Red Wine as Consecration

Red Wine has been used for millennia as a means of consecration

“The force that through the green fuse drives the flower

Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees

Is my destroyer.

And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose

My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.”

— Dylan Thomas, 1914-1953

Consecration is the act of making something holy—an outward sign of the inward presence of God.

Red wine has been used in rituals throughout history as a symbol, and sometimes a cause, of consecration. Often because it is associated with blood, usually the blood of a sacrifice of one kind or another.

It is said by anthropologists that the earliest bands of humans out hunting felt the natural imbalance caused by humans killing other animals to eat. When they killed a boar say, or a deer, they would sacrifice one of the hunters to bring back the balance between humans and the world.

A warrior would often drink the blood of animals (or of their human enemies) because they believed the strength or qualities of the animal, or their enemy, would be taken up into their own bodies.

In that way, the warrior took on the attributes of what, or who, he had eaten and therefore became stronger or wiser or faster than normal. Some warriors supposedly achieved superhuman powers this way.

Now, I’ve got to imagine that blood drinking is a lot of trouble. And, it probably doesn’t fit the commonly accepted public flavor profiles. Besides, it’s in limited supply.

Grapes on the other hand, can be grown in one place and harvested year after year. Much easier on the hunters and the sacrifices both. Red wine, being more or less the color of blood, became a highly desirable substitute.

So for all of known history red wine has been a medium of taking on the power of the gods. It was believed to reestablish the balance between God and Mankind, bringing them into reconciliation with one another and placing the power of the god into the bodies of ordinary men.

The upside of all this drinking of blood and/or wine is that the resulting reconciliation becomes a celebration of the return of the joy of living. Not just regular, “damn I’m really glad I got pepperoni on that pizza,” but the ineffable joy of being kind of joy.

Hence, many of these rituals occurred around now, the Spring Equinox, when life was returning to the woods and the fields, and animals were giving birth in the Spring.

Wine oriented rituals of consecration are found in almost all religions, with the obvious exception of Islam.

Wine and the Sacred

In the Book of Numbers from the Hebrew Bible, 12 spies were sent into the promised land (the valley of Eshkol) and they brought back huge clusters of wine grapes to show how fertile the valley was. In Eshkol, Yahweh (God of the Hebrew Scriptures) was worshipped as a wine god.

https://alex20478.wordpress.com/category/uncategorized/

In the Old Testament, God (Yahweh) is wild and crazy already. He doesn’t seem to need additional stimulation. Drinking seems tautological.

Although later, maybe around the time of Hosea, he did absorb the local wine God Eshkol, whose name means “grape cluster”. The Jewish holiday Sukkoth was originally a local wine festival for Eshkol.

Yahweh’s personal position on drinking remains obscure, but His good friend Moses drank. Wine is a major part of Judaism and Jewish rituals even today.

Also, it is a major part, sometimes pretty much the only part, of the rituals of selected highlights of Judaism’s competitors, Pagans and Christian alike. Although on the whole, God in the Jewish Scriptures mostly doesn’t seem to notice wine, He did get very testy about alcohol from time to time.

Who can forget the most excellent party going on in honor of God’s ex-wife, the Canaanite Goddess Asherah, when Moses came off of the mountain and smashed all those perfectly good clay tablets?

Drinking was definitely involved. Also naked people. That seems to be a recurring theme in ancient wine drinking stories.

The Jews spend a lot of time in the Old Testament tearing down shrines to Asherah.

Given the number of shrines there were to tear down, it would seem Gods and Goddesses in downtown Canaan both drank back then.

The Promised Land indeed.

The most famous red wine of Hungary is Egri Bikavér, “Bull’s Blood”

https://www.rationalwine.com/review-31-hungarovin-egri-bulls-blood-2010/

The soldiers in the Roman Empire who were very busy persecuting the Jews and their neighbors, were also very big on drinking red wine. People were always trying to kill them after all. It’s stressful. They were especially partial to red wine because, well, you know, blood is red and soldiers deal in blood a lot.

Most Roman soldiers worshipped the Roman God Mithras who was born from a rock, and slayed a white bull with a scorpion clamped on his genitals. The bull’s genitals, not Mithras’ genitals.

The soldiers drank the blood of the bulls in underground caverns and washed it down with red wine.

I couldn’t make this stuff up. Mithraism was a major competitor to Christianity from roughly the first to the fourth century A.D. although I’m not entirely sure why.

https://www.christiantoday.com/article/pope.francis.explains.importance.of.wine.in.catholic.rituals.citing.jesus.first.miracle.of.turning.water.to.wine.in.cana.wedding/87983.htm

Speaking of drinking God’s blood, how about that Jesus?

