Cultural references to absinthe

Absinthe has a widely documented role in 19th-century visual art and was frequently the subject of many genre paintings and still lifes of the day.

have featured hallucination sequences after characters imbibe absinthe, in reference to the drink's mythical hallucinogenic properties.

Marie Corelli's Wormwood: A Drama of Paris (1890) was a popular novel about a Frenchman driven to murder and ruin after being introduced to absinthe.

Corelli intended it as a morality tale on the dangers of the drink, with one contemporary scholar comparing it to the anti-drug propaganda film Reefer Madness.

It had no more perceptible kick in it than lime juice, or a diluted paregoric cough mixture which it resembled in flavour, but he knew it had hidden properties which would act like a drug in clearing and accelerating his brain.