The World of Caffeine (10 page)

We can only wonder if the recent discoveries that caffeine can increase the rate of lipolysis, or fat burning, has protective effects against the pulmonary complications of smoking and congestive lung disease, kills bacteria, and may be useful for atopic dermatitis, are significantly or only coincidentally foreshadowed in a drug manual that is at least five hundred years old.

The Tao, evocatively translated as “the Way,” is an early Chinese word for the mystical totality of Being, or Nature, of which all things were understood to be part. It comprised two opposing principles, the yin and yang, or the feminine and masculine aspects, the interplay between which was held to generate or constitute the variety of the world’s particulars. The practice of Taoism was intended to enable its adherents to bring their minds and bodies into harmony with the all-encompassing and everywhere present Tao. This attainment was to be achieved by appeals to the gods or ancestral spirits, the proper alignment of houses and burial plots, and, most important for our story, the consumption of a balanced diet, that is, a regimen informed by a knowledge of the yin and yang properties of different foods. Thus, like the humoral theory of Galen, the Taoist medical theory relied on restoring or pre serving the proper interplay of forces within the human organism. In senses analogous to the terminological practice of European humoral theory, foods or medicines were considered “cold” or “hot,” depending on whether they contained more of the female principle or the male. What we know to be caffeine’s pharmacological properties made tea central to Taoist treatments.

One traditional Taoist scheme applied in Lu Yü’s time identifies six vapors or atmospheric influences descending from heaven, an imbalance among which will result in various infirmities. As in the humoral theory, this “atmospheric theory” associates a specific health problem with an excess of each of the vapors. In his notes to his translation of
The Classic of Tea,
Francis Carpenter lists these six health problems:

1. An excess of
   yin
   creates chills.
   
2. An excess of
   yang
   creates fever.
   
3. An excess of wind creates illness of the four limbs.
   
4. An excess of rain creates illness of the stomach.
   
5. An excess of darkness leads to delusions.
   
6. An excess of light creates illness in the heart.
   ²⁹
   

According to Carpenter, these vaporal elements combine in various ways to create the five flavors (salt, bitter, sour, acid, sweet); the five sounds or notes of the pentatonic scale
(kung, shang, chiao, chih, yü);
and the five colors (red, black, greenish-blue, white, and yellow). Any imbalance among them can cause trouble.

The Taoist nutritional theory was carried a step further by those adepts who believed that, through an intense study of the yin and yang of different foods and medicines, they could confect an elixir of life, the use of which would attain a subtler and more complete balance of these properties and a biological stability tantamount to immortality. Although the varying components of this potion included botanicals such as ginseng and mushrooms, and elements such as gold and mercury (lethal metals that were also a favored part of humoral treatments through at least the eighteenth century in the West), in every Taoist recipe tea, perhaps because the stimulating effects of caffeine conferred feelings of strength and power, invariably topped the list of ingredients in the brew.

Lao Tzu and his followers regarded tea as a natural agent that, properly used, could help beneficially transform the individual human organism and, as such, was a tool for the advancement of personal salvation. Confucius, who lived at about the same time as Lao Tzu, saw in the ceremonial use of tea a powerful reinforcement of the conventionalized relationships indispensable to an ethical society. Confucius ennobled the ancient Chinese
li,
or “ritual etiquette,” into a moral imperative. He taught that, when conjoined with the requisite attitude of sincere respect, conduct guided by decorous ceremony such as ritual tea drinking cultivated the person and allowed him to live harmoniously with his fellows.

The success of Confucius’ program demanded attention to the minute or, some might say, trivial aspects of everyday life.
Li
required that every detail of a gentleman’s conduct, including “the way his meat was cut or his mat was placed,” determined his character, his relation to others, and even his place in the balance of the cosmos. As time went on, this doctrine devolved into fussiness over the details of etiquette, and eventually came to signify little else. As Anderson says, morality, etiquette, and the methods of maintaining social order became blended indistinguishably: “A gentleman’s social position and access to luxuries (such as tea) were considered morally justified because he observed etiquette appropriate to his social position.”
³⁰
The uses of tea came to exemplify this integration of manners and morals better than any other aspect of Chinese society.

