On Meeting the Spirits of Alcohol in Ritual
In celebration of officially copyrighting my upcoming book—set for release this January—I’m offering a Yule gift: a full essay from the EsoteriKa section of Ars Architektonic Anomalia. May it stir something ancient in you. Happy Yule, beloveds. 🔥📜
⚠️ Ritual Drinking Disclaimer (or: Don’t Be a Dumbass) ⚠️
Before we begin, a word to the wise—and the reckless.
Everyone’s tolerance is different. Everyone’s chemistry is different. I’ve spent years refining my ability to use alcohol and other substances to enhance perception, not obliterate it. This is not party culture. This is calibrated, alchemical praxis. I am a master of my thresholds. You probably aren’t.
If you’re under 21 (honestly, under 33), this is not for you. Your brain’s still baking and your ego’s still loud. Wait. Life will give you plenty of time to meet the gods. Don’t rush the mirror.
Also: do not try dervishing under the influence unless you want to meet the floor in an ungraceful embrace. The spirits I describe here move—sometimes wildly. If you’re not grounded, they’ll throw you like a bad date.
I am not responsible for anyone who reads this and decides to fling themselves into a ritual trance after shotgunning rum and lighting candles near curtains. That’s not mysticism. That’s natural selection.
Drink slowly. Move wisely. Don’t mix sacred work with idiocy.
Now, if you’re still with me: pour the glass. The spirits are waiting.
I. INTRODUCTION — WHY ALCOHOL IS CALLED “SPIRITS”
The ancients weren’t being poetic when they named alcohol “spirits.” They were being literal. Anything that ferments develops a presence, and anything distilled develops a will. Alcohol is not inert—never has been. It is a housed intelligence, a residue of transformation, a consciousness born from fruit, grain, honey, or leaf passing through the alchemy of rot and fire. To drink it mindlessly is one thing; to drink it intentionally is quite another. When you loosen the mind and lower the iron gates of ego, alcohol does what it has always done: it reveals its inhabitant.
Most people never meet these spirits because they never give them silence. They drown the bottle in chatter, music, bars, clinking glasses, and the noise of other humans. Spirits do not rise for the distracted. But when you drink alone—slowly, without a phone, without a screen, without anyone else’s breath in the room—the drink itself begins to show its character. The veil thins. The edges soften. Something subtle leans in. The intelligence behind the fermentation, the thing awakened in the brewing, the personality born from the sugars and the yeast—that is what steps forward.
In ritual settings, the effect intensifies. Offerings, song, breathwork, erotic voltage—these open the field. Alcohol responds. Not as a drug, but as a presence. Each type speaks in its own timbre. Wine coils. Mead hums. Gin flickers. Rum laughs. They are not the same, and they do not behave the same, because they are not the same beings.
Drink with intention, and you will meet them. This is not metaphor. This is encounter.
II. WHY RITUAL DRINKING IS DIFFERENT FROM SOCIAL DRINKING
Ritual drinking is not drinking. It is listening. It is stripping away the social static until only the essence of the alcohol remains. Most people have never met the drink they’re consuming—too much noise, too much conversation, too many eyes and lights and limbs blurring the edges. But when you drink alone, slowly, with full awareness and nothing external pulling at your attention, something happens. The veil begins to shift. You feel not just the burn or warmth or buzz—but the character. And if you keep going, you meet the spirit behind the glass.
Each alcohol speaks its own language, and like any language, fluency comes with repetition. Over time, you learn the feel of them. You begin to recognize their voice. And for me, this fluency emerged through a very specific ritual praxis—one bottle of wine stretched over six or more hours, or the equivalent in spirits carefully paced. Never to numb. Only to open.
The setting is sacred. I make offerings to the Gods first. A small pour, a spoken name, a kiss on the rim. Then I begin: movement, music, bare feet on floorboards. Dancing not for performance, but for field activation. Singing, sometimes in words, sometimes in tones no language has touched. Poetry when it arises—never forced. And then the erotic charge: breath, blood, pulse. Something ancient wakes in the body and the room. The Gods notice. The air thickens. Glimpses come. The alcohol spirit responds.
This is not about getting drunk. This is not about escape. It is about arrival. This is communion, not consumption. And if you treat it that way, the spirits will reveal themselves to you.
