Artemisia Absinthium

Common Names Wormwood, absinthe, la Fee Verte, the Green Muse.

... that sage of the glaciers, absinthe!

—Arthur Rimbaud (letter to Delahaye)

As the term absinthe is used both as a synonym for "wormwood" and also as the name of the famous liqueur, we will use "wormwood" to refer to Artemisia absinthium, and "absinthe" to refer to the alcoholic beverage.

RelatedSpecies Artemisia vulgaris: mugwort (also called wormwood). Riparian, herbage full of vertue: nervine, stimulant, a wash for poison oak, protection against witchcraft, ghosts, thunder, and thieves.

Artemisia tridentata: sagebrush.

sweat-lodges: the sacred sage, horses, cowboys, campfires—

Artemisia moxa: used for moxibustion in Chinese acupuncture.

Artemisia dracunculus: tarragon.

Thujone, the major active ingredient of wormwood, is also found in cooking sage, Salvia qfficinalis; in tansy, Tanacetum vulgare; and in cedar trees, genus Thuja.

In addition to wormwood, absinthe (the liqueur) contains hyssop (Hyssopus offici-nalis), lemon balm (Melissa officinalis), fennel (Foeniculum vulgare), and anise (Pimpinella anisum). Some varieties contain sweet flag, Acornus calamus. Other absinthes include such herbs as coriander, veronica, marjoram, nutmeg, oregano, angelica, mint, chamomile, parsley, juniper, dittany, and spinach.

Taxonomy Family, Compositae. Munz, in A California Flora, states that Artemisia was the wife of Mausolus, King of Caria, but clearly the genus was named for the Goddess, as was recognized by Apuleius in the second century.

Earrings of the moon:

Artemis, goddess of wild things, chastity, fertility, and the bloody hunt.

Dian's bud is the plant that Oberon uses to reverse the effects of the love potion in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

artemisia tridentata artemisia tridentata

The genus is widespread in the Northern Hemisphere. Many species are medicinal; many have not been fully investigated. Artemisia is in the mayweed tribe, along with chamomile, yarrow, tansy, and coltsfoot.

Part Used Leaves.

How Taken As a liqueur, obtainable only with extreme difficulty. Absinthe is banned by most of the civilized world. Absinthe was legal in Spain until the end of the Franco reign, but is said to be impossible to obtain now, even there. Evidently the old Fascist "took it with him."

Absinthe is a clear bright-green liquid. As absinthe was bottled between 120 and 160 proof, it was rarely drunk neat, but usually diluted about five to one with water. More, because of the bitterness, absinthe was usually drunk sweetened with sugar. Since sugar is not very soluble in alcohol, a delightful ritual developed. A small amount of absinthe was poured into a glass. A special slotted spoon, with a flange, was placed on top of the absinthe glass and a sugar cube placed on the spoon. Then water was poured over the sugar cube, dissolving the sugar into the water, the water falling into the absinthe and mixing with it. Concentrated oils in the absinthe mix with the water and cloud, changing the color of the absinthe from a crystalline green to an opalescent yellow.

Green changed to white, emerald to opal; nothing was changed.

The man let the water trickle gently into his glass, and as the green clouded, a mist fell from his mind.

Then he drank opaline.

— Ernest Dowson, "Absinthia Taetra"

Wormwood may also be smoked. Ratsch (1992) reports that a Mexican species of Artemisia is smoked as a marijuana substitute. An Asian species of sagebrush, Artemisia nilagirica, is smoked by the Oraons of West Bengal for its hallucinatory effect (Pal and Jain 1989). The Zuni inhaled fumes of Artemisia caruthii to effect analgesia (Ott 1993). The sacred sagebrush of the Great Basin, Artemisia tridentata, is highly important in sweat lodge rituals. Jonathan Ott (1993) reports psychoac-tive effects from smoking Artemisia absinthium, an assertion that I have been able to verify.

ChemistryThujone, an isomer of camphor, CKJHAO, is the major psychoactive ingredient.

Although by count of atoms, thujone is like camphor and menthol, its geometry and bonding structure is strikingly similar to A tetrahydrocannabinol, THC A recent article in Nature suggests that the peculiar effects of absinthe may be related, neurologically, to the observed effects of Cannabis.

No, not the same, though the speed is reminiscent . . .

Besides thujone, wormwood contains absinthin, C30H40O6, one of the most bitter substances known.

