Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil

by Mueller, Tom

  Making olive oil required some old-time Greco-Roman skill, which the barbarians often lacked. In his Dialogues, Gregory the Great tells a story from the life of Sanctulus of Norcia, a sixth-century priest who lived in what is now Umbria shortly after the area was conquered by Lombard war bands. Sanctulus arrived at an olive mill one day and asked its pagan Lombard owners to fill his oilskin. These rough men, who had struggled all day at their press without obtaining so much as a drop of oil, thought Sanctulus was mocking them and cursed him loudly. The imperturbable saint merely smiled and said cheerfully, “Is this how you pray for me? Come, fill my skin and I will leave you.” As the Lombards renewed their insults, Sanctulus glanced at the press and saw that no oil was coming out. He asked for a bucket of water, blessed it, and then, with all eyes on him, threw it over the press. “And such an abundance of oil ran forth,” the hagiographer concludes, “that the Lombards, who before had long labored in vain, now had enough oil to fill not only their own vessels, but also his skin. Their hearts were filled with gratitude, because the holy man, who had come to them begging for oil, was now, through his blessings, supplying in great abundance that which he himself had come to find.”

  Sanctulus’s help was probably more technical than celestial: experienced millers commonly threw hot water on their presses to increase yields, especially during the second pressing, when they coaxed a few last drops of oil from the nearly spent pomace. (The expressions “first pressed” and “cold pressed” once distinguished high-quality oil extracted from fresh olives from oil made with the overheated dregs. Nowadays these terms are largely obsolete, because all true extra virgin oil is made from fresh olives milled at low temperatures, and most of it isn’t pressed at all, but centrifuged.)

  Olive oil was also an essential fuel in churches, burning in lamps at altars and saintly shrines. Some large churches consumed huge quantities: in the Lateran basilica during the fifth century, 8,730 oil lamps burned around the clock, all year long. Olive oil was preferred to other fuels because it was long-lasting, gave off a clear, brilliant light, and was odorless—the pork fat customarily burned in the lanterns at the ninth-century abbey of Fulda smelled so foul that its studious abbot Rabanus Maurus, who certainly burned much midnight fat himself, begged the Carolingian king Louis the Pious for an olive grove in Italy, to light his church in a more seemly and fragrant way. No doubt agreeing with Rabanus, well-to-do worshippers throughout Europe willed money gifts or supplies of oil to churches, to fuel lamps that would burn perpetually for the salvation of their souls. Sailors and traders who arrived in the port of Venice, following an ancient tradition, left money or oil to fuel the altar lamps of the Basilica of San Marco. Elsewhere the faithful bequeathed olive trees or entire groves to a church, to supply oil for its lamps. When a group of knights rode through Puglia in 1147 on their way to the Holy Land during the Second Crusade, they stopped at the Bari cathedral to pay their respects to Saint Nicholas, patron saint of the city, to whom they deeded the oil of forty olive trees in perpetuity, on the condition that a lamp with their oil be kept burning continuously until their safe return. Such bequests often stipulated that the gift be void if oil were used that had not come from the deeded groves—evidence of a brisk trade in ersatz lamp oil, perhaps cut with liquefied pork fat.

  While in the Bari cathedral, the knights no doubt collected some oil as well, to preserve them during their upcoming ordeal in the Holy Land. The bones of Saint Nicholas, which had been transferred there from Turkey sixty years earlier, were celebrated throughout Europe for the miraculous oil they exuded, said to cure countless diseases. Nicholas’s grave was one of many sites in Europe and the Middle East where the relics of a saint gave off a holy oil, as sweet-smelling as the flowers of Paradise, which might spring up like a holy gusher at the anniversary of the saint’s death. Even the oil that burned in the lamps beside saintly shrines frequently had sacred power. Perhaps because of olive oil’s well-known tendency to absorb tastes and fragrances, as well as its time-honored associations with divinity, lamp oil was believed to soak up the sanctity of the shrines where it burned, becoming the essence of holiness. Medieval pilgrims eagerly collected this substance, known as “the oil of the saints” or “the oil of prayer,” at holy places across the Christian world, and brought it home in small bottles of silver, lead, or terra-cotta known as ampullae, which are still found in the treasuries of many European churches, some containing traces of holy oil. This oil also made the ideal preservative for saintly relics; in eleventh century Rome, Christ’s foreskin and umbilical cord (which He evidently left behind when He ascended bodily to heaven) were reverently stored under oil in the pope’s private chapel. Saintly lamp oil was held in such regard that some Monophysite heretics drank it during the Mass instead of communion wine.

