HOMER’S MAGIC HERBS.
THERE are certain low-lying districts in southern Spain where the
branched lily, or king’s spear, blooms in such profusion that whole
acres, seen from a distance towards the end of March, show as if densely
strewn with new-fallen snow. Just such in aspect must have been the
abode of the Odyssean dead. There, along boundless asphodel plains,
Odysseus watched Orion, a spectral huntsman pursuing spectral game:
there Agamemnon denounced the treachery of Clytemnestra: there Ajax
still nursed his wrath at the award of the Argive kings: there Achilles
gnawed a shadowy heart in longing, on any terms, for action and the
upper air: thither Hermes conducted the delinquent souls of the suitors
of Penelope. A tranquil dwelling-place: where the stagnant air of apathy
was stirred only by sighs of inane regret.
Homer’s asphodel grows only in the under-world, yet it is no mythical
plant. It can be quite clearly identified with the _Asphodelus
ramosus_,[306] now extensively used in Algeria for the manufacture of
alcohol, and cultivated in our gardens for the sake of its tall spikes
of beautiful flowers, pure white within and purple-streaked without
along each of the six petals uniting at the base to form a
deeply-indented starry corolla. The continual visits of pilfering bees
attest a goodly store of honey; while the perfume spread over the
northern shores of the Gulf of Corinth by the abundant growth of
asphodel was said to have given their name, in some far-off century, to
the Ozolians of Locris.
Footnote 306:
The daffodil has no other connexion with the asphodel than having
unaccountably appropriated its name, through the old French
_affodille_. It is a kind of narcissus, while the asphodel belongs to
the lily tribe.
Introduced into England about 1551, it was succeeded, after forty-five
years, by the yellow asphodel (_Asphodelus luteus_), of which already in
1633 Gerard in his Herbal reports ‘great plenty in our London gardens.’
Hence Pope’s familiarity with this kind, and his consequent
matter-of-course identification of it with the classical flower in the
lines,
By those happy souls who dwell
On yellow meads of asphodel:
wherein he has entirely missed what may with some reason be called the
local colouring of Hades.
In order to explain the lugubrious associations of the branched
asphodel, we must go back to an early stage of thought regarding the
condition of the dead.
Instinctively man assumes that his existence will, in some form, be
continued beyond the grave. Only a few of the most degraded savages, or
a handful of the most enlightened sceptics, accept death with stolid
indifference as an absolute end. The almost universally prevalent belief
is that it is a change, not a close. Humanity, as a whole, never has
admitted and never can apostatise from its innate convictions by
admitting that its destiny is mere blank corruption. Apart from the
body, however, life can indeed be conceived, but cannot be imagined;
since imagination works only with familiar materials. Recourse was then
inevitably had to the expedient of representing the under-world as a
shadowy reflection of the upper. Disembodied spirits were supposed to
feel the same needs, to cherish the same desires, as when clothed in the
flesh; but they were helpless to supply the first or to gratify the
second. Their opulence or misery in their new abode depended solely upon
the pitying care of those who survived them. This mode of thinking
explains the savage rites of sacrifice attendant upon primitive funeral
ceremonies: it converted the tombs of ancient kings into the
treasure-houses of modern archæologists; and it suggested a system of
commissariat for the dead, traces of which still linger in many parts of
the world.
Here we find the clue we are in search of. It is afforded by the simple
precautions adopted by unsophisticated people against famine in the
realm of death. Amongst the early Greeks, the roots of the branched lily
were a familiar article of diet. The asphodel has even been called the
potato of antiquity. It indeed surpassed the potato in fecundity, though
falling far below it in nutritive qualities. Pliny, in his ‘Natural
History,’ states that about eighty tubers, each the size of an average
turnip, were often the produce of a single plant; and the French
botanist Charles de l’Écluse, travelling across Portugal in 1564-5, saw
the plough disclose fully two hundred attached to the same stalk, and
together weighing, he estimated, some fifty pounds. Moreover, the tubers
so plentifully developed are extremely rich in starch and sugar, so that
the poorer sort, who possessed no flocks or herds to supply their table
with fat pork, loins of young oxen, roasted goats’ tripe, or similar
carnal delicacies, were glad to fall back upon the frugal fare of mallow
and asphodel lauded by Hesiod. Theophrastus tells us that the roasted
stalk, as well as the seed of the asphodel served for food; but chiefly
its roots, which, bruised up with figs, were in extensive use. Pliny
seems to prefer them cooked in hot ashes, and eaten with salt and oil;
but it may be doubted whether he spoke from personal experience.