The elaborate preparation of tea fit easily into this way of understanding things, as Lu Yü, over a thousand years after Confucius, was to make clear in his
The Classic of Tea.
Typifying the Confucian response to Taoism, Lu Yü’s work reflects the affirmation of both Confucian social decorousness and the Taoist cosmic harmonies that were to shape the tea ceremony
in later centuries. Anderson says of
The Classic of Tea,
“The passages that emphasize the value of moderation in tea-drinking and lifestyle; close attention to detail, cleanliness, and form; and the careful consideration of the guest’s comfort are particularly significant as each point evinces a Confucian regard for
li
.”
³¹

These were the early cultural precursors to the development of the tea ceremony. But its most immediate sources, as it has come to be practiced for more than a thousand years, were the rituals and beliefs of Ch’an Buddhism. Ch’an, one of the three streams into which the Indian Mahayana Buddhism diverged on entering China, and which was to become the progenitor of Zen Buddhism in Japan, taught that nirvana, Buddhahood, or salvation could be sought through the austere cultivation and emptying of the mind and could be attained in a sudden flash of insight, or Enlightenment. Not surprisingly, all those who proclaimed themselves spiritual descendants of Buddha claimed that their teachings were true to Gautama’s Way. But the Ch’an Buddhists were, in this respect, the most authentic. For Buddha himself had rejected the rituals and substantive doctrines of Hinduism, because he rejected attachment to any ritual or any doctrine or indeed to any affection or assertion whatever. Buddha therefore taught no doctrine but instead guided his followers on the Way of salvation from suffering, advising that after the desires for sex, food, glory, money and other worldly lusts had been overcome, our last remaining pernicious attachments are to ideas, the belief that one thing is so and another thing not so. True to the original quest of the Buddha, the Ch’an monks initiated use of the
kung-an,
forerunner of the Zen
koan,
as a way of freeing the mind from what they understood to be the limitations of logic and the intellect. Following Hui-neng (E’no, 638–713), one of Ch’an’s founders, who taught that enlightenment could occur at any time or place in ordinary life, Ch’an disciples rejected both scriptural authority and philosophical texts, turning away from orthodox ritual practices. The tea ceremony, in which a commonplace of life attains a kind of mystical, contemplative, and emblematic dimension, became the external embodiment of their religious quest.

The early Ch’an monks who drank tea did so from a single large bowl which they passed around in a circle, as the Sufi devotees were to do in sharing coffee hundreds of years later. This custom is mentioned in
Pai-chang Ch’ing Kuei,
a book of monastery regulations supposedly promulgated by Pai-Ch’ing (sometimes known as Huai-hai, Hyakujo Ekai, or Riku).
³²
However, in the earliest recorded example of the Ch’an tea ceremony, the host would present each participant with his own bowl of powdered tea, add hot water, and whip it vigorously. As we will see in
chapter 9
, this led smoothly into
chado,
or the Way of Tea, and
chanoyu,
or the tea ceremony, in Japan.

The Chinese contributed importantly to the creation of the tea ceremony and incorporated within it symbols from several philosophical systems. However, when compared with what Anderson calls the “full-blown cognitive synthesis later to be realized in Japan,”
³³
the Chinese experience can be seen to represent only an early stage of the
chado’s
development. Therefore, although it was in China that the integration of Confucian, Taoist, and Buddhist spirituality in the tea ceremony had its beginning, it was only in Japan, where indigenous Shinto and other influences came into play as well, that the tea ceremony developed into a central transformational device advancing the Buddhist quest for enlightenment.

Teahouses in China date from the thirteenth century, becoming, in the Ming dynasty, important centers of social life. Like coffeehouses in the Islamic world and Europe, they played a large part in the political life of the country—for example, the 1911 revolution was plotted in the back room of a Shanghai teahouse.
³⁴
Again, it was only in Japan, however, after tea’s conquest of that country in the seventeenth century, that the teahouse and tea garden, like the tea ceremony, reached their full development.

