The invention of wine and its meaning as a myth

Abstract

Hasan Özdemir's article, entitled, "Şarabi{dotless}n İcadi{dotless} ve Dört Vasfi{dotless}" (The Invention of Wine and Its Four Characteristics) is one of the most interesting applications of Historic-Geographic Theory. In this article, Özdemir carries out a thorough piece of research on "the tales of the invention of wine" which spread different regions of the world. He also tries to find an "ur-form" of them. In these tales, Noah decided to plant a vineyard and Satan came to see him and then Satan took a peacock, a monkey, a lion and a pig, slit their throats and sprinkled the vine-stock with their blood. For this reason, people who drink wine begin to resemble to those animals in proportion to their amount of drinking. In other words, as long as a person drinks a wine, he/she will resemble to a peacock, a monkey, a lion, a pig, respectively. Özdemir claims that these tales are formed in The Near East and then they are transmitted to Europe. On the other hand, they can also be analyzed by using Structuralist Theory. The theory depends on some "binary oppositions" such as "syntagm/paradigm or metonymy/metaphor" and each dichotomy includes two fundamentals of language. Claude Lévi-Strauss, who is regarded as one of the foremost structuralist anthropologists, generally reduces "myths" to binary oppositions. Lévi-Strauss asserts that myths have a meaning which is supposed to be conveyed to the new generations, but, according to Strauss, the meaning is always embedded in dichotomies like "syntagm/paradigm or metonymy/metaphor" which can be inferred by using the elements of the myths. Tales of the invention of wine have also a universal binary opposition: good/bad. The dichotomy, in these tales, is reproduced as Noah/Satan. While Noah tries to make beneficial things like grape-juice or grape molasses, Satan wants to make harmful things like wine. If a scholar wants to extend these kinds of binary oppositions to the animal world which is mentioned in these tales, he/she would discover another interesting dichotomy: peacock/pig. Since the pig is close to human beings in terms of genus, people become anxious when they look like pigs, however, the peacock is not close to a human being in terms of genus; therefore people do not care about resembling to peacocks. The closeness between pig and human being makes the difference between humans and animals blurred and this creates anxiety that human beings resemble pigs when they drink too much.