  To this day, the bones of Saint Nicholas are still believed to exude a holy, healing oil, which the cathedral clergy collects each year in a solemn May ceremony. After the crypt in Bari was renovated in the 1990s, however, the quantity of liquid has dropped off sharply; today the priests only manage to sponge up a few precious glassfuls, which they dilute with several gallons of holy water and distribute to the faithful. Cutting Nicholas’s holy oil doesn’t seem to trouble the Catholic Church, which is less concerned about oil purity than in former times: Pope Paul VI ruled in 1973 that vegetable oil could be used instead of olive oil in the sacramental anointing of the sick.

  Even in the Middle Ages, for all its holy resonance, olive oil remained a slippery substance, semantically and symbolically, and it was possible to have too much of a good thing. Because it had been widely used in Greco-Roman baths, gymnasia, amphitheaters, and temples, where it was a vital active ingredient in athletics, hedonism, flashy sexuality, and religious sacrifice, olive oil retained a whiff of paganism that Christians sometimes found offputting, even threatening. The Church attempted to coopt some of these symbolic valences, applying chrism and other holy oils to the bodies of the faithful at baptism, confirmation, exorcism, and extreme unction, which theologians were quick to point out made them athletes of Christ in the contest against sin and evil. However, uneasy memories remained trapped in olive oil, and the strict regulation of its use as a skin lotion in early monastic communities suggests its lasting heathen appeal. A monastic rule of the fifth century prescribes severe punishments for monks who cover themselves in oil after a bath, and enjoins, “Do not permit anyone to spread your body with oil, except in cases of grave illness.” Ascetics like Saint Anthony, the formidable desert hermit, demonstrated their superiority to paganism and the wiles of the flesh by renouncing a well-oiled body forever: Anthony ostentatiously refrained from applying any oil to his limbs, much to the amazement of his contemporaries.

  Though the people might renounce oil during their daily routines, their miracle stories, dreams, and fantasies suggest that they still yearned for a good oiling. In the sixth century Life of Saint Radegund, the saint appears in a dream to a nun dying of dropsy, and orders her to undress and climb into an empty washtub. Radegund pours oil on the dropsical nun’s head, and dresses her in new clothes. The next morning the nun awakes, her hair still fragrant with Radegund’s wondrous oil, to find she has been healed of her disease. The fourth-century Egyptian holy man Macarius, famed for his asceticism, cured a virgin who had been transformed into a mare by sorcery, by rubbing oil over her entire body—a ticklish task even for a good ascetic to tackle without at least a squirm of concupiscence. Perhaps the most vividly pagan oil miracle appears in the Passion of Saint Perpetua, the strange, troubling tale said to have been written in prison by Perpetua herself, just before she was martyred by wild beasts in the arena in Carthage in 203 AD. One night, the story relates, Perpetua dreamed that a Christian deacon named Pomponius came to her cell, took her hand, and led her to the amphitheater, where a huge crowd of people were watching from the stands. “And there came out against me a certain ill-favored Egyptian with his helpers, to fight with me. Also there came to me comely young men, my helpe
rs and aides. And I was stripped naked, and I became a man. And my helpers began to rub me with oil, as is their custom for a contest.” Perpetua defeats the Egyptian, tramples his head to signify her triumph, and claims the victor’s prize: a staff with golden apples attached to it.

  Freud would have had a field day.

