his
shabby surtout. He comes here, one of the many wrecks of the Panama Canal,
a piece of jetsam cast up by that tidal wave of speculation and
corruption. He is of the old type, the thrifty peasantry; and he has his
little income from the _Rente_. He says that he is too old to cross the
ocean--and why should he, with the atmosphere of old France to be had a
stone's throw from his little apartment in Bourbon Street? It is a curious
type of house that one finds in this quarter in New Orleans; meagre
without, but within one comes unexpectedly upon great spaces, carved
wooden balconies on which the rooms open. So he dreams away his honored
days in the Old Absinthe House. His rusty black, with its worn red button,
is a noble wear.
   Black, by the way, seems almost universal among the women: is it
instinctive good taste? At least, it serves to bring up the general level
of good looks. Most American women spoil what little beauty they may have
by overdressing. Here there is nothing extravagant, nothing vulgar, none
of the near-Paris-gown and the lust-off-Bond-Street hat. Nor is there a
single dress to which a Quaker could object. There is neither the
mediocrity nor the immodesty of the New York woman, who is tailored or
millinered on a garish pattern, with the Eternal Chorus Girl as the
Ideal--an ideal which she always attains, though (Heaven knows!) in
"society" there are few "front row" types.
   On the other side of me a splendid stalwart maid, modern in muscle, old
only in the subtle and modest fascination of her manner, her face proud,
cruel and amorous, shakes her wild tresses of gold in pagan laughter. Her
mood is universal as the wind. What can her cavalier be doing to keep her
waiting? It is a little mystery which I will not solve for the reader; on
the contrary--

VIII.

   Yes, it was my own sweetheart (no! not all the magazines can vulgarize
that loveliest of words) who was waiting for me to be done with my
musings. She comes in silently and stealthily, preening and purring like a
great cat, and sits down, and begins to Enjoy. She know I must never be
disturbed until I close my pen. We shall go together to dine at a little
Italian restaurant kept by an old navy man, who makes the best ravioli
this side of Genoa; then we shall walk the wet and windy streets,
rejoicing to feel the warm sub-tropical rain upon our faces. We shall go
down to the Mississippi, and watch the lights of the ships, and listen to
the tales of travel and adventure of the mariners. There is one tale that
moves me greatly; it is like the story of the sentinel of _Herculaneum_. A
cruiser of the U.S. Navy was detailed to Rio de Janeiro. (This was before
the days of wireless telegraphy.) The port was in quarantine; the ship had
to stand ten miles out to sea. Nevertheless, Yellow Jack managed to come
aboard. The men died one by one. There was no way of getting word to
Washington; and, as it turned out later, the Navy Department had
completely forgotten the existence of the ship. No orders came; the
captain stuck to his post for three months. Three months of solitude and
death! At last a passing ship was signaled, and the cruiser was moved to
happier waters. No doubt the story is a lie; but did that make it less
splendid in the telling, as the old scoundrel sat and spat and chewed
tobacco? No, we will certainly go down, and ruffle it on the wharves.
There is really better fun in life than going to the movies, when you know
how to sense Reality.
   There is beauty in every incident of life; the true and the false, the
wise and the foolish, are all one in the eye that beholds all without
passion or prejudice: and the secret appears to lie not in the retirement
from the world, but in keeping a part of oneself Vestal, sacred, intact,
aloof from that self which makes contact with the external universe. In
other words, in a separation of that which is and perceives from that
which acts and suffers. And the art of doing this is really the art of
being an artist. As a rule, it is a birthright; it may perhaps be attained
by prayer and fasting; most surely, it can never be bought.
   But if you have it not. This will be the best way to get it--or
something like it. Give up your life completely to the task; sit daily for
six hours in the Old Absinthe House, and sip the icy opal; endure till all
things change insensibly before your eyes, you changing with them; till
you become as gods, knowing good and evil, and that they are not two but
one.
   It may be a long time before the veil lifts; but a moment's experience
of the point of view of the artist is worth a myriad martyrdoms. It solves
every problem of life and death--which two also are one.
   It translates this universe into intelligible terms, relating truly the
ego with the non-ego, and recasting the prose of reason in the poetry of
soul. Even as the eye of the sculptor beholds his masterpiece already
existing in the shapeless mass of marble, needing only the loving kindness
of the chisel to cut away the veils of Isis, so you may (perhaps) learn to
behold the sum and summit of all grace and glory from this great
observatory, the Old Absinthe House of New Orleans.

   _V'la, p'tite chatte; c'est fini, le travail. Foutons le camp!_

--------------------
isbn # 1-55818-270-5

octy

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: Dmytri Kleiner -- Quirk
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