Some Ancient Shit

I found a page of some nice recordings of ancient Greek instruments, the aulos and the kithara (a bigger version of he lyre), recorded on Edison cylinders around the turn of the 5th century BC (from the day Socrates drank the hemlock). Emotional stuff. I especially like the last aulos recording. Very bluesy.

In addition, I did some research on an ancient drink called posset in the Middle Ages, which was a mixture of milk, wine, eggs, nutmeg, and sugar. Sounds like egg nog, right? Yes. And then they let it curdle and sit for a while and it forms these three layers and you eat it with a spoon and drink out the bottom alcoholic layer. Yummy. Sounds good.

But then there's this ancient Greek drink called kykeon that was made of wine or water and barley, goat cheese and herbs. Sounds pretty nasty. I'm hungry though so it sounds good. And apparently they would drink it each year at the Eleusinian Mysteries (which went on for 2000 years - must have been somethin'!), only some people think the barley was infested with ergot, a fungus, which produces some nasty compounds that are precursors to LSD and are way nastier, causing convulsions, burning in the limbs, uterine contractions (even in men!), hallucinations and even death. And there's a theory that ergot-infested rye was the cause of the hysterical behavior in young women that resulted in the Salem Witch Trials. And that the epic poem Beowulf is the memory of a quelling of a fertility cult based upon drinking of ergot whose preserved bodies have been found in bogs in Britain with ergot in their stomachs. Wow.

All in all, a very good Wikipedia session.