Instead of attempting to summarize or interpret the immensely diverse range of data that are available on alcohol and religion from an anthropo- logical point of view, it seems appropriate in this context to point out a series of questions that indicate areas where useful and conceptually important contributions might well be made by interested researchers. The writing that has been done on the symbolism of drinks and drinking is largely humanistic in content and style. However interesting and sug- gestive it may be, there is little of a substantive nature that would com- mand the attention and respect of colleagues in more self-consciously scientific disciplines. It could be rewarding if a researcher who has con- siderable experience in eliciting and interpreting the meanings and inter- relatedness of symbols with other parts of sociocultural systems were to turn attention to the subject of alcohol in religion. Ethnographic fieldwork with such an emphasis could be a valuable addition in many parts of the world, but probably that fresh perspective itself could afford significant insights if applied to much of the literature that is already extant.
The meanings of sacrifice and offerings deserve further elucidation. With respect to alcohol, special attention should probably be paid to dif- ferentiating cases where alcohol is offered directly as a gift to supernatural beings, and those where the worshipers themselves consume it by way of making a gesture of tribute. Intimately linked with such beliefs and atti- tudes are those about drunkenness. We know little about the different meanings of a drunken deity, a drunken worshiper, a drunken defiler, or a drunken seeker after special communication or transcendental experi- ence. Most societies that offer alcohol to supernaturals enjoy it in their own lives. If exceptions can be found, what are we to make of them?
Drinking does not necessarily result in an altered state of conscious- ness. How do beliefs about the effects that alcohol has on people relate to beliefs about the efficacy of alcohol as a sacrament—or its negative values as a sacrilege? How does it happen that alcoholic beverages come to be viewed as appropriate offerings or gifts to ancestors or other supernatu- ral beings? Once that pattern is in place, how can it be changed? Or even undone?
What are we to make of the fact that some groups are convinced that it was a male deity who brought the benefits of alcohol to humankind, whereas others are equally certain that it was a female? How do these beliefs relate to other aspects of cosmology? Or to contemporary social
organization? And do they influence decisions about who is to manufac- ture alcoholic beverages? Or to dispense them? Are there regular and sig- nificant ways in which drinking supernaturals differ from abstaining ones? The same question may be pertinent about ancestors.
How much can we understand of the actual microdynamics by which practitioners of a given religion, having favored drinking and its effects, reverse that stand and declaim against it? Or, as new religions emerge, what kinds of factors affect choices that are made about the subject? By whom are they made, on what bases, and how are they effectively com- municated to others?
The “great Jewish drink mystery” remains much as it was when Keller (1970) first pointed out the unsolved question of how the notoriously hard-drinking and boisterous drunken Judaeans or Canaanites became the sober Hebrews. Presumably it relates to the codification of religion and the institution of home rituals in the period following their reunification from the first diaspora and the building of the Second Temple (around 500
B.C.). But it is unclear how they fast gained a reputation for frequent cere-
monial drinking combined with virtually no secular drinking, with mod- eration and sobriety becoming general. The mechanics of how this came about remain unknown, although detailed analysis of the self-consciously detailed analysis and prescriptions for proper behavior that were being deliberated and written at the time presumably hold clues. For that mat- ter, there has been little attempt to relate differences in drinking and asso- ciated attitudes to other cultural beliefs among Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform segments within contemporary U.S. Jewry, although descrip- tions are consistent.
In a sense, similar questions about the dynamics of changing drinking patterns and their relation to other cultural changes could fruitfully be asked also about the Arabs and others whose traditional love of wine was curtailed under Islam. For that matter, the ways in which the clergy and a small group of alchemists or physicians long kept their monopoly over distillation in Europe, not forfeiting it until late medieval times, has not been documented. Neither has the relative sobriety of so-called ascetic Protestantism as contrasted with Catholicism, or specific sectarian bans that prevail in some churches.
How much light can the roles of alcohol in religion throw upon broader questions of how sociocultural systems change—or resist change? Are beliefs or behaviors more susceptible to change? And why? Whichever may be the case, are prescriptions or proscriptions more likely to change? And which is more likely to result in change?
The number of anthropological questions that remain to be addressed with respect to the relation between alcohol and religion is manifold—and fascinating—and many of them have both practical and theoretic implica- tions that reach far beyond any of the component fields of interest.
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