Heh.

So I decided I would give the SlowPost/seed note concept a go. I’ll coat different papers with various glues and see how well the seeds stick. I’ll then wait a few days to plant them in pots with potting soil, some face up, some face down. I didn’t make any paper as I’d like to see what would work best. From there, depending on results and if it’s fun, I’ll refine my method.

My seeds are hand harvested by a local gardener. These are poppy seeds, Papaver somniferum, Giganteum mix, with flowers that are lilac, red, salmon, pink, white, and purple, single and peony poppy. I think the blue seeds (Oriental mix) are better for culinary use, so if this works and I order a bucket, I’ll probably get the blue seeds and plant a big patch for us.

I love poppies. They’re surprisingly graceful and I love how they always look sleepily happy at the sun. They’re colors dazzle me. And Papaver somniferum, the opium poppy, is an ancient plant that is food and medicine. The young leaves of the poppy plant can be used as a potherb or eaten in a salad, and the tiny seeds eaten raw. Poppy seeds can also be pressed for oil, which makes up about forty-five percent of the total seed weight and is edible without heating or refining, and can also be used in lamps.

Papaver somniferum,is by no means the only cultivated plant with ties to medicine, magic, and ritual for which no truly wild population has been found. Considering there are over fifty species of Nicotiana, the only one which has never been found growing wild is the plant whose leaves have had such an effect in the various guises of tobacco. Another is the coca plant.

Archaeologists on the island of Cyprus unearthed a ceramic opium pipe that had been buried for three thousand years, and conjecture the pipe had been used by the People of the Sea, the Minoans who fled the eruption of Thera. Homer sang of these blue-eyed blond opium smokers. They were the giants Samson slaughtered with the jawbone of an ass in the Book of Judges and the grandparents of Goliath.

The ancient Greeks consecrated altars and priests to the sacred plant. Scraps of poetry, pottery, and painting suggest that some of the first Greek deities to emerge from chaos brought opium with them. According to Lucian of Samnos, Nyx (Night) and her son, Thanatos (Death), ramble about the countryside wreathed in poppies with jars of juice to drop in the eyes of mortals. The fire stolen by Prometheus is described metaphorically by Aeschylus as both flower and drug. Prometheus concealed the fire in the customary manner of herb gatherers—in a hollow fennel stalk—and stole it from Zeus at a place called Mekone, “poppy town.”

Opium was used by members of the cult of Helen. To comfort Telemachus as he searched for his father,

[Helen] picked up a bowl for mixing wine and dropped in a drug: opium, from poppies grown in an earth rich with enchantments, which Queen Polydamna of Egypt had given her. Helen knew the drug would prevent someone from crying even if “he were to see a brother or beloved son put to the sword before his very eyes.” When the men drank the wine, she invited them to abandon themselves to the pleasure of talk. As Helen spoke, Meneleus gave her a happy, misty look, calling her “dear.” In the deep calm of the opium, he recalled without a single quiver of resentment, how Helen had, to the last, tried to bring ruin upon the Greeks.

Some theorize that Helen began her history as a tree goddess, especially since her name is pre-Greek, and she was clearly a priestess of the primordial All-Mother, who by Homer’s time had acquired the name of Demeter, who presided over one of the greatest religious traditions in human history. The Eleusinian Mysteries flourished unbroken from the Homeric Age until 400 AD, when the Christians finally stamped it out. What are the mysteries? “The saying of many ridiculous things and many serious things,” according to Aristophanes. No one has offered a better description.

Opium use throughout Asia, Europe, and the Middle East continued in various forms for centuries. In 1799, sixteen-year-old Friedrich Sertürner, a pharmacist’s apprentice in Paderborn, Germany, became convinced that opium had a single active ingredient varying in proportion to the troublesome addictive parts blighting the drug. In 1803, after experimenting with opium dissolved in acid and washed with ammonia, Sertürner discovered what he thought was the specific narcotic element of opium. He named it morphine, after Morpheus, Ovid’s name for the god of dreams and another son of Sleep.

