Green Fairies, Yellow Fairies: The Sistership of Wormwood & Damiana
Absinthe as Muse, Damiana Liqueur as Lover: Can a link be drawn between these two powerful herbs?
You don’t mess with fairies. This is the lesson of many a fairy tale — they steal your time, your youth, your lovers and your fortunes. The green fairy, associated with potent wormwood brew absinthe popular in the 19th century, became the scourge of Europe, blamed for social disintegration, murderous impulses and deviancy. Yet whilst artists descended into madness, they still danced with this fairy enthralled, singing her praises each new morning, relieving the ache for her embrace by pouring cool water over sugar into the green depths of it’s potency.
In Oliva’s painting ‘Absinthe Drinker’, le fee verte is this enticement: a temptress, luring men to her bedside. Depending on which side of the absinthe debate you were on, this bed could be a fatalistic one that led to certain evils or one that became about transformation, allowing the mind to drift into creative realms coveted by writers and artists alike. The photograph below shows famous poet Paul Verlaine, who, dying as a life long alcoholic, was said to curse absinthe which he blamed for his own ‘folly and crime, of idiocy and shame’ and supported it’s abolishment from society.
For me my glory is an
Humble ephemeral Absinthe
Drunk on the sly, with fear of treason
and if I drink it no longer,
it is for a good reason.
The first few lines are oft quoted as a praise for absinthe, joining the chorus of those extolling it’s virtues (Oscar Wilde said that ‘a glass of absinthe is as poetical as anything in the world. What difference is there between a glass of absinthe and a sunset?’). Yet it’s the neglected second part that makes me pause — was he reluctant to drink it for fear of betraying the social order of his country or the imposed ban, which came in , or was the reason much deeper than that? Verlaine served a five year prison sentence for attempted murder, and in the last years of his life was treated for a range of illnesses such as cirrhosis of the liver and syphilis. Dying, there’s little wonder he would repent his years spent at the bedside of the green fairy.
Absinthe was also symbolic of transformation. There is something magical about it’s preparation, where sugar is burnt on a slotted spoon and stirred into the liquid to see it transform from bright mint green to a milky green. Just as the alcoholic spirit transforms, so does the human spirit, liberated by oil of wormwood to embraces new ideas — a must for creatives who travel inward to find brilliance. In Verlaine’s case, the transformation is more sinister.
Under the influence of the green fairy, such avant garde Parisiens became commentators on the strange, changing and uncertain new world, just as the hippies in the ’60’s seemed to critique, resist and create their own new future many decades later as they dropped acid and swirled in paisley mists and music born of such liberating neural transformations. The parellels between LSD and wormwood are dazzlingly clear — wormwood taken internally is also an hallucinogenic.
Parallels can be made to all kinds of drugs across the decades — each decade, it seems, has it’s drug of choice that is both a muse and a demon. Ecstasy could also seen as the liberator of the social ills of today — whilst it kills, many find themselves and others through it’s magical reworking of neural pathways that, once open, are rarely again shut.
Just as conservatives refuse drug testing at festivals in a more hardline, abolitionist approach, many saw absinthe was seen as responsible for utter madness — the scourge of Europe, responsible for immorality and the general downfall of France and a poisoning of a population. So under the sway of the green fairy, decriers declared, France could only be saved if they were rid of it. Of course, social decline or at least transformation was happening anyway with an emerging industrialization and other changes that were banging on the doors of the nation. How does one cope with rapid change but to find a scapegoat for it? It’s not an uncommon turn of events.
Dega’s painting ‘L’Absinthe’ challenged the traditional ideas about woman in society — one critic called this subject a ‘whore’.
Valentin Magnan, physician-in-chief of Sainte-Anne, France’s main asylum, was the national authority on mental illness and he contributed to the belief that madness was a a result of decline in French culture. Absintheeism was seen as a part of this and distinct from alcoholism:
In 1869 he published results of an experiment designed to do just that. He placed one guinea pig in a glass case with a saucer of pure alcohol. A second guinea pig got its own case and a saucer of wormwood oil. Two other cases contained a cat and a rabbit, both with saucers of wormwood oil. As Magnan watched, the three animals inhaling wormwood fumes grew excited and then fell into seizures. The alcohol-breathing animal merely got drunk.
The guinea pigs were possibly overdosing on thujone, the main chemical in wormwood, of which absinthe is made. However, it is more likely that they were drinking inferior alcohol with adulterants such as chloride and copper sulfate — and worse, ethanol, because to keep wormwood in solution means you need more than 50 percent of alcohol by volume. The guinea pigs, like the men and woman dying of ‘absintheeism’ were likely just dying of chronic alcoholism.
