Coffee has been considered so dangerous, drinking it has been an act of sedition.

An old fable has Pope Clement VIII,  forced to give an explanation when he was found sipping “Satan’s Drink”, tersely reply: “Satan’s Drink is so delicious it would be a sin to let infidels have exclusive use of it.”

Another myth has Mohammed saying he could unhorse forty men and possess forty women on the strength of a single cup of coffee.

True or not: these might have been a great anecdotes to use on later clerics and leaders who tremblingly, sometimes preemptively, attempted to outright ban the bean.

If, as I say, “addiction is the new sin”, it is also a very old one.

Like any substance worthy of the qualifier “addictive”, coffee has survived several attempts to ban it, and midwifed its own revolutions.

In politics and religion, famously the two pillars of the state, appropriation is the price of success.

Thus, while the old-school conservatives of the last century rallied and railed against degenerate drug use (think: Nixon’s “War on Drugs”), few of them had caffeine in mind. How many, I wonder, thought up strategy over cups of warm dishwater?

To many of Clement’s contemporaries, however, coffee was the brew of infidels; it was then associated with Islam, having probably originated in Ethiopia and spread under the influence of the Ottoman Empire. For them, a war on drugs meant a war on caffeine. But banning the bean has been an ecumenical exercise.

In response to seditious poetry, King Charles II tried to shut down coffeehouses by forbidding the sale or consumption of coffee in England. (He reversed the decision less than two-weeks later.) Khair-Beg, governor of Mecca, tried to ban coffee for the same reason, until the sultan of Cairo, an infamous caffeine-addict, reversed the ban.

Ottoman ruler Murad IV is said to have dressed up as a commoner and lugged around a big sword to decapitate coffee-drinkers. Ibrahim I, Murad’s successor, is said to have instituted beatings as a first time penalty for coffee drinking; second time offenders are said to have been tied into a leather sack and tossed into the Bosporus.

Prussia’s Frederick the Great, fretting the flow of money from his country because of coffee consumption, proscribed coffeehouses, though he is said to have continued coffee consumption himself, often substituting champagne for water in the brewing process.  He also penned a polemic arguing for the superiority of beer over coffee.

Caffeine’s largest success has been its unabated proliferation in spite of the disfavor of these traditional power structures.

Given this resistance, why, or rather how, did coffee survive?

The traditional answer is simple enough. Because, unlike alcohol, caffeine innervates the mind, leaving its users more prone to talking, instead of tittering, and not incidentally making caffeine far more politically dangerous than alcohol.  In fear of this quality, Grand Vizier Kuprili of Constantinople is said to have closed coffeehouses to preempt subversion during a war; though, it probably didn’t hurt that imams and dervishes had “raised a loud wail against it, saying the mosques were almost empty, while the coffee houses were always full” at that time. Nothing reinforces the state like religious support.

Another way of understanding this is to consider the individual experience.

Viewed with some leeway, coffee consumption is its own religious experience. The meaning of these fables is not in what they say, but in what they don’t. They don’t comment on the dissident history of coffee, the fact coffee has been the preferred drink of radicals and French existentialists. Nor, indeed, do they recognize the  ecstatic jitter of that first sip. (Part of coffee’s rise was undoubtedly due to Islamic monks and mystics who appreciated the energy caffeine provides. And while pseudo-mystics like Aldous Huxley and Timothy Leary credited mescalin-related substances with lifting the veil, I would be curious to find out how much of their work was done under the influence of caffeine.)

Many  imbibers have ritualized the experience of the morning cup. I know of one man, for example, who has refined the brewing process so far as to have acceptable time limits for how long the water must settle before brewing can begin. A minute too long means restarting.

Today’s intake: one and a half 30-ounce pots, and one 8-ounce mocha.

Today’s recipe: use champagne instead of water in your next brew.

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Notes and Footnotes:

(1) Concerning the Clement fable: This is actually a slight mangling of the fable on my part. The truth in a fable, however, is found in its fictions. And for our purposes, this is accurate enough. (My guess is that the anecdote is etymological in function: it is meant to explain Clement’s “baptism” of coffee, transplanting it into the embrace of Christendom.) To this day some Catholics take credit for the widespread appeal of coffee. For a more traditional telling, look here.

(2) The threat of ban is not entirely dead, either. At least, not in all times and places. Hamburg, Germany, nixed coffee pods in its government-run buildings this year in order to be more enviro-friendly. A New Jersey “distracted driving” bill from this year might make driving with a to-go cup fine-worthy, following similar legislation in Utah and Maine. Even though it doesn’t explicitly ban coffee, it could be used in that way. Though this aside wanders somewhat from the point of this particular post. The bill was sponsored by New Jersey Democrats, and it is unclear whether eating and drinking would be included; the bill’s sponsors say no.  However, the bill’s language proposed to allow officers to issue summons for “any activity unrelated to the actual operation of a motor vehicle in a manner that interferes with the safe operation of the vehicle.”To prove my point about popular whiplash to outright bans, “Wisniewski said he was surprised by the reaction to the legislation. He said the outcry against the bill has been so strong that his inbox has filled up even more than when he proposed a 25-cent-per-gallon increase in the gas tax.”

(3) Concerning Islam and coffee: Coffee by no means had an unchallenged tenure in Islamic culture. More on that some other time.

(4) Concerning Vizier Kuprili: for a more robust account, see “All About Coffee” William Ukers, 1922.

(5) Concerning related drug legislation in the U.S. during the twentieth century: look at the fascinating “History of Legislative Control Over Opium, Cocaine, And Their Derivatives”, David Musto. At one point, caffeine faced a similar fate to some of the drugs eventually classified as “narcotics”.