"It’s called mad honey, and it has a slightly bitter taste and a reddish color. More notably, a few types of rhododendrons ... contain grayanotoxin, which can cause dramatic physiological reactions in humans and animals. Depending on how much a person consumes, reactions can range from hallucinations and a slower heartbeat to temporary paralysis and unconsciousness."
"The intoxicating effects of mad honey have been known for thousands of years. Not surprisingly, there have been many famous episodes of human inebriation caused by its consumption. Xenophon, Aristotle, Strabo, Pliny the Elder and Columella all document the results of eating this 'maddening' honey, believed to be from the pollen and nectar of Rhododendron luteum and Rhododendron ponticum. According to Xenophon, an invading Greek army was accidentally poisoned by harvesting and eating the local Asia Minor honey, but they all made a quick recovery with no fatalities. Having heard of this incident, and realizing that foreign invaders would be ignorant of the dangers of the local honey, King Mithridates later used the honey as a deliberate poison when Pompey's army attacked the Heptakometes [1] in Asia Minor in 69 BCE. The Roman soldiers became delirious and nauseated after being tricked into eating the toxic honey, at which point Mithridates's army attacked." Source: Wikipedia.
[1] "In about 65 BCE, Pompey's army was approaching Colchis. Mithridates' allies there, the Heptakometes, were described by Strabo as 'utterly savage' mountain barbarians, dwelling in tree forts and living on 'the flesh of wild animals and nuts.' The tribe was feared for attacking wayfarers - suddenly leaping down on them like leopards from their tree houses. The Heptakometes may have received specific orders from Mithridates on how to ambush the Roman army. What we do know for a fact is that they gathered up great numbers of wild honeycombs dripping with toxic honey and placed them all along Pompey's route. The Roman soldiers stopped to enjoy the sweets and immediately lost their senses. Reeling and babbling, the men collapsed with vomiting and diarrhea and lay on the ground unable to move. The Heptakometes easily wiped out about one thousand of Pompey's men." - Greek Fire, Poison Arrows, and Scorpion Bombs: Biological and Chemical Warfare in the Ancient World by Adrienne Mayor. (Quoted in Roman Times)
Taking mad honey sounds like a dangerous way to get loaded. According to the Drug Classroom, "[t]he core symptoms of mad honey poisoning include nausea, vomiting, salivation, headache, blurred vision, sweating, weakness, circumoral paresthesia, tongue numbing, fainting, drowsiness, drunkenness, tingling, and seizures." The toxins in the honey can also cause "1st to 3rd degree heart block, asystole, and myocardial infarction."
"Researchers at Tel Aviv University were able to reconstruct the nutrition of stone age humans. In a paper published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology (Yearbook of Physical Anthropology article), Dr. Miki Ben-Dor and Prof. Ran Barkai of the Jacob M. Alkov Department of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University, together with Raphael Sirtoli of Portugal, show that humans were an apex predator for about two million years. Only the extinction of larger animals (megafauna) in various parts of the world, and the decline of animal food sources toward the end of the stone age, led humans to gradually increase the vegetable element in their nutrition, until finally they had no choice but to domesticate both plants and animals -- and became farmers." Source: Science Daily.
This is another entry in the longstanding debate about the Stone Age diet. If I understand it correctly, these researchers are saying that humans were strictly meat-eating "hyper-carnivores" until the extinction of their game forced them to start eating more vegetables, which in turn led to the domestication of plants and various animals. The researchers came to this conclusion after studying "about 400 scientific papers from different scientific disciplines, dealing with the focal question: Were stone-age humans specialized carnivores or were they generalist omnivores?" They also looked at archaeological evidence:
"...research on stable isotopes in the bones of prehistoric humans, as well as hunting practices unique to humans, show that humans specialized in hunting large and medium-sized animals with high fat content."
Comment: Call me a skeptic, but I don't really take these studies about the Stone Age diet any more seriously than I do all the studies about what we should be eating now. The findings change so much that I stopped paying attention to them. When it comes to early humans, there's a lot of disagreement as to whether they were omnivores or strictly carnivorous, and it wasn't that long ago when various researchers were saying that our prehistoric ancestors were mostly vegetarians. The most likely scenario, I think, is that Stone Age hunter-gatherers probably ate whatever they could get their hands on, including each other in some cases. This kind of diet had its risks, however, as shown in the next video.
