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CHAPTER 1

Living Water

Some time before 1310 Arnaud de Ville-Neuve, a physician and alchemist at the University of Paris, poured wine into a glass alembic and heated it in a sand bath over a charcoal brazier. Ville-Neuve was not the first person in the world, or even in Europe, to do this: he was well aware of the long and distinguished tradition of Arabic alchemical distillation, and from his reading he must have had some inkling of the principles he was playing with. Others had already named the fluid which condensed in the neck of his alembic: some called it aqua ardens, "fiery water," or aqua vine, "water of the grape," but to Ville-Neuve it was aqua vita, "living water":

This name is remarkably suitable, since it is really a water of immortality. Its virtues are beginning to be recognized, it prolongs life, clears away ill- humors, revives the heart, and maintains youth.

Ville-Neuve wondered whether this liquid might be the essence of sunshine, distilled by vines into their grapes. And his "living water" captured the imaginations of all kinds of Europeans: gentlemen pursuing natural philosophy in their private closets, physicians seeking new medicines and restoratives, alchemists searching for the elixir of life, and (not least) tradesmen looking to make money from the basic, visceral human drive for intoxication. It was instrumental in forging new connections between alchemy and medicine, politics and religion, trade and empire, East and West. These factors all came together in the Dutch Republic in the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries, and one result of this fruitful collision was "genever" — a rectified liquor named after its principal flavoring, juniper. It was once argued that this rich, rough drink was the creation of one man, Sylvius de la Boë — a deeply contentious point, as we'll see. But the early history of gin (the subject of this chapter) is much more than a flash of inspiration in the laboratory of an Amsterdam physician. It is the gradual coming together of two heady, symbolically-charged substances — juniper and spirit — both of which had many adventures before they were united in a glass of genever.

But why was genever — the first incarnation of gin, born in an age of global trade and exchange — flavored with the berries of a plant well-known throughout the West for millennia? The solution to this puzzle takes us back through the depths of European prehistory to the end of the last ice age. Around twelve thousand years ago, as the glaciers and tundra began to retreat, juniper and other conifers began to spread north alongside bands of Neolithic farmers. This double migration established the earliest rhythms of a relationship: juniper thrived in the open heaths and moorlands created by farmers, as they began to clear the primeval forests of northern Europe and the British archipelago. Archaeological evidence suggests that juniper quickly found its way into the diets of these pastoralists, and traces of this ancient taste can be discerned in the traditional cuisines of Scandinavia, Germany and the Low Countries. The berries (actually tiny, fleshy cones) balance a resinous, balsamic warmth with a fresh, citrus clarity, which cuts through the richness of dark meats and game.

A handful of berries might be thrown into a prehistoric communal cooking-pot, but juniper also added a refreshing tang to the drinks of early Europeans. Finnish sahti — a beer flavored with juniper berries instead of hops, and filtered through juniper twigs — has been brewed since the sixteenth century (and possibly much earlier), making it the only medieval-style beer still widely drunk in Europe. Slovak borovicka, a juniper brandy, has been drunk throughout the former states of the Habsburg empire for at least seven hundred years. And there are reports, though little firm evidence, that some Scottish Highland clans drank juniper-flavored whisky, and used fires kindled with juniper sticks to heat their pot-stills.

But its culinary use was only one aspect of juniper's significance, and evidence from the earliest literate cultures reveals a parallel strand of sacred symbolism and healing power. For the Syrian Canaanites juniper was associated with the fertility goddess Ashera, and it makes many appearances in the Old Testament, typically as a sign of protection and fruitfulness. King Solomon built the first Temple from juniper and cedar wood, and in the Apocrypha a juniper tree was said to have sheltered the Holy Family as they fled from Herod's troops. In other Middle Eastern cultures juniper's religious and medical virtues were seen to be intertwined: the crushed berries were one ingredient in the salves used for embalming in ancient Egyptian funerary rites, and Egyptian medical papyri recommended the berries and needles as a treatment for tapeworm infestation.

In AD50 the Roman physician Pedanius Dioscorides brought together the various Mediterranean medical traditions involving juniper in his De Materia Medica. Unlike so many other Classical texts, this remained in continuous circulation and use throughout the West for more than a thousand years, and served as the standard pharmacopoeia for European physicians until the sixteenth century. Dioscorides recommended the application of crushed juniper berries to the genitals as an effective form of contraception, and also lauded the fumigant virtues of its needles and twigs. Producing an aromatic smoke when burned, they might drive out the miasmas thought to be responsible for many epidemics. This view led some medieval physicians to include juniper berries and twigs in the long, beaklike masks they wore when attending the victims of the Black Death.