He grew up in the wine country of Israel (Galilee) and knew all about wine. In fact he became the world’s most famous winemaker when he turned the water into wine at the wedding of Cana.

Jesus drank of course—you remember that whole Last Supper thing. He says quite clearly, “Drink ye all of this, this is my blood which is shed for you and for many for the remission of sins….”

Clearly the solution to sin is drinking God’s blood. And God’s blood is wine. Red wine of course. In this case, Kosher.

Roman Catholics and Greek Orthodox Christians both believe the red wine of communion becomes the blood of Jesus in your body, just like Jesus said. And bread turns into his flesh in your flesh. Just like the ancient hunters.

As a child, I found that yucky.

But, it does argue that wine in some way instigates new life in place of the old one that was taken in sacrifice. Red wine consecrates your body when you’ve been out doing things to it you really shouldn’t be doing.

The Ancient Greek and Minoan Gods drank heavily—and red wine was used in both societies to consecrate temples, sacred groves and, paradoxically, weapons.

Dionysios (Bacchus) himself was from Crete and taught the Minoans to plant vineyards and make wine. Red wine, since whites didn’t work out well back then.

From there, the cultivation of wine grapes spread to Greece and the rest of the ancient world. Dionysios was in fact, red wine itself. He was the essence of life— the bubbling up of fermentation was thought to be Dionysios bringing in magical powers to the otherwise mundane grape juice.

All of Dionysios’ rituals involved wine—again for the act of consecrating the human body, temples, weapons, statues and whatever had need of a touch of the sacred. The consecration of the wine brought whatever it came in contact with into alignment with God. Who was, in the case of Dionysios, wild, ecstatic and crazy as a loon.

The blood and body of the Greek God Dionysios was red wine itself. Dionysios was born of a human mother (Semele), died as an infant, and was reborn. He was a god that fulfilled the same purpose for the Greeks as Jesus did for Christianity.

https://www.greekboston.com/culture/mythology/dionysus/

And, don’t get me started on the Nordic Gods in Valhalla. Wretched excess I say. The main God Odin, flanked by his Ravens, ate nothing and drank only wine. No water or beer. No Diet Coke.

Viking children did drink beer everyday but I don’t think that had anything to do with God—mostly the water was bad. Mead (made from honey) was the drink of choice in Valhalla but they drank wine too, made from various fruits. Also imported German wines. At least the wealthy did.

In all these cases wine is used to purify and make ordinary things sacred. Usually by losing personal control of yourself and letting the greater forces in the world work through you.

Sometimes I suspect, God was not really involved.

Rebirth

The idea that red wine can somehow mitigate the distance between humans and All-That-Is and/Or Isn’t may just be wishful thinking on the humans’ part, but it’s been a deeply held belief since before history began.

I myself could, from time to time, stand a little reconciliation with the powers that be.

The media and television and films are obsessed with death. Shows with dead bodies, (and undead bodies—who doesn’t love a good zombie?), real life murder mysteries, wars both real and imagined, and the secret lives of serial killers are ubiquitous.

And of course, at this moment, there’s a lot of real death in the world and the news.

So, maybe a little nod to life is not such a bad thing around now. Maybe it’s worth taking a walk in a vineyard, or a garden or a forest and seeing what’s up with the earth this week. Winter’s over. Who knows what’s going on out there?

Life is slopping out of everything.

There is an old Aztec poem about tiny yellow flowers in the grass, growing up out of the blood and carnage of the battlefield. Even in translation it is startlingly powerful.

Just last month, a video from the war in Ukraine became its own poem, when a phone camera captured an old, Ukrainian baba (grandmother), scarf over her head in the freezing cold, who walked up to the Russian soldiers that had just destroyed her house and killed her family.

She took a handful of sunflower seeds out of her pocket and thrust them at the soldiers. “Here”, she said. “Put these in your pockets. Then, when we kill you, the flowers will grow from your body.”

Don’t mess with Grandma.

Life is tougher than you think.

The vineyards are flowering now

https://worldoffloweringplants.com/vitis-vinifera-common-grape-vine/

I know, white wines or rosé are usually associated with the new life of Spring. But, the Spring flowers are more than just new life, they are the consecration of the unthinkable.

So, I say, let’s lift a glass of red wine to Spring as well, and to the joy of the new life that lays beneath the surface of destruction around us everywhere.

You might even want to take a moment to hold still and stare at one of those Spring flowers for a few minutes so that you remember that like Winter, death too, will finally leave.

And, when it does, life is still there, being born again, and again, over and over until the end of time.

Stay well.