"Corn cultivation spread from Mesoamerica to what is now the American Southwest by about 4000 B.C., but how and when the crop made it to other parts of North America is still debated. In a new study, scientists report that corn was not grown in the ancient metropolis of Cahokia until sometime between A.D. 900 and 1000, a relatively late date that corresponds to the start of the city's rapid expansion." Source: Science Daily (2020).
Note: "Cahokia was the largest and most influential urban settlement of the Mississippian culture, which developed advanced societies across much of what is now the central and southeastern United States, beginning more than 1,000 years before European contact." (Wikipedia)
Maize (corn) is thought to have been domesticated in southern Mexico around 10,000 years ago. If the dates are correct, it took around 6,000 years for the cultivation of maize to spread to the American southwest and another 3,000 years for the crop to reach Cahokia in the midwest. This very slow spread can be explained, at least partly, by the fact that it took time for maize to adapt to northern climates, but it also suggests that the indigenous peoples of the ancient Americas were fairly static, spending most of their time in their traditional territories.
When maize reached Cahokia it was just a small village, but around a century later (or less) the settlement began to expand dramatically:
"Beginning in about 1050, Cahokia grew from 'a little village of a few hundred people to part of a city with 5,000 to 10,000 people in an archaeological instant' ... The population eventually expanded to at least 40,000. This early experiment in urban living was short-lived, however. By 1350, after a period of drought and civil strife, most of the city's population had dispersed." (Science Daily)
"Tony Robinson encounters corpses mutilated after death, a twelfth century plague-spreading zombie, and cannibalistic King of England in his quest to discover why our ancestors were so afraid of the dead."
"They have long been famed for their love of lavish banquets and rich recipes. But what is less well known is that the British royals also had a taste for human flesh." Source: Daily Mail (2016).
"A new book on medicinal cannibalism has revealed that possibly as recently as the end of the 18th century British royalty swallowed parts of the human body.
"The author adds that this was not a practice reserved for monarchs but was widespread among the well-to-do in Europe.
"Even as they denounced the barbaric cannibals of the New World, they applied, drank, or wore powdered Egyptian mummy, human fat, flesh, bone, blood, brains and skin."
Note: It appears that aristocrats weren't the only ones who believed in the medicinal properties of human body parts and fluids. There are all sorts of stories about commoners doing the same thing. For example, the crowds who witnessed Charles I's execution supposedly rushed in to mop up the king's blood:
"At about 2:00 p.m., Charles put his head on the block after saying a prayer and signaled the executioner when he was ready by stretching out his hands; he was then beheaded with one clean stroke. According to observer Philip Henry, a moan 'as I never heard before and desire I may never hear again' rose from the assembled crowd, some of whom then dipped their handkerchiefs in the king's blood as a memento." (Wikipedia) According to the Guardian, they believed that royal blood had healing properties.
"Scythian-era people lived across Eurasia from about 700 BCE to 200 BCE, and have long been considered highly mobile warriors who ranged widely across the steppe grasslands. Herodotus describes Scythian populations as living in wagons and engaging in raiding and warfare, and this view has persisted throughout history -- supported by archeologists' observations of similar styles of horse harnesses, weapons, burial mounds and animal style motifs throughout what is now Ukraine." Source: Science Daily.
According to new research, the Scythians may not have been as nomadic as previously believed:
"'Our study demonstrates overall low levels of human mobility in the vicinity of key urban locales of the Scythian era, in contrast to previous stereotypes of highly nomadic populations,' said Alicia Ventresca Miller, lead author of the study... 'While long-distance mobility increased during the Scythian era relative to preceding periods, it was limited to a small percentage of individuals.'"
Note: I have no idea how conclusive any of this is, but the study was highly sophisticated, using techniques developed in the field of bioarchaeology. The researchers "took samples of bone and tooth enamel from 56 human skeletons at three burial sites ... in modern-day Ukraine. The team examined these samples using isotope analysis [next video]. This kind of analysis examines isotopes of elements -- in this study, strontium, oxygen, nitrogen and carbon -- deposited in human tissues through eating and drinking. This allows researchers to determine where an individual traveled and lived based on the unique isotope composition in their tissue."
"The Festival of Drunkenness is a religiously significant celebration that was held annually (said to be biannually in some places) by the ancient Egyptians. The background story for the celebration of this festival can be found in a text known as The Book of the Heavenly Cow [next video]. In this text, there is an ancient Egyptian myth involving the destruction of mankind. According to the myth, human beings were saved from extinction thanks, in part, to alcohol." Source: Ancient Origins (2016).