Their consumption, however, was recommended by the example of
Pythagoras, and was said to have helped to lengthen out the fabulous
years of Epimenides. Yet, such illustrious examples notwithstanding, the
degenerate stomachs of more recent times have succeeded ill in
accommodating themselves to such spare sustenance. When about the middle
of last century the Abate Alberto Fortis was travelling in Dalmatia, he
found inhabitants of the village of Bossiglina, near Traù, so poor as to
be reduced to make their bread of bruised asphodel roots, which proving
but an indifferent staff of life, digestive troubles and general
debility ensued. This is the last recorded experiment of the kind. The
needs of the human economy are far better, more widely, and almost as
cheaply subserved by the tuber brought by Raleigh from Virginia. The
plant of Persephone is left for Apulian sheep to graze upon.
Asphodel roots, accordingly, rank with acorns as a prehistoric, but now
discarded article of human food. They were, it is likely, freely
consumed by the earliest inhabitants of Greece, before the cultivation
of cereals had been introduced from the East. There is little fear of
error in assuming that the later Achæan immigrants found them already
consecrated by traditional usage to the sustenance of the dead—perhaps
because the immemorial antiquity of their dietary employment imparted to
them an idea of sacredness; or, possibly, because the slightness of the
nourishment they afforded was judged suitable to the maintenance of the
unsubstantial life of ghosts. At any rate, the custom became firmly
established of planting graves with asphodel, with a view to making
provision for their silent and helpless, yet still needy inmates. With
changed associations the custom still exists in Greece, and, very
remarkably, has been found to prevail in Japan, where a species of
asphodel is stated to be cultivated in cemeteries, and placed, blooming
in pots, on grave-stones. We can scarcely doubt that the same train of
thought, here as in Greece, originally prompted its selection for
sepulchral uses. Unquestionably some of the natives of the Congo
district plant manioc on the graves of their dead, with no other than a
provisioning design.[307] The same may be said of the cultivation of
certain fruit-trees in the burying-grounds of the South Sea Islanders.
One of these is the _Cratæva religiosa_, bearing an insipid but eatable
fruit, and held sacred in Otaheite under the name of ‘Purataruru.’ The
_Terminalia glabrosa_ fills (or filled a century ago) an analogous
position in the Society Islands. It yields a nut resembling an almond,
doubtless regarded as acceptable to phantasmal palates.
Footnote 307:
Unger, _Die Pflanze als Todtenschmuck_, p. 23.
We now see quite clearly why the Homeric shades dwell in meadows of
asphodel. These were, in the fundamental conception, their
harvest-fields. From them, in some unexplained subsensual way, the
attenuated nutriment they might require must have been derived. But this
primitive idea does not seem to have been explicitly present to the
poet’s mind. It had already, before his time, we can infer, been to a
great extent lost sight of. It was enough for him that the plant was
popularly associated with the dusky regions out of sight of the sun. He
did not stop to ask why, his business being to see, and to sing of what
he saw, not to reason. He accordingly made his Hades to bloom for all
time with the tall white flowers of the king’s spear, and so perpetuated
a connexion he was not concerned to explain.
Homer cannot be said to have attained to any real conception of the
immortality of the soul. The shade which flitted to subterranean spaces
when the breath left the body, resembled an animal principle of life
rather than a true spiritual essence. Disinherited, exiled from its
proper abode, without function, sense, or memory, it survived, a
vaporous image, a mere castaway residuum of what once had been a man.
Tiresias, the Theban soothsayer, alone, by special privilege of
Persephone, retained the use of reason: the rest were vain appearances,
escaping annihilation by a scarcely perceptible distinction. No wonder
that life should have been darkened by the prospect of such a destiny—or
worse. For there were, in the Homeric world to come, awful possibilities
of torment, though none—for the common herd—of blessedness. Deep down in
Tartarus, those who had sinned against the gods—Sisyphus, Ixion,
Tantalus—were condemned to tremendous, because unending, punishment;
while the haunting sense of loss, which seems to have survived every
other form of consciousness, giving no rest, nor so much as exemption
from fear, pursued good and bad alike. Nowhere does the utter need of
mankind for the hope brought by Christianity appear with such startling
clearness as in the verses of Homer, from the contrast of the vivid
pictures of life they present with the appalling background of despair
upon which they are painted.
Its relation to the unseen world naturally brought to the asphodel a
host of occult or imaginary qualities. Of true medicinal properties it
may be said to be devoid, and it accordingly finds no place in the
modern pharmacopœia. Anciently, however, it was known, from its manifold
powers, as the ‘heroic’ herb. It was sovereign against witchcraft, and
was planted outside the gates of villas and farmhouses to ward off
malefic influences. It restored the wasted strength of the consumptive:
it was an antidote to the venom of serpents and scorpions: it entered as
an ingredient into love-potions, and was invincible by evil spirits:
children round whose necks it was hung cut their teeth without pain, and
the terrors of the night flew from its presence. Briefly, its faculties
were those of (in Zoroastrian phraseology) a ‘smiter of fiends’; yet
from it we moderns distil alcohol! Of a truth it has gone over to the
enemy.
Sweet is moly, but his root is ill,
wrote Spenser in one of his sonnets. But it may be doubted whether he
would have committed himself to this sentiment had he realised that the
gift of Hermes was neither more nor less than a clove of garlic.
Odysseus approaching the house of Circe in search of his companions
(already, as he found out later, transformed into swine), was met on the
road by the crafty son of Maia, and by him forewarned and forearmed
against the wiles of the enchantress. Skilled in drugs as she was, a
more potent herb than any known to her had been procured by the
messenger of the gods. ‘Therewith,’ the hero continued in his narrative
to the Phæacian king, ‘the slayer of Argos gave me the plant that he had
plucked from the ground, and he showed me the nature thereof. It was
black at the root, but the flower was like to milk. The gods call it
moly, but it is hard for mortal men to dig; howbeit, with the gods all
things are possible.’ It is thus evident that the Homeric moly is
compounded of two elements—a botanical, so to speak, and a mythological.
A substratum of fact has received an embellishment of fable. Before the
mind’s eye of the poet, when he described the white flowers and black
root of the vegetable snatched from the reluctant earth by Hermes, was a
specific plant, which he chose to associate, or which had already become
associated, with floating legendary lore, widely and anciently diffused
among our race. The identification of that plant has often been
attempted, and not unsuccessfully.
The earliest record of such an effort is contained in Theophrastus’s
‘History of Plants.’ He there asserts the moly of the Odyssey to have
been a kind of garlic (_Allium nigrum_, according to Sprengel), growing
on Mount Cyllene in Arcadia (the birthplace, be it observed, of Hermes),
and of supreme efficacy as an antidote to poisons; but he, unlike Homer,
adds that there is no difficulty in plucking it. We shall see presently
that this difficulty was purely mythical. The language of Theophrastus
suggests that the association of moly with the Arcadian garlic was
traditional in his time; and the tradition has been perpetuated in the
modern Greek name, _molyza_, of a member of the same family.
John Gerard in his Herbal, calls moly (of which he enumerates several
species) the ‘Sorcerer’s garlic,’ and describes as follows the
Theophrastian, assumed as identical with the epic, kind.
Homer’s moly hath very thick leaves, broad toward the bottom,
sharp at the point, and hollowed like a trough or gutter, in the
bosom of which leaves near unto the bottom cometh forth a
certain round bulb or ball of a green colour; which being ripe
and set in the ground, groweth and becometh a fair plant, such
as is the mother. Among those leaves riseth up a naked, smooth,
thick stalk of two cubits high, as strong as is a small
walking-staff. At the top of the stalk standeth a bundle of fair
whitish flowers, dashed over with a wash of purple colour,
smelling like the flowers of onions. When they be ripe there
appeareth a black seed wrapt in a white skin or husk.
The root is great and bulbous, covered with a blackish skin on
the outside, and white within, and of the bigness of a great
onion.
So much for the question in its matter-of-fact aspect. We may now look
at it from its fabulous side.
And first, it is to be remembered that moly was not a charm, but a
counter-charm. Its powers were defensive, and presupposed an attack. It
was as a shield against the thrust of a spear. Now if any clear notion
could be attained regarding the kind of weapon of which it had efficacy
thus to blunt the point, we should be perceptibly nearer to its
individualisation. But we are only told that the magic draught of Circe,
the effects of which it had power to neutralise, contained pernicious
drugs. The poet either did not know, or did not care to tell more.
There is, however, a plant round which a crowd of strange beliefs
gathered from the earliest times. This is the _Atropa mandragora_, or
mandrake, probably identical with the _Dudaim_ of Scripture, and called
by classical writers _Circæa_, from its supposed potency in philtres.
The rude resemblance of its bifurcated root to the lower half of the
human frame started its career as an object of credulity and an
instrument of imposture. It was held to be animated with a life
transcending the obscure vitality of ordinary vegetable existence, and
occult powers of the most remarkable kind were attributed to it. The
little images, formed of the mandrake root, consulted as oracles in
Germany under the name of _Alrunen_, and imported with great commercial
success into this country during the reign of Henry VIII., were credited
with the power of multiplying money left in their charge, and generally
of bringing luck to their possessors, especially when their original
seat had been at the foot of a gallows, and their first vesture a
fragment of a winding-sheet. But privilege, as usual, was here also
fraught with peril. The operation of uprooting a mandrake was a critical
one, formidable consequences ensuing upon its clumsy or negligent
execution. These could only be averted by a strict observance of forms
prescribed by the wisdom of a very high antiquity. According to Pliny,
three circles were to be drawn round the plant with a sword, within
which the digger stood, facing west. This position had to be combined,
as best it might, with an approach from the windward side, upon his
formidable prey. Through the pages of Josephus the device gained its
earliest publicity, of employing a dog to receive the death penalty,
attendant, in his belief, on eradication. It was widely adopted, and by
mediæval sagacity fortified with the additional prescriptions that the
canine victim should be black without a white hair, that the deed should
be done before dawn on a Friday, and that the ears of the doer should be
carefully stuffed with cotton-wool. For, at the instant of leaving its
parent-earth, a fearful sound, which no mortal might hear and sanely
survive, issued from the uptorn root. This superstition was familiar in
English literature down to the seventeenth century.
Thus Suffolk alleging the futility of bad language in apology for the
backwardness in its use with which he has just been reproached by the
ungentle queen of Henry VI., exclaims,
Would curses kill, as doth the mandrake’s groan,
I would invent as bitter-searching terms,
As curst, as harsh, and horrible to hear,
Deliver’d strongly through my fixed teeth,
With full as many signs of deadly hate,
As lean-fac’d Envy in her loathsome cave.
And poor Juliet enumerates among the horrors of the charnel-house,
Shrieks like mandrakes’ torn out of the earth,
That living mortals hearing them, run mad.
The persuasion was, moreover, included amongst the Vulgar Errors gravely
combated by Sir Thomas Browne.
Mandragora, then, is the most ancient and the most widely famous of all
magic herbs; and the old conjecture is at least a plausible one that
from its exclusive possession were derived the evil powers employed to
the detriment of her wind-borne guests by the inhospitable daughter of
Perse.
Moly, on the other hand, must be sought for amongst the herbaceous
antidotes of fable. Perhaps the best known of these is the plant
repugnant to the fine senses of Horace, and equally abominable to the
nostrils of Elizabethan gallants. The name of garlic in Sanskrit
signifies ‘slayer of monsters.’ Juvenal ridiculed the Egyptians for
paying it reverence as a divinity.
Porrum et cepe nefas violare ac frangere morsu.
O sanctas gentes, quibus hæc nascuntur in hortis
Numina!
The Eddic valkyr, Sigurdrifa, sang of its unassailable virtue. As a sure
preservative from witchcraft it was, by mediæval Teutons, infused in the
drink of cattle and horses, hung up in lonely shepherds’ huts, and
buried under thresholds. It was laid on beds against nightmare: planted
on cottage roofs to keep off lightning: it cured the poisoned bites of
reptiles: it was eaten to avert the evil effects of digging hellebore;
while, in Cuba, immunity from jaundice was secured by wearing, during
thirteen days, a collar consisting of thirteen cloves of garlic, and
throwing it away at a cross-road, without looking behind, at midnight on
the expiration of that term. The occult properties of this savoury root
originated, no doubt, as M. Hehn conceives,[308] in its pungent taste
and smell. Substances strongly impressive to the senses are apt to
acquire the reputation of being distasteful to ‘spirits of vile sort.’
Witness sulphur, employed from of old, in ceremonial purification. But
this may have been owing to its association, through the ‘sulphurous’
smell of ozone, with the sacred thunder-bolt.
Footnote 308:
_Wanderings of Plants_, p. 158.
All the magic faculties of garlic, it may be remarked, are directed to
beneficent purposes; whereas those of the mandrake (regarded as an herb,
not as an idol) are purely maleficent. Later folk-lore, however, has not
brought them into direct competition. Each is thought of as supreme in
its own line. Only in the Odyssey (on the supposition here adopted) they
were permitted to meet, with the result of signal defeat for the powers
of evil.
Thus we see that the identification of moly with garlic is countenanced
by whatever scraps of botanical evidence are at hand, fortified by a
constant local tradition, no less than by the fantastic prescriptions of
superstitious popular observance. The difficulty or peril of uprooting,
which made the prophylactic plant obtained by Hermes all but
unattainable to mortals, is a common feature in vegetable mythology. It
figures as the price to be paid for something rarely precious, enhancing
its value and at the same time affixing a scarcely tolerable penalty to
its possession. It belonged, for instance, in varying degrees, to
hellebore and mistletoe, as well as to mandragora. With the last it most
likely originated, and from it was transferred by Homer, in the exercise
of his poetical licence, to moly.
From the adventure in the Ææan isle, as from so many others, Odysseus
came out unscathed. But it was not without high moral necessity that he
passed through them. The leading motive of his character is, in fact,
found in his multiform experience. He is appointed to see and to suffer
all that comes within the scope of Greek humanity. No vicissitudes, no
perils are spared him. Protection from the extremity of evil must and
does content him. For his keen curiosity falls in with the design of his
celestial patroness, in urging him to drink to the dregs the costly
draught of the knowledge of good and evil. Yet it is to be noted that
from the house of the enchantress there is no exit save through the
gates of hell.
Within the spacious confines of the universe there is perhaps but one
race of beings whose implanted instincts and whose visible destiny are
irreconcilably at war. Man is born to suffer; but suffering has always
for him the poignancy of surprise. The long record of multiform
tribulation which he calls his history, has been moulded, throughout its
many vicissitudes, by a keen and ceaseless struggle for enjoyment. Each
man and woman born into the world looks afresh round the horizon of life
for pleasure, and meets instead the ever fresh outrage of pain. Our
planet is peopled with souls disinherited of what they still feel to be
an inalienable heritage of happiness. No wonder, then, that
quack-medicines for the cure of the ills of life should always have been
popular. Of such nostrums, the famous Homeric drug nepenthes is an early
example, and may serve for a type.
We read in the Odyssey that Telemachus had no sooner reached man’s
estate than he set out from Ithaca for Pylos and Lacedæmon, in order to
seek news of his father from Nestor and Menelaus, the two most eminent
survivors of the expedition against Troy. But he learned only that
Odysseus had vanished from the known world. The disappointment was
severe, even to tears, notwithstanding that the banquet was already
spread in the radiant palace of the Spartan king. The remaining guests,
including the illustrious host and hostess, caught the infection of
grief, and the pleasures of the table were over-clouded.
Then Helena the child of Zeus strange things
Devised, and mixed a philter in their wine,
Which so cures heartache and the inward stings,
That men forget all sorrow wherein they pine.
He who hath tasted of the draught divine
Weeps not that day, although his mother die
And father, or cut off before his eyne
Brother or child beloved fall miserably,
Hewn by the pitiless sword, he sitting silent by.
Drugs of such virtue did she keep in store,
Given her by Polydamna, wife of Thôn,
In Egypt, where the rich glebe evermore
Yields herbs in foison, some for virtue known,
Some baneful. In that climate each doth own
Leech-craft beyond what mortal minds attain;
Since of Pæonian stock their race hath grown.
She the good philter mixed to charm their pain,
And bade the wine outpour, and answering spake again.[309]
Footnote 309:
_Odyssey_, iv. 219-32 (Worsley’s translation).
Such is the story which has formed the basis of innumerable conjectures.
The name of the drug administered by Helen signifies the negation of
sorrow; and we learn that it grew in Egypt, and that its administration
was followed by markedly soothing effects. Let us see whither these
scanty indications as to its nature will lead us.
Many of the ancients believed nepenthes to have been a kind of bugloss,
the leaves of which, infused in wine, were affirmed by Dioscorides,
Galen, and other authorities, to produce exhilarating effects. It is
certain that in Plutarch’s time the hilarity of banquets was constantly
sought to be increased by this means. But this was done in avowed
imitation of Helen’s hospitable expedient. It was, in other words, a
revival, not a survival, and possesses for us, consequently, none of the
instructiveness of an unbroken tradition.
A new idea was struck out by the Roman traveller Pietro della Valle, who
visited Persia and Turkey early in the seventeenth century. He suspected
the true nepenthean draught to have been coffee! From Egypt, according
to the antique narrative, it was brought by Helen; and by way of Egypt
the best Mocha reached Constantinople, where it served to recreate the
spirits, and pass the heavy hours, of the subjects of Achmet. Of this
hypothesis we may say, in the phrase of Sir Thomas Browne, that it is
‘false below confute.’ The next, that of honest Petrus la Seine, has
even less to recommend it. His erudite conclusion was that in nepenthes
the long-sought _aurum potabile_, the illusory ornament of the
Paracelsian pharmacopœia, made its first historical appearance! Egypt,
he argued, was the birthplace of chemistry, and the great chemical
desideratum from the earliest times had been the production of a
drinkable solution of the most perfect among metals. Nay, its supreme
worth had lent its true motive to the famous Argonautic expedition,
which had been fitted out for the purpose of securing, not a golden
fleece in the literal sense, but a parchment upon which the invaluable
recipe was inscribed. The virtues of the elixir were regarded by the
learned dissertator as superior to proof or discussion, in which exalted
position we willingly leave them.
More enthusiastic than critical, Madame Dacier looked at the subject
from a point of view taken up, many centuries earlier, by Plutarch.
Nepenthes, according to both these authorities, had no real existence.
The effects ascribed to it were merely a figurative way of expressing
the charms of Helen’s conversation.
But this was to endow the poet with a subtlety which he was very far
from possessing. Simple and direct in thought, he invariably took the
shortest way open to him in expression; and circuitous routes of
interpretation will invariably lead astray from his meaning. It is clear
accordingly that a real drug, of Egyptian origin, was supposed to have
soothed and restored appetite to the guests of Menelaus—a drug quite
possibly known to Homer only by the rumour of its qualities, which he
ingeniously turned to account for the purposes of his story. Now, since
those qualities were undoubtedly narcotic, the field of our choice is a
narrow one. We have only to inquire whether any, and, if so, what,
preparations of the kind were anciently in use by the inhabitants of the
Nile valley.
Unfortunately our information does not go very far back. A certain
professor of botany from Padua, however, named Prosper Alpinus, has left
a remarkable account of his personal observations on the point towards
the close of the sixteenth century. The vulgar pleasures of intoxication
appear to have been (as was fitting in a Mohammedan country) little in
request: among all classes their place was taken by the raptures of
solacing dreams and delightful visions artificially produced. The means
employed for the purpose were threefold. There was first an electuary of
unknown composition imported from India called _bernavi_. But this may
at once be put aside, since the ‘medicine for a mind diseased’ given by
Polydamna to Helen was, as we have seen, derived from a home-grown
Egyptian herb. There remain of the three soothing drugs mentioned by
Alpinus, hemp and opium. Each was extensively consumed; and the practice
of employing each as a road to pleasurable sensations was already, in
1580, of immemorial antiquity. One of them was almost certainly the true
Homeric nepenthes. We have only to decide which.