  At any rate, the sacred role of olive oil in hagiography tracked the widespread popular use of olive oil to cure a range of maladies. Medieval pharmacists and apothecaries, following the advice of Hippocrates, prescribed olive oil against numerous ailments, from skin disease to digestive disorders to gynecological complaints, and used it as a base for numerous philters and unguents; medieval formularies mention oil-based extracts of scorpion, viper, stork, bat, fox, and other medicinal creatures. Some authorities prescribed a hot bath followed by a full-body rubdown with olive oil to cure kidney stones and seizures, and recommended submerging the lower half of the body in oil as an antidote against certain poisons. Olive oil, taken internally, was considered an effective cure for many ailments, including intestinal worms, snakebite, and even insanity, though one medical writer cautioned that oil not be given to people of a choleric disposition. Monastic cellarers believed olives and oil to be effective in reestablishing a proper balance among bodily humors, and sometimes prescribed olive oil to control violent impulses or sexual urges, which were thought to result from an excess of hot and moist humors in the blood. Doctors and holy men alike used oil against leprosy, blindness, and demonic possession, wives fed it to their husbands to free them from the wiles and incantations of prostitutes. Occasionally, holy oil and oil of the saints could even resuscitate the dead.

  Yet olive oil was also employed in evil spells and incantations. The Church issued frequent bans against the use of consecrated holy oils by sorcerers and magicians; in the year 810, for example, the chapter of the cathedral of Tours ordered priests to guard the holy chrism vigilantly, because of the widespread belief that any criminal who managed to anoint himself with it could never be brought to trial. And there was a fine line between holy oil and snake oil. In the 430s, a monk appeared in Carthage carrying a martyr’s bone steeped in oil. Sick people and cripples that he dosed with the oil seemed to recover, at least as long as the monk was with them, but after he left they invariably relapsed. The citizens of Carthage eventually decided that his supposed cures were the result of demonic hallucinations rather than divine healing, and the monkish grifter skipped town.

  I SAT WITH Ehud Netzer, archaeologist at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, on top of Herodium, the conical 300-foot hill where he had recently uncovered the tomb of Herod the Great. We were eating a lunch of olives, pita bread, and bitter onions, and looking toward the purplish haze of Jerusalem in the distance. Here and there in the lowlands rose the minarets of bedouin villages, surrounded by sandy sprawls of corrugated iron and raw concrete, while the neat ovals of tile-roofed houses in the Jewish settlements—Tekoa, Nokdim, and Eldar—occupied the nearby hilltops, like tiny fortifications. To the east and south, the naked folds of the Judean Hills rolled out toward the horizon, incandescent under the desert sun. Here and there were small olive groves, pale ridges of green on the sun-baked soil. That trees could survive in such fierce conditions seemed impossible.

  Yet survived they had, and even thrived, since antiquity. Tekoa’s olive oil was famous in Old Testament times; in a yearly ceremony after the olive harvest, it was sent in wagons to Jerusalem, where it was used in the Temple for ritual offerings and to light the great Menorah.

  When I said this, Netzer grunted and tossed a handful of pits down the slope. “Olive trees are power,” he said with surprising vehemence. “People here, both Palestinians and Israelis, grow them to control the land—to occupy it.”

  He said he’d been watching the groves grow up around Herodium for decades as he excavated the site, and their advance had become a constant reminder of the social turmoil and latent violence of this land. For years at a time the Israeli army had denied him access to the area, fearing Muslim attacks, and Netzer worried about losing access to it permanently, as had happened in Jericho, one of his most important archaeological excavations, when the Palestinian Authority assumed full control there after the Second Intifada in 2000. The risks of working here were real. On July 3, 1982, David Rosenfeld, an American-born Israeli settler, was murdered at Herodium. The killers, who stabbed Rosenfeld over one hundred times, were two local bedouins, one of whom worked in Netzer’s excavation crew. “I was very close to the murderer’s old father,” Netzer said sadly. “Two days after David’s death, a group of Israelis and Americans, Arabs and Jews, washed away the caked blood. We lit an oil lamp and said Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead.”

  At the same time, Netzer also felt under pressure from Jews. The day after David Rosenfeld’s funeral, Jewish activists occupied a new outpost, El-David, on a neighboring hilltop, in reprisal for the murder. (The community later changed its name to Nokdim.) “Instead of panic and fear on the part of Jews,” the community’s website stated, “the Arabs got a new settlement and new settlers.” As if this wasn’t enough, Netzer received a visit from another ultra-orthodox group, called Atra Kadisha, which defends Jewish graves, sometimes by force, against disturbance of any kind, by archaeologists and road-builders alike. In the back of his mind, he said, was the threat that Atra Kadisha might shut his excavations down.

