Coffee: The Epic of a Commodity (4 page)

Thus among the children of Israel wine was greatly prized as a popular article of diet and as the furtherer of sociability, being forbidden only to priests and judges when engaged in the performance of their official duties. Thus in the sacred writings of the Jews the founder of Islam could find nothing in the least analogous to the prohibition against wine he introduced into the Koran. Nor could he find anything of the sort in Christian teachings.

On the contrary, Christianity went a step further in the apotheosis of the civilizing and uniting qualities of the vine. In the mystery of the Last Supper, the blood of the grape became the blood of Jesus. Asceticism and abstinence, though essential elements of Christianity, were not applied to the use of wine. It seemed to the early Christians as innocent as bread, for otherwise it would not have been made symbolical of the holiest of sacrifices. Even a religion that sedulously preached the mortification of the flesh, a religion in whose name Tolstoy seriously recommended that we should abstain from procreating our kind—even Christianity held in honour the cordial, brotherly, intellectualizing and spiritualizing effect of wine. Christ was no anti-Bacchus.

But Mohammed was an anti-Bacchus! With an impulsive energy that outsoared anything that Jew or Christian before him had said against wine—in essentials, his predecessors had done no more than recommend temperance and decency—Mohammed uprooted the vine. Wherever Islam set its foot, vineyards were turned to other uses and the cultivation of the grape came to an end. All round the southern shores of the Mediterranean, from the days of the Hegira onwards, viticulture was abandoned.

The German traveller Gerhard Rohlfs, who, in 1868, travelled through the region known to the ancients as Cyrenaica, sometimes called Barca by modern geographers, saw the ruins of the temples of Bacchus. Among the imports from which were derived the revenues of what was then a Turkish vilayet, wine was mentioned, for none was grown locally. When, in northern Africa, Bacchus still held sway, there was no need to import wine!

Thus, from the outlook of the economic geographer as well, the revolution wrought by Islam was enormous. With the coming of Mohammed and his prohibition against wine, after the great days of the folk-migrations, along the southern part of the Mediterranean basin classical culture had come to an end. For the culture, the civilization, of the Greeks and the Romans had been fundamentally Bacchic.

Lewin, the toxicologist, writes: “There was not only one Noah, to discover the uses of wine; there have been many such innovators on our globe, led by chance observation or by deduction to the preparation of alcoholic beverages.”

Only one branch of civilization, the Hellenic, thought fit to deify the spiritual expansion that results from the witchery of wine. For the Jews, Noah remained a man; Bacchus-Dionysus became a god. A very large part of Greek mythology relates to the spread of the worship of Bacchus. Ere long the cult of Dionysus overshadowed and outweighed the service of other gods, though these latter from time to time came into their own once more. The final conquest of Bacchus, as we learn from Greek tragedy, led to tremendous upheavals in the human mind and in social order.

Strangely enough, the founder of Islam, who, in the fierce campaign he directed against wine, could find no support in Jewish or Christian authorities, could get what he wanted from Hellas! The foundations of the abstinence movement were undeniably laid by the Greeks. It seems as if the temperamental harmony and moderation of the Hellenic mind had reacted against the extravagances of the worship of Bacchus. The Pythian Apollo was at enmity with Bacchus until he struck up an alliance by which Bacchus was brought under control.

Nietzsche has pointed out that the original theme of Greek tragedy was the woes of Dionysus. Woes? That seems strange. Are we to suppose that the primitive Hellenes had already come to regard Dionysus as a god mishandled by the Puritans? Certainly one of these anti-Bacchic enthusiasts, Pentheus, who succeeded Cadmus as king of Thebes and who resisted the introduction of the worship of Dionysus into his kingdom, came to a bad end. He was torn to pieces by his mother and his two sisters, Ino and Autonoë, who, in their Bacchic frenzy, believed him to be a wild beast.

Had not Pentheus refused to come to terms with Dionysus, he would have saved his kingdom and his life. The United States would, by such an alliance, have been saved many of the troubles that prevailed during the dozen or so years in which the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution was in force: assassinations, bootlegging, gangsterism, corruption, social disorganization on a large scale. This experience has shown that the Hellenic myth may counsel a recognition essential to human nature.