The characteristic turbidity of absinthe when water is added to it is from the ter-penes, which are soluble in alcohol but insoluble in water, precipitating to form an emulsion. Absinthe is a drink of terpenes: thujone from the wormwood, fenchone from fennel, pinocamphone from hyssop, anethole from anise, and ci-tral from melissa. Thujone, fenchome, and pinocamphone are all ketones, isomers of camphor.

Effects Absinthe can excite sexuality, stimulate ideas and conversation, or dissolve the brain.

Difficult choices, indeed.

Absinthe is known as a narcotic, a stimulant, an aphrodisiac, a convulsant, and a hallucinogen. Medically, wormwood is an anthelmintic and febrifuge. Maurice Zolotow (1971) wrote that absinthe was without equal in counteracting airsickness and seasickness.

The Plant Artemisia absinthium has been known and used by herbalists since ancient times. The name wormwood comes from Old English/Old Saxon wermod, meaning something like "defend the mind." Because of the plant's efficacy as a vermifuge, the second syllable of the Middle English wor-mod was gradually assimilated into worm-od, and the word became worm-wooc

In Greek the plant was apsinthos (a\\iwQoq), the root of our word absinthe. Like wermod, apsinthos is 0.0.0., "of obscure origin," but may mean "no wasting," reflecting wormwood's power as a general tonic, as \|nvoo is Cretan for ()9ivco, "wasting."

Effects It's like when you have just forgotten what it was you were about to say: that instant. . . extended.

Like Cannabis sativa, Artemisia absinthium is a cognodysleptic. But the differences in absinthe's effects from both hemp and alcohol are distinctive enough to prompt us to place it in a new class, rhapsodica, on the path between inebriantia and excitantia. Absinthe again exemplifies the importance of admixtures. A lot depends on dosage, length of use, and intent.

In small doses wormwood is a nervine and a digestive tonic.

It does not idle in the stomach lie

But, like some God, give present remedy.

- Abraham Cowley, Of Plants

Wormwood is credited with curing chills, fevers, and bronchial ailments. Richard Burton recommended pillows stuffed with wormwood for insomnia.

artemisia absinthium, prom mattiol's commentaires, i 579

I began my absinthe experiments with wormwood. Whereas absinthe liqueur is not available in the United States, wormwood the herb is. I first wanted to determine the effects of wormwood alone, so I brewed a strong tea. Wormwood is said to be the second most bitter substance known, after rue, and, having drunk extremely bitter potions before, I purposely made the wormwood tea especially strong, as I knew that I would never be able to drink a second cup, even if the tea were weak. Now bitter concoctions are not uncommon on our Poison Path, but wormwood, ahhhhh, is the type for the class!

The first effect was loosening of the sinuses. Perhaps purging would be more accurate. Much stronger this way than the Japanese wasabi horseradish. If you are ever stuffed up and need to liquify the inside of your skull, wormwood is worth considering!

The paintings I had seen of absinthe drinkers almost always portrayed them sitting at a cafe on a boulevard, probably in the early evening, dressed, men in coats, women in hats and high collars, summer in the air, with the drinkers staring off into space, lost in reverie with a vacant inward stare, and a half-empty glass of absinthe on the table in front of them. As I finished my cup of wormwood tea, I prepared myself with notebook and pencil, in order to record the effects.

After some minutes, I noticed that I wasn't writing anything. I was just staring off into space. And the space was beautiful. The light was brighter. Mottled sunlight filtering down through the walnut tree. It was afternoon. The temperature was perfect. I could feel the air on my arms and face. I got up and opened the door, letting the light and the outdoors into the room. I lay down on a couch where I could look out the door and up into the tree.

It was nice. Everything was nice. The light was different, softer and more intense at the same time. I felt great, actually. I gazed around my studio and spent a lot of time looking at my paintings.

A little tightness in the head and around the eyes . . .

The convulsive properties of thujone are exactly like those of camphor. Large doses of camphor were once used to induce convulsions in mental patients, a technique that today has been replaced by the application of large jolts of electricity.

The Hevarja Tantra mentions drinking camphor in a ritual context.

george moore at the cafe de la nouvelle athenes, edouard manet, i 878

Pharmacology Complex, because of the multiple and synergistic effects of the various herbs and alcohol. In I7o8,johan Lindestolpe, in his book De Venenis (On Poisons), claimed that chronic use of wormwood caused permanent nerve damage, and said that his information was based on personal experience. M. Cadeac and A. Meunier, two French scientists, investigated all the ingredients of absinthe in 1889, attempting to determine the effects of each. They found that the ingredients fell into two groups: the epileptisants, including hyssop, wormwood, and fennel; and the stupefiants, anise, angelica, oregano, and melissa. They declared all of them dangerous. In 1980, Y. Millet (Conrad 1988) and five colleagues replicated some of the earlier studies, finding that both anise and hyssop oils, injected into rats, could cause convulsions. Millet's group characterized the effects of the anise injections as "like opium," and concluded that hyssop was the most dangerous of the herbal ingredients.

