
When Howard Carter opened up King Tut’s tomb, he found board games, a trumpet, a wardrobe, and underwear with his name embroidered into it (word has it that thugs in the afterlife will steal your undies). He also found jars of, well, Tut, food, and booze. Wine, both red and white. All of these things were meant to accompany and assist Tut on his long journey into the afterlife. I only hope they left him a few Advil and a tube of Pringles.
An old Polka song explains, ‘In Heaven there is no beer, that’s why we drink it here.’ Aside from being a brilliant argument to one’s soberer family members for sipping on earthly nectars, this sentiment does seem to brush up against the thinking of ancient cultures.
Alcohol is commonplace at ancient tombs and death rites. The Sumerians believed that their dead went to a dark and dusty cave called Kur, where they wallowed in terrible thirst for eternity. To quench this thirst, Sumerians poured libations into the ground. Akin to how we ‘pour one out for a homie’ the Sumerians took it more literally and put clay tubes into the ground and poured beer through to their ancestors. This tradition carried over to the Greeks and Romans. Everyone in Hades was confused, thirsty, and irritable. They passed the time playing games that their relatives had put in their tombs. The Greeks would thus pour drinks into the dirt to refresh their friends and loved ones in the afterlife. This was no doubt appreciated by the Greeks whose relatives had left them with Monopoly.
In ancient China, people were buried with beer so they could still have a drink in the afterlife. These days, on Tomb Sweeping Day, a communal day of cemetery upkeep that takes place more often than I clean my kitchen, custom states that people bring their relatives beer. That is, of course, unless they went to Diyu, a hellish maze of death and torture that bad people go to (like our hell or the DMV). They don’t get beer. In fact, they get eviscerated, decapitated, mauled by tigers, and set afire until their bodies dissipate. But don’t worry, they regenerate in to their original physical form so they can go through the maze again. Sort of like the worst video game ever.
The Chinese are not the only to juxtapose alcohol in the afterlife to death. Vikings who die gloriously in battle went to Valhalla, an eternal beerhall where the honorable dead drink mead for eternity from the golden udders of a goat named Heiðrún. Hopefully part of the entrance fee isn’t pronouncing the golden-uddered goat’s name correctly. Those who don’t die gloriously in battle – not bad people, mind you, but just didn’t die in battle – go to a place called Hel. Yeah. You might know this one. It’s a dark, cold, miserable place where there is exactly, yep, no beer and no mead. No word on whether Valhalla revelers get a night in Hel now and again just for a quiet place to sleep it off. I have a feeling these questions weren’t asked much in Viking culture.
There’s no written record as to how the first lucky person or Neanderthal came out with alcohol, but it’s likely it was an accident. Beer was bread, the only difference was fermentation, which likely occurred by accident when grains were left too long and began fermenting. No matter, the earliest evidence we have for purposeful beer-making activity is in around 13,000 BCE and comes from the Raqefet Cave in the Carmel Mountains in northern Israel and Raqefet Cave. Archaeologists found fermented grain residue in a Natufian burial site inside the cave, which suggests they were making beer-like drinks over 13,000 years ago. The Natufians were semi-sedentary hunter-gatherers, and this discovery suggests they may have fermented grain into beer for ritual, magic, and religious purposes. No doubt that
It’s not surprising that ancient cultures linked alcohol to death and the afterlife. The sheer intoxicating effects of alcohol must have lent it a mythical and mystical aura. Cultures like the Celts believed that drinking brought you closer to the dead and the afterlife and great quantities of it were probably drunk on Samhain, the day of the year the spirits are supposed to be their most accessible.
Some cultures didn’t wait for death to offer intoxicants to its departed or, in this case, it’s soon-to-be-departed. The mummy of a 16-year-old Incan girl known as ‘the maiden’ was found in a cave 6,739 meters up on Mount Llullaillaco in Argentina. Thought to have been a sacrifice, she died about 500 years ago. Toxicology reports show that not only did her blood have high levels of coca and alcohol, but that they were much higher in the last months of her life. This suggests she had taken part in rituals to prepare her (in many ways) for her sacrifice. And, though the whole idea of a young girl being chosen for sacrifice over, say, a Republican politician, does sound ghoulish, she was intoxicated when she died and probably did so very peacefully.
Pouring beer into the ground for loved ones might sound a bit odd, but of course we do something like this nowadays – pouring one out for a friend or leaving an empty dinner plate for dead relatives are an extension of this tradition. Also, when I’m gone I hope that my friends will spill some beer for me to enjoy on my dusty post-life travails. That is, of course, if they’re not there waiting for me.