THE ELIXIR OF LIFE HAS BEEN RECREATED!
The mythical potion that grants its drinkers eternal life, the recipe that alchemists have sought for THOUSANDS of years, has finally been discovered. This is literally the most important discovery of human history, and poises us on the cusp of a brand new era in human evolution. Look at that bottle – tiny but ornate! The legends were true; it must only take only a few sips of the “white drops” to be effective!
“Archaeologists have dug up a 19th-century recipe for fending off death.”
Okay, yes, well…hmm. That’s a lot more recent than I was expecting. The 19th century is definitely not in “sands of time” territory. That’s not even “mists of time” territory. That’s like…”veils of time” territory. Very wispy and translucent veils. Even if this elixir turned out to be the one from the lesser versions of the legend – extending life to an unnatural extent rather than banishing death completely – it seems to me that we might have *noticed* these near-immortals walking among us. On the other hand, these proto-immortals certainly would have taken great pains to disguise themselves, and there’s always the possibility of a Bilderberg Group/Illuminati/Ordo Templi Orientis conspiracy to hide it. But onward, the answers will surely reveal themselves.
“During a recent excavation beneath a hotel site at 50 Bowery, Chrysalis Archaeology discovered a tiny, greenish glass bottle that once contained the “Elixir of Long Life.”
So the bottle is empty, which is disappointing, but perhaps to be expected. After all, if you’d dedicated most of your life to uncovering the secret to even NEAR immortality, you’d certainly would have drained the dregs from that bottle. I don’t even leave drops left in cans of soda, and those basically contain the opposite of eternal life. But perhaps a crack team of brilliant chemists, backed by an international consortium, can use what ever trace residue still remains in the bottle to *begin* to reconstruct the elixir. This could be our first handhold we need to scale the unscalable wall of death and take hold of immortality with both hands. Not an end to death, then, but the beginning of the end.
“The bottle found amid a cache of 150-year-old liquor bottles beneath what was once a German beer garden sparked the archaeologists’ curiosity, and they decided to hunt down the original recipe so they could try the elixir themselves.”
Okay, let’s take this one damning sentence fragment at a time. They found a bottle labeled “the elixir of life,” along with a bunch of alcohol, in the ruins of a beer garden? You might take that title at face value if it was found in what was once an alchemist’s grotto, or the catacombs, or under a monastery. In that context, yes, it might be reasonable to assume that the name The Elixir of Life is to be taken literally and sincerely. In a beer garden, mixed in with assorted bottles of alcohol? THAT bottle?
Look at that bottle. I swear I’ve got a novelty shot glass that looks exactly like that.
This bottle didn’t contain the elixir of life. Probably the most interesting thing that this bottle contained is an old hangover cure playfully named “the elixir of life.” Seeing this bottle and thinking it’s actually the elixir of life makes you worse than one of those guys who responds to a woman’s Twitter joke as if it were 100% serious. But it gets worse.
After finding this bottle, these archaeologists, who undoubtedly spent years of their lives tirelessly studying to learn how to coax secrets from the shadows and whispers of the past, decided that their next step would apparently be to consult some German librarians and ask them if they had any old recipes for “elixir of life.” I mean, for one, the idea that archaeologists needed to find an old bottle named “the elixir of life” to have their interest piqued about what is the most sought after legendary historical artifact in the world is sort of bizarre and unbelievable. Even if you’re a very serious and realistic archaeologist doesn’t believe that the elixir of life exists, you have to at least have *heard* of it before. This is like being a historian specializing in Ancient Greece and suddenly getting interested in Atlantis after visiting Las Vegas, or being a astronomer and having your interest in UFOs piqued by watching Ancient Aliens on the History Channel. But setting that aside, why ON EARTH would you think an arbitrary recipe picked from the undoubted dozens and dozens of recipes ineffectual “elixir of life” would have anything at all to do with a novelty hangover cure you found in a beer garden?
In any case, the conclusion to the story is that Chrysalis Archaeology is going to, I kid you not, sell the chance to taste the fake elixir of life at a pub crawl in New York. Which I guess I can’t really get mad about.
What did it turn out ot be, I wonder? Aquavit? Uisca beatha? For fuck’s sake, half of our most delicious alcohols are already called the Elixir of Life.
It really does sound just like a very Victorian name for fancy alcohol.
I hope ten thousand years from now, archaeologists dig up a bottle of Aquavit and just lose their fucking minds.
“We’re sure this is it! The actual water of life!”
“Why?”
“Well…well look, it says it right here on the label. What ELSE could it be?”
“But it’s sitting next to calcified jello shots!”
“We believe we’ve found the hidden cache of 19th century alchemist Jonathon “Jack” Daniels. A historic find!
Seriously, it must be the most significant discovery since the Johnnie Walker archive was deciphered in stardate 86088.58!
It’s probably Qream.
Cheers to this.
Early chemical analysis reveals the Victorian prototype for Hypnotiq.
You rang?
if the stories my friend in Cultural Resource Management tells are anything to go by, the Chrysalis people, if not the writer of the linked article, were definitely hoping to find a new kind of cocktail recipe
The picture of the guy from Atlantis makes me so happy and is so perfect here.
