July Links 2009

Stumbled across this old legend of how tobacco came to be and it was just too cute not to post. It’s attributed to Holland, of all places, and shows a superb disregard of historical fact with a mythological setting that’s a bit of a headscratch but probably no more so than the average Michael Bay movie, which makes me suspect a sailor might be have been involved. My own contribution to the saga is in italics¹:

One day Jupiter invited all the gods to Olympus for a party. There was to be drinking, feasting, merry-making. And Dancing. Lots of dancing as it turns out. Gods don’t exhaust easily. Vulcan, who had a crippled leg, felt a bit embarrassed about not being able to dance, so he sat alone in a corner, smoking his pipe. He’d only come for the sake of his wife. Working a crowd wasn’t his forte, but Venus thrived when surrounded by people and he couldn’t stomach the idea of a century or seven of listening to her overly loud sighs and strategic crying if they missed this.

So he smoked in a corner, watching his kid brother — Mars of the gorgeous hair and cruel mouth — twirl and spin Venus around the room. Vulcan sat, fogotten, smoking and smoking and smoking until finally the smoke was so thick the gods couldn’t see one another and Jupiter roared, “Who is making this fog that stinks like my dead father’s testicles!”

It was only a matter of moments before Jupiter would sweep through the smoke and find the only being in attendance with a pipe emitting smoke.

Vulcan had 2 choices — 1) he could dump his pipe in a nearby pot plant. But he just knew the damnable thing would be whispering to his auntie Ceres later that night. And she at present was on the wrong side of that peculiar cycle where she either admired the beauty of the trinkets he fashioned in idle moments and revolutionary utilities of the creations and implements his rough hands crafted or she loathed him for ripping apart her earth in search of more metals to work on and boiling her rivers with the scorching offal of his forges; 2) he could leave the pipe on a table and pretend he hadn’t seen who put it there. But the table was covered in a cloth spun by his mother, and cloth burned easily. He couldn’t bear the thought. Even if it was her hand that flung him from the mountain to the ground, the soil and stone that so brazenly shattered an immortal knee forever,  it was also her tears that was his only company all the cold, lonely way down. Or perhaps it was simpler than that, the simple fear of mother’s hand casting him away that was greater than a son’s fear of his father’s wrath.

Vulcan spent so much time pondering all this shite that inevitably Jupiter cleared the smoke and caught the culprit, aka him. Jupiter slapped the pipe from his son’s hand and it fell to the earth where it shattered, scattering unburnt seeds the world over. Soon after it rained, the seed lived and this is how the gods brought man the holy plant²,  Tobacco.

~The End~

Also found a few more origin myths of tobacco — more grounded with the peoples who historically developed the holy plant and these accounts are devoid of my own interjections.

(Since I’ve already fabulously embarked on a post of useless trivia, it’s worth remarking that nicotine is named after one Jean Nicot, a French scholar of the 16th century who passionately crusaded for the holy plant’s medicinal qualities. He made a convert of Catherine de Medici, who championed tobacco. Nicot also compiled one of the first French dictionaries.)

I love origin myths. Creation myths are cool? But origin myths, the tales we tell regarding the simplest things is the most special and imaginitive of all forms of invention.

Never fails to awe, humble and entertain.

This is where and how and why storytelling began.

1. hey, the point of these stories is not to preserve or remember them but to continue the yarn [↩]
2. I kid you not, this is actually how it’s written in the account I read [↩]