1. On Drinking Alcohol

We look at alcohol’s ritual, psychological, and cultural function. Starting with Dionysus and the ancient Greeks, we compare alcohol with psychedelics and other drug and explore what’s going on beneath the surface at after-work drinks through this lens.

Can you really trust someone you have never seen with their inhibitions lowered? Is transgression required for bonding? We attempt to reach some deep conclusions over some good whisky.

Episode Transcript

In which Cipher and Proxy drink whiskey and ask why. What follows is a wide-ranging conversation about alcohol as a ritual substance, Dionysus and the nature of possession, the psychoactive pharmacopoeia of the ancient world, the social function of getting drunk with colleagues, and what the gods might actually be.

Scene: a dimmed study, cluttered with objects. Cipher and Proxy, two friends, are drinking whisky.

Cipher: Why do you think that alcohol is important?

Proxy: Why are we drinking it now?

Cipher: Well, it has been used as a ritual drink for a long time.

Proxy: And long may it be so.

Cipher: The Greeks had no word for it, I believe.

Proxy: It's Arabic, isn't it? Al-kuhul?

Cipher: Yes, but the Greeks thought that the power in the wine was the god, Dionysus.

Proxy: In a literal sense?

Cipher: That is the easiest way to conceive of it, I think.

Proxy: Is it the power of the god that is manifest in the wine, or perhaps we should say in the spirit — a fitting name?

Cipher: Aptly named, yes. But I believe that the spirit — the wine — is the god. I am not sure that gods could be neatly separated from their powers.

Proxy: An interesting notion, and a rational one perhaps, if you're not aware of particular chemical compounds.

Cipher: Is it irrational if you are?

Laughter.

Proxy: I imagine it is a startling metaphysical experience, if you have no knowledge of the mechanism. When I was in Yemen, occasionally men would sidle up to me and ask, "How do you feel when you drink alcohol?"

There was none in the country, really. All they knew was that it turns people crazy — that it almost turned you into a kind of werewolf. Because you start doing inhuman things, according to what they had heard. And this was really a question like "what does pork taste like?" Of course that was pure taboo; they assumed it must taste incredible for it to be forbidden. But alcohol — alcohol they knew was transformational.

Cipher: From what you're saying, it sounds like they see it as a kind of possession.

Proxy: Yes.

Cipher: I suppose you can immediately reach for a hypothesis there about why a monotheism might ban it.

Proxy: Or why certain members of a religion might prohibit it.

Cipher: It's competition, isn't it? If you are being inhabited by a divine or powerful force, that is. Just as psychedelics were problematic to the government in the sixties. They had built this great machine that was the US state and then suddenly Hollywood refused to take part in it.

Proxy: Because psychedelics seem to fill you with an ideology. That seems to be the bizarre fact. And that ideology is that actually we should be nice to each other; the world's a nice place. And that subsuming your individuality into a machine in order to kill or be killed in Vietnam is maybe not the way to go.

Cipher: Although I suppose that doesn't read perfectly across to alcohol. Because with alcohol, after a pint and a half of beer, everything is very pleasant and you're a nice person. But then that can switch over a couple of beers later; some people get violent and aggressive under alcohol in a way that I don't think you see with psychedelics. There's an unpredictability to it.

Proxy: You're right. I think that both can be viewed as a form of possession though. Because with both you become something that you were previously not. Or with both, is it just an unearthing of things that are latent? Or is it an amplification of traits that are there? Is it a reduction in self-control? Or does the chemical bring content that isn't already within you?

Cipher: Possession would seem to imply that something enters you that was not there before, which in turn opens the door to the latter possibility. Although it does not entail it; possession could be something within taking over. Dionysus — was he predictable? How well does his nature correspond to alcoholic inebriation? Was he always relaxed and chilled out?

Proxy: Oh, definitely not. I think to many modern scholars, and many of the ancients, and certainly to me, he is the scariest god. Because he represents an unbridling, shall we say, or an unchaining of passions. And his cult had to be carefully contained within ritual in order for that to be managed.