“one of those guys who responds to a woman’s Twitter joke as if it were 100% serious.”
What about the guys who respond to women’s Twitter jokes (or just statements) with ironic invocations of “not all men,” to show that they’re in on the joke?
(Part of the reason that I refuse to get Twitter, and just type in “twitter.com/mallelis/with_replies” when I want to see the latest Twitter jokes, is fear that I would succumb to something equally stupid to ingratiate myself to writers I admire.)
It is hard because trying to ingratiate myself to writers I admire by saying someting stupid is basically all I use Twitter for.
I do not hold myself above the instinct to ingratiate, I would just want to do so in a smart and cool way. Since I don’t trust I could pull that off, I steer clear.
The article is still pretty cool. Bitters are interesting and I’d love to try these (that is if it didn’t mean seeking out things like genitian root and spanish saffron and then waiting two weeks for the mixture to brew up).
There was a pretty low-budget documentary on netflix about absinthe that I really enjoyed. If I remember correctly, according to the film the basic recipe was taken from an elderly herbalist-type woman and then re-branded by these brothers so that they could distance it from her because a female peasant herbalist was too “witchy” to appeal to the public. Or something like that.
Honestly, that is the story behind pretty much every liquor invented before the age of artificial flavoring.
hm, I don’t know much about the origin of liquors. sounds like history though.
FUN FACT: Amaretto is not almond flavoured, it is peach pit-flavoured with the almondy taste coming from the cyanide in the pits.
that is a delightful fact
I may actually try making it. I kind of love bitters and at one point made some out of, basically, stuff I found in the wood (EDIBLE stuff, don’t worry). I know the natural food store in town has gentian and spanish saffron. White turmeric might be hard to find, though.
I would love to hear about how it turns out if you do! I’m at work and have to minimize my non-business internet activity but I really want to look up white turmeric asap because I’m kind of obsessed with the orange variety and I’ve never heard of white.
Weird and off-topic, but a friend and I were recently talking about how much we’d love a truly historically accurate theme bar where the interior, clothing, drinks and food were all true to period. I’d love to visit a 19th century German beer garden.
These are the kinds of ideas I come up with when I’m trying to come to terms with the fact that I won’t ever get to time-travel.
I am REALLY looking forward to more tags on Mallory’s thoughts about uisge beatha.
I’ve been trying to come up with a Baccano! joke for the past hour and have failed because I’m not very funny. So instead I will drop that series name here and look around like this hoping that there are some people here who are cleverer than I am, or at least who know what I’m talking about.
cap_america_i_understood_reference.gif
(the anime fans are here somewhere, I swear!)
I bought novelty glasses at Target last year for my new apartment that are labeled “POISON” and “VENOMOUS.” Archaeologists are going to have a field day in another 150 years.
It bothers me that so many archaeology articles end up so Upworthy-like sensationalist when they’re interesting enough in their own right. Earth sciences in general (it seems a bit of a stretch to lump archaeology in there, my apologies, but a lot of my friends went that route instead of starting in anthro) tend to get so clickbaity to get people interested, and that sucks because geology is interesting! Geography! Archaeology! Just because we aren’t unraveling the mysteries of DNA or figuring out the physics of a black hole doesn’t mean that we aren’t just as worthwhile.
/geologist $0.02
I enjoy the thought of a venomous glass that will bite you. Maybe it is a marvellous creature disguised as a container. Isn’t there something in Fantastic Beasts that can disguise itself as a bucket?
/pedantry
hm, I don't know much about the origin of liquors. sounds like history though.
I would love to hear about how it turns out if you do! I'm at work and have to minimize my non-business internet activity but I really want to look up white turmeric asap because I'm kind of obsessed with the orange variety and I've never heard of white.
Weird and off-topic, but a friend and I were recently talking about how much we'd love a truly historically accurate theme bar where the interior, clothing, drinks and food were all true to period. I'd love to visit a 19th century German beer garden.
These are the kinds of ideas I come up with when I'm trying to come to terms with the fact that I won't ever get to time-travel.
that is a delightful fact
De-lurking because I know one of the archaeologists who worked on that site, and, the breathlessness of the DNA headline notwithstanding, their find and subsequent research was pretty cool. They tracked the bottle to its likely origin, used that information to further contextualize it, and then found a recipe for the drink it probably contained, which is, effectively, an extinct cocktail. Once they had the recipe, they figured out where in the city they could find the right ingredients (some common, some not) and brewed a few bottles of the “elixer.” They Jurassic Park’d a booze thing.
I tried some; it was sweeter than I was expecting.
Basically, I think it’s cool that archaeologists do stuff like this. (Also, obviously none of them thought it really contained the ELIXER OF LIIIIIFE.)
To your reasonable description of the sober-minded and sane workings of archaeological science, I say: I say FIE and BAH HUMBUG.
I’ve never been one to argue with a good FIE.
The article is great, but the TAGS. Slain.
The article is great, but the TAGS. Slain.