III. WHY I DON’T DRINK WHITE CLAW ANYMORE
I don’t drink White Claw anymore because there’s nothing in it to meet. It has no origin myth, no cultural lineage, no providence. And in ritual, providence matters. It’s not just where a drink comes from geographically—it’s the story carried in its making. The ancestral memory of fermentation. The prayer sung over the vat. The hands that stirred it, the soil that fed it, the gods that claimed it. Providence is the spirit’s inheritance—the line through which it speaks. Without it, there’s no anchor, no personality, no intelligence to call forth. No name to whisper back.
White Claw is alcohol stripped of memory. A synthetic fizz wrapped in trend. There is no elder watching over it. No wild yeast, no sacred mold, no myth behind the label. It was born in a lab, flash-marketed into the mouths of the mimic masses, and it behaves accordingly. Hollow. Placeless. Toneless. It is ritually unpredictable—because there is no there there. Just sensation without soul.
And that makes it dangerous.
A substance without a spirit is a mimic drink. It imitates presence, but offers none. It carries no consequence, no guidance, no feedback loop. It leaves you open, but unguarded. Rituals are sensitive ecosystems. Every component either calls in truth or invites interference. When you use a hollow drink in a sacred setting, you might as well be leaving the door open for anything. You don’t know who—or what—will slip in.
I don’t drink White Claw anymore because I’ve learned what happens when you court emptiness with open lips. Give me a drink with blood in it, memory in it, madness in it. A drink with a name. A drink with a spirit.
IV. HOW TO GAUGE DIFFERENT SPIRITS
You do not gauge spirits by taste alone. Flavor is a costume, an outer skin. The true nature of the drink reveals itself in how it moves through you—how it touches your intelligence, how it pulls your emotions, how it alters your body’s rhythm and voice. Each alcohol, when met in silence and ritual, carries a mythic current that is felt, not imagined. An elemental sensation that rises through the body like heat from buried stone. An erotic signature that marks the encounter as singular, and alive.
You get to know the spirits the same way you get to know a lover—not by reading a label, but by what unfolds between you when you're alone together. My rituals are what allow this clarity. They are the field in which the alcohol speaks. Offerings come first—a pour for the Gods, a kiss of smoke, a whispered name. Then movement. Then voice. Then the slow unfolding of mind. One bottle of wine over many hours. Or the careful, paced equivalent in gin, mead, rum. The alcohol enters slowly, and the spirit within begins to rise.
What follows is a kind of courtship. Some spirits teach. Some seduce. Some disrupt. Some reflect. But none of them remain passive. In ritual, they reveal who they are—and who you become in their presence.
The taxonomy that follows is not theoretical. It’s been earned, hour by hour, cup by cup, dance by dance. This is how I know the difference between wine and gin, mead and rum—not from their scent, but from their effect. How they make me sing. How they make me move. How they help the Gods speak through me. How they fuck me, mind first.
Now, I’ll introduce you to each one.
V. THE SPIRITS THEMSELVES — A FIELD GUIDE
A. Wine — The Ecstatic Lover of Dionysus
Wine is not just fermented grape—it is the breath of Dionysus, still warm. It arrives with hips and heat and chaos wrapped in velvet. The Maenads knew. They didn’t drink wine to unwind—they drank it to dissolve. To be overtaken. Wine in ritual is an ecstatic force, emotional and unrelenting, a god with wine-dark eyes and red-stained hands. When you drink it in solitude, with offerings on your altar and the veil already thinning, it doesn’t ask permission. It grabs your hips. Spins you. Makes you speak in tongues.
The intelligence of wine is unmistakable. It elevates—but not in the clean, sharp way of gin. It’s messier. Smudged. Brilliant. It turns intelligence into obsession. Ideas come laced with ache. Your voice thickens with meaning. Your movements become dervish-like, circular, wide-hipped, trance-bound. Poetry doesn’t just arise—it erupts, gushing out of you as if pulled by divine suction from a place behind your lungs.
Wine is a lover, yes—but not a gentle one. Not polite. Not interested in moderation. It grabs your jaw in both hands and says:
“Open your mind. You’re about to speak in tongues.”
It doesn’t relax you. It unhinges you—gracefully, with velvet violence. Thought becomes rhythm. Logic becomes rhythm. The words you speak feel older than you. Prophecy leaks into the bloodstream.
