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Absinthe is making a comeback, but its not about booze.

Last Wednesday evening (June 23rd) at Christie’s auction house, on King Street in London (not long before the tornado struck King Street in Midland, Ontario, and the three bolts of lightning struck Chicago simultaneously, but probably shortly after the G8-eve earthquake), a 1903 painting by Pablo Picasso sold for $46.3M. “Portrait d’Angel Fernández de Soto,” or “Portrait of Angel Fernandez deSoto” is more commonly known as “The Absinthe Drinker” (see below):

[The name Angel Fernandez de Soto can be roughly translated as "angel of the son of journey, adventure and bravery who lives near a forest".]

The re-emergence of the painting is likely deliberate. The drink featured in it — absinthe — has been banned since shortly after the late Senator Robert Byrd was born. It is on the verge of a huge comeback in its original concoction, as the UK Telegraph notes in this June 11th article (H/T: Bob Schlenker).

The drink’s powers were notorious in late 19th-Century Paris among bohemian artists and writers. Many swore it expanded consciousness and enhanced creativity, dubbing it the Green Fairy. Van Gogh is said to have created Starry Night under its influence and it has been suggested it played a part in him cutting off one of his ears. Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec and Picasso all partook in “l’heure verte” – a five o’clock ritual of sipping absinthe with a lump of sugar on a spoon. But in 1915, the French authorities declared it the scourge of society and banned it, in part due to fears it would knock out French forces in the First World War.

Nearly a century later, many of the myths surrounding absinthe have been debunked but the cloudy, herbal liquor remains illegal and can only be sold if called “Absinthe-based spirit” and made to a slightly different recipe. But two absinthe enthusiasts are leading the fight to remove the ban from the law books, give it back its proper name and revive the original recipe.

The firm Absinthe Devil is “an online retailer of hard-to-find barware products” based near me outside of Boston. On June 17th, they released the results of a survey finding that American absinthe drinkers are “big spenders”… hardly a surprise. This has all the hallmarks of a major trend, the idolatrous, even Satanic aspects of which are right out in open for all to see.

Absinthe is also referred to as the “Green Goddess”. The prospect of a revived global absinthe industry (in its original wormwood formulation; synthetics have been labeled absinthe for some time) has the Swiss and French in fight over the name.

The Swiss have asserted that they own the term ‘absinthe’ as of this Wednesday (June 30th). World Radio Switzerland has picked up the story.

Why was it banned in the first place?

In 1905, a farmer in French-speaking Switzerland, Jean Lanfrey, went on an all day drinking binge of absinthe, brandy and wine. Later in the evening, a growing and prolonged argument with his wife turned intensely tragic. Mr. Lanfrey, in his all day drunkenness, eventually shot his wife with their unborn baby, their four-year old daughter and their two-year old child sleeping in the crib. Mr. Lanfrey tried to shoot himself but failed.

Everyone who knew Mr. Lanfrey said that this violent rampage simply did not fit [his] personality. As a result, his actions were blamed not on his occasional violent outbursts he was known for, nor for the mixture of drinking all day with wine, brandy and absinthe. Propaganda focused solely on the fact that he drank two large glasses of absinthe.

Immediately, European communities began attributing absinthe as “the cause of bloodthristy crime.” The anti-absinthe campaign was now in full force and in 1908 it was banned completely in Switzerland.

Sounds like demonic possession to me, facilitated, no doubt, by the liquor. (Who ever said the two don’t go hand in hand? I’ve seen it firsthand.)

Why all the fuss about some green, and (I’m told) icky-tasting booze? Why now? Here’s just a tiny fraction of the effusive adoration that “Absinthe Fever — an absinthe information resource and community” website has to say about it:

The Green Fairy is the English translation of La Fee Verte, the affectionate French nickname given to the celebrated absinthe drink in the nineteenth century… poets and artists were [also] inspired by the “Green Muse”; Aleister Crowley*, the British occultist, worshipped the “Green Goddess”.

The symbol of transformation

But Green Fairy isn’t just another name for absinthe: she is a metaphorical concept of artistic enlightenment and exploration, of poetic inspiration, of a freer state of mind, of new ideas, of a changing social order… perhaps with a bit of thujone** “high” thrown in. To the original bohemians of 1890s Paris, the Fairy was a welcomed symbol of transformation… on their quest to escape the conventional reality of their time into the sanctuary of the surreal.

Transformation has always been the fundamental essence of the Green Fairy… during the magical ritual of la louche… symbolic of the subsequent transformation that shall take place in the drinker’s mind… [She is] the goddess of artistic rebellion… rebellious and challenging to the extreme… def[ying] the traditional notions of decency, morality, and propriety…

It goes on from there in the same vein. More on the “rituals” here.

Original caption: “Out of the bottle: The Green Fairy at work, liberating the mind of a poet. The dramatic pose of the poet and the misty-green appearance of the painting symbolise the effects of absinthe. (‘The Green Muse’ by Albert Maignan, 1895.)”

*Aleister Crowley was not merely an ‘occultist’, but a thirty-third-degree Mason. He is purported to have conjured Satan himself, and is generally regarded as the foremost Satanist of the 20th century.

**Thujone is the active, semi-hallucinatory molecular ingredient in the oil of the wormwood plant. As the Telegraph article noted:

First drunk by ancient Egyptians and Greeks, absinthe was originally outlawed because scientists said one of its key ingredients, wormwood, contained the thujone molecule they blamed for causing hallucinations and brain damage.