Almost fifteen hundred years after De Materia Medica, a self- proclaimed successor to Dioscorides — the seventeenth-century English apothecary Thomas Culpeper — continued to insist upon the therapeutic value of juniper. Culpeper inherited the Classical tradition of Hippocrates, Galen and Dioscorides, but he also brought a radical twist to their thinking. His experiences serving as a surgeon with the Parliamentary forces during the English Civil War convinced him that the secrets of effective medicines should not be concealed within the pages of expensive Latin tomes, but should be available to all — a dangerously extreme position even at a time when, in Christopher Hill's phrase, the world had been turned upside down by the execution of Charles I. Culpeper described his English Physitian, published in 1652 after the end of the war, as:

a Compleat Method of Physick, whereby a man may preserve his Body in Health; or cure himself, being sick, for three pence charge, with such things as only grow in England, they being most fit for English bodies.

Culpeper made Classical thought, astrological reasoning and the folk medicines of unlettered wise-women march together in the service of a common aim — to help the poor maintain their rude English heath. The English Physitian was a self-help book for those who could not afford the expensive, and not always satisfactory, attentions of apothecaries. Culpeper argued that anyone could treat themselves far more effectively with what was to hand, and juniper — growing wild in hedgerows, and on moors and chases — could cure a multitude of English diseases:

[Juniper berries] are admirably good for a cough, shortness of breath, and consumption, pains in the belly, ruptures, cramps, and convulsions. They give safe and speedy delivery to women with child, they strengthen the brain exceedingly, help the memory, and fortify the sight by strengthening the optic nerves; are excellently good in all sorts of agues; help the gout and sciatica, and strengthen the limbs of the body.

In Culpeper's cosmology, juniper also tapped into the powers of the divine macrocosm, and his full entry is reproduced in Appendix 1. The English Physitian was not only a practical herbal, but also an "Astrologico-Physical Discourse": each herb, and each malady, was associated with a heavenly body, and (in good Classical fashion) treatment was a matter of balancing one influence with its opposing partner. Juniper, a "solar herb," was naturally efficacious against diseases associated with the moon.

Though mainstream belief in astrology and the power of the macrocosm faded, juniper's reputation as a medicine did not. A new generation of practitioners came to value juniper oil for its antiseptic and insect-repellent powers (hence its use in flea collars), and it is still used occasionally in dressing wounds and in the treatment of urinary tract infections. It continues to play an important part in the traditional medical systems of Eastern Europe, frequently in the form of brinjevec, a Slovenian spirit produced by fermenting and then distilling juniper berries. Valued for its digestive properties, brinjevec is also said to relieve stomach ache and menstrual pain, and is variously consumed, inhaled or rubbed into the skin.

Folkloric uses of juniper have likewise continued, particularly in northern Europe, and tend to reflect its medical function as a fumigant. Juniper branches were thrown on to the Beltane fires, and a faggot of smoldering juniper twigs was used to purify farmsteads and stables on the first morning of the New Year. With a darker purpose, the wise-women of Lothian prescribed a tea made of juniper berries and needles as an abortifacient, and farmers included it in their hedges, where it was believed to guard against the depredations of wolves and wildcats. These usages and meanings have been carried over into modern magical and neo-pagan practices: juniper twigs, or juniper-laced incense, provide fragrant smoke for manifestations and rituals of purification, and pouches of berries are hung around the necks of infants to ensure a lifetime of good health.

But juniper also provided a setting and title for that most chillingly Sophoclean of folk-tales — "The Juniper Tree," a Low German story collected by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm at the beginning of the nineteenth century and published in their Children's and Household Tales in 1812. Driven by the primal jealousy between a stepmother and her stepson, this deliciously pre-Freudian allegory features cannibalism and metamorphosis, filicide countered with matricide. (It has since inspired an eponymous novel by Barbara Comyns Carr, a 1985 opera with music by Philip Glass, and a 1990 Icelandic film starring BjÃrk.)

"The Juniper Tree" begins with a moment of innocence, tinged with shades of the Fall. A pregnant wife, walking in the garden of her house, eats a handful of berries from her juniper tree. She falls ill — the reasons for which are unexplained, as juniper berries are not notably poisonous — and dies during birth, though her new son survives. She is buried beneath the roots of the tree, and her widower takes another wife, who gives him a daughter. The daughter and her half-brother get on well, but the stepmother resents her stepson who will one day inherit his father's estate, leaving her daughter with nothing. So she asks him to choose an apple from a wooden chest; as he bends down, she brings the lid down on his exposed neck and strikes his head from his shoulders.