Europeans, the world’s greatest explorers, returned with stories of the Islamic enthusiasm for coffee and coffeehouses within about a hundred years of their inception in the Middle East. However, no travelers returned to Europe from China as witnesses to the days of the Chinese encounter with tea, because none visited there in ancient times. By the time anyone from Europe knew about tea or tea drinking, both the commodity and practice had been familiar in China for at least two thousand years. Therefore, we have no travelers’ tales to give us outsiders’ impressions of the first ebullient days of tea in China.

Arab traders knew of tea by A.D. 900, but the first references to tea by Europeans (after Polo’s) came more than six hundred years later, for it was first named in print in the West in 1559 in a book by a Venetian author celebrated for accounts of adventurous voyages in ancient and modern times. A short time later, in 1567, two Russian travelers brought glowing reports of the plant upon their return from China. It wasn’t until the beginning of the seventeenth century, toward the end of the Ming dynasty, that a Dutch ship left Macao with a bale of tea leaves for delivery to Amsterdam, which became the first tea known to have reached the West.

The use of the cacao bean is often erroneously thought to have originated with the Maya of Mesoamerica, much as coffee is erroneously thought to have originated with the Arabs and tea with the Chinese. But recent archeological discoveries reveal that the Olmecs (1500 to 400 B.C.), members of the earliest American high civilization, who lived in the fertile coastal Mexican lowlands centuries before the Maya arrived, harvested wild cacao pods that they made into a chocolate drink. They were almost certainly the first to cultivate the tree.

Little is known about the early Olmecs; even the name “Olmec” is applied to them only as a back-formation, as it was what their descendants called themselves, while their true name remains hidden in undeciphered hieroglyphs. The early Maya (1000 B.C. to A.D. 250) became the second people to cultivate cacao, which they began in the Yucatan peninsula. Their cacao plantations, which expanded throughout their dominions, made the Maya very wealthy. After the passing of the Mayan age, in the ninth century A.D., chocolate was drunk by the Toltecs, who flourished from the tenth to the twelfth centuries, and by the Aztecs, whose ascent began in the twelfth century. It was from Aztec hands that the Spanish conquistadors were first served chocolate at the outset of the sixteenth century.

The Maya were the first people of the New World to maintain historical records, although most of their records were lost when conquistadors and missionaries, eager to establish a foothold in the New World, eradicated all the traces of native religion and culture they could find. However, because of their remoteness and the surrounding inhospitable, heavily overgrown terrain, the ruins of some ancient Maya cities remained unknown until the nineteenth century, and, therefore, escaped the systematic destruction by the European invaders. These surviving Maya inscriptions on pots, jade, bones, stones, and palace walls begin to appear around 50 B.C., tracing the history of their royal line from that time until the Spanish conquest. The Maya may have also kept bark-paper books, in which they recorded inventories or recipes, but these would have long since perished in the humid heat of the tropics. The only surviving Classic Maya (A.D. 250–900) records of cacao use are decorated vessels found in the tombs of the powerful. The Maya used cacao beans as currency throughout their domains, and prices were fixed “by the bean,” for example, eight to ten for a rabbit, a hundred for a slave, four for a squash. A 1545 Nahuatl document lists an exchange value of one bean for a large tomato, two hundred for a turkey cock, one hundred for a turkey hen, three for a turkey egg, and three for a fish wrapped in maize husks. Combining these price lists with the reports of Alonso de Molina, who published the first Nahuatl-Spanish dictionary in Mexico City in 1571, which reports that the daily wage of a porter in central Mexico was a hundred beans, we can gain some idea of the cost of living for the native population of the time and what an expensive luxury cacao must have been for the average Maya peasant. When the Maya were defeated by their rivals, the Aztecs, sacks of cacao beans were among the items of tribute exacted from them.
¹

In their onslaught, the Maya appropriated Teotihuacan, the New World’s greatest pre-Columbian city of the age, which dominated the Valley of Mexico and much of Central America. The Maya warrior merchants assumed control of Teotihuacan’s lucrative trade routes, which they maintained until the late seventh century when the Toltecs moved into the Valley of Mexico, gaining the ascendancy that they maintained from the tenth century until the middle of the twelfth. Toltec acolytes carried cacao branches and culminated their rites by sacrificing dogs the color of cacao paste. About 1150 the Toltec capital, Tula, was destroyed, and their power waned.

