Absinthe

Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

Updated May 11, 2009

Absinthe was never just another drink. It has a special place in the history of modern culture.

About absinthe there is an aura of decadence, madness and perversity. The once-banned liquor recalls the imagery and elegance of poetry by Baudelaire or Verlaine, the withering hauteur of Oscar Wilde, the tastes of Toulouse-Lautrec and the passions of van Gogh. Each of these figures paid fervent tribute to absinthe: the green fairy, the green goddess, the green muse, the glaucous witch, the queen of poisons.

In the late 19th century, absinthe was so popular that in Paris it rivaled wine as the drink of choice. Nineteenth-century writers like Alfred de Musset fell prey to intoxication. At the Académie Française, where he was working on a dictionary, it was said that he "absinthes himself too often."

Toulouse-Lautrec was so wedded to absinthe that he had a special cane made that hid a glass. He may have also introduced the drink to van Gogh, who threw himself into it with abandon. Aside from drinking the liquor, van Gogh painted it, and once threw a glass of it at Gauguin. Manet and Degas painted absinthe drinkers. So did Picasso. Munch drank it heavily and Strindberg fed his insanity with it. Verlaine felt enslaved to what he called "the green and terrible drink."

The green-colored, high-proof herbal liquor was once illegal in the United States. (It was banned in America in 1912 because of health concerns fanned by some of the same anti-alcohol forces who would later push through Prohibition. Due to a reorganization of the government's food-safety bureaucracy, the ban was effectively lifted before World War II, although it took decades before anybody realized it.)

The early 20th century furor over absinthe extended way beyond the States - even before that mini-Prohibition began, alarm bells were ringing all over Europe. In 1905 a Swiss man murdered his family after drinking absinthe, leading to the liquor's banishment from that country, where it originated. The French thought they risked losing World War I to robust beer-drinking Germans because of the dissolute influence of absinthe, so it was banned in that nation as well.

The medical evidence appeared damning. As early as 1879 The New York Times warned that absinthe "is much more perilous, as well as more deleterious, than any ordinary kind of liquor." A 19th-century French doctor, who made a lifetime study of absinthism, chronicled its symptoms: "sudden delirium, epileptic attacks, vertigo, hallucinatory delirium." Absinthe, a liqueur that can have an alcohol content as high as 75 percent, was  said to twist men's - and women's - minds.  Absinthe lovers denied its toxicity, and blamed the wine industry for seeking to sideline a competitor. (Modern analysis has shown that the absinthes produced today have none of these effects.)

In recent years, this anise-flavored spirit began seeping back into the mainstream. It tantalized with its promises of visionary consciousness, so elaborately celebrated by a century of artists and writers. With its limited availability and exotic reputation, the drink inspired cultish devotion. In 1994 a museum devoted to absinthe opened in Auvers-sur-Oise, outside Paris.  In 2004, the Swiss legalized absinthe in a national referendum. The European Union gradually jettisoned a hodgepodge of bans and increased absinthe's availability.

Now it has been widely restored, and has grown in popularity. In recent years, brands of absinthe made according to traditional recipes have been legally imported to the United States.

As The New Yorker reported in 2006, the regulated chemical thujone, found in wormwood and once thought to have been the cause of absinthe's lure and its dangers, did not show up in any significant quantities in analyses of historical absinthe. So these authentic replicas, despite containing wormwood, do not pose a legal challenge. And the alarmed pronouncements about absinthe made from the beginning of the Belle Époque have been proved groundless, which was decisive in swaying United States government regulators.

The world was ripe for its return, and we are in the midst of what appears to be an absinthe mini-craze. The hundred-year-old legends about its ties to murder and madness have been discredited. The absinthe available over the counter nowadays is neither dangerous - in fact, it's debatable whether it ever was - nor illegal.  And it has given us theme bars and happy-hour promotions, like "l'heure verte," a so-called "resurrecting" of "a daily ritual in Montmartre during the late 1800s" that involved absinthe drinkers "talking about all of the happenings in the art world of the time."

This still leaves open the reasons behind absinthe's reputation as an intoxicating source of creativity and invention, a power that led Hemingway's character Robert Jordan, in "For Whom the Bell Tolls," to carry around a flask of this "opaque, bitter, tongue-numbing, brain-warming, stomach-warming, idea-changing liquid alchemy." It also leaves unsettled the cause of what led absinthe to be attacked, as one 19th-century poet put it, as "the Devil, made liquid."

Devil or not, in tasting absinthe now, those older associations with bohemian modernism, with van Gogh and Manet and Baudelaire and the life of Parisian cafes at the turn of the 20th century, still strongly resonate.