The Mythology of Wine

By Arthur George

In ancient times, wine, vineyards, and grapevines were thought to have supernatural qualities, enabling people to experience the divine. Naturally, wine, vines, and vineyards featured prominently in myths. This trailblazing book details the wine-related myths and legends in ancient Mesopotamia, Greece, Israel, Egypt, and early Christian Europe, showing how they have influenced our own wine culture, and filling an important gap in our knowledge about wine.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tellwell Talent
• Release date: Oct 29, 2020
• ISBN: 9780228832591

Arthur George

Arthur George is a mythologist, cultural historian, and author who writes, teaches, lectures, and blogs about mythology, why it is important in our modern world, and how it can enrich our lives. He is also a home winemaker with his own vineyard. He previously authored The Mythology of Eden and The Mythology of America's Seasonal Holidays.

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Copyright © 2020 by Arthur George

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Cover image: The Virgin of the Grapes, by Pierre Mignard, 1640s

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Tellwell Talent

www.tellwell.ca

ISBN

978-0-2288-3258-4 (Paperback)

978-0-2288-3259-1 (eBook)

Table of Contents

Preface

List of Figures and Credits

Chapter 1 - Introduction: A First Sip

Chapter 2 - Noah, Mesopotamia, and Anatolia

Chapter 3 - Ancient Canaan and Israel

Chapter 4 - Ancient Egypt

Chapter 5 - The Classical World

Chapter 6 - The New Testament and Early Christianity

Chapter 7 - Wine, Myth, and Legend in Europe

Chapter 8 - Concluding Thoughts

Select Bibliography and Suggestions for Further Reading

Preface

As a mythologist, winemaker, and foodie, I have always been fascinated by how food and drink have featured in myths, legends, and folktales, and in religious rituals. This was already happening when humankind’s earliest literature emerged in the ancient Middle East. People offer food and drink to the gods, and gods present the same as gifts to people. In the stories people feast and get intoxicated, and reportedly experience divinity. Feasts are dedicated to the harvest and the vintage.

I have followed how wine in particular has featured in these stories and rituals. More often than not, it is the beverage and offering most highly valued by people and their gods. But I had to learn about wine in myths piecemeal, drawing on general history books, history of wine books, mythology books, and works about particular ancient cultures in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Palestine and Greece. For food in general, we have some good books such as Tamra Andrews’s Nectar & Ambrosia: An Encyclopedia of Food in World Mythology. But we don’t have a book focusing on wine in myths. To my mind, the absence of such a book has left a gap in our wine culture and in wine education. The community of wine enthusiasts deserves to know about the mythology of wine, and to have a resource that will help them do so.

Now that I’m living in California wine country, farming my own grapevines, and making my own wine, I’ve taken even more of an interest in the mythology associated with vineyards, wine, and wine deities. I decided to take up the challenge of writing an accessible book about wine mythology mainly for the benefit of the community of wine enthusiasts around the world who want to learn more about the subject of their passion.

For this purpose, I decided to focus on the ancient mythologies that eventually led to the formation of wine culture in Europe, which in turn has been spreading around the world for centuries. Although the book is entitled the mythology of wine, at points it also includes material in the related fields of legend, folklore, history, and religion, and also rituals involving wine. In particular, I have included a substantial amount of biblical material, which is remarkable for its richness in relation to wine symbolism. While some of this material is historical, that history is still interpreted in Judaism and Christianity through a symbolic framework that was established in a more mythical past (according to most scholars), going back to God’s selection of the Chosen People, the Exodus, and the Conquest of the Promised Land. So the book takes the reader back to that mythical past and then carries the imagery forward through the Hebrew Bible, New Testament, and early Christianity. This wine symbolism was vibrant through all that time, and it has had a tremendous impact on Judeo-Christian culture. The coverage in this book ends when the mythmaking about wine ended, in the high Middle Ages.

I have included numerous illustrations designed to give readers a better feel for wine culture in each of the cultures that I cover. The bibliography is not a full one, but is select, designed to provide resources to readers who want to explore the subject further. Quotations from the Bible are from the New Revised Standard Version unless stated otherwise.

I would like to thank the many friends, specialists, and winemakers whose ideas, knowledge, suggestions, creativity, and technical skills have been of great help to me in writing this book. They know who they are. I also thank my loving wife, editor, and companion in wine appreciation, Elena, for her continuous support throughout the project. And last but not least, I am grateful to my cat Farli for being my faithful companion in my office while I was working on the book in the long evenings.