Hemispherical bowl of light brown pottery, made during the Classic Maya period (A.D. 250–900) in Mexico. Originally there were three sunken oval panels with carved bas-reliefs, but one has been destroyed. These were separated by incised columns of glyphs. Each oval panel had a shorter column of glyphs. Of the two surviving reliefs, one shows a figure, probably the god of cacao, seated on a low dais. He points to a pottery jar. The striped oval objects in front of him represent cacao pods, and his curious headdress represents the branches of a cacao tree before harvesting. This is the oldest surviving vessel containing traces of a caffeinated beverage. Compare its date with that of the clay wine jar in the University of Pennsylvania Museum that was found in Iran, with wine residues from about 5500 B.C. Although wine making is more complex than coffee, tea, or chocolate making, Neolithic men made wine, whereas the first direct evidence of caffeine use came at least six thousand years later. (Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collections, Washington, D.C.)

Stories of the savagery of the early Mesoamericans abound. The Maya who settled in Chichen Itzá, a Yucatán city that became the center of a mixed Maya and Mexican culture, before sacrificing a prisoner to their goddess of sustenance, hospitably served him a cup of thick, cold chocolate, hoping to bring about a literal change of heart. For, once the cup was empty, they believed that the heart, transformed into a cacao pod, would be ripe for cutting from his chest and burning as an offering. The Spanish explorers were impressed with the ceremony attending the growing and harvesting of cacao among the Aztecs, in which many of these primitive components still survived. According to their accounts, this ceremony included human sacrifice, masked dancing, and sexual abstinence relieved by erotic games on the day of the harvest.

The chief deity of the Aztec state religion was the ancient tribal god, Huitzilopochtli, now styled as a sun god and god of victory in war. He had an unquenchable appetite for human hearts. Like Frazier’s goddesses of fertility, who demanded the sacrifice of the king each year to secure the rebirth of spring, Huitzilopochtli required daily human sacrifices to ensure the rising of the sun each morning. His requirement in this regard, not an inchoate obsession with death or cruelty, was the reason behind the thousands of such sacrifices that took place each year.

The Aztec religion offered the soldiers and aristocrats other powerful and often terrifying gods, prominent among whom was Tezcatlipoca, the “Smoking Mirror.”
²
His chief rival was Quetzalcoatl, the “Feathered Serpent,” patron of the priesthood and also worshiped by the common people. The everyday lives of these ordinary Aztecs, including their crops and crafts, were protected by this benign demigod, born to a virgin and a god. He was a kindly, bearded, fair-skinned deity who hailed from the golden land beyond the sunset, and whom they took to be the purveyor of practical knowledge and the ideal of self-sacrifice. Demonstrating striking parallels with Shen Nung, Quetzalcoatl ruled as the Aztec priest-king and taught his people the use of the calendar, how to plant maize, and the art of working gold and silver, and also brought caffeine to the world in the form of the seeds of the cacao tree, which he taught the people to grow and prepare. One account of Aztec beliefs states that Quetzalcoatl, growing old, or having been tricked by another deity into drinking a poison potion that robbed him of divine strength, worried that his unsightly decrepitude would frighten his subjects. He burned his palace and buried his treasures of gold, jade, blood-stones, and rare shells. He then sailed on a raft of snakes to his homeland, where he rules in perpetuity. He promised to return in the year “One Reed,” which recurred every fifty-two years on the calendar he had taught the Aztec people to use.
³

Just as the Muslims had found in coffee a substitute for wine, the Aztecs especially prized chocolate because it gave them a substitute for their traditional native drink,
octli,
the fermented juice of the agave. Although, unlike the Muslims, the Aztecs were not absolutely forbidden to use alcoholic beverages, drunkenness among them was strongly disapproved. The consumption of
octli
was restricted to those of sufficiently mature age, which sometimes meant those old enough to have grandchildren. Public intoxication was not a misdemeanor, as it is in Western societies today, but a capital offense, the most common punishment for which was execution. Not surprisingly, the Aztecs had a large cautionary temperance literature, including many horrific tales about the evils of inebriation.
⁴

Because chocolate could serve as a safe alternative to
octli
and offered its own unique stimulating effects, it was highly esteemed by the Aztec aristocracy. They kept the drink largely to themselves, forbidding its use by commoners, including priests. However, because of caffeine’s value in the rigors of a military adventure, the Aztec nobility granted an exception for soldiers on campaign and the
pochta,
the hereditary class of merchant-adventurers who fought their way across Mesoamerica to bring exotic trade goods, needed to exalt the king and court, from outlying regions to the capital.

