GOD IS DAMP, POPE DECLARES AFTER MONKS GET HIGH ON BAD MEAD
A single batch of hallucinogenic hooch rewrites a thousand years of theology, leaving the Church—and its holiest relics—uncomfortably moist.
Oh, sweet Innocent III’s famously fertile niece, you want to hear about Brother Thaddeus? Of course you do. By the soggy Shroud of Turin, what a mess that was. See, over at the Abbey of St. Giles the Gassy—a dreary little pile of stones in Flanders, mostly known for the Abbot’s prodigious flatulence—they had this one monk, Thaddeus, who was so pious he’d probably confess to having a lustful thought about a particularly shapely turnip. A real prick, in other words. His job was brewing the mead, and for the Bishop’s annual visit, he wanted to make something *truly* divine.
So this pious little weasel is out gathering honey and herbs, praying his rosary so hard the beads are practically smoking, when he finds this patch of… odd-looking mushrooms. All iridescent and sort of throbbing. Instead of thinking, “Hmm, this looks like something the Devil would sprout from his unholy nethers,” Thaddeus figures it’s a sign from God. An angel-sent garnish. So he throws a fat handful into the fermenting vat. The resulting brew, which he christened “Nectar of the Nine Choirs,” looked like piss and smelled like a bog-drowned badger, but by God, it packed a punch that could make a statue of St. Peter get up and start groping the choirboys.
The Bishop arrives, a fat, gout-ridden man named Jean de Boulogne who hadn’t seen his own holy sceptre in a decade. He, the Abbot, and poor Thaddeus have the first ceremonial cups. Ten minutes later, they’re all on the floor of the refectory, screaming in what they could only describe as *divine, saturated ecstasy*. They didn’t see pearly gates or fields of Elysian. Oh no. They saw the Truth. They saw God. And God, my friends, wasn’t some bearded patriarch on a throne. God was a vast, cosmic, slightly clammy entity—a sort of divine mildew clinging to the basement walls of creation. The *Imago Dei* was a shimmering, pulsating, vaguely fungal network. The “music of the spheres”? A gentle, wet, squelching sound, like a saint walking barefoot through a puddle of holy water.
News travels, as it does, especially when a Bishop starts excommunicating people for being “offensively arid.” A cask of the "Sacred Nectar" makes its way to Rome, a little gift for Pope Gregory IX. Now, Greg was a miserable bastard best known for, I don’t know, inventing the Inquisition and declaring that cats were Satan’s preferred pet. But he and the Curia lock themselves in the Lateran Palace for a week with this mead. When they emerge, blinking and damp, everything changes. A papal bull is issued—*Deus est Humidius* (“God is Damp-ish”)—declaring that the ultimate state of holiness is moisture. Dryness becomes a sin. The new path to salvation involved encouraging leaks in church roofs and spending hours in contemplative prayer inside sweaty steam-baths. Relics were now judged by their mold-purity.
My own Cistercian order, lovers of austere, dry-stone architecture, nearly had a collective aneurysm. The Franciscans, dirty little beggars that they are, took to it like ducks to… well, like Franciscans to a puddle. For about fifty years, all of Christendom was gloriously, soggily insane. Then the original batch of mead ran out, no one could find those magical little mushrooms again, and the visions stopped. The Church quietly sobered up, pretended the whole “moisture is godliness” thing was a metaphor, and went back to a nice, respectable, and thoroughly dry God. But if you look in the darkest, dampest corners of some old cathedrals, you might still find an old bishop, on his knees, licking the walls. Just in case.