Hmm… ancient Egyptians… revive the original recipe…

Consider Deuteronomy 29 (below) the first time that the Hebrew word lah-an-aw’ — H3939 shows up. It is used eight times in scripture, seven of them translated ‘wormwood’, one as ‘gall’. (Note also that the Strong’s number is 303 x 13.)

10 Ye stand this day all of you before the LORD your God; your captains of your tribes, your elders, and your officers , with all the men of Israel, 11 Your little ones, your wives, and thy stranger that is in thy camp, from the hewer of thy wood unto the drawer of thy water: 12 That thou shouldest enter into covenant with the LORD thy God, and into his oath, which the LORD thy God maketh with thee this day: 13 That he may establish thee to day for a people unto himself, and that he may be unto thee a God, as he hath said unto thee, and as he hath sworn unto thy fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob. 14 Neither with you only do I make this covenant and this oath; 15 But with him that standeth here with us this day before the LORD our God, and also with him that is not here with us this day: 16 (For ye know how we have dwelt in the land of Egypt; and how we came through the nations which ye passed by; 17 And ye have seen their abominations, and their idols, wood and stone, silver and gold, which were among them:) 18 Lest there should be among you man, or woman, or family, or tribe, whose heart turneth away this day from the LORD our God, to go and serve the gods of these nations; lest there should be among you a root that beareth gall and wormwood; 19 And it come to pass, when he heareth the words of this curse, that he bless himself in his heart, saying , I shall have peace, though I walk in the imagination of mine heart, to add drunkenness to thirst: 20 The LORD will not spare him, but then the anger of the LORD and his jealousy shall smoke against that man, and all the curses that are written in this book shall lie upon him, and the LORD shall blot out his name from under heaven. 21 And the LORD shall separate him unto evil out of all the tribes of Israel, according to all the curses of the covenant that are written in this book of the law…

Hmm… do ya’ think this one is ambiguous? The Lord, via Moses, is obviously not talking mainly about the literal wormwood plant, but using wormwood as a metaphor for bitter fruit. Jesus picks up the same idea in Matthew 7:15-20 (mirrored also in Luke’s gospel):

A Tree and Its Fruit
15 “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. 16 You will recognize them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? 17 So, every healthy tree bears good fruit, but the diseased tree bears bad fruit. 18 A healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a diseased tree bear good fruit. 19 Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. 20 Thus you will recognize them by their fruits.

Most are probably more familiar with the only two times that the Greek term for wormwood (ap’-sin-thos, G894, the Greek root word for the beverage) shows up in scripture, in Revelation 8, just after v8 in which a, “great mountain burning with fire was cast into the sea: and the third part of the sea became blood…”

And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters; And the name of the star is called Wormwood: and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter… (Revelation 8:10-11)

Here’s what the wormwood plant looks like (H/T: Jay):

And here’s the BP logo:

What seems likely — to me anyway — is that the second and third trumpet judgments in Revelation 8 (water to blood; waters, plural, become bitter and poisonous) are deeply and symbolically intertwined with the BP oil spew.

Recall that thujone, the active ingredient in wormwood, derives from its oil.

About half of my e-mails recently have to do with various scenarios (and there is no shortage of imaginative ones!) for the BP oil and/or its more volatile organic fractions to come on-shore and wreak devastation. That includes poisoning water supplies in ways that would be nearly impossible to remediate — that is, to clean up — at reasonable cost.

When the underground tank at a filling station leaks into the groundwater, the property on which it sits can often become unsaleable because of the potential for groundwater contamination liability. So too with home heating oil tanks. Multiply that across a few states and, well, you get the picture. Can you say “American refugees”? The notion of illegal aliens may soon begin to apply across state borders as it during the Dust Bowl of the 1930′s.

What does absinthe have to do with it?

The research I’ve laid out above should make clear that the deep, dark spiritual associations with this beverage are on a plane entirely different from your average consumer of alcoholic beverages who gets obnoxious after having a few too many.

Is it any wonder then, that a world under judgment would be falling all over itself to bring this horror beverage back — openly courting and making light of its licentious and clearly demonic associations? Is it any surprise that the same world that fell all over itself in 2008, in fawning adulation of a man many (including yours truly) believe to be one of the final duo of antichrist figures, would now be falling all over itself to bring back a beverage banned exactly 100 years prior to his campaign and democratic anointment?

It seems to me that the world’s worldly, God-denying thirst for the super-trendy, oily absinthe — literally wormwood, in the Greek — mirrors the thirst of worldly people for petroleum oil to do all the things we like to do just for fun. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the internal combustion automobile but it would be hard to argue that we have not made it an idol. We are in the process of reaping the full fruits of both lusts.

As with the words of God, spoken by Moses in the Deuteronomy 29 passage, and reflected in the Revelation 8, third-trumpet judgment, we are about to have our thirst for these non-life-giving things fulfilled in ways we’d prefer not to think about.

Like the Israelites who received heaps of quail in the desert when they murmured and complained and thought Yahweh’s provisions were not enough for them, so too we are in the process of seeing what it is to see the old Chinese curse fulfilled: “Be careful what you wish for… lest you get it…”

Some wanted ancient oil… we’ve got it in disgusting, tar-ball abundance. Some wanted an ancient Egyptian recipe for a semi-hallucinogenic beverage that master satanist, Aleister Crowley worshiped as a “Green Goddess”? We’ll get that too… along with the spirit of Anubis, the god of death.

UPDATE: For more on BP logo symbolism and oil ‘anointing’, see Bob Schlenker’s June 10th piece over at Open Scroll Blog: “BP and the Anointing of Death”.

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