Motecuhzoma Ilhuicamina, Montezuma I (1390–1464), seventh king of Mexico, expanded the Aztec empire until a loose confederation of nearly five hundred cities, including those of the Maya and Toltecs, paid tribute to his capital, Tenochtitlán. These conquered cities supplied food and raw materials for Tenochtitlán’s growing population. They also provided luxury goods, including gold, feathers, gemstones, amber, jaguar skins, and, of course, cacao, as well as an ample provision of warm bodies for sacrifice to the martial gods of their conquerors. It was Montezuma I who promulgated the law that no one who had not participated in armed conflict, not even the king’s son, could affect the trappings and enjoy the privileges of wearing cotton or feathers, smoking tobacco, eating delicacies, or drinking chocolate.
⁵

In Montezuma I’s time, the Aztecs were capable tenders of their indigenous crops and livestock, although wheat, barley, cattle, horses, and sheep were unknown. The land was communally cultivated and a portion of the yield paid as tax to the central government. In many ways, however, the Aztecs had not advanced beyond the Bronze Age. They had neither wheeled vehicles, nor any machines depending on rotary motion, and had not yet discovered the working of iron and steel. Such European commonplaces as glass, gunpowder, and alphabetic writing were absent from their culture.

Hernán Cortés (1485–1547), the light-skinned, bearded Spanish conquistador, received one of the warmest welcomes in history when he disembarked in Mexico in 1519, a year that, it so happened, coincided with a recurrence of “One Reed” on the Aztec calendar, the anniversary of the time that Quetzalcoatl, the light-skinned, bearded patron deity of everyday life had promised to return from a realm beyond known lands. The Aztecs had waited expectantly for countless cycles, and the arrival of Cortés and his troops in Tenochtitlán seemed to be a fulfillment of Quetzalcoatl’s promise, and Cortés, the merciless conquistador, and Quetzalcoatl, the kindly and beneficent god, became one and the same.

Motecuhzoma Xocoyotzin, Montezuma II (1466–1520), eleventh king of Mexico, grandson of Montezuma I, sat on the Aztec throne in the year Cortés arrived. If we are to believe his own accounts and those of the Spanish conquistadors, Montezuma II had a taste for luxury and the talent and resources to gratify it. His imperial banquets, examples of gastronomic artistry, were reminiscent of the feasts of the early Roman emperors, in that they began with rare birds and exotic fruits imported from the far reaches of his domain. Also as at Roman feasts, performers amused the assembled with singing and dancing. But the final course of the banquet was something that neither Cortés, nor any other European, Asian, or African, ancient or modern, had ever encountered: After ceremonially washing their hands, the respectful serving women would bring
cacahuatl,
a cold, thickly frothing, bitter beverage brewed from roasted cacao beans, seasoned with vanilla or spices, which they proffered in golden goblets to the king. Witnesses vary as to whether the guests and household were also so honored.
⁶

According to early and probably exaggerated Spanish accounts, Montezuma downed fifiy cups of chocolate daily, including many consumed each time he consorted with his concubines, for what the Spanish erroneously thought was the Aztec belief in chocolate’s aphrodisiacal powers. Some Aztecs may have added a fermented corn mash to their chocolate, giving the drink an extra kick, although it is probable that only the nobility and warriors had an opportunity to partake of it. Although they knew nothing of caffeine’s and theobromine’s physical and mental stimulating powers, the Aztecs were convinced that chocolate imparted both strength and inspiration from Quetzalcoatl, and it was chiefly owing to its pharmacological powers that cacao was highly esteemed.