There are a few different ways into this. You can look at it from the perspective of social regulation: that Dionysus is the element that bucks against control and order, which is the more Apollonian thing. And therefore that element needs its own place and its own rituals in order to be managed.

And so those drawn to psychology see him as the unpredictable, the dark thing — almost as if he were the shadow of the subconscious, or the monsters that lurk in the subconscious, erupting outwards at certain moments. Though again that makes him the uncontrolled element that's within all of us, that has to be expressed from time to time. And so it is all the more crucial that he is acknowledged, respected, and thus managed.

And we arguably see both of these emphases in myth. In the Bacchae, Euripides' great tragedy, Pentheus denied Dionysus and tried to suppress his cult at Thebes. Euripides shows Pentheus driven mad by the god, such that he goes to spy on his mother and other women who are worshipping the god in his secret rites. Dionysus causes Pentheus' mother to believe that her son is a lion, and so she and her fellow worshippers rip him apart with their bare hands. She carries his head back into the city in triumph. And then the god allows her to see that it's her own son.

Cipher: That kind of sounds half alcohol and half psychedelics, doesn't it?

Proxy: There is that theory — that actually there was much more than wine in the wine. There were herbs and so forth in there. And of course earlier we discussed the benign and positive psychedelic trip that seems to have undermined the draft in the sixties. Conversely, the very first trip on LSD, taken by its creator Hofmann, was in fact utterly dark and terrifying. Bad trips seem to be rare, but they do occur. Pentheus and his mother seemed to have had very bad trips, because they did not respect the god. Therefore, seeing Dionysus's character as encompassing both forms of intoxication is plausible.

Cipher: And that needs digging into, doesn't it? Because some of the reports of drinking wine back then suggest you'd have to water it down twenty parts to one. And we know they didn't have distillation, so it wasn't an alcohol strength thing. But somehow this wine was getting its power.

Proxy: I think so. And they also drank it hot. So it would have been more of a mulled wine.

Cipher: That would evaporate off the alcohol, wouldn't it?

Proxy: Possibly. For one thing, the ancient Greeks were extremely competent herbalists. They knew all of the stuff that was around in the countryside because, of course, they're really living in it in a way that moderns are not. They've been there for a long time. And they know the plants and what they do. We know that there are psychedelics available in the Greek countryside, if you know where to look.

Cipher: They're in the English countryside. And not just the Liberty Cap mushrooms, but also DMT in the Common Reed.

Proxy: In the earlier accounts of contact with certain groups in the Amazon we can see something fascinating that is relevant here. These groups were of course living in their environment in the sense that you described, untouched by modernity. Their knowledge of flora was not dead knowledge. It wasn't knowledge they inherited.

I will explain what I mean: when some of these groups were first contacted, the anthropologists were astonished at how few plant remedies they had in their arsenal. They might only have five or a dozen different plant remedies for very basic conditions. The anthropologists thought that these people must be really primitive, since they had not developed remedies beyond the simple selection that they used despite living in the cornucopia of the Amazon. And then ten years later, the anthropologists noticed that these peoples suddenly had hundreds of different remedies. They eventually realised that these people were actually extremely healthy before they came into contact with Western civilisation. They had far fewer diseases. They had a healthy lifestyle. And so they didn't need much in the way of plant medication. As soon as they did need it, when they had come into contact with us and caught a whole load of new diseases and started eating less wholesome food, they went out into the jungle. Through their knowledge of the plants they created new remedies from scratch, through experimentation, and through their knowledge of the mechanisms involved.

Cipher: Which is remarkable, isn't it? Because it is not scientific knowledge, or at least it is not wholly scientific knowledge. It's not wholly empirical knowledge. They don't have the scientific method in order to build that knowledge.

Proxy: Quite. And nor is it just passed-down wisdom that they copy from their parents and their grandparents. They're able to make new knowledge.

Cipher: And they're presumably conceiving of the relationships between the various properties of these plants in a very different way from the way that we would conceive of it.

