by H. E. Jacob
Wood goes on to draw the following momentous conclusion: “If the caffeinized muscle always does better work, without having to pay for this in any other way than by the natural onset of fatigue in due course, we are compelled to recognize that caffeine does not merely intensify the vigour of muscular contraction, but also enables the muscles to act more economically—in a word, to do more work with the same expenditure of energy.”
This law, a definitive gain in the economics of the human labour process, was supplemented in 1925 by the work of Allers and Freund, who showed that coffee is an energizer of the brain no less than of the muscles. They found that the processes of acquiring knowledge were greatly facilitated by the drinking of coffee, but, on the other hand, that the reproduction of what had previously been learned was nowise furthered. (This reproduction is, rather, interfered with by a superfluity of new images and ideas.) The experiments also showed that in abstract thinking the visual elements of thought became more conspicuous. Furthermore, the intellectual elements of thought grew more pregnant, while the power of detailed expression was facilitated. The description of a movement, for instance, contains a larger number of optical subsections. “Sensory and conscious associations moved into the foreground while automatic associations passed into the background. Thus coffee is able to promote the brain’s power of effecting combinations. Where we have to do, however, with the reproduction of data previously stored in the memory, with the recalling of matter already learned, coffee would seem to be a hindrance rather than a help.” It would be hard to give a more vivid description of the “creative and liberative” power that coffee exerts upon the brain. This brilliant, rebellious, anti-conservative influence has made coffee, throughout its history, a harbinger of storms.
What, however, are the hundred thousand human beings studied during the twentieth century by Hollingworth, Wood, and others, in comparison with the countless millions who, since the beginning of the modern age, at first on the coast of Araby and thereafter in all quarters of the world, have been drinking coffee? Coffee has changed the surface of the globe! The muscular and cerebral stimulation and transformation produced in mankind by coffee have transfigured the visage of history.
For this remains unquestionable. If today the city of New York, with its skyscrapers and its indefatigable swarms of human beings, differs so greatly in aspect from Rome in the year 1300, there are, no doubt, many reasons for the contrast; but one of the most important is this, that since the discovery of coffee the human working day has, theoretically, been expanded from twelve hours to twenty-four.
Throughout classical antiquity and the Middle Ages, the only drugs known to have a powerful action upon the nervous system were narcotics and depressants. (Physiologically considered, alcoholic beverages are essentially narcotics, or stupefacients!) “Denarcotizers” had not been discovered. No pure stimulant was known to those who sustained the civilization of classical days and of the Middle Ages; nothing that could keep the body bright and alert when it was craving for sleep.
The discovery of coffee was, in its way, as important as the invention of the telescope or of the microscope, without which we should know little of the incredibly vast and nothing of the incredibly small. For coffee has unexpectedly intensified and modified the capacities and activities of the human brain. For thousands of years, until the discovery of coffee, work always stopped when the worker’s body grew tired. But the cæsura of sleep, which ensued upon fatigue, changed the essential nature of the work; it was no longer the same man who resumed work after the interruption of sleep, not the man who had begun the labour process. Before the discovery of this stimulant, every kind of “differential” work, every task that needed extreme accuracy, extraordinarily minute measurements, was impossible, except for those few persons of altogether exceptional will-power who have existed in every century.
This is the marvellous fact, that since the discovery of coffee vast masses of persons who are far from being geniuses have found within their own brain-boxes a “docile domestic animal which has many of the capacities of genius.” Mathematics, chemistry, physics, the whole group of sciences belonging to the philosophico-mathematical category—above all, medicine and its ancillary disciplines—were, in classical antiquity, studied and practised, furthered and understood, only by a restricted number of persons, because, when human society was under the influence of wine, “the anteroom of sleep,” a great majority of cultured persons were averse to intellectual research. Bacchic civilization, the cult of eloquent drunkenness, switched most persons of culture on to a different road.