Wine is not lovemaking. Wine is possession.
The Maenads didn’t sip—they danced on bones.
And if you let it, if you meet wine with full ritual voltage, you’ll feel the god rise through your spine like a divine ambush. You’ll write things you didn’t know you knew. You’ll laugh. You’ll cry. You’ll see your own hands shaking, stained red, knowing something just came through you clean.
Recommended: Z. Alexander Brown — Uncaged.
The name is not a gimmick. It’s a warning.
Wine will fuck you in the face.
And I promise—it will feel good.
B. Mead — The Honey-Slow Time Weaver
Mead is ancient. Older than wine, older than gods with names. It is what happens when bees, time, and air conspire. Fermented honey—simple to say, but primal in consequence. To drink real mead is to drink memory. Not just yours, but the world’s. There’s a reason it shows up in myth as a drink of poets and kings, lovers and seers. Mead doesn’t rush anything. It slows the world until time folds over itself in golden loops.
When you enter ritual space with mead, the air thickens. You begin to move differently. Dancing on mead feels like swimming through honeyed fog—every gesture feels sensual, deliberate, lacquered in gold. Your intelligence is still present, but softened into something slow-burning and syrup-slick. You think in waves, not spikes. Singing becomes decadent. You want to hear your own voice, feel the way it curls around the syllables. Poetry doesn’t arrive like wine’s chaos—it oozes, patient, amber, inevitable.
Mead feels fucking amazing. Of all the alcohol spirits I’ve met, mead might be my favorite to play with. It’s generous. It wraps around you, warm and glowing. It makes your body feel like something worth worshipping, and makes everything you say feel dipped in sacred sweetness. But—and this matters—you have to buy the good stuff. Cheap mead is hollow. It won’t work. This is not a drink for corners cut. If you’re a pauper ritualist like me, reserve it for the rites that call for honeyed speech and slow divine seduction.
Mead as a lover is indulgent. It pours honey across your skin, slow and glistening—then licks it off with a knowing smile. It doesn't dominate. It envelops.
Recommended: GI. Dansk Mjod.
The gods will recognize it. So will your blood.
C. Gin — The Astral Trickster
Gin is strange. Gin is sharp. Gin is not here to hold your hand. It’s juniper-based, yes, but don’t be fooled by the floral flirtation—this spirit doesn’t open the heart, it slices straight through the skull. Of all the alcohol spirits I’ve met, gin is the most cerebral, the most disembodied, the most astral. It doesn’t warm. It shimmers. It buzzes like electric wire just before it snaps. Gin is alcohol’s answer to LSD. It doesn’t pull you into the body—it kicks you out, cleanly, cleverly, and with style.
Your mind on gin becomes a razor. You think with frightening precision. Symbols unfold faster than your hand can write. Words flash in constellations. You are no longer of the earth. I can’t stress enough how sharp your mind becomes. It’s not “drunk” in the usual sense—it’s chemically adjacent to a lucid trip. Choose your gin carefully. The botanicals matter. Every plant, every root, every flower used in distillation has an occult meaning, a correspondence, an effect. Each botanical constellation creates a sigil in the blood. When you drink gin in ritual, you are drinking alchemical spells.
But dancing? Forget it. Imagine my surprise when I tried to dervish on gin and felt like a floating head with ghost limbs. You become all mind. No hips, no breath. Just clarity so intense it borders on alien. Singing and poetry are still available, but they take on a glassy edge—less emotional, more alchemical. Less fire, more crystal. It’s beautiful, but it’s not warm.
Gin as a lover is the Trickster in silk gloves. It won’t touch you right away—it asks riddles. It plays games. It makes you prove yourself worthy before slipping beneath your skin. But once it does? You’ll never think the same again.
Recommended: McQueen and the Violet Fog.
It’s not just a name. It’s a key. Every botanical in it is part of the map. Drink with intention. See what opens.
D. Rum — The Laughing Pirate Spirit
Rum is pure mischief. Born from sugarcane and sun, it carries the wild joy of something that never cared for order in the first place. It’s primal. Sticky. Lawless. And once it hits, your intelligence packs up and leaves—grinning. Rum doesn’t want your mind. It wants your laughter. And it gets it.