Proxy: Yes. And the combination is important because it's not like you take one leaf and that cures this and another leaf and that cures that. Ayahuasca is a famous example where on its own it has no effect at all. You have to mix it with something else. And it's not obvious what that is. It's not obvious that ayahuasca would have that effect if you mix it with something else. I mentioned common reeds and you can't use that instead of ayahuasca. You have to mix it with something else. And just no one had done it, no one would have thought of doing it. Because why would you? What are you expecting when you do that? But they got there somehow, and different groups used different admixtures to get the same effect because they have similar chemical properties.

Cipher: Of course it is possible to think this just happens through thousands of instances of trial and error. But then again, it's very hard to understand how that would happen without absolute carnage, isn't it?

Proxy: Yes, but also why would you conduct these experiments in the first place?

Cipher: Although perhaps there is a hint at a solution: when the peoples in the Amazon started to get sick, there were new requirements for cures that needed to be fulfilled, and so these peoples would look for them. Could psychedelic compounds and mixtures be discovered the same way? Though this raises the question as to what the "requirement" was when they found psychedelics like ayahuasca as the solution.

Proxy: Yes it does — an interesting enough question for an entirely separate conversation.

Cipher: But for the moment we can say that it is plausible that the Greeks knew what they were about when it came to plants and their properties. And with the plants that are available to you and me here, they would see something very different.

Proxy: Very good. We should bear in mind the possibility that Dionysus is more than just alcohol — he might be other psychoactive substances too. One might wonder if the Yemeni picture of alcohol is an inheritance of that Mediterranean Dionysiac drink, but that is far beyond our scope to answer.

So going back to this idea of possession: I actually don't think that in our civilisation or our society, alcohol on its own serves the purpose of possession. It may do for others, but not ours.

Cipher: Agreed. Possession is not my experience at work drinks.

Proxy: No. It's much more about bonding, I would say. I think it is much more about the idea of building trust. Because I think that with inebriation, you let your guard down a little bit. You're a little bit more free and you reveal a little bit more of who you are and what's going on with you as an individual. And I think that if you do that with other people, that bonds you. After all, you've shared an experience with some risk. If you have got drunk with someone, you are bonded with them because you've both glimpsed each other. You've had a sort of a peek underneath the social armour, at least to a certain extent.

Cipher: I think it goes even further than that, because when you're drunk, you're more likely to break some law or transgress some moral code. And you're certainly going to transgress the HR policies and office behaviour after a few drinks. The reason why Chinese businessmen are so notorious for getting drunk is the idea that they are, as a group, transgressing shared moral norms. Both getting drunk, and what they do under the influence.

Proxy: It binds them together.

Cipher: And so it's a kind of threat that you can now dob each other in and get each other into trouble. We've also seen what they're actually like under their professional shell.

Proxy: I believe the ancient Greeks had a concept very like this. They called it pistis. The word means trust, confidence, or faith. But it could be brought about by a group of young noblemen deliberately committing a crime together. And quite a shocking crime. And this would then bind them together as a sort of political slate or as a political faction for life. I seem to recall that this is one interpretation of the famous mutilation of the Herms at Athens.

Cipher: That's really interesting.

Proxy: So I think my suspicion is that one of the reasons alcohol is so important is because it provides something akin to that. But in quite a safe and low-intensity way.

Cipher: It's something you can do with your office mates. If you go out to a bar, it can still be official. It can still be HR-approved. And while no one's ever going to acknowledge why it benefits the business, it really does. I think if you stop having these office drinks, productivity goes down, ceteris paribus. Staff turnover likewise goes up, because people don't want to be at work.

And actually the thing about alcohol is that you can really easily graduate it. Going to the bar does not mean you have to get absolutely wasted. Because you buy it in these quite small units of increment. So you can go thinking that, "well, I'm only going to have two." And that's absolutely fine. It's not like taking heroin where you're all in from the get-go. You can sort of dip your toe in, and you can retain a lot of control up until quite a late stage of inebriation.

Proxy: And actually you lose a lot of respect if you can't control it.

