HERB - Re: Absinth

[khkeeler]

John Day further asked
>         Secondly.  I have heard some people talking of Absinthe as a strange
> concoction of Alcohol and Wormwood.  They said it was a potent hilucinigenic
> and occasionally drove people mad.  I was curious if this was actualy a
> period drink and if such poisons might have contributed to the beleife in
> Magic and other things which were firmly beleved in at the time but now
> proven to have never existed.
Absolutely a Period drink.  That is, after distilling alcohol became
widespread (somewhere about 1200 in England and especially France) they
put all the herbs they'd been putting into wines as tonics into
brandies.  The famous liquers date to this time being improved
steadily.  Wormwood _Artemisia absinthium_ (I'd guess Linneus knew it
was used in absinth and used that for the scientific name for the plant)
was a major herb for driving off intestinal worms and related medicinal
uses.  It and a whole variety of other things went into the liquer
called absinth, but when it was found to be toxic, wormwood was
identified as the poison.  Concentrated in the brandy and drunk in
moderate quantities it is both addictive and quite poisonous. There must
be a high as well--I don't think the hallucinations are strong.  
   There is a very thorough book with the title _Absinth_ written in the
last 20 years--I ran into it in the library at the University of
Colorado, Boulder.  It talks about the liquer's properties and
particularly the absinth culture of the 1920's and 1930's artistic
community of Paris.  
	I had heard -- but never saw documentation -- that absinth was illegal
in the whole US.  If Grania had an absinth-and-whisky cocktail in New
Orleans recently I'd check to see if they've got absinth without the
wormwood (like cocacola used to have cocaine, the product goes on, the
formula changes.) If not, I'd recommend before drinking it everyone read
the book _Absinth_ so you can make informed decisions.

Agnes 

Mistress Agnes deLanvallei, Mag Mor, Calontir
In support of the study and safe recreation of Medieval uses of plants. 
If I can help you in your inquiries, I would be honored.
kkeeler1 at unl.edu
============================================================================
Go to http://lists.ansteorra.org/lists.html to perform mailing list tasks.