From what I've read, the Festival of Drunkenness wasn't just a big celebration with some harmless social drinking; it was about getting completely plastered and passing out to commemorate how booze saved humanity from the bloodthirsty warrior goddess, Sekhmet:
"According to the story, Ra had become weary of people's endless cruelty and nonsense and so sent Sekhmet to destroy them. She took to her task with enthusiasm, tearing people apart and drinking their blood. Ra is satisfied with the destruction until the other gods point out to him that, if he wanted to teach people a lesson, he should stop the destruction before no one was left to learn from it. Ra then orders the goddess of beer, Tenenet, to dye a large quantity of the brew red and has it delivered to Dendera, right in Sekhmet's path of destruction. She finds it and, thinking it is blood, drinks it all, falls asleep, and wakes up as the gentle and beneficent Hathor." (Ancient History Encyclopedia)
In other words, all it took to transform the homicidal blood-slurping Sekhmet (often represented as a lion) into Hathor, the goddess of "music, dance, joy, love, sexuality and maternal care" (often represented as a cow) was to get Sekhmet drunk. I also like the bit about how Ra had to be reminded that there was no point in killing everybody if his goal was to teach people a lesson. This is a great story, much more human than the legend of Yahweh exterminating his own creations (humans as well as animals) in a flood.
Note: According to the Ancient Architects video at the top of this post, the Festival of Drunkenness "could potentially explain the original pre-dynastic origins of the Great Sphinx - as a bloodthirsty statue of an Egyptian lion goddess."
Ancient Egypt is normally seen as kind of austere and grim, but the Egyptians had all sorts of feasts and banquets and they liked their beer:
"Considering the value the ancient Egyptians placed on enjoying life, it is no surprise that they are known as the first civilization to perfect the art of brewing beer. The Egyptians were so well known as brewers, in fact, that their fame eclipsed the actual inventors of the process, the Sumerians, even in ancient times." Source: Ancient History Encylopedia.
The Festival of Drunkenness goes way back:
"Originally, it was thought these rituals took place later in Egyptian history when they were ruled by the Greeks and Romans. However, recent discoveries from the excavations of the Temple of Mut complex in Luxor show they took place much earlier - around 1470 BCE. ... the Festival of Drunkenness was celebrated by people at least once a year, sometimes twice, in homes, temples and makeshift desert shrines. It was different than many other temple ceremonies as the priests or pharaoh would act on behalf of the people. In this ritual, everyone participated together -- the elites and the peasants. The scene is described in a hymn to Sakhnet as young women with flowing garlands in their hair serving alcohol to everyone They all drink to the point of passing out, then are awoken to the beating of drums and the priests carried out a likeness of the goddess Hathor and they present their petitions to her. It wasn’t just drinking going on either. Graffiti was found discussing 'traveling the marshes', which is a euphemism for having sex. These festivals took place at the beginning of the Nile floods in mid-August, which hearkened to the fertility and renewal of the land by the floods." Source: Naked History (2017).
How can you not like a civilization where everyone took part in a festival like this at least once a year? Drunken orgies have been popular throughout history, of course, but they've gradually lost their religious context. Next video shows a panel from William Hogarth's moralistic series of paintings, A Rake's Progress (1733-35). I like to think that the Festival of Drunkenness in ancient Egypt involved scenes like these all over the country.
"In the Old Norse written corpus, berserkers ... were warriors who purportedly fought in a trance-like fury, a characteristic which later gave rise to the modern English word 'berserk' ... Berserkers are attested to in numerous Old Norse sources, with their name literally rendered as 'bear-coats', along with úlfhéðnar ('wolf-coats')." Source: Wikipedia.
"...It is proposed by some authors that the northern warrior tradition originated in hunting magic. Three main animal cults appeared: the bear, the wolf, and the wild boar."
The legend of the werewolf may be related to these ancient stories:
"Old Norse had the cognate varúlfur, but because of the high importance of werewolves in Norse mythology, there were alternative terms such as ulfhéðinn ('one in wolf-skin', referring still to the totemistic or cultic adoption of wolf-nature rather than the superstitious belief in actual shape-shifting). In modern Scandinavian also kveldulf ('evening-wolf'), presumably after the name of Kveldulf Bjalfason, a historical berserker of the 9th century who figures in the Icelandic sagas." (Wikipedia)
Berserkers, like Shieldmaidens, may be completely mythological. According to the National Museum of Denmark, there is little to no archaeological evidence that they ever existed. Assuming that they were real, however, and that the stories about their ultraviolent frenzies are accurate, what could account for their deranged behavior?