A temperance movement, certainly, existed among the Greeks. In the circle of Socrates, for example, moderate drinking prevailed. The Pentheus tragedy was aimed only at those who demanded the absolute prohibition of wine, the “teetotallers” of that day who desired asceticism for its own sake. Indeed, the very word “tragedy” meant primarily “goat-singers” (perhaps because the singers were clad in goat-skins, or because a he-goat was the prize); but it is certainly remarkable that the persistent excitability of these cloven-hoofed creatures, which plays so great a part in the Arabian fable of the discovery of coffee, should, in Hellenic mythology, have made them the totems of wine. Goats are always represented as drunken; sometimes under the inebriating influence of wine, and at other times exhilarated by its opposite, the stimulant coffee.

“We shall have won a clue to the mystery of æsthetics when we have realized that the progress of art is associated with the twofoldedness of the Apollonian and the Dionysiac.” Such are the words with which Friedrich Nietzsche begins his great study
The Birth of Tragedy.
“To bring these two impulses into closer approximation,” he continues, “let us contemplate them as the discrete artistic worlds of dreams and intoxication. . . .” Here I will cut my quotation short. For, though it is true that Dionysus was the god of intoxication, it remains uncertain, as far as our present knowledge goes, that Apollo was the god of dreams. Clear, thoroughly wakeful images, such as are appropriate to Apollo, and the sharply outlined and lucid Dorian art of which he was the alleged originator, have nothing to do with the phenomena that belong to the field of what we now understand as dreamland. That is why we balk when we read that Nietzsche assigned dreamland to Apollo as the god’s spiritual abiding-place.

The truth is that today, differing from Nietzsche, we look upon dreams and intoxication as twins and not as opposites. The imagery of our minds during sleep, the invasion by the unconscious of the land of dreams, is not by us contrasted with the ramblings of the spirit under the influence of alcohol. Besides, in the end drunkenness leads to sleep, and by way of sleep to dreaming. Things that are on the same staircase, and differ only by their being on a higher or lower step, cannot be polar opposites. Nietzsche’s Apollo and Nietzsche’s Dionysus are not really antagonists as are wine and coffee.

Nietzsche’s Apollo does not carry a charm that can rival the magic of wine; that is why the German philosopher’s Apollo resembles Bacchus far more closely than he thinks. The undermining of early Hellenic culture by hyper-logicality, enlightenment, “Socratic thought,” did not, as Nietzsche opined, occur in the days of Euripides, but much later. It occurred in the hey-day of the Arabs, and their powerful black potion, which made an end of Hypnos as well as of Bacchus, dispelled dreams as well as drunkenness. Coffee became a far more powerful enemy of Bacchus-Dionysus than the Pythian Apollo had ever been. In the end, indeed, coffee became an enemy of the Pythian Apollo as well. The goal of a brain spurred onward by coffee is anything but Apollonian. The runaway chariot of logic, the furious gallop of the steeds of thought, has nothing in common with the harmonious and restful clarity with which Apollo, the “dreamer,” develops his imagination. Nietzsche on one occasion drew a distinction between the Dionysus of the Greeks and the Dionysus of the barbarians. Are we to suppose that, in the history of civilization, coffee may have been the “Apollo of the barbarians”?

It is not idle to inquire what would have blossomed out of Greek civilization if a barbarian Apollo had taken the place of the Hellenic. It is not idle to imagine what the life of the classical world might have been like if coffee had come into daily use side by side and on equal terms with its adversary wine. Diderot and d’Alembert, the founders of the
Encyclopædia,
would seem to have toyed with the notion that at least one person originally a Hellene had known of coffee, namely, Helen of Troy. They referred to the passage in Homer’s
Odyssey
in which there is mention of a magic draught which, as described, certainly has an effect similar to that of coffee. This is the episode in the fourth book, when Telemachus, son of Odysseus, searching for his lost father, is sitting at the board of Menelaus. The company are weeping, and no one can make an end of lamentations: “Then Helen, daughter of Zeus, turned to new thoughts. Presently she cast a drug into the wine of which they drank, a drug to lull all pain and anger, and bring forgetfulness of every sorrow. Whoso should drink a draught of it when it is mingled in the bowl, on that day he would let no tear fall down his cheeks, not though his mother and his father died, not though men slew his brother or dear son with the sword before his face, and his own eyes beheld it. Medicines of such virtue and so helpful had the daughter of Zeus, which Polydamna, the wife of Thon, had given her, a woman of Egypt, where earth the grain-giver yields herbs in great plenty, many that are healing in the cup and many baneful. There each man is a leech beyond all human kind.”

