The evening explored the relationship between wine and psyche. By psyche I mean the sum total of all conscious processes on an individual and collective level. There has been a deep relationship between human consciousness and wine dating back to at least 6000 BC. Wine production started in Georgia and Iran and then spread in about 4500 BC through Greece and Crete to Europe.

One key Greek social institution was the symposium. This was not the dry lecture with questions and answers we know today; entertainment was provided in the form of music, games, songs and food was served with wine. A symposium was overseen by the symposiarch who would decide how strong or diluted the wine would be depending on whether the evening would be a serious philosophical discussion or one heck of a party! The following is a quote from the Greek symposiarch Eubulos,

“For sensible men I prepare only three kraters: one for health (which they drink first), the second for love and pleasure, and the third for sleep. After the third one is drained, wise men go home.”

We formatted our evening like a symposium hoping we would stay, as we did, in the more philosophical and artistic realms with the help of our friends Ed Dunsavage and Grant Ruiz on guitar, Yahya Nadler doing body poetry and Andy Phillips, the wine connoisseur. I was the resident philosopher. Andy expertly paired each of the six Greek wines with an artistic offering.

After our first taste of a Greek Gentilini Robola, Ed began the evening with a beautiful medley of jazz tunes invoking the presence of wine, both sweet and dissolving. After each artistic offering we had a minute of silence to drink in the effect of the music or body poetry along with the paired wine. Then I would make comments to understand the symbolic, mythological and archetypal dimensions of wine and the offerings. After Ed’s piece I planted the seed of symbolic thinking and its importance.

In ancient Greece there were two ways to think: logos and mythos. Logos consists of scientific discourse and inquiry and is related to the brain’s left hemisphere functions. Mythos is the realm of dreams and images, the depths of the mystery of existence and is related to the functions of the right hemisphere. Over the past several hundred years we have devalued and lost the importance of mythos. Thus we lose the sense of depth and meaning in our lives, what the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung called the spirit of the depths. Religious and spiritual dimensions are discounted, since they do not fit with scientific fact. The fundamentalist backlash present in our world today is partly due to the absence of mythos, of depth meaning.

.....to be continued - Rod Raphael Birney, MD