In a hideous parody of the conscientious housewife, she does not waste the carcass: she turns her stepson into a stew and black puddings, and feeds them to her husband, who — unaware — pronounces his child delicious. But the daughter appreciates the horror of what has happened, and when her mother is occupied she collects the bones of her half-brother from the cauldron, and buries them beneath the juniper tree. In a flash of fire his soul rises from the bones in the form of a bird, singing of his murder. The bird grows more powerful, until he can carry a millstone high enough to bludgeon his stepmother to death. As she dies, he returns to human form, and lives happily with his father and his half-sister.

So it seems that by the sixteenth century, when it was taken up as the distinctive flavoring for genever, juniper already had a long history of gastronomic, sacred and medicinal meaning. What of spirit — that playful, ambiguous word, which can signify a demon, a ghost, a principle of life, the essence of human character, or an extract of wine or beer?

Evidence for the origins of distillation is fragmentary to say the least, and what we have is a fairly speculative story elaborated from hints in ancient texts and traditions. The Sanskrit Vedas, thought to have been written around 2500 BC, mention a process which sounds like distillation, and which was used to produce the entheogenic somasara consumed during festivals. Stronger evidence comes from Chinese philosophical treatises of the eighth century BC, describing fragrances and tonics distilled from herbs. This raises the tantalizing possibility that knowledge of the technique may have passed along the Silk Road to the Middle East.

In the centuries around the birth of Christ various scholars and artisans in trading ports around the eastern Mediterranean began to write about distillation. In Alexandria the alchemist and Gnostic Zosimos of Panopolis recorded the exploits of the semi-legendary Maria the Jewess, a female alchemist said to have invented distillation. In Athens Aristotle noted the paradox of wine: soup became stronger as it was reduced, but wine lost its power to intoxicate. This idea was taken up by Dioscorides, and De Materia Medica includes a recipe for a fortified vinum hippocraticum, made by heating wine in a clay pot and collecting the distillate in wool or a sponge laid over the mouth of the vessel. Ancient Greek sailors appear to have used a similar method to make drinking water from seawater on long voyages.

Wherever the technique originated, historians agree that distillation came of age in the intellectual and cultural ferment of the Muslim empire in the seventh and eighth centuries AD. At the Persian medical school of Jundishapur in the sixth century apothecaries were distilling rose-water, juniper oil and other herbal medicines, but the full flowering of Arabic "philosophical chemistry" came with the establishment of the new Abbasid capital at Baghdad in 763AD. The caliphate established a large library, known as the "House of Wisdom," along with schools teaching all the learned and humane arts. The result was an original and diverse research community, a torrent of translations from Latin and Greek texts, and the emergence of a distinctively Arabic alchemical tradition.

The leading figure in Baghdad alchemy was Abu Musa Jabir ibn Hayyan, known to his medieval Western successors as "Geber." In the course of his work Geber created the "alembic" — the swan-necked alchemical still made of glass, ceramic or copper. He experimented rapaciously, distilling just about any liquid he could get his hands on, and his writings describe the clear, flammable liquid obtained from the distillation of wine. His colleague at the House of Wisdom — Abu-Yusuf Ya'qoub ibn 'Ishaq ibn al-Sabbah ibn 'Omran ibn Isma'il al-Kindi, known, mercifully, as "al-Kindi" — used the alembic to make cordials and perfumes, but it was the ninth-century physician Muhammad ibn Zakariya-Razi, "Rhazes," who collected and codified the secrets of wine-distillation. Rhazes became fascinated with the properties of this volatile, ephemeral liquid, and gave it an Arabic name — al-koh'l. Already we can see the doubleness, the playfulness, wrought by this substance on the minds that contemplated its nature. In Arabic, al-koh'l signified both a psychoactive substance and a djinn, prefiguring the double meaning of "spirit" in English. And it recalled and transformed the central image in "Aladdin's Wonderful Lamp" from The Thousand and One Nights, compiled in Persia around the time Rhazes was writing: the djinn rising from the spout of Aladdin's lamp, just as al-koh'l rose from the neck of the alembic.

But this magical substance, and the technique that produced it, did not make a single grand leap across the Mediterranean. Rather, it took a more gradual route from the libraries of Baghdad to the monasteries and universities of Europe. A ninth-century monastic treatise nicknamed the Mappae Clavicula ("The Little Key to the Map") — a practical handbook for blacksmithing and copying manuscripts — also contains the first known European instructions for distillation. By the eleventh century, the secrets of Arabic philosophical chemistry had reached the most important center of medical education in post-Roman Europe, and the place where juniper and spirit first came together: the Benedictine monastery at Salerno in southern Italy.

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Excerpted from "The Book Of Gin"
by .
Copyright © 2011 Richard Barnett.
Excerpted by permission of Grove Atlantic, Inc..
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