Had the Ancient Greeks distilled beer, the Olympian god could have been embodied as byne pneuma, the spirit of malted barley, or hydor zoes, water of life, comparable to anglicised whisky in Ancient Greek.
The Greeks did distil fiery wine, oinos tou thymou, which featured in the Dionysian mysteries as fire displays in purification ceremonies, as part of his origin story. In 408 BCE, Euripides wrote of the Dionysian rituals in Bacchae, reporting, “They carried fire blazing upon their curls (heads), and it did not burn them.” Scholars speculate that classical writers referenced flammable liquids in these theatrical events, employing alcoholic vapours to create a spectacle of flames from crude distillations on an ambix or mastarion, an ancient Greek bronze alembic still. Seven decades later, Aristotle wrote in Meteorologica, “Ordinary wine possesses a kind of exhalation, and that is why it gives out a flame,” further unmasking Greece’s archaic distillation methods. Aristotle’s lack of understanding of the invisible alcoholic vapours did not feature in his four terrestrial elements of fire, air, water, and earth, nor his pneuma or ether, the incorruptible and divine fifth substance permeating the celestial realm.
Roman philosophers Latinised Aristotle’s pneuma as quintae essentiae — the fifth element, which astrophysics now refers to as quintessence or dark matter energy. The invisible cosmological enigma fills more than 90 per cent of the universe.
Medieval European alchemists and distillers sought the elusive quintessence in their quest for the philosopher’s stone, aiming to transmute ores into gold, or distil fermented liquids into medicines and potent recreational beverages. Pyrotechnical improvements to Greek and Islamic alembics allowed Western distillers to achieve fractional distillation of ethanol, producing safe alcohol for consumption. Distillers described this distilled liquid as aqua ardens (burning water, 1160s), aqua vitae (water of life, 1270s), spiritus (1280s), and alkool (1520s). As distilling was adopted into different cultural languages, aqua vitae’s lingua franca was exchanged for vernacular words: Gaelic uisce-betha (1405), French eau de vie (1690), and English hotte waters (1500s) and malt spirits (1690). Grain was the primary source for the manufacture of proto-whisky in the British Isles, where barley was preferred. In North America, corn and rye were the predominant grains, yielding potable liquor from their soil and toil.
People and places connected with whisky were bestowed with cultural and geographic names that turned out to be linguistic chimeras. Bacchus-worshipping Romans referred to Ireland as Scotia and Gaels as Scotti. In the late seventh century, the Scotti tribes from Ireland invaded the Hebridean islands and western North Britain, subjugating the earlier Gaelic-Brittonic inhabitants, to form the Kingdom of Dalriada. By the 11th century, what the English called Alba or Roman Caledonia became known as Scotland. Ireland’s usquebaugh eventually gained popularity and became known as Scotch, the spirit of Scotland. The Gaelic and English diaspora that crossed the Atlantic Ocean fashioned whisky into a distinctly American spirit, mashing native corn into bourbon. Bourbon was named after the royal dynastic French family that believed in absolute monarchy, who ironically helped fund the American revolutionaries in their War against the English Crown.
Since ancient times, Dionysus was shortened to Denis. Paris’ first canonised bishop was Saint-Denis. Later, under his Anglo-Norman family, they carried the Saint-Denis lineage to England, which anglicised to Sidney and the nominative, Sydney. This mythological god lives on as one of the world’s great cities in a country where whisky has been the leading spirit for the past 140 years.
Sydney proved an apt geographic determinism of Dionysus, where distilled spirits were the primary means of commercial exchange during the colony’s inebriated first four decades, and where whisky distilleries have peppered the city for more than 200 years.
