Magical potions have been present in human culture ever since humans started to brew herbs and animal skins, taste fermented drinks or cook mushroom, rotten wheat or worms. In the Neolithic burial chamber Barclodiad y Gawres (c. 2000 bc) in north-western Wales, the following brew has been identified:
The central area contained the remains of a fire onto which had been poured ‘a strange stew consisting of wrasse, eel, frog, toad, grass-snake, mouse, shrew & hare’, then covered with limpet shells and pebbles. The significance of this ceremony is unknown.
From shamanism to Greek myths, from fairy tales to Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream (1590–6) and the Harry Potter (1997–2007) novels, magical drinks have been bridges into unknown dimensions, expanding life and consciousness, producing hallucinations and visions, creating or destroying love, distorting perception, transforming or killing bodies. The borderline between potion and poison is sometimes hard to spot, not only linguistically. Though they seem to be omnipresent in human cultures, the nineteenth century saw a return of these substances in the arts and especially in literature. It is here that we find the best close-up revealing the cultural dynamics at work. While the Victorians embraced the realist novel, fantasy also blossomed and revived archaic memories, and magical potions returned with a vengeance.