Is not that an almost exact description of the clinical effect of trimethyldioxypurin upon the nervous system? Whereas alcohol has always promoted the onset of “maudlin misery,” a dose of caffeine promptly inhibits the lachrymal secretion. As is well known, it is impossible to shed tears after drinking a strong cup of coffee. Whence, moreover, did Helen procure nepenthe, which for a whole day dried the tears of the drinkers? We are told it came from Egypt, perhaps from upper Egypt and Ethiopia, from that territory known as Kaffa where—is it too bold an assumption?—in the days before the rise of Islam the coffee-tree was already known and cultivated.

Diderot and d’Alembert got their idea from Pietro della Valle, who supposed that Helen’s drug might have been a mixture of wine and coffee. The effects of what she administered might also be those of Indian hemp, or hashish. Pietro della Valle was an Italian traveller who visited Turkey, Egypt, Palestine, Persia, and India, his journeys lasting from 1614 to 1626. At the beginning of the eighteenth century it seems to have amused scholars to speculate concerning how far the ancients may have been acquainted with our modern intoxicants, stupefacients, and stimulants. Paschius, for instance, declared that coffee was among the gifts that Abigail brought to David, to appease his anger against Nabal—which is, of course, absurd, since the five measures of parched grain referred to in the eighteenth verse of the twenty-fifth chapter of the first book of Samuel were obviously wheat.

However that may be, Helen of Troy alone is mentioned in Homer as having this remarkable drug at her disposal. It was an isolated philtre, which could not seriously compete with the energy of wine. Not then. Not to the men of the days concerning which Homer wrote. That could not happen until heaps of coffee-berries were collected from the hot wadies in the land of Yemen.

Coffee and wine! Wakefulness and sleep! For the last effect of wine is sleep, whereas the last effect of coffee is wakefulness.

The antipode of sleep is not, as Nietzsche thought, the dream, but wakefulness. It was the mission of the Arabs to extract wakefulness from the coffee-bean, and decoct it into a magic potion for coming centuries. It was the children of Mohammed who were the first, with Apollonian clarity, to venture the decisive thought of protesting against sleep: “He who sleeps away half his life, lives only half his life.”

The Arabs led the attack upon unconsciousness and darkness, upon the fettering influence of gravitation; they led the attack but for which modern civilization would be unthinkable; and a strange thrill affected those who for the first time read in the book of
The Thousand and One Nights
the bold utterance: “Well is it for him who never sleeps!”

W
HEN
the imam and his monks in Shehodet Monastery tasted coffee for the first time, did they know the nature of the substance that was its active principle? They did not know, and not until many centuries had elapsed did chemists isolate the drug and give it a name. In the year 1820, a German chemist, Runge, extracted it for the first time. It belongs to the class of bodies known as alkaloids, and its chemical composition is expressed by the name of trimethyldioxypurin, known for short as caffeine. It presents itself in the form of shining, white, needle-shaped crystals, reminding us of swansdown and still more of snow. They have a faintly bitter taste, but are odourless.

Pending its discovery by man, this drug was slumbering in various habitats other than coffee-beans. Nature is a huge masked ball, which we are privileged to watch; and trimethyldioxypurin is hidden under many disguises. Probably plants containing it are found in all parts of the world. The Sudanese Negroes get the effect of coffee from an extract of the cola-nut; the bushmen of South Africa, from a decoction of cyclopia leaves (bush tea). From the roasted seeds of
Paullinia cupana
, the Indians of the Amazon region prepare a caffeine paste which they name “guarana.” The Brazilians and Paraguayans, from of old, have been accustomed to prepare a caffeine-containing infusion from maté, the leaves of a species of ilex.

Amazing is the way in which, throughout the world, people have discovered this odourless chemical, which exists nowhere in the free state and never cries out to them, “Here I am!” A bodily and mental urge must have guided them in their pursuit of trimethyldioxypurin when, without the help of science, they set themselves to find it. But in no other form has caffeine had so determinative an influence upon civilization as in that of the beverage known as coffee. Not the
Cola acuminata,
the cola-nut of the Sudanese, although it contains more caffeine than does coffee, has transformed the civilized world, but
Coffea arabica,
originally derived from Ethiopia, from which coffee was first prepared by the Arabs.