The Dionysian Wild, Part 3: The God and the Magic of Mead

Sláinte!

“Led by such tokens and such instances, some have taught that the bees have received a share of the divine intelligence, and a draught of heavenly ether; for God, they say, pervades all things, earth and sea’s expanse and heaven’s depth; from Him the flocks and herds, men and beasts of every sort draw, each at birth, the slender stream of life; yea, unto Him all beings thereafter return, and, when unmade, are restored; no place there is for death, but, still quick, they fly unto the ranks of the stars, and mount to the heavens above.” ~ Virgil, Georgics, Book IV.

A few weeks ago, my son Aidan and I went for a hike through the woods down to a stream about a mile away. On the way, we noticed that honeybees had made their home in the bole of an oak tree along the path. The hole was about fifteen feet up the trunk and a long stream of hardened propolis (the glue of the bees) dripped down the trunk from a crack in the wood. I wrote a poem that features this landscape in my most recent book, Mythologies of the Wild of God. Actually, many of the poems in the book arose out of the landscape around my farm, as if the land itself were telling me its stories. The title of the poem is “Bysios,” the name of the Delphic month corresponding more or less to spring and the month of oracular inquiry.

BYSIOS

Dawn: the light over the farm and the fields, the budding oaks brazen and impervious to green
The language of birds: the bark of a crow, a rooster’s arrogant call, the lilting peal of robins, a hammering woodpecker, starlings and their mechanical rasp, redwings whistling in the marsh . . . and I remember the fallen sparrow’s nest under the white pine with strands of my grey hair cushioning the chalice

The intermittent shirr of truck tires over Mount Hope Road
The trilling descant of toads in the flooded woods
The lowing of a newborn calf
The white noise of the moon

A sound from the river, a sound I do not hear but sense.
A summons.

The river: a hollowed oak limb on the bank clouded with bees, 
The air sweet with the scent of the queen,
Leopard frogs and salamanders in the shallows. 
Trout hover and shine in the shimmering light of the rushing water.

Without removing my boots, I wade into the water, waiting, listening.
The thrumming of the bees, the music of the river, 
The rise and fall of the wind in the trees.

A cluster of black alder at the water’s edge . . . 
Something snared on the surface by the branches:
The head of the god, a lyre, the holiness of all singing.

The poem, though it raises the image of Orpheus, is nonetheless connected to our Dionysian theme, as the mysteries of Dionysus later merged with those of Orpheus, the former’s maenads responsible for the death of the latter, whose severed head floated down the River Hebrus still singing, a fate to which every poet aspires.

Bees are associated with Dionysus in his mythos, and he is said in some accounts to have invented honey. Others report that after he was born from the thigh of Zeus, his sacred nurses anointed his lips with honey before feeding him.[1]

Before grains had been brewed into ale and even before the grapes had been turned into wine, men have made an intoxicating drink from the honey of bees. Indeed, in the myth of Zeus’s vanquishing of his father, Kronos, he first gets the monster-father drunk on mead before releasing his siblings from the paternal belly—certainly a parody of motherhood not unlike those of our historical moment. But mythologist Carl Kerényi wonders if drunkenness is the right word when speaking of the intoxication of mead. He prefers the term “euphoria.”[2]

Even more than wine (prior to the Eucharist) the mythos and mystery surrounding bees, honey, and the making of mead prove extraordinarily rich in symbolic import. As Robert Gayre writes in his wonderful Brewing Mead, first published in 1948,

“Among the ancients mead was not merely drunk as a wine, a liquor to refresh and stimulate, and therefore valuable as such, but it was also partaken of as something which in itself had magical and indeed sacred properties. As a result, it comes about that we find mead, its raw honey material, and even the creature which provides it, the bee, all holding high places in sacred mythologies of olden times. Thus honey was considered a ‘giver of life’, and the bee was associated with the souls of men, and was a messenger of the gods.”[3]

This is attested to by the Vedas, Norse and Celtic mythology, as well as in ancient Greece and Rome. Mead throughout these traditions is a drink associated with longevity (and even immortality) as well as fertility, so it comes as no surprise that it was also considered an aphrodisiac. Mead is also associated with healing. For example, the Latin medicus was at some time in history combined with the Irish word llyn (liquor) to make meddyglynn, which eventually became the word metheglin (a kind mead flavored with herbs or flowers). The modern Welsh word for medicine, interestingly, is meddyglynn.[4] This takes the toast “To your health!” into a decidedly poetic and mythic direction. For what is an embracing of life if not both health and euphoria?

In Norse mythology, the mead of Odin imparts wisdom and inspiration to poets (I’m in!) and the honeybee, its culture centered on the being of the queen, is the conduit from the spiritual world to the world of men. As Gayre writes, the bee

“was closely associated with the Great Mother Goddess, and it was figured in the mouth of the lion in the religion of Mithra, and thereby was intended to represent the Word of God, or the Word proceeding from the mouth of the god. In Chaldee, the actual word ‘bee’ is the same as ‘the Word.’”[5]

Currently, I have about 10 gallons of mead in various states of fermentation. Five gallons are of a sweet mead that is just about ready to be bottles, and the other five are of cyser, which is a mead made with apple cider instead of water (usually the ratio in mead is four gallons of water to one gallon of honey, though the more honey you add the sweeter and stronger the mead—that cyser should be a banger!) I typically make up to 20 gallons of mead a year and I’ve gotten to be pretty good at it over the years. I am able to do this because I raise bees, but also because I’m a sophiologist and a poet. And, let’s face it, as Horace said “No poems can please long or live that are written by water drinkers.” That’s my story, and I’m stickin’ to it.

Raising bees, making mead, and being a poet are all one and the same to me. For as Heidegger said, “We are bees of the invisible.”[ 6]

[1] Carl Kerényi, Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton University Press, 1976), 31.

[2] Ibid., 35.

[3] Robert Gayre and Nigg with Charlier Papazian, Brewing Mead: Wassail! In Mazers of Mead (Brewers Publications, 1986), 17.

[4] Ken Schramm, The Compleat Meadmaker (Brewers Publications, 2003), 8.

[5] Gayre, Brewing Mead, 27.

[6] Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Harper & Row, 1971), 130.