The Forbidden History of Europe - The Chronicles and Testament of the Aryan 501 continued to the sounds of holy music and dancing. Other food brought by the congregation,was blessed by the FEASTING, A TIME FOR Magi, and prepared by the Volkhva and other women folk who were present at the ceremony. JOY 20. A communal feast was shared out, with plenty of high spirited action continuing on into the wee hours of the night. Some days were so highly solemnised that work may have stopped for several days, thus allowing pilgrims to make their way to distant khrami, temples, groves, idols and springs of repute. A typical Persian ritual feast resembled a Scandinavian or Russian feast-come-banquet in many respects. The Persians; “..Indulge in lavish feasts which feature the heaviest possible drinking, for ... they carry on their most important deliberations when drinking wine; and they regard decisions then made as more lasting than those made when they are sober”. They dine in an extravagant manner, serving whole animals in great numbers and of various kinds; and their couches, as also their drinking-cups and everything else, are so brilliantly ornamented that they gleam with gold and silver”.2108 Many a Norsemen undertook to resolve important business matters and personal affairs during the course of a drinking session. This could have its drawbacks. Sometimes inopportune comments were made while inebriated. This might lead to conflicts the following day, where parties had been humiliated, or realised the rashness of any deals they had made, in the cold light of day. Other libations The following libations were drunk throughout much of Europe by the upper and lower classes in both pagan and Christian times, though prior to the conversion, these brews had a religious character, laden with magic. Brewers relied heavily upon the process of fermentation to achieve their intoxicating “holy” properties. Fermentation is itself caused by the addition of yeast, (a lichen-like fungi that converts sugars into alcohol) or flowers with yeast-like qualities. In areas where yeast was unknown, the emptying of communal spittle into the batch may have simulated the yeast fermentation process. Beriozovitsa Another Russian libation was Beriozovitsa.2109 To make it the Slavs milked birch sap, and this somehow underwent BIRCH SAP ALCOHOL a fermentation process as it stood in storage vats. Little else is known about the precise means of brewing birch-brew, but the method was probably of some antiquity. Mead Russian Church texts forever condemned the revelry of the mead parties which so characterised Mediaeval Russian social life. The Old Russian word for ‘mead’ was medovukha,2109 a honey-beer apparently brewed using yeast MEAD and hops. Based on the Scythian Haumavarka word form medovukha could mean “mead-wolf”. As it stands, the Old Russian and Slavic word med and variants of it (meaning “mead” or “honey”) are traceable to the Old Indian (madhu meaning “mead”), and the Avestan (madu, meaning “honey” or “wine”).2110 Obviously European mead, the drink of ages, had an Aryan genesis, and most likely possessed the same religious virtues that it had under the Indo-Europeans. As you will recall mead was profoundly connected with the worship of Indra. Finns drank Sima in the form of ritual mead during their Sima ceremonies, instead of a milk-based Soma libation. If Indra was the basis of the Aryan-pagan and Dualistic religions in Europe, then the warriors probably drank their libations from ceremonial buckets, just like Indra (Perun) did. Mead is also present in the Old Prussian as meddo, the Lithuanian and Latvian medus, the Gaelic mid (mead brewed with hops). Imported spices from India and beyond, such as cinnamon or nutmeg were probably mixed with honey, sacred spring water and boiled. Next it was allowed to cool off and mixed with yeast or some other fermentation catalyst. Later that day it was barrelled and stored for half a year. Mead was kept, not only in barrels, but also in underground storage pits where it could be withdrawn by the bucket-load, during prolonged festivities. Allusions to mead are especially found in Finnish folklore. Lemminkainen’s mother resurrected him after dredging his corrupted body parts from the river of the dead with a rake.2111 She sewed anew his sinews and bones, and he became whole once more. All that remained was to re-invigorate him with ointment; “a drop of mead brought 502 The Forbidden History of Europe - The Chronicles and Testament of the Aryan to anoint the weary one, to tend the ill-befallen”.2111 To brew the mead, she sent a bee out into the forests.2112 There it visited the gaily coloured forest flowers and came home laden with mead. It went