Cipher: Which is another way of sizing each other up socially.

Proxy: You reveal more of yourself, don't you?

Cipher: And if you're the one that has to be put in a taxi and sent back home, you're not getting promoted.

Proxy: You are seeing again, I think, that idea of peeking under the social curtain or the social armour. But seeing what they're made of, not just what they're like.

In the army, if you've joined to be an officer, one of the last rounds of the interview process is a dinner where everyone has a bottle of wine put in front of them. And so the test is to have a dinner party and there's a bottle of wine in front of you. People are just looking and seeing what happens. And I think that's quite an interesting test to just get out of the way up front. Because if you can't deal well with that situation, you're not going to be a good person to fight alongside.

Cipher: I can imagine that.

Proxy: So you're prematurely making people reveal something they would never reveal under normal interview conditions or even in a kind of teamwork exercise or physical training scenario. You're actually peeking under the bonnet.

Cipher: That's it, isn't it? You're peeking under the bonnet. I think at least one of the reasons why alcohol plays such an important part in our society is because it is an absolutely crucial medium for group bonding. Which is actually quite a banal point, isn't it? But I think there's a much more interesting thing going on about why that works; it works because it suppresses the introspective and pulls back the curtains on what lurks within.

Proxy: Quite — with most other inebriants it's not really a team thing. There's less of a shared experience. I mean you mentioned heroin; that's not a shared experience.

Cipher: So I'm led to believe.

Proxy: In one of the books I read recently, some astronauts were off to some very distant place and they each had a suicide method in case it all went wrong. And one of them chose heroin on the assumption that it was the "best" way to die. Would you go in for that?

Cipher: I don't know. It seems cowardly, but then at the same time you're probably allowed a bit of self-indulgence. It reminds me of Huxley being asked to have some mescaline administered on his deathbed.

Proxy: Me too. But see, one of the other astronauts decided to take a pistol. His reasoning was that they needed a backstop in case the heroin did not work; someone needed to remain compos mentis in order to finish off his friends before killing himself. Which is a very dutiful choice, and I think more admirable.

Cipher: And far less pleasant.

Proxy: There's that element of selfishness in the heroin choice, and the element of duty to the team in the pistol choice. Alcohol is best used to engender the latter. It is a much more inter-subjective drug. Getting drunk with friends is ontologically different from getting drunk alone. My impression is that it makes very little experiential difference whether heroin is taken in company or alone.

Cipher: So we can see from that that alcohol is quite different, on its own, from the psychedelics. Alcohol is not something that opens up new subjective worlds within you. It almost anaesthetises the subjective world; it makes it simpler or less refined. But what it does do is ease the wheels of interaction — and these two properties are surely linked.

Proxy: And this makes it a poor choice for an individual intoxicant.

Cipher: Clearly — alcoholism tends to be what happens when you make it a solo sport.

Proxy: Alcohol in a group context is healthy, but alcohol on your own...

Cipher: It's not. A glass of wine after work — fine. But more than that, and you're going to get yourself into trouble.

Proxy: Very quickly.

Cipher: It's useful, it's powerful, and it's dangerous. And I think that's a common triad of properties for interesting things.

Proxy: But back to work drinks. I hate to keep bringing them up. It's acknowledged that you will do the work better if occasionally you let the alcoholic part of Dionysus possess you as a group.

Cipher: And if you don't have that, you'll be less productive.

Proxy: You need to cultivate the spirit that animates the team, the esprit de corps. That word "spirit" again... It is the spirit that loosens the individual, and so binds the group.

Cipher: Indeed.

They contemplate the fireplace awhile.

Proxy: But I suppose that with that we can once again think about — well, is it possession? Is that chap in Yemen right that it makes you into a werewolf, that it fundamentally transforms you or fills you with something else?

Cipher: Or is it unearthing what is already there?

Proxy: My personal experience is it's unearthing — removing inhibitions.

Cipher: I agree, and that would be the implication of what we said. But consider this: perhaps that in itself is in a sense filling you with something from elsewhere. After all, your conscious self excludes or suppresses a lot of things. It's not just that those parts are kept hidden from others; I would contend that much of the time they are also kept hidden from you.

Proxy: There's other stuff in there, isn't there, that is normally kept out of view — both of your own introspective consciousness and of what other people can observe.

Cipher: I think that at least on one reading of the psychoanalysts and modern psychology, there are, in a sense, sub-entities within us.

Proxy: Like Jung's shadow?

Cipher: Yes, exactly. But even the lower brain systems may be said to have their own personalities, because they have their own wishes and desires that sometimes conflict with one another.

You might have one part of your brain-body system craving doughnuts or sex or whatever, but then another part of the system may be saying, "no, no, that is definitely not what we need to be doing right now." And we have all experienced that conflict in ourselves, which is certainly akin to a struggle between two wills. That seems to me to strongly suggest that what I am saying is true: there are subordinate personalities within us that emerge from the different biological systems of which we are the conglomeration. They thus have their own desires, and can argue with each other just as much as they can negotiate or cooperate.

Proxy: So alcohol is a possession, but it's not possession by an external entity. It's possession by an internal entity?

Cipher: Yes, or entities. The subordinate personalities which are usually suppressed being released — unbound — by the spirit.

Proxy: I see.

Cipher: But then again, you see, this is where the best way to conceive of the gods is actually as internal entities — but as internal entities that are instantiated in all of us.

And in that sense, they are universal — they exist across time and space. The Dionysus in me may die with me, but he still exists in the mass of the species. They've existed as long as we as a species have existed, and they may be even older.

But they don't exist externally out in space. They exist in the repeated pattern that is the human organism. We inherit them with our genetic code, and they rule our lives as gods.

Proxy: A step on from the shared unconscious is a shared pantheon.

Cipher: They're there in the blueprints.

Proxy: And presumably they're either things that have coalesced through evolution, at the very least, or they actually do serve an adaptive purpose.

Cipher: Well, if they weren't useful, evolution would have got rid of them.

Proxy: A reasonable thought. Though you can have these useless offshoots like the appendix and coccyx and so forth.

Cipher: But I think whether they are adaptive is an open question. And actually I think that's a later question. I think the more interesting question is: is it useful to think about gods or spirits in this way, as entities that exist within the structure of our being?

If they were such, then they pre-exist us as individuals, and they will exist after we're gone. They will be part of each of us as individuals, and yet they exceed us. And they will be immanent to everyone with what we might call a normal human mind.

Proxy: And they're powerful, because presumably they are there in response to the world. The gods themselves, as described in myth and stories, are a kind of shortcut — an adaptive shortcut for us understanding the complexity of what otherwise could not be understood.

Cipher: So Dionysus is not the wine. He is the desire to drink the wine. And he is the part of you unleashed once the wine is drunk.

Proxy: So by giving a name and reifying it, one turns it into a character that helps us use it, or at least acknowledge it's there.

Cipher: And that you're not going to be a functional human being if you don't acknowledge you have this bit of brain or body that wants to let loose, or whatever else it might want.

Proxy: And if you are willing to provisionally accept this, then you can start to have really interesting speculation about what happens in the transition from polytheism to monotheism.

Because if you accept this line of thinking you can start to see a polytheistic pantheon as the reification of a mind, but it's fragmented and kaleidoscopic and slightly chaotic. And that is not a criticism of polytheism per se, because that may be closer to the truth of what the mind is.

Cipher: However, once you transition over into monotheism, the mind is reified as a single sovereign entity. Freud would no doubt place the ego in this presumptively sovereign role.

Proxy: That makes me think of that theory that the two halves of the brain weren't communicating very well thousands of years ago and so when one half was passing information to the other, it felt like a different personality, or an actual god speaking to you.

Cipher: But polytheism was around very recently in biological terms. And so I find it hard to believe that the structure of the brain or how our minds work was different.

Proxy: The brain is very plastic though, isn't it? The brain doesn't require evolution to change. And the mind changes many times over the course of a human life in response to events and the environment. We have all met people whose minds work very differently following some significant event in their lives, or in response to illness or good fortune or whatever.

