To Sir John Hall, Bt (not to be confused with the other Sir John Hall, Bt, the magician), I owe the most satisfying defining statement I have seen for a long time: ‘The chief use of vipers is for the making of treacle.’
Sir John did not write that sentence himself, for his subject was the Golden Syrup tin. The declaration about vipers came from the Natural History (1693) of Sir Thomas Blount, Bt, whose wife bore him five sons and nine daughters before he died, