Something in the wine

Peter Watson's Great Divide has long pointed to the Old World as having "progressed" from psychotropic drugs, picked up by hunter-gatherers; to alcohol, brewed by farmers. Brian Muraresku asks whether shamanism lasted that bit longer.

This idea sounds 1970s. Indeed that's about when John Allegro and Morton Smith hit Judaism and Christianity, respectively. Inevitably Allegro was deemed a fraud and Smith, Problematic. Other, more serious researchers got tarred by association and, then, along came Nancy Reagan. But, as they say, now it's 2020.

Judaism and Christianity are officially in the Neolithic tradition where we ingest wine for our shamanistic urges. Unofficially, Muraresku points out Hippolytus attacking drug-infusions in the wine. This means that "too many" people were spiking it.

The cerveza, that trashy Celtic beer the poorer classes got in Spain, sometimes didn't even need the spiking. The Ergot fungus does things to one's head. Maybe vin plonk in Gaul had ergot, too. Lower-caste Roman subjects sometimes attended Jewish and then Christian services on account they needed a doctor, which trade Jews and Greeks abroad often took, indeed founding hospitals for the indigent.

Suppose these was something funny in the Seder wines in the early 30s AD...

UPDATE 3/20/21: Quillette burbles about The Patriarchy, and cites Nixey unironically. "Hard pass", as they say - until someone else attempts this topic, someone who's not Richard Spencer. Might have to be Tim O'Neill.