The Viking berserkers, we are told, went into battle in a trance-like rage and were supposed to be almost uncontrollable killing machines. Dressed in wolf and bear pelts, they would attack friend and foe alike and their homicidal madness sounds a lot like a drug-induced frenzy of some kind:
"This fury, which was called berserkergang, occurred not only in the heat of battle, but also during laborious work. Men who were thus seized performed things which otherwise seemed impossible for human power. This condition is said to have begun with shivering, chattering of the teeth, and chill in the body, and then the face swelled and changed its colour. With this was connected a great hot-headedness, which at last gave over into a great rage, under which they howled as wild animals, bit the edge of their shields, and cut down everything they met without discriminating between friend or foe. When this condition ceased, a great dulling of the mind and feebleness followed, which could last for one or several days." -- Fabing, Howard D. (1956). "On Going Berserk: A Neurochemical Inquiry. (Subscription-access only)
Note: A detailed commentary on berserkers in general and Fabing's paper can be found here.)
The legends suggest that the berserkers might have taken some kind of drug that caused these fits of berserkergang. Whatever it was, it came on with a rush of "shivering, chattering of the teeth and chill in the body," caused a spike in blood-pressure ("the face swelled and changed its color") and body temperature ("a great hot-headedness") and ended with a hangover with could last for days. No one really knows if the berserkers were high on something, but various candidates have been suggested:
"While some researchers believe the Berserkers simply worked themselves up into a self-induced hysteria before fighting, others maintain that it was sorcery, the consumption of drugs or alcohol, or even mental illness, that accounted for their behaviour. Some botanists have claimed that berserker behaviour could have been caused by the ingestion of the plant known as bog myrtle, one of the main spices in Scandinavian alcoholic beverages." Source: Ancient Origins.
The problem with the bog-myrtle theory is that the plant was commonly used to make beer back then and doesn't appear to produce this kind of dramatic effect on people. Maybe I missed something, but I couldn't find any mention of it in The Vaults of Erowid, a site which covers psychotropic plants and herbs in exhaustive detail.
Bog Myrtle (Myrica Gale) is a natural insect repellent, among other things. It was used (along with other herbs) to flavor beer in the middle ages until "hops supplanted gruit herbs for political and economic reasons." (Wikipedia). Bog Myrtle itself isn't psychedelic, as far as I can tell, but various mixtures of gruit herbs could act as euphorics and some of them had hallucinogenic or deliriant properties, so the idea that the Berserkers were stoned on some kind of herbal drink when they went into battle isn't all that outlandish.
"Helpful for enhancing lucid dreaming and astral work generally, bog myrtle was a flavoring for a type of European beer known as gruit up until the introduction of hops. The other components of gruit (1) were yarrow and wild rosemary. Some say this brew was behind the Berserkers [sic]. In northern Europe, bog myrtle and yarrow have been ingredients in fermented drinks made from grain, honey, or fruit since the Iron Age, and it is still used in Scandinavia to make a liqueur called 'snaps.'" Source: Alchemy Works.
(1) Medieval brewers used a wide variety of gruit herbs in their beer.
If the berserkers were high on something, the most likely candidate is gruit beer, but if they were that drunk it's hard to see how they could function very effectively. Some sources I've found speculate that they were tripping on the psychedelic amanita muscaria mushroom, but the psychoactive ingredient in the mushroom is muscimol, which is described as a "sedative-hypnotic," i.e., a tranquilizer -- just the opposite of what you would expect. Also, I've never heard of a psychedelic that consistently produces outbursts of violent rage. If the berserkers were taking a drug, it sounds like it was a medieval form of PCP.
Were the berserkers mentally ill? Again, it doesn't sound like it. Their furies seem to have been situation-specific, only occurring during battles or perhaps when they were working in their villages. If they were crazy they would've been prone to go berserk for no reason at all, but none of the sources I've found describe them flipping out at random. So, unless they were elite warriors who ate some plant that drove them into a homicidal rage the most plausible explanation for their reported behavior is that the berserkers are simply characters from Old Norse mythology. In other words, maybe they never actually existed.
"Why do some animals eat or abandon their offspring? According to researchers, these might actually be forms of parental care. Their mathematical model shows that when overcrowding threatens offspring survival -- which often occurs due to spread of infection or competition for resources -- sacrificing a few so the most can live becomes the ultimate form of tough love." Source: Science Daily (2019).
Tough love. That's hilarious. Only a sociobiologist could argue with a straight face that eating your own children is a form of "parental care." Don't get me wrong, though. I can think of lots of good reasons for eating your own babies. Maybe you can't afford the quarter-of-a-million dollars it will cost to raise that cute little rug rat to the age of eighteen, or maybe you just want to stop their incessant babbling and howling.
