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By Root 1249 0

what other determining factors might exist (not every pregnant woman who drinks to excess will produce a child with fetal alcohol syndrome), so people figure it is better to be safe than sorry, and caution no alcohol at all. But I want you to consider how many people you know personally whose lives were harmed by their father’s drinking while they were growing up, as compared to how many people you know whose lives were affected by anyone’s mother’s drinking alcohol during pregnancy. In the thousands of years of recorded history, in countries where they drink a lot, have we heard any association of the mother’s drinking wine or beer or even scotch during pregnancy as correlated to the children’s intelligence, success, and happiness? How about the father’s drinking during a person’s childhood? So why don’t the labels say: “If you are a man and live in a family, it is advised that you refrain from alcohol consumption to prevent lifelong emotional scars on your children.”?

This is about our society being much more comfortable limiting the liberty of women than it is limiting the liberty of men. But after all, it is just advice. Why do the women take it so seriously? They know that the Irish, the French, and the Russians have produced almost all the great novels, and they give their pregnant women beer, wine, and vodka, respectively. Many of today’s mothers-to-be also know that their own mothers, and their husbands’ mothers, drank throughout their pregnancies—Pink Squirrels and hot toddies just as often as they wanted. The whole thing is crazy. Alcohol is our culture’s dominant legal drug. It has a lot of drawbacks. A mother who reports on a questionnaire that she resorts to our culture’s big drug several times a day is also going to correlate with kids that have some difficulties, for other reasons. Scientists keep shocking themselves by finding ever smaller amounts of reported drink that correlate with kids having slightly lower IQs, but you have to think about what else you might be learning from a woman who is willing to say on a questionnaire that she drinks every day. I’m not telling you anything you don’t know already. So why does the government put that warning on the bottles, and why do the women adhere to it far more rigorously than they adhere to any other rule about drinking or eating that they have ever been told? Many pregnant women wouldn’t take a sip of champagne on New Year’s Eve. Why? Because this is Demeter stuff. Let no distilled grain pass your lips for precisely nine months, and unto you will be born a healthy child. Amen.

The last Greek festival I promised you is not about fertility; it is about living forever. In the last stage of frenzied Greek parties, after the classical age of philosophy and the breakdown of democracy, finally, the guys get to be part of the bacchanal. After Alexander the Great, the Greek world got more cosmopolitan and the severe division between men’s and women’s spheres began to slacken. At this point in Greek history we suddenly see women included in paintings of fancy dinner scenes, and ideal love begins to be that between a husband and wife. Mystery-religion ceremonies—most famously, the Eleusinian mysteries—started as female but came to be a very heated coed escapade. Many husbands and wives were initiated together. Mystery religions were most popular with urban sophisticates. There was darkness and dancing, wine and drugs, esoteric rituals and liturgy. With the men involved, the key theme no longer had mostly to do with children, motherhood, and bountiful crops. Now it had to do with life after death; indeed, the mystery religions were a major source of modern belief in an afterlife. The other sources of this belief are Judaism, Platonism, and Buddhism. And of all these, the afterlife imagined by the mystery religions was the most personal: that is, you yourself were to survive death, as yourself, and it would be an almost physical existence full of insights and delights. I don’t think the men caused the concentration on the afterlife, or that a switch of interest from birth