Analytical thought, which, in contrast with synthetical thought, has been the main characteristic of civilization since the opening of the modern era, is mainly attributable to the generalizing influence of coffee upon thought itself. Without effort, today, countless persons, in numberless professions, are engaged in “differential” activities, which in antiquity were possible only to such outstanding geniuses as Archimedes and Hero of Alexandria.
A cup of coffee is a miracle.
A miracle like a musical harmony, a wonderfully compounded assemblage of relationships.
Although our sense of taste is no less acute than our hearing, our gustatory nerve would react to pure caffeine, the chemical substance with the formula C8 H10 N4 O2, not at all or only to report a faint and uninteresting bitter sensation. It is the fats and the mineral substances that impinge upon the taste-buds, and those that, volatilized, assail the endings of our olfactory nerve—the ethers, phenols, furfurals, acetones, ammoniacal substances, and twenty lesser satellites—which combine to produce the enthralling aroma and taste of a well-made cup of coffee.
The ratios must be carefully maintained. Otherwise there will be crude disharmony, and the general result will be nauseating. Trimethylamin, for instance, which plays so important a part in producing the agreeable flavour of coffee, is the substance which predominates in putrefying fish. It is thus something more than a possibility of discord; it is a vegetable poison. But, in the minute proportions in which it is found in a well-roasted coffee bean, it combines to produce the attractive harmony of the flavour.
There is a perpetual dance of the various ingredients. “Dance is universal.” By this proposition of the romanticist physicists and natural philosophers, a proposition which recalls the teachings of Oken and Schelling, we are reminded of what happens when we analyse the little planetary system of the coffee-bean. Attraction and repulsion, affinity and the harmony of numbers! Mankind is not made up simply of human beings, but of what individual human beings eat and drink. It consists of the demons that enter us through our mouths. Insoluble is the riddle why, in certain epochs, the demons of sleep predominated in what we put into our mouths, whereas in other epochs the demons of wakefulness have predominated.
Coffee has strange kinships; it has clansmen who march side by side with the chief. In chemical laboratories today remarkable discoveries are being made. Professor Nottbohm of Hamburg, for example, has discovered that in coffee there is another active principle, another alkaloid, besides caffeine, namely trigonellin. But this substance, as Hantzsch has proved, is one of the main constituents of nicotine, the active principle of tobacco.
The first time I heard that coffee and tobacco, the two great quellers of fatigue in contemporary civilization, stand chemically side by side, I was reminded of an exciting discovery of the geologists. It appears that in Swabia there is a region where, underground, the waters of the Danube and the Rhine mingle, before one river sets forth on its eastward and the other on its northward flow. Thus is it with coffee and tobacco, the magical elements join hands for a moment before they separate.
Dance is universal.
4
Persecution and Victory
WHEN was it that, in Shehodet Monastery, the monks had their first taste of “k’hawah”? The date is hard to ascertain.
This much is unquestionable, that Avicenna, the famous Arabian philosopher and physician of Bukhara, often st
yled the Prince of Physicians, was acquainted with coffee by about the year A. D. 1000. He did not call it “k’hawah,” but “bunc”—the name by which coffee is still known in Ethiopia.
It was not then a beverage widely consumed by the people. True, both the Arabs and the Persians drank coffee, but we have no reason to believe that the coffee-plant was systematically cultivated either in Arabia or in Persia. Coffee was brought from Ethiopia and Somaliland by caravans; then it was shipped across the Red Sea for a further long journey by land. This made it a high-priced commodity, available only to the wealthy. Even so, it probably did not become a daily beverage, but was employed medicinally, for the relief of certain ailments.
Such a use of coffee may have continued inconspicuously during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. In the French national library there is preserved a manuscript by Sheikh Abd el Kader wherein we are informed that coffee was not known in Yemen earlier than the year 1450. This statement is certainly incorrect. The probability is that a certain Jemal Eddin, also known as Dhabani, who had travelled in Ethiopia, introduced the cultivation of the coffee-shrub and the use of the beverage into Yemen, so that, being locally produced, the expensive import was no longer needful, and coffee became much less expensive.