off again to a “holy stream’s whirlpool” and got water for her there. The mother then cooked these ingredients; “in tiny cauldrons, in beautiful pans”.2112 The bee (“the little man”) then ascended up into the heavens to where MEAD BREWING IN THE the gods live, for “there is mead aplenty there ... with which once the Creator sang charms and ... anointed his brood injured KALEVALA by an evil power”.2112 “In pots of silver ... pans of gold, honey boiled in the middles, at the brims melted butter, mead at the south tip”.2113 “Forestland’s vat of honey, is fizzing as it ferments”.2114 Mead could also have medicinal properties. The Finns concocted honeyed ointments from the mead that dropped from the limbs of the oak tree. Together with oak bark, grass and hay the honey was boiled; a healing ointment made.2115 Beer Ritual beer first began its life in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, but later spread throughout much of Europe RITUAL BEER and Asia. Whether it had been independently discovered in these many different locations, or whether the brewing arts were taught to them is uncertain. Nevertheless it was but one style of ritual drink that formed the backbone of their pagan religious life, especially amongst those who could not drink Haoma or Soma for most of the year. As with mead, beer was normally drunk to excess by the warrior breeds, who treated most sacred intoxicating drinks with some slight irreverence, just like Indra (Perun) their idol, with his gut full of Haoma and beer dregs which he sculled by the bucketfull. As part of the beer-making process, barley was soaked in lake or creek water and allowed to ferment in barrels stored in the warm environs of a temple sanctuary, kept temperate by the combustion of an eternal fire. Once converted into malt it was dried out, pulverised, mixed with hot spring water, mashed, and these remnants were then mixed with boiled and filtered hops water. The application of yeast to the batch now caused the enhanced fermentation of the brew, which was then further strained to remove sedimentation and stored ready for use in barrels. Non-ritual beer was made by suitably skilled person’s using secret recipes too precious to tell. In these special brews Volkhvy and learned brewers probably added a few extra goodies such as wormwood, or the juice of mushrooms to the vats, for a bit of extra kick. During Summer the barrels were probably stacked beneath the “life-giving Sun”. Hops, a principle constituent of beer appears in the Russian as khmel’, Bulgarian khmel, Serbo-Croat khmel, Polish HOPS chmiel, Slovenian hmelj, Czech chmel.2116 These supposedly come from a Middle Greek word. Hops also appears in the Old Icelandic as humli, Anglo-Saxon hymele, Middle Latin humulus, and Middle Low Germen homele.2116 The Kalevala tells us a little about Finnish beer making, and the attendant mythical and religious aspect to it. 2117 Firstly they sacrificed a great bull by a downward swing of the club, preceding the beer-brewing.2118 Hops were cultivated by trailing them up the sides of trees, and “Lord Luck sowed barley”.2118 Though the Kalevala adds that hops were not grown in the lands of the Finns,2118 and so were evidently imported from hitherto unidentified locations. When it was time for the brewing “hop called out from the tree, barley spoke from the field-top, water from Kaleva’s well” asking to share each other’s company, for they had become bored.2117 A female “beer-smith” set to work.2117 On a promontory, “on a fleeting Summer’s day” (ie; at a certain time after the Summer solstice) she brewed the beer in a “birch tub”, with well stoked fires beneath ... “six grains of barley, seven hop catkins, of water eight ladlefuls; she put the pot on the fire and brought the stew to the boil”.2117 Evidently the ratios used were six of barley, eight of water, and seven of hops. In this tale the beer-smith wonders how she can ferment the mushy beverage. In vain she tries various agents; pine needles and cones from the spruce tree; chips of wood from the floor; bear spittle. None of them started the THE BEER-SMITH TRYS fermentation. Lastly she tried “mead-sweet grass” and “golden flower petals ... the golden grass”. The latter agent seems MANY ADDITIVES, TO SEE to have been the dandelion, which the ancient Greeks also used for the same purpose. “Now the beer chose to ferment, IF THE BEER WILL the young drink grew up in the grooved cask of new wood”. “The fair brew was maturing lying underground” in pits where FERMENT the casks were kept at the required temperature, by surrounding the barrels with stones specially heated in “beer- The Forbidden History of Europe - The Chronicles and Testament of the Aryan 503 fires”.