Arthur George

August 2020

List of Figures and Credits

Note: The images are in the public domain unless noted otherwise.

Chapter 1

Introduction: A First Sip

Wine is a joy. That’s how we first experience it, and that’s how ancient myths describe people’s first experience of wine. While we savor it individually, more commonly we enjoy it with others. It puts us in the right mood for socializing, easing nerves and tensions. It relaxes introductions, helps us get to know people better, and builds bonds. Naturally it leads to laughter, song, and dance. We toast to express our hopes and aspirations. Wine itself becomes a topic of conversation. And it tends to bring out truth from within us—in vino veritas.

But wine also plays a more profound role. From its beginning to the present day, wine has had a religious dimension and has been part of our important rituals of life. For Roman Catholics, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Eastern Orthodox, and others, worship is not complete and valid without wine. For Jews, wine is essential for celebrating the Sabbath, Passover, and marriages, and is popular at Bar and Bat Mitzvahs in the Cup of Life (or Blessing) ceremony. This is because traditionally, people have considered wine to have profound power and value—physical, cultural, religious, and otherwise spiritual. It therefore enjoys an elevated cultural status over all other alcoholic beverages. Among all of our beverages today, only wine has sacramental meaning.

Once wine was discovered, it was natural to attribute it to a deity, because grape juice turned into wine inexplicably. The fermentation process itself was fascinating. The bubbles ooze and burst, making crackling and popping sounds. The process generates heat, like fire. Getting a whiff of the carbon dioxide emitted can make one dizzy. To the ancients, fermentation seemed magical—a god or goddess must loom behind it, or literally in it. We didn’t finally learn how fermentation works through yeasts until Louis Pasteur’s discoveries in the nineteenth century.

The other reason for thinking that wine is divine was the inebriating effect that it has. This too seemed supernatural. People concluded that not only wine, but grapevines and grapes had divinity in them. This meant that inebriation was not just for pleasure but was a form of divine ecstasy made possible by the deities. Wine was therefore a medium through which one could contact and experience the gods. Naturally, wine gods arose.

Since a deity was in wine, which the ancients thought of as his or her blood, by drinking the wine they were partaking of divinity. People experienced that divinity in the palpable effect of the wine; they believed that the deity was now inside them. Mediating between heaven and earth, wine brought people closer to the gods, and people had godlike experiences. Through such experiences, people could develop a personal relationship with the deity. This was an especially powerful aspect of a wine god. Other gods were more distant from people and seemed to care less about humanity or individual humans. But a wine god like Dionysus was really present for people because he could be felt. So naturally he could serve as a personal god, a savior. This is why Dionysian religion was so popular and powerful, and why the Dionysian mysteries evolved in which people were accorded eternal life. Wine was an instrument of spiritual as well as physical transformation.

Naturally, wine was considered a gift of the deity present in the wine, of his or her essence. If someone had vineyards and wine in abundance, he or she had been blessed. In America, when we enjoy prosperity we say that there’s a chicken in every pot, but in ancient Israel the equivalent was a person being under his vine and fig tree (1 Kings 4:25; Micah 4:4; Zechariah 3:10). If one’s vineyards and wine were poor, however, then the person was out of favor, probably because of something he or she did or didn’t do, so one must regain favor through rituals and correct behavior. Wine became a central element of religious rituals designed to appease and persuade the gods.

Wine and Myths

Once people believe in deities and divine forces, they begin to mythologize about them. In the case of wine, the myths explain such things as how, where, and when wine originated and was discovered, who are the wine deities, what they do, and wine’s role in celebrations, religious rituals, and spirituality. We will see many examples of this throughout this book, but here at the outset it is important to outline some recurring, archetypal themes in wine myths.

Creation and Civilization

One such theme is wine’s role and symbolism in creation, including the creation and evolution of civilization. In creation myths, the primordial state of affairs is one of disorder and formlessness, usually called chaos. Creation consists of transforming chaos into order; normally a creator god handles this. This process entails giving form to the preexisting chaotic primeval substance by separating it into a multiplicity of things, each having its own characteristics, function, and name. In particular, pairs of opposites and analogous distinctions are established: male/female;