  Year after year, around Herodium and in other parts of the West Bank, Netzer had watched olive trees being planted by the opposing factions, until their beauty had become tainted in his mind. “Now I see their other side. I see power struggles, I see places where rock-throwers and killers can hide. In my mind, this universal symbol of peace, for Jews and Arabs alike, has become a picture of conflict, hatred, danger.”

  After the Six-Day War of 1967, Israel occupied most of the West Bank territory, which contained an estimated 10 million olive trees owned by Palestinian farmers. The Palestinians continued to tend their trees more or less undisturbed until in 2000, the year of the Second Intifada, when Israeli soldiers and Jewish settlers, citing security concerns, began to burn, cut down, and uproot olive trees in many parts of the region, particularly near roads and Jewish settlements, and along the borders with Jordan and Syria. Since then, hundreds of thousands of olive trees owned by Palestinians—some sources put the number as high as half a million—have been destroyed, in what the liberal Israeli press calls the Olive Wars.

  The destruction has accelerated dramatically since October 2005, when Israel began building the West Bank barrier (which many Palestinians refer to as the “racial segregation wall”), more or less following the Green Line, the border between Israel proper and the West Bank territories. This network of walls, ditches, barbed wire, and other obstacles, which in places is sixty meters wide, eight meters tall, and resembles the Berlin Wall in all its Cold War grimness, has intensified the destruction, and put many other groves off limits to their Palestinian owners. Israeli settlers have been accused of stealing Palestinian olives, both already harvested and directly from the trees, sometimes with the tacit approval of the Israeli army.

  Christians are caught up in the Olive Wars as well. Two days after speaking with Ehud Netzer in Herodium, I visited Aboud, a town northwest of Jerusalem, to meet Father Firas Nasib Aridah, a Jordanian-born Catholic who is the parish priest of Our Lady Mother of Sorrows, the town’s church.

  “So you actually did come!” he said when he saw me. On the phone he’d instructed me to visit Aboud with a Palestinian driver and by daylight, “to avoid any unpleasantness on the road,” as he’d put it. Aridah has close-cropped reddish-brown hair, a booming voice, and moves like he talks, swiftly and decisively. Despite his cassock, he has the energetic air and upright carriage of an athlete, or a soldier.

  After showing me around the small church, with its naïve stained glass windows and a lectern made from an ancient olive tree destroyed by Jewish settlers in 2000, he walked briskly toward the edge of town to show me the scene of
his dramatic recent confrontation with the Israeli army. Along the way the townspeople, many wearing checked keffiyeh headdresses, called out to him, addressing him as abuneh, which in the local Arabic dialect means both “patriarch” and “man of God.” He stopped to heft babies, pat shoulders, and distribute good-natured jibes in Arabic. He laughed frequently. “If I’m not laughing, I’m not a real priest,” he told me. “Laughing trains many muscles that you don’t train any other way.”

  Aridah explained that his town has 1,300 Muslims and 900 Christians, who for centuries have coexisted in tolerance and mutual respect. “They work and shop and travel together, send their children to the same schools. Muslims celebrate Christmas and Easter with us, in the multipurpose room of our parish, and Christians celebrate Ramadan and [Eid al-]Adha in a hall near the mosque. And Christians and Muslims harvest their olives side by side. Even the poorest people bring a bottle of their first olive oil to our church, to be used as a sacrament.”

  The West Bank barrier threatens to disrupt this ancient equilibrium. At the edge of town, the road we were walking on ended in a berm of raw earth, thrown up by Israeli bulldozers to block traffic into the area near the barrier. We climbed the berm and surveyed the terraced olive groves and pasturelands beyond. A reddish swath cleared by the dozers ran through them like a scar.

  Aridah said that 5,100 of Aboud’s trees had already been destroyed in the work so far, and that if the barrier were completed, Aboud’s inhabitants would be cut off from a further 1,100 acres of village land, with 10,000 more trees.

  “Some families lost everything to the barrier. Generations have supported their families from these groves. Many families eat between forty and sixty liters of oil per year. Now some have to buy their oil, or use cheap seed or palm oil instead because they can’t afford olive oil. Plus there’s the lost income. On a good harvest year, one olive tree can produce $200 in profit, through sales of the oil, table olives, and olive oil soap. For our families, the olive tree isn’t just a symbol of life, it is life.”