The isolation of morphine was the first discovery of any alkaloid and an important milestone in the history of biochemistry. To have discovered the nature of an alkaloid and isolated it as Sertürner had would have entitled him to the Nobel Prize if one had existed.

Morphine was a miracle drug but like most miracles, it came with drastic side effects, including addiction. Scientists continued seeking the “bee without the sting,” a nonaddictive drug with the positive properties of opium. In 1898, trying to create a sort of super aspirin at Friedrich Bayer’s Elberfeld Farbenfarbik, Heinrich Dreser, the scientist who developed aspirin as an alternative to sodium salicylate, substituted two tiny strings of acetyls between the alcohol and phenyl hydroxy groups in morphine. The resulting drug, diacetylmorphine, was tested on sixty patients who responded marvelously. Delighted at the absence of morphine side effects such as nausea, anorexia, or constipation, the research team confidently concluded that addiction would be absent as well. Bayer called it heroin, from the German heroish, meaning a lot of power in a small unit, and sold it as assiduously as aspirin.

A single dose of heroin only lasts a few hours. For someone with a bad cold, as many as four doses of Bayer heroin were needed. After a couple days of self-administration, the patient would report dreadful symptoms such as cramps, headaches, sniffles, anxiety, and depression. The patient would take Bayer Heroin to relieve these symptoms, and then take more to avoid them altogether. It was the same pattern with morphine addiction but with an important exception: while it took months to become addicted to morphine, a person could have a full-blown heroin habit in two weeks.

Yet, until the advent of the twentieth century, opium and opium-based medicines were among the few that effectively deaden pain and alleviate suffering. The analgesic effect is rooted in the brain, as is the euphoric side-effect. Many attempts continue try to eliminate the “undesirable” euphoria of these drugs in an effort to provide pain relief without addiction. But these medicines are addictive because they so effectively change sensations from painful to pleasurable, making a nonaddicting opiate impossible, a contradiction in terms.

Addiction is not an issue for people suffering pain due to terminal illness. Pain management has become a serious concern in agonic therapy. Known pharmacologically as Diamorphine, heroin is considered more effective and safer than morphine in treating the pain of myocardial infarction. It may also be of more use to people suffering from some stomach cancers. The contemporary use of Brompton’s Cocktail (an analgesic and stimulating mix of alcohol, cocaine, and heroin) in British hospices for terminal patients is an example of comfort-oriented therapies.

Finally, I can’t talk about poppies without sharing a recipe. I’ve never made mond kuchen (moon cakes) but the woman who gave me the recipe said her family had made them for generations. Scholars have traced similar recipes to Austria and Hungary. Way back when in those countries, the opium latex was collected and used as medicine, including an opium water fed to babies to keep them quiet as the older children and adults worked in the fields. The seeds, known as “moon seeds,” were harvested and made into mond kuchen.

Filling:
1 pound fresh, finely ground poppy seeds
1 cup boiled milk
1/4 cup melted butter
2 teaspoons lemon zest
Mix poppy seeds, butter, zest and only 3/4 cup boiled milk. The filling should be somewhat thick, but if it is not spreadable, add more of the milk. Divide into four equal portions.

Dough:
4 cups flour
4 tablespoons sugar
1 cup lukewarm water
2 eggs, beaten slightly
2 cakes yeast
1/2 cup butter, softened
1 teaspoon salt

Crumble the yeast in a bowl. Add water and sugar, stirring until blended. In a separate bowl, mix flour and butter as if for a pie crust. Add eggs, salt and yeast mixture. Blend until the dough is smooth.

Divide into four portions and roll out as thinly as possible. Spread filling and roll like a jelly roll. Place in greased baking pans and bake at once at 350º for 30 minutes or until brown.

Wow. Guess I know a lot about poppies. And are the flying monkeys the creepiest movie henchman ever or what?