Anti-absinthe sentiment reached frenzied peaks with a murder in Switzerland in 1905 by a French speaking labourer:
Lanfray had drunk his way through the previous day, beginning near dawn with a shot of absinthe diluted in water. A second absinthe shot soon followed. At lunch and during his afternoon break from work at a nearby vineyard, he downed six glasses of strong wine. He drank another glass before leaving work. Heading home, Lanfray stopped at a café and drank black coffee with brandy. Back home Lanfray finished a liter of wine as his wife watched in disgust. She called him lazy. He told her to shut up. She told him to make her. He took his loaded rifle from the wall and shot her through the forehead. When his daughter Rose came to investigate, he shot her too. Then he went into the next room, walked to the crib of his other daughter, Blanche, and shot her.
https://www.sciencehistory.org/distillations/magazine/the-devil-in-a-little-green-bottle-a-history-of-absinthe
Devastated, he hanged himself in prison three days after his trial. And thus the le fee verde became le diable vert — the green devil — and banned in Switzerland in 1905 and other countries, including the U.S, following suit.
It was banned for nearly a century. Today you can find genuine absinthe in many places over the world, despite myths that say ‘you can’t get it with wormwood anymore’. A quick search online dispels this myth — in Switzerland, for example, you can find absinthe brewed from a magical threesome of wormwood, anise and fennel seeds. Recipes might include other various aromatic plants such as lemon balm or hyssop. As the mice might attest, however, it wasn’t so much the amount of wormwood that will make you hallucinate, but the amount of alcohol.
There were many nights in the Czech Republic where I ignored the warnings-to-self of the night before and ended up drinking the fabled green juice, ending in hallucinogenic experiences on dark cobbled lanes. Now I know it was perhaps not the green fairy, therefore, but the excess consumption of alcohol that went with it. Still, they were nights where I felt camaraderie with the poets of the past century where the green fairy would hover just in the periphery of my vision. I wanted to believe in her, winging her way to my shoulder as I walked home, full of creativity and a kind of ecstasy.
Is damiana could be wormwood’s sister?
Despite the exploration of devilry above, absinthe was not always a green fiend— it’s key ingredient was used by the Greeks as a medicine, soaking artemia absenthium in spirits to supposedly aid childbirth. Hippocrates prescribed it for period pain, anaemia and rhemeutism. During the bubonic plague, the English used to burn wormwood to fumigate their houses. In the 1830’s expansion of the French into North Africa it was used to ward off insects and prevent fever — the fact it ended up as a cheap alternative to wine and a muse of poets from here doesn’t take much imagination. More recently wormwood has been studied for it’s ability to combat malaria and cancer.
It is not to that that I am lured to the bedside of damiana, however, but for it’s ability to quell anxiety. This beast rattles my nervous system so completely that I reach for herbs to subdue it, wrapping its claws in the cotton wool of traditional remedies rather than the brutal promises of pharmaceuticals. A tea made of damiana calms and gives me erotic dreams, pleasant and happy.
Like wormwood, damiana too is a medicine. Long believed to be a folk remedy, it is heralded as an aphrodisiac — in Mexico, they make an aphrodisiac liqueur from it. Whilst some articles call it a ‘herbal hoax’ which could be paralleled to the ‘hoax’ of absinthe (did it really stimulate ideas, or was this just the alcohol talking?), later science has proved there is merit in the belief damiana could be an aphrodisiac.
Yet there’s another sisterly link with absinthe. It’s use in synthetic cannabis has caused authorities and the media to feel concern and the focus has been on the low levels of cyanide-like compounds which can cause excessive doses to be dangerous. However, remember ethanol? It’s not the damiana itself that’s to blame, but an unregulated market that may use any number of other dangerous substances in the mix. Reported side effects of synthetic cannabis have been agitation, blood pressure increase, heart attacks and kidney damage, paranoia and weight loss. I’m not an expert on this by any means but to me, it seems that the isolated herbs in these synthetic drugs can often become a scapegoat due to a lack of real understanding of their power and magic. There is often an unfair stigma attached to herbs that cause it to become feared in society.
Bans on legal highs (the name for herbal alternatives like ecstasy or cocaine) in places like the U.K stem from isolated cases of deaths and overdoses. Forget about the terrible toll of opoid addiction and other more socially legitimate highs such as alcohol (in both Australia and the UK, 4.5 percent of deaths annually can be attributed to alcohol) — let’s ban something that society doesn’t understand because there’s been little to no research done on them. A cry to ban alcohol certainly didn’t happen when this year, a teenage girl died in a Sydney hospital with a lethal amount of booze in her system from consuming large amounts of alcohol. The health system is still prescribing pills that lead to suicide, addiction and a host of other ills. And one would wonder, too, whether the legalization of long feared substances like cannabis might prevent this kind of thing in the first place.
The beautiful yellow fairy that is damiana is well loved in this household. Like her sister absinthe, our vodka soaked damiana is a powerful brew, evoking bliss and euphoria in a gentle and dreamy way. It sends us into an immediate state of well being and, drunk by candlelight and moonlight, increases intimacy, desire and sensation. Damiana tea helps sleep but also brings on lucid and erotic dreams.
Like the green fairy did with the poets long ago in France, damiana brings on my muse — I feel creative and stimulated by her. Yet there’s a dark side to her as well, that makes me wonder if she’s in league with her green sister entirely — sometimes, just sometimes, she makes me dream of murder.
