Among the most common and popular foodstuffs that permitted the transition from a human condition on
Among the most common and popular foodstuffs that permitted the transition from a human condition on the verge of the unlivable to a drugged and paranoid dimension was poppy seed bread…In areas where it was cultivated, even the flour of hemp-seeds was used in the kitchen to prepare doughs and breads which ‘cause the loss of reason’ and ‘generate domestic drunkenness and a certain stupidity’. One could doubtless regard this as having been directed not so much from above (as is sometimes supposed), as desired and sought by the masses themselves, consumed as they were by disease, hunger, nocturnal fears and daytime obsessions.The collective journey into illusion, followed by ‘domestic drunkenness’ – with the help of hallucinogenic seeds and herbs, arising from the background of chronic malnourishment and often hunger – helps to explain the manifestation of collective mental delirium, of mass trances, of entire communities and villages exploding into choreal dancing. But it could also be the path which allows us to catch a glimpse of a two-sided mental model of the world, born under the ambiguous and equivocal sign of dualism, conditioned by a hallucinated and altered awareness of reality, where the layers are overturned, the universals reversed, the world ending up head-over-heels, with head on the ground and feet in the air. The result of an altered measuring of space and time, based on a non-Euclidic geometry and a magical, dreamlike perspective where the relations of propositions are regulated by different instruments of verification and measure from those employed in the cultural areas where classical logic predominates, which are none the less not able to separate themselves totally from contamination introduced by the ‘culture of hunger’.Piero Camporesi - Bread of Dreams: Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Europe. University of Chicago Press ‘89(1607 Pieter Brueghel the Younger - The Wedding Dance) -- source link
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