Erbe & Filtri
The Green That Drove Painters Mad — Absinthe: the botanical demon that science has almost forgiven
Between the green fairy and thujone: when a bitter herb becomes guilty of everything
Come closer. Smell that — herbaceous, intensely bitter, like dry leaves chewed in the darkness of a crypt. It is Absinthe. For centuries it healed, inspired, terrified. Then, in a single summary trial, it was condemned as a hallucinogenic poison. The real twist? Science has almost acquitted it.
La Leggenda
It is said that *Artemisia absinthium* — great wormwood — took its name from Artemis herself, goddess of the hunt, the moon, and the thresholds between worlds. Medieval herbalists called it *the herb of the bitter moon*: gathering it at night, under the first quarter, was said to amplify its protective powers against the malevolent spirits that travel in darkness.
It is said that in the Middle Ages pilgrims sewed sprigs of wormwood into the soles of their sandals: it would keep away the demons of the road and the miasmas of the marshes. It is said that witches burned it as incense to open the sixth sense and summon the dead to speak — a use that the grimoires of the Anglo-Saxon tradition record among the herbs of Saturn and Mars, cold and sharp as blades.
And then there is the *green fairy* — the Fée Verte. **The most powerful legend of absinthe is that of its artistic poison.** It is told that Van Gogh saw yellow halos around lamps, heard voices, cut off his own ear in a delirium — and that all of this was the work of the green fairy that dwelled in the glass. Toulouse-Lautrec, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Oscar Wilde: the Pantheon of absinthe is a museum of genius and ruin. It was said that the drink opened doors of perception that common alcohol could not even find.
Il Vero
**Artemisia absinthium is one of the most anciently documented medicinal herbs in the world.** The Greeks used it for its medicinal properties, the Romans incorporated it as a culinary herb; in the Middle Ages it was a remedy for intestinal worms — hence the English name *wormwood* — and a bitter digestive. Dioscorides and Pliny both cite it in their naturalistic treatises.
The dark turning point arrives in the nineteenth century with the industrial birth of distilled absinthe. By the mid-1800s, production by Pernod and other major distillers brings the drink into the hands of every French social class. **Toward the end of the century, European governments begin to grow alarmed:** its spread is pervasive, alcoholism a real social crisis. A culprit more specific than alcohol is needed — and thujone, the terpene characteristic of artemisia, becomes the perfect scapegoat.
The problem is that the *scientific proof* of danger is very poorly constructed. As Difford's Guide documents, the researcher who led the campaign of condemnation **forced laboratory animals to consume pure concentrated wormwood oil** — not diluted absinthe — and used the resulting convulsions as a demonstration of the drink's danger. A method that, in the words of Difford's Guide, is equivalent to testing the effects of coffee by administering pure caffeine intravenously.
The ban arrives in a cascade: **Belgium in 1905, Switzerland in 1910, the United States in 1912, France on 16 March 1915** — with 422 votes in favour and only 58 against in the French Chamber of Deputies, in the midst of the World War, when it was useful to have a demon to point at.
Modern science has overturned much of that narrative. According to data reported by Study.com and research published on ResearchGate, **the thujone content in historic absinthe never reached levels sufficient to produce real psychoactive effects.** The European Union, which permitted the commercial rediscovery of absinthe from 1988, set a limit of 35 mg/L of thujone — and analyses of period bottles show that those levels were rarely exceeded even before the ban.
**Van Gogh probably suffered from pre-existing neuropsychiatric disorders** — epilepsy, mood disturbances, perhaps lead poisoning from pigments — exacerbated by alcohol as such, not by thujone as a special agent. The green fairy was, in large part, a metaphor that prohibition transformed into a verdict.
What remains true, and verified, is the pharmacological richness of artemisia. The plant contains **absinthin and artabsin**, bitter lactones that stimulate the production of bile and gastric juices — digestive properties recognised today even by modern phytotherapy. And there is a detail that is almost enough to make one tremble: another artemisia, *Artemisia annua*, has given humanity **artemisinin**, the most effective active principle against malaria discovered in the twentieth century, awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2015 to the Chinese researcher Tu Youyou. The family is the same. The boundary between poison, remedy, and wonder, as thin as ever.