In ritual, rum unbuttons you. There’s no taxonomy here, no riddles to solve, no structure to decode. You’re not writing poetry. You can’t. You’ll try to speak and just end up cackling. I laughed my ass off. Thinking? Gone. Analysis? Gone. I couldn’t even string a single metaphor together, and I didn’t care in the slightest. Because it feels so good. Dancing becomes goofy, unhinged, euphoric. Singing comes, sure—but it’s more sea shanty than hymn. I kept blurting out “Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum” like it was gospel. And it was. The sacred text of pirates who knew pleasure was its own altar.
Rum as lover? Think rough hands, warm breath, and a devilish smile. It spins you around, pulls you close, then drapes an arm around your shoulder and says:
“Relax. I’ll fuck you when we’re both done laughing.”
You don’t resist. You can’t—you’re too busy giggling, swaying, babbling nonsense in the most delicious way possible. Rum doesn’t demand clarity. It demands surrender.
And you understand immediately why pirates lived on this stuff. It makes lawlessness feel holy. It makes pleasure feel eternal.
Recommended: The Kraken.
Yes, release it. And yes, I said that a lot. “RELEASE THE KRAKEN”!
Let it grab you. Let it drag you down. You’ll enjoy the drowning.
VI. PRACTICAL NOTES ON ENCOUNTERING SPIRITS
If you want to meet the spirits of alcohol, you must approach them properly. This isn’t casual drinking—it’s communion. And communion requires care. Drink slowly. Drink ritually. Always alone or in the company of the sacred. This is not a group activity. This is intimacy with the unseen.
Don’t mix these spirits with garbage or with each other–one spirit per ritual. No Coke. No Red Bull. You’re not at a frat party—you’re opening the veil. If gin needs a mixer, choose something clean like La Croix or mineral water. For wine or mead, I intersperse with flavored soda water—again, La Croix works beautifully—to stretch a single bottle over six hours or more. It’s not about dilution. It’s about rhythm. Heat and cool. Pulse and pause. With rum, hot buttered is fine, especially if you make the butter mixture yourself with intention. The spirits notice that.
Offerings matter. Think of it as foreplay. The drink you pour for them—before your first sip—is a gesture of respect. But don’t stop there. Offer dance. Offer poetry. Offer orgasm, if the spirit turns that key. Offer blood—just one drop, when it feels right. Offer rainwater from your balcony. Offer something real. They respond to the effort. They always do.
And never—never—film it. No cameras. No caring what anyone thinks about what you do privately. No performance. The spirits hate being observed by anything but you. Presence collapses under observation. If you break the trance to check how you look, the ritual is over. You’ve already left the room.
What matters most is sincerity, voltage, mythic posture. They respond to devotion, not dogma. Treat the drink like a god and it will show its face. Drink like a human trying to feel special or to get fucked up, and it will stay hidden.
They know the difference.
VII. CONCLUSION — HOW THIS REVEALS THE TRUE NATURE OF ALCOHOL
This is not an exhaustive map. There are many spirits I haven’t yet written about—whiskey, good beer, absinthe, and others still waiting in the wings. But I won’t write about a spirit until I’ve met it properly. Until I’ve sat with it in silence. Danced it through. Bled for it. Let it show me who it is. The ones I’ve described here—wine, mead, gin, rum—I know them. Intimately. They’ve spun me, stung me, sweetened me, and wrecked me. They’ve entered the temple of my body and spoken with full voices.
Each alcohol contains a spirit. And each spirit has personality, intelligence, and preference. This isn’t poetic language—it’s observable reality when approached through ritual. Wine wants madness. Gin demands riddles. Mead melts time. Rum laughs you loose. They’re not interchangeable. They’re sovereign. Like gods.
The only reason I can speak about them like this is because my praxis revealed them. Not because I drank, but because I invited. I treated them as beings, not beverages. I approached with offerings and desire. I gave them a stage, and they stepped into it.
Anyone can learn to sense the spirits in alcohol. But it will cost you your noise, your need to be seen, your habits of consumption. You must replace those with:
Reverence.
Patience.
Ritual intention.
Only then will they rise.
Remember this, above all:
Alcohol doesn’t create spirits—it releases the ones waiting inside—
Majeye