In both the 1889 and the 1980 studies, however, the quantities of essential oils injected into the rats were far higher than it would be possible to drink, even with a whole bottle of absinthe. The executive editor of Clinical Toxicology, Dr.

Richard Rappolt, reported in 1979 that the most harmful ingredient in absinthe was not wormwood or thujone, but alcohol (Conrad 1988). Jean-Charles Sournia (1990) goes further and states flatly that the ban on absinthe "had no scientific basis." One opposing viewpoint, by Wilfred Niels Arnold, was published in Scientific American in 1989. Arnold states that "the interdiction [on absinthe] was tardy but surely justified." Curiously, however, he cites no studies more recent than 1874 to back up his assertion.

But dosage is everything. According to Duke (1985), wormwood contains up to 1.7 percent essential oil, 3 to 12 percent of which is thujone. So we could say that wormwood averages 1.5 percent essential oil and 0.15 percent thujone, by weight, and probably be on the high side. By multiplication, that means that absinthe made from my recipe at the end of this section contains forty-five milligrams of thujone per liter of finished product. Mild convulsions in rats begin at around thirty milligrams of injected thujone per kilogram of body weight (the LD50 for mice is 134 mg/kg). I weigh eighty kilograms. Therefore, a minimally toxic dose of thujone for me is 2.4 grams, or fifty bottles of absinthe.

One glass of absinthe (forty milliliters of absinthe plus two hundred milliliters of water) contains less than two milligrams of thujone, WD of a minimally toxic dose. For a substance to be classified as GRAS (Generally Recognized As Safe) by the Food and Drug Administration, their safest category, the nominal serving

must be at least ioo times smaller than the minimum toxic quantity. It appears from my arithmetic that absinthe is GRAS by a factor of twelve.

Effects Absinthe makes the tart grow fonder.

- Ernest Dowson (Flower and Mass 1967)

L'Absinthe, bue un soir d'hiver, Eclaire en vert I'ame enfumee.

Absinthe, on a winter evening, Illumines the smoky soul in green.

- Charles Cms, "With Flowers and with Women"

Experiments with wormwood on animals seem to verify that it produces both auditory and visual hallucinations. In a scene reminiscent of H.P. Lovecraft, dogs injected with absinthe were reported to stand barking at blank walls.

The Plant Wormwood is said to have grown up along the path the serpent took when cast out of Eden. Ironically, when God next returned to walk on earth, some believe that it was wormwood that was offered to Him on the sponge in His hour of destiny, to ease His suffering.

There fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp And the name ofthe star is called Wormwood.

Others, however, say that wormwood was a gift of Diana, and was given to Chiron the centaur, the ancient master of leechdoms.

Artemisia is sacred to Vishnu and Shiva.

History In the ancient world absinthe was prepared as an infusion of wormwood leaves in wine and taken as an herbal tonic. Galen wrote of absinthe's virtues, as did Hippocrates and Pliny. Dioscorides included wormwood in De Materia Medica, and stated that it was an insect repellent as well as a vermifuge.

Wormwood is said to kill fleas, so I once rubbed down my cat with a handful of fresh wormwood leaves. The cat, ofcourse, immediately began cleaning himself. He licked, scowled, shook his head, and gave me such a dirty look that I never repeated the experiment.

I use sprigs ofwormwood in trunks and clothes closets, to repel moths and vermin.

Dioscorides recommended adding wormwood juice to ink, saying that it would keep mice away from the papyrus.

In the Middle Ages absinthe was used as a cure for flatulence, effective in dogs as well as in people. The English brewed an ale with wormwood, called purl. Samuel Pepys mentions wormwood ale in his diary.

He hath made me drunken with wormwood.

Absinthe, as we know it now, was invented by a country doctor in Switzerland, or so the folklore goes, in 1792. The doctor's name was Dr. Ordinaire, and his absinthe quickly acquired a local reputation as a cure-all. When the good doctor died, he willed his recipe to his housekeeper, for whom, it was said, he had an affection. The housekeeper passed the recipe on to her two daughters, who continued to make and sell the doctor's tonic. A certain Major Dubied was so impressed with the medicinal and aphrodisiacal virtues of the sisters' product that he bought not only a case of their bottles but also their recipe. One suspects that it was the aphrodisiacal rather than the medicinal properties that inspired the major's purchase, because he gave the recipe as a wedding gift to his son-in-law, Henri-Louis Pernod. Pernod began manufacturing absinthe on a commercial scale in 1805.