The first, as being the cheaper form of indulgence, was mainly resorted
to, our Paduan informant tells us, amongst the lower classes. From the
leaves of the herb _Cannabis sativa_ was prepared a powder known as
_assis_, made up into boluses and swallowed, with the result of inducing
a lethargic state of dreamy beatitude. _Assis_ was fundamentally the
same with the Indian _bhang_, the Arabic _hashish_—one of the mainstays
of Oriental sensual pleasure.
The earliest mention of hemp is by Herodotus. He states that it grew in
the country of the Scythians, that from its fibres garments scarcely
distinguishable in texture from linen were woven in Thrace, and that the
fumes from its burning seeds furnished the nomad inhabitants of what is
now Southern Russia, with vapour-baths, serving them as a substitute for
washing. Marked intoxicating effects attended this peculiar mode of
ablution.
In China, from the beginning of the third century of our era, if not
earlier, a preparation of hemp was used (it was said, with perfect
success) as an anæsthetic; and it is mentioned as a remedy under the
name of _b’hanga_, in Hindu medical works of probably still earlier
date. Its identity with nepenthes was first suggested in 1839, and has
since been generally acquiesced in. But there are two objections.
The practice of eating or smoking hemp, for the sake of its exalting
effects upon consciousness, appears to have originated on the slopes of
the Himalayas, to have spread thence to Persia, and to have been
transmitted farther west by Arab agency. It was not, then, primitively
an Egyptian custom, and was assuredly unknown to the wife of Thôn.
Moreover, hemp is not indigenous on the banks of the Nile. It came
thither as an immigrant, most probably long after the building of the
latest pyramid. Herodotus includes no mention of it in his curious and
particular account of the country; and, which is still more significant,
no relic of its textile use survives. Not a hempen fibre has ever been
found in any of the innumerable mummy-cases examined by learned
Europeans. The ancient Egyptians, it may then be concluded, were
unacquainted with this plant, and we must look elsewhere for the chief
ingredient of the comfort-bringing draught distributed by the daughter
of Zeus.
There is only opium left. It is legitimately reached by the ‘method of
exclusions.’ Should it fail, no substitute can be provided. But it does
not fail. No serious discrepancy starts up to shake our belief that in
recognising opium under the disguise of nepenthes we have indeed struck
the truth. All the circumstances correspond to admiration: the
identification runs ‘on all fours.’ The physical effects indicated agree
perfectly with those resulting from a sparing use of opium. They tend to
just so much elevation of spirits as would impart a roseate tinge to the
landscape of life. The intellect remains unclouded and serene. The
Nemesis of indulgence, however moderate, is still behind the scenes. The
exhibition of a soporific effect has even been seriously thought to have
been designed by the poet in the proposal of Telemachus to retire to
rest shortly after the nepenthean cup has gone round; but so bald a
piece of realism can scarcely have entered into the contemplation of an
artist of such consummate skill.
For ages past, Thebes in Egypt has witnessed the production of opium
from the expressed juice of poppyheads. Six centuries ago, the substance
was known in Western Europe as _Opium Thebaïcum_, or the ‘Theban
tincture.’ Prosper Alpinus states that the whole of Egypt was supplied,
at the epoch of his visit, from Sajeth, on the site of the ancient
hundred-gated city. And since a large proportion of the upper classes
were undisguised opium-eaters, the demand must have been considerable.
Now it was precisely in Thebes that Helen, according to Diodorus,
received the sorrow-soothing drug from her Egyptian hostess; while the
women of Thebes, and they only, still in his time preserved the secret
of its qualities and preparation. Can we doubt that the ancient
nepenthes was in truth no other than the mediæval Theban tincture? Even
stripping from the statement of Diodorus all historical value, its
legendary significance remains. It proves, beyond question, the
existence of a tradition localising the gift of Polydamna in a spot
noted, from the date of the earliest authentic information on the
subject, for the production of a modern equivalent. The inference seems
irresistible that the two were one, and that, as De Quincey said, Homer
is rightly reputed to have known the virtues of opium.
------------------------------------------------------------------------