Ambrosia - the nectar sustenance of the Greek pantheon - consisted of a fermented honey that granted immortality to all lips it touched. An earthly counterpart was consumed throughout the ancient Aegean world as an entheogen, a psychoactive substance used in religious ceremonies. Of course, worshipers also inebriated themselves with the "gift of the vines," loving wine to the point of creating an entire deity, Dionysus, to personify and exalt the experience. Like the ancients, modern society still reveres alcohol and this is nowhere more evident than a college campus. Advertisements glamorize it. Movies idolize it. And upper classmen proselytize it. Today's
"Greeks" no longer favor wine, usually preferring an icy keg to a cooled merlot. Apollo …show more content…
It was in this world of alcohol worship that I found myself emerged at the onset of my freshmen year. My high school experience with it had been relatively mild; whether because it was harder to get or the restrictions of living at home, drinking had always been an occasional social thing and usually handled responsibly. Yet as I entered the door of my first college party, I soon realized the rules had changed. Crowded within the fraternity house were hundreds of people, each unfamiliar face covered with a plastic cup. The mass swarmed rhythmically to the music, grinding against each other and screaming ecstatically. I could only marvel at the debauchery of the whole scene and at my own awkward anxiety, a feeling I hadn't experienced since my first day of middle school. "I should get a beer," I thought. Outside on the patio, the revelations kept coming. The poor keg was being bombarded on all sides, like the climax of an old zombie movie in which the last uninfected holdouts try in vain to defend against the living dead's circumscribed attack. All rules of civility and courtesy …show more content…
Arbitrating the altar was a Greek who went about his task with solemnity, his backward hat demarking his reverence, like a Yakama or miter. I could almost make out his homage to the party gods as he filled each chalice: "Bless this brew, and the good people at Rolling Rock who made it, in
"Greeks" no longer favor wine, usually preferring an icy keg to a cooled merlot. Apollo …show more content…
It was in this world of alcohol worship that I found myself emerged at the onset of my freshmen year. My high school experience with it had been relatively mild; whether because it was harder to get or the restrictions of living at home, drinking had always been an occasional social thing and usually handled responsibly. Yet as I entered the door of my first college party, I soon realized the rules had changed. Crowded within the fraternity house were hundreds of people, each unfamiliar face covered with a plastic cup. The mass swarmed rhythmically to the music, grinding against each other and screaming ecstatically. I could only marvel at the debauchery of the whole scene and at my own awkward anxiety, a feeling I hadn't experienced since my first day of middle school. "I should get a beer," I thought. Outside on the patio, the revelations kept coming. The poor keg was being bombarded on all sides, like the climax of an old zombie movie in which the last uninfected holdouts try in vain to defend against the living dead's circumscribed attack. All rules of civility and courtesy …show more content…
Arbitrating the altar was a Greek who went about his task with solemnity, his backward hat demarking his reverence, like a Yakama or miter. I could almost make out his homage to the party gods as he filled each chalice: "Bless this brew, and the good people at Rolling Rock who made it, in