The good I do Venus herself will own, She, though all sweets, yet loves not sweets alone. She wisely mixed with my juice her joys, And her delights, with bitter things alloys.

— Abraham Cowley, OfPlants

French soldiers fighting in Algeria in the 1840s drank absinthe as a preventative against malaria and other diseases, and that sparked the first big surge in absinthe's popularity in France. (The use of absinthe as an antimalarial medication is not without scientific support. In 1990, M. Zafar and his associates found that alcoholic extracts of Artemisia absinthium given orally were nearly as effective in suppressing malarial Plasmodium in mice as was the standard antimalarial drug chloroquine. Other species of Artemisia have been proven effective even against quinine-resistant strains of malaria. Absinthe's efficacy as a febrifuge is also well supported.)

The soldiers brought the taste back to Paris, and absinthe drinking was well established by 1859, when Edouard Manet painted "The Absinthe Drinker." The painting created a small scandal, artists and intellectuals taking sides to attack or defend the painting, a controversy that foreshadowed the history of absinthe in France for the next sixty years.

The story of absinthe reads like a who's who in art and literature: Manet painted absinthe themes, and his friend Charles Baudelaire drank absinthe (though he later rejected it in favor of opium). Verlaine and Rimbaud seem to have drunk absinthe more or less continuously. Van Gogh drank absinthe. Oscar Wilde drank a lot of absinthe, and wrote about it. Ernest Dowson drank it. Poe drank it. Degas drank absinthe in the cafes and then painted absinthe, stirring up a scandal in London. There was something about light seen through an absinthe intoxication that seemed to feed the impressionists. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec drank absinthe, and painted it frequently. Paul Gauguin liked absinthe, and was somehow able to continue drinking it even in Tahiti. Alfred Jarry called absinthe "Holy Water," and his friend Pablo Picasso painted pictures of absinthe a number of times. Jack London liked absinthe.

What other psychotropic concoction, excepting perhaps wine, has produced as large a body of laudatory poems in the last two thousand years as has absinthe?

It was the national drink of France for two generations. It was finally killed by World War I and the growing forces of Prohibition, and was buried with the generation that loved it most.

The French military intelligentsia, if that is not an oxymoron, were strongly influenced by the philosopher Henri Bergson. They believed that France could win the war if they had enough elan vital. The inability of the French generals to understand the effect of machine guns on frontal assaults has always been an enigma to me, but so it was. The generals believed that the reason the assaults were failing was that the troops did not have enough elan. They sought the cause for this deterioration of French elan, and the culprit they found was absinthe. Absinthe was outlawed by martial law.

After the war everything was different. The French were more interested in American drinks like the cocktail than in the old-fashioned absinthe. The American expatriots, on the other hand, were very interested in absinthe and were able to obtain it through the black market. Ernest Hemingway, who liked absinthe enough to bring a supply with him back to Key West, agreed with many earlier writers by saying that absinthe was not a hallucinogen, but that it just rearranged one's ideas in new ways:

In this, the real absinthe, there is wormwood. It's supposed to rot your brain out but I don't believe it. It only changes the ideas.

- For Whom the Bell Tolls

the drinker, henri de toulouse-latrec, 1889

the drinker, henri de toulouse-latrec, 1889

So did absinthe get a bad rap? Yes and no. One of the spearheads of the antiabsinthe campaign was the defense plea entered by a man named Lanfray in 1906. Lanfray, an alcoholic who drank a bottle of wine and a bottle of brandy every day, as well as a couple of glasses of absinthe, had murdered his wife and family in a psychotic rage. His defense was that he had been rendered temporarily insane by the absinthe. Unlike Dan White, who beat his double murder rap of shooting San Francisco mayor George Moscone and supervisor Harvey Milk by claiming temporary insanity from eating "Twinkies," Lanfray was convicted. Nonetheless, the Prohibitionists used the case to successfully get absinthe outlawed in several cantons in Switzerland. Harry Anslinger availed himself of the same strategy thirty years later, when there was a similar murder in Florida, to prove that Cannabis transformed its users into killers.