Even then, however, it had not become an article of widespread daily consumption. That did not happen until a religious dispute attracted general attention to it. People began to try the beverage as soon as it was forbidden. There was a prohibitionist movement, and the average man is likely to lust after forbidden fruit! In the holy city of Mecca, a zealot of high rank declared war to the death against coffee, with the result that its influence quickly spread wherever the Turks held sway.
In the year 1517, the sultan of Egypt appointed a new viceroy in Mecca. His name was Khair Bey, a proud and extremely ambitious young man. He found it vexatious that the world was so old. “A worn-out slipper is no longer a slipper,” he was accustomed to say to his servants. For this reason, he was mockingly spoken of as the “slipper philosopher.” Lampoons in verse were composed about him, making fun of his zeal for purifying public morals. Enraged thereat, he sent forth spies to find out who were the writers. Always they were coffee-drinkers, who sat beneath the colonnades of the mosques, giving their fancy free rein.
It was not the poems or the poets whom Khair Bey, the viceroy, wished to attack. They were too small game. His target was the “stimulant” that endowed ordinary persons with shrewdness and wit, and made their minds sparkle.
He concealed the true reason for his campaign, a personal one he would have been ashamed to acknowledge. He professed a determination to pass judgment upon coffee, coffee-drinking, and coffee-drinkers, in accordance with the dictates of the Book of Books. “Little do I care,” said he, “if people say that coffee has been drunk for centuries. The Koran has no concern with venerable customs. The Word of the Prophet is timeless; it is a sword of judgment in the hands of him who knows how to make distinctions.”
He assembled in his divan a number of Ulemas, muftis, military officers, philosophers, and men learned in the law. His brow was clouded with wrath, for he was a passionate youth.
To begin with he ordered the preparation of the beverage which was to be the subject of inquiry. Two slaves made coffee in the presence of the company, roasting the beans, pounding them in a mortar, and seething them in water. The coffee thus prepared gave off a pleasing aroma, which ran counter to Khair Bey’s intention. He said: “No matter if the odour be delightful. We read in the Koran that the devil can assume a seductive mask.”
The company preserved a respectful silence. Now the viceroy, taking a bean between finger and thumb, lifted it high in the air, showed it to all present, and continued: “We read in the chapter entitled ‘The Table’ that wine, gaming, pictures, graven images, and casting lots, are among the most evil devices of Shaitan!”
“That is not wine!” said one of the muftis. “It is more of the nature of charcoal. Grind it between your teeth, and you will realize that it is like wood charcoal.”
“You say, then, it is an ash?”
“Certainly it resembles ashes.”
“In that case it is as earth, and you know well that earth is one of the articles of diet forbidden by the Koran.”
“You are mistaken, lord!” said one of the masters of the law. “That roasted seed is not earth in the sense in which we apply the term to the earth of our fields. It is a dead portion of a plant. Even if this plant were forbidden—we do not know, as yet, for we are assembled to decide that point—it would be permissible in the condition of the bean you hold, for it has passed through the fire.”
“Yes, I agree,” said an old, white-bearded Ulema. “Fire, ‘atesch,’ purifies everything. It purifies by transforming. Even though the blossoms and the substance of the coffee-berry were unclean—which we do not know as yet, since that is what we are gathered here to ascertain—the condition of the bean you now hold is one transformed. An unclean article can be purified through the instrumentality of another. Bear in mind Abu Bekr’s dog. Being a dog, the beast was unclean. But when it fell into a salt lake and became petrified, it was cleansed.”
The viceroy grew angry, but contained himself. Those whom he had assembled in council were the wisest of the land. He dismissed them to think the matter over, enjoining on them to return at the same hour next day.
“Bismillah!” he said piously, to open the conversation. “In the name of Allah, the all-merciful, we have set out from false premises. We are not concerned with passing judgment upon the plant, but upon its effect. I consider it to be ‘buzeh,’ intoxicating, like brandy or mead. There are two hakims among the company. Let us hear what they have to say about the matter.”
