In Heaven There is no Beer
..that's why we drink it here.
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. 26 jars of white wine, some whose labels name the maker, were meant to 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 sipping on earthly nectars, this sentiment does seem to brush up against the thinking of ancient cultures.
Alcohol is commonplace at ancient tombs and places of funerary rites. So, it seems we’ve been sending off our friends with a drink for thousands of years. Most early cultures viewed the afterlife as a arduous journey taken through a hot dry place. The Sumerian dead went to a dark and dusty cave called Kur, where they wallowed in terrible thirst for eternity. To quench this thirst, their family poured libations into the ground. They did this literally by putting clay tubes into the ground and pouring 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 loved ones in the afterlife. This alcohol then eased the tension caused by those afterlife games of 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, people also bring their relatives beer. That is, unless they went to Diyu, a hellish maze of misery and torture that bad people go to (like our hell or the DMV). They don’t get beer. Instead, they get eviscerated, decapitated, mauled by tigers, and set afire until their bodies literally dissipate. But don’t worry, they regenerate to their original physical form so they can go through the maze again. Sort of like the worst video game ever. For eternity.
The Chinese are not the only culture whose access to alcohol in the afterlife depends on your during-life actions. 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, just those who didn’t die in battle – go to a place called Hel, whose gist you can probably quickly grasp. It’s a dark, cold, miserable place where there is exactly, you guessed it, no beer, no mead, and no golden udders. No word on whether Valhalla revellers 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 record as to who the first lucky person was to come out with alcohol, but it’s likely it was an accident. If they didn’t have a god before they discovered beer, they surely had one after. After all, whose name would they implore into the ground in the earth’s first hangover. Beer was bread, the only difference was fermentation, which probably occurred naturally and by accident when grains were left too long in certain conditions. What does become clear is that alcohol – beer and wine – developed independently in various early cultures and became important to them.
A lot of evidence suggests that alcohol was often used in funeral rituals. This isn’t surprising, as alcohol surely took on a mystical quality to these people. Its ability to change their perception of themselves and the world around them would have set beer apart from other food and drink. One minute you’re drinking a bowl of coarse oatmeal, the next you’re showing off for Mog, the hot lady who lives in the cave next door, and then challenging all the dire wolves to a fist fight. Surely someone said to someone else: let’s make more of this. And then let’s invent pizza.
The earliest evidence for purposeful beer-making activity comes from the Natufian culture around 13,000 BCE. The Natufians were semi-sedentary hunter-gatherers who lived in the Carmel Mountains in northern Israel. In Raqefet Cave, archaeologists found fermented grain residue at a site with more than thirty graves. This all suggests they – at least to some degree – made beer for magic, ritual, and religious purposes, and sent their fallen friends off on their final journey with a tasty beverage. What specifically those beliefs were, we don’t know.
In some cultures, intoxicants were not given to the dearly departed as much as the soon-to-be-dearly-departed. The mummy of a 13-year-old Incan girl known as ‘the maiden’ was found in a cave near the summit of Mount Llullaillaco in Argentina. She was sacrificed around 500 years ago in a ritual called Capacocha and toxicology reports show that her system took in high levels of coca and chicha (maize beer) in the last year of her life, which then peaked in the last month of her life. The beer and coca would have served to relax and her; no deity wants a stressed-out sacrifice. And though I have happily enforced a lifelong advocation of not giving cocaine or corn beer to children, this ghoulish ritual would have ensured a tranquil death and hopefully one not filled with terror. So when she went on that journey, it was probably peaceful. And, hopefully, whenever she got to wherever she was going, someone gave her a drink from a golden udder.
So, what to drink in honor of 15,000 years of drinks dedicated to the dead?
Beer.
Beer was the most common beverage spilt into the ground for those in the afterlife. It was meant to quench the thirst of those on a mysterious journey through a dry and dusty land – to what? Maybe a land of milk and honey. Maybe a goat with a weird name. Hopefully not a maze in China.
Choose a beer that you drink when you have been playing sports or mowing the lawn and you need a good thirst quencher. A beer whose bottom you’re going to point to the ceiling as you guzzle it from the bottle. What you would want on a long and arduous journey through a dry and dusty mysterious land.
Ingredients
- Beer
- A glass (optional)
- A snack
Instructions
Open the beer and drink it like you’ve been thirsty for a decade. Drink to those who have gone before you, those who would kill for a sip of beer right now. Then go into your yard and pour some into the ground for them.