Still, absinthe is clearly a poison. Whether it is more poisonous than the alcohol in which it is dissolved is certainly doubtful. Many inferior absinthes were being sold in France, some mixed from industrial alcohol and essential oils. Unscrupulous manufacturers would add copper sulphate, or worse, anti nony salts to the mixture to give it the characteristic green color and turbidity that real absinthe has. Heavy metal poisoning would be a certain result of ingesting such abominations, and it is likely that many of the horror stories about absinthe were caused by such toxic adulterations.

But none of this proves that absinthe is safe.

Correspondences Nicholas Culpepper assigns wormwood to Mars, perhaps because of the herb's warming quality.

Effects After the first glass you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see things as they are not. Finally, you see things as they really are, and this is the most horrible thing in the world.

- Oscar Wilde (in Conrad ig88)

Absinthe, mother of happiness, O infinite liquor, you shimmer in my glass pale and green like the eyes of the mistress I once loved. . . .

— Gustave Kahn, "Absinthe"

Whiskey and beer for fools; absinthe for poets; absinthe has the power of the magicians; it can wipe out or renew the past, and annul or foretell the future.

— Ernest Dowson (Flower and Mass ig6j) . . . It smelled like bottled summer.

— Barnaby Conrad (ig88), describing his first sniff of absinthe

Voesis When absinthe was outlawed in France and Switzerland, Pernod Fils was forced to make an absinthe without any wormwood. The closest product today to real absinthe is Pernod 51, which contains all of the original herbs except for the wormwood, the percentage of anise being increased to make up for it. It is possible to create a pretty good absinthe by simply adding the wormwood back in.

I say "simply," but there are several steps involved, and once mastered there is no reason not to make absinthe from scratch. There were always regional absinthes in France, and the mixture of herbs in the drink was never canonized completely, sweet flag, dittany, angelica, oregano, coriander, and nutmeg being included in some absinthes and not in others. My own recipe is based on that most excellent of formularies, Dick's Encyclopedia of Practical Receipts and Processes, and other nineteenth-century formularies.

To Prepare 30.0 g wormwood

Absinthe 8.5 g hyssop by Distillation 1.8 g calamus

6.0 g melissa 30.0 g anise seed 25.0 g fennel seed 10.0 g star anise

3.2 g coriander seed

Put the dry herbs in a large jar. Dampen slightly. Add 800 milliliters of 85—95 percent alcohol. Wine spirits make a better product than pure grain alcohol. Let it steep for several days — a week is better — shaking occasionally. Then add 600 milliliters of water and let the whole macerate for another day. Decant off the liquid, squeezing as much from the mass of herb as possible. Wet the herbs with some vodka and squeeze again. Recipe should give a little over a liter and a half of green liquor. It must then be distilled. Inferior recipes skip this step, but what they produce is not worthy to be called absinthe.

In the distillation, change the receiver when the distillate turns yellow: those are the faints. You can save the faints and add them to future distillations, but they will taint the flavor if added directly to the product. Just use the good stuff. The next step is to color and finish the liqueur by another round of maceration.

Color the distillate by again adding:

4.2 g mint

1.1 g melissa

3.0 g wormwood 1.0 g citron peel

4.2 g liquorice root

Let the herbs macerate for another three or four days. Decant, filter, bottle. You will probably want to carefully add some concentrated sugar syrup to the blend. The result will be a Swiss style absinthe of about 135 proof. Recipe makes one liter of absinthe.

To Prepare If you want to doctor a bottle of Pernod, you need the essential oil of worm-Absinthe wood or an alcoholic distillate of the same. Absinthe contains the equivalent of jrom Pernod about one ounce (thirty grams) of wormwood per quart or liter of liqueur. One way to prepare the absinthe is to macerate four ounces (120 grams) of dried wormwood in a quart (or liter) of alcohol, and then add a couple of cups of water and distill off the essence. The distillation, after the maceration, is vital. Whereas the distillate explodes into minty and aromatic flavors, the residue, with equal, nay, surpassing vehemence, explodes into astonishing, persistent bitterness. Add the distilled essence to the Pernod in a proportion of one to four.

If you can obtain the essential oil of wormwood (without the thujone removed), your job is easy: just dissolve 0.3 or 0.4 milliliters of the oil in some alcohol and add it to a quart or liter of the pastis.

But it is just about as easy to make the absinthe from scratch. Try it the old way first.

The Ally If you are sick, it will cure you.

If you are depressed, it will ease your soul — If you are smitten, desirous to touch the one so longbeyond your grasp, it will give you words and a long green hour, together, to speak them.

the absinthe drinker, edouard manet, 1862

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