“That is not so easy,” replied the elder of the two physicians. “One who is to know what is ‘buzeh’ must be an infidel! I have never partaken of mead or brandy, but I have been informed by others that he who has consumed a sufficiency of strong drink becomes, in the end, insensible. When I have drunk coffee, the power of my senses has been redoubled.”
“If Allah,” rejoined the viceroy pithily, “had wished to redouble your intelligence, he would have done so himself, without this artificial aid.”
“True,” said some of the muftis. This seemed to most of those present a strong point against coffee. If it conferred supernatural powers on one who drank it, it must be a devilish potion. A man had only two hands, although he might fancy that it would have been more convenient for him to have four.
“Not one of us knows what an intoxicant is,” said the viceroy, whose temper had improved. “Still, which among you can deny that coffee banishes sleep? What do you think of that in the light of the sixth chapter of the Koran, the one entitled ‘The Beast’? Do we not read therein: ‘Allah sends us the morning, having ordained the night for repose, and provided the sun and the moon for the determination of time’? Remember that the Koran proceeds as follows: ‘Such is the ordinance of the Almighty!’”
All present sprang to their feet. With one exception, they pointed meaningly, with the exclamation: “Forbidden! We have decided!”
“Not so fast,” put in the younger hakim. “Our ruler asks my opinion. As that of a practising physician, may I utter it?”
“Say on.”
“No more than the rest of you do I know from personal experience the effects of wine, being a true believer. But there are other things than wine that can produce insensibility. There is, for instance, opium, the juice of the poppy plant. This puts the senses to sleep.”
“As I listen to your words, hakim,” said the viceroy sourly, “I recall the thirty-eighth verse of the sixth chapter of the Koran: ‘God leads astray whom he wills, and leads whom he wills into the right path.’”
“May I be allowed to continue my argument?” asked the hakim. “I will elaborate. If coffee is a magic potion, so is that prepared from the opium plant. If we are not permitted artificially to induce wakefulness, neither may we artificially induce
sleep. In the ninety-sixth verse we read: ‘Allah has appointed the night for repose.’ The scripture does not say that He has appointed the day for repose! But those to whom opium has been administered sleep by day as well as by night. Why then, lord, should we be forbidden to drink coffee so as to keep awake at night?”
The assembly of the sages was agitated like a sea. Their green silken robes rustled. The wearers, with lean faces, aquiline noses, eloquent lips, disputed acrimoniously. Some agreed with the older physician, others with the younger. Impotent in his wrath, the viceroy looked on. He did not venture to utter anything authoritative that might tip the scales one way or the other. All he could say was: “I look to you for a truthful decision. Such is the will of Allah!”
The dispute went on for hours. The parties to it swayed, now to the right, and now to the left, differing from one another as much as is possible among pious Moslems. One of the army officers went so far as to compare the dark, roasted coffee-beans with the brilliant eyes of the houris of Paradise. This infuriated a mufti who, foaming at the mouth, shouted words from the forty-fourth chapter of the Koran: “The tree sakum is the sinner’s food! It will scald the belly of those who consume it, like molten brass or boiling water!”
Thus did they argue more and more fiercely, until peace was restored by sunset and the summons to evening prayer. Then, when devotions were finished, lest the debate should be resumed, an old man of ninety said: “When I look at you, I am reminded of those soldiers who engage in a sham fight, twenty marching towards the west and twenty towards the east. I also recall the words of the learned Muktassi, who visited many lands, and, who at the close of his life, wrote: ‘It seems to have pleased Allah that I should be both holy and unholy. I have swallowed broth with the Sufis, eaten porridge with monks, and have consumed the rough diet of seafaring men with sailors. Sometimes I observed all the rules of piety; and at other times I ate forbidden victuals, against my better judgment and without any absolute necessity. I have lain in prison; I have been highly honoured. Mighty princes listened to my words; at other times I was chastised with rods.’ Since, my lord viceroy, we cannot, at your divan, decide as to the qualities of coffee-beans, let us break up our assembly. Some will avoid coffee, regarding it as forbidden, others will drink coffee, regarding its use as permissible.”