This baby looks particularly tasty.
Another good reason to eat babies is to save the planet from the global warming crisis. As we all know, the world will end in a few months if we don't immediately dismantle our advanced industrial societies and drastically reduce the population.
The best reason to eat babies, though, is hunger. Jonathan Swift, the famous Anglo-Irish gourmet, pointed out that plump human babies around a year old are particularly succulent and nutritious:
"I have been assured by a very knowing American of my Acquaintance in London; that a young healthy Child, well nursed, is, at a Year old, a most delicious, nourishing and wholesome Food; whether Stewed, Roasted, Baked, or Boiled; and, I make no doubt, that it would equally serve in a Fricasie, or Ragoust." -- Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal (1729)
Swift didn't mention it specifically, but babies are also very tasty when they're barbecued.
"Ancient Egyptians believed that the mushrooms were plants of immortality and called them 'a gift from the God Osiris'. Egyptian pharaohs proclaimed mushrooms to be food reserved only for royalty; common people were not even allowed to touch them. Conservation of nature by ancient Egyptians was recorded on walls of temples and papyrus sheets. Egypt considered as the cradle of mycology when ancient Egyptians produced a number of hieroglyphic depictions of psychedelic mushrooms on temple’s walls and through hieroglyphic texts throughout the country." -- The Conservation of Mushroom in Ancient Egypt Through the Present, Research Gate (2016).
Note: The use of psychedelic mushrooms goes way back. According to Wikipedia, "Prehistoric rock art near Villar del Humo in Spain, offers a hypothesis that Psilocybe hispanica was used in religious rituals 6,000 years ago." This is the first I've heard about mushrooms being used in ancient Egypt, though. Psilocybin mushrooms seem to be pretty rare in Africa, but most of the sources I've run across say that the Egyptians grew and used them for ceremonial purposes, and there appears to be hard evidence to support this:
"The Egyptians, similar to Mesoamerican societies, created numerous forms of artwork depicting mushrooms, and had vernacular terms for the psychoactive varieties translating to 'sons of the gods' or 'food of the gods.' They believed that, since mushrooms do not sprout from a seed, they were placed on earth by the god Osiris; therefore their consumption was limited to the priesthood and upper classes (who were also thought to be descended from the gods). It has even been theorized by Egyptologist Stephen Berlant that ancient Egyptians cultivated these mushrooms on barley grain, showing how culturally and spiritually significant their use was." Source: Double Blind Magazine.
Note: This is beside the point, I guess, but the ancient Egyptians were wrong to call psychedelic mushrooms the "food of the gods." As everyone knows, there is only one food of the gods -- the incredible alkaloid known as Herakleophorbia IV, aka Boomfood, described in H.G. Wells' great book, The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth and dramatized in a 1976 movie which can only be called a masterpiece of acting and special effects.
Winemaking in Egypt goes back to the 3rd millennium BC, but growing grapes was never easy in that country's hot desert climate. Wine was probably a luxury item back then, too expensive to be a staple of the ordinary Egyptian's diet the way it was with the Roman, but red wine -- a color the Egyptians associated with blood -- had religious uses and various tomb paintings suggest that wine was important enough to be included in the list of essentials to be taken into the afterlife:
"Wine played an important role in ancient Egyptian ceremonial life. A thriving royal winemaking industry was established in the Nile Delta following the introduction of grape cultivation from the Levant to Egypt c. 3000 BC. The industry was most likely the result of trade between Egypt and Canaan during the early Bronze Age, commencing from at least the 27th-century BC Third Dynasty, the beginning of the Old Kingdom period. Winemaking scenes on tomb walls, and the offering lists that accompanied them, included wine that was definitely produced in the delta vineyards. By the end of the Old Kingdom, five distinct wines, probably all produced in the Delta, constituted a canonical set of provisions for the afterlife." (Wikipedia)
The ancient Egyptians also used wine as a kind of delivery vehicle for medicinal herbs:
"Chemical analyses of ancient organics absorbed into pottery jars from the beginning of advanced ancient Egyptian culture, ca. 3150 B.C., and continuing for millennia have revealed that a range of natural products—specifically, herbs and tree resins—were dispensed by grape wine. These findings provide chemical evidence for ancient Egyptian organic medicinal remedies, previously only ambiguously documented in medical papyri dating back to ca. 1850 B.C." -- Ancient Egyptian Herbal Wines, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (2009).