Cipher: You're right, perhaps it is plausible.

Proxy: Well, I'm really way beyond what I could empirically justify here.

Cipher: That's where it gets fun though.

Proxy: Let's speculate further then: in monotheism, would focusing on this idea that there is one unifying principle or one sovereign power within the universe cause the mind to attempt to organise itself in a different manner?

Would it attempt to suppress or assimilate these previously disparate "gods" into a single, indivisible entity?

And is that the birth of the modern notion of the "individual"? An individual is, by definition, indivisible.

Cipher: We became a coherent whole more clearly demarcated, and so you almost have to lock bits out.

Proxy: Certain bits get locked away in order to make this happen.

Cipher: And Islam as the ultimate monotheism thus forbids alcohol and other intoxicants, and conflates the inebriated spirit with demons like werewolves.

Proxy: Perhaps not always the healthy approach.

Cipher: But perhaps effective in other ways.

Proxy: So polytheism is not quite like having multiple personalities, but a bit like that.

Cipher: I suppose that a genuine polytheist is open to the notion that they want different things at different times and in different circumstances. They are less likely to feel a sense of tension or dissonance when they act in different ways in different contexts. Identity and constancy of behaviour do not overlap as firmly as they do for the monotheist — at least this is what I would speculate.

Proxy: So an extreme example would be like berserkers going into that zone.

Cipher: Possibly.

Proxy: I'm just thinking of the most recent thing I looked into, which is basically that the berserkers are a myth that didn't happen. But I don't know whether that's true.

Laughter.

Cipher: Well, I think it is, and what you have been saying implies that you can unleash something given the right stimuli.

Proxy: And then it goes back in its box once it's spent. It can be acknowledged by the polytheist — that's the point. Whereas for the monotheist that stuff has to be stamped out and denied because it implies possession by a power that is not the one power.

Cipher: This also makes me think of the problem with soldiers coming home from war. In war of course they are having to be a very different thing from at home with their families.

Proxy: I think it's obvious that the mind doesn't and can't succeed in just being one thing.

Cipher: But I suppose the idea is that it is much more motivated to try to be one thing. And under this system it does cause problems.

Proxy: Back to work drinks: is it that you take a whole self to work, or just part of it?

Cipher: Your work personality is likely to be quite different from the one you use around your friends.

Proxy: I don't think that you're seeing the whole person when you get inebriated. You're just seeing something more of them.

Cipher: You're seeing how they have fun.

Proxy: And actually, of course, having fun and playing and joking is a really fundamental way that we read each other. It's a form of play, and play is fundamental for mammals in learning to scope each other out and cooperate. Just think about how much easier it is to achieve practical or difficult things with someone if you share a sense of humour.

Cipher: I think work drinks can provide a space for adults to play, and therefore bond. And of course the office is a terrible space for learning to play, which involves experimentation and risk. But you do need to have established how to work together through play in order to truly function as a team. There is the ironic thought that in fact Dionysus, "the loosener," helps build a more effective and tightly bound team.

Proxy: Does that make sense?

Cipher: It does. You have to untie ropes before tying them together afresh. I suppose it used to be that you'd have a lot more sports at work, for example, which is part of that — but sports isn't quite play when it's organised.

Proxy: No, because play is much more freeform, isn't it?

Cipher: And work drinks are freeform.

Proxy: Anything can happen. There's no goal. It's open-ended. There's no win condition.

Cipher: When it goes well you construct an experience for yourselves over the course of the night, don't you?

Proxy: And you'll refer back to it in the future.

Cipher: It provides that bedrock of a relationship, doesn't it? That you shared that narrative experience in the same way that children do when they play.

Proxy: Then that's why, if you're not an unfortunate person who's an alcoholic, you definitely should drink.

Cipher: There's much more going on than just drinking.

Proxy: I'm glad we've solved that.

Cipher: Quite.

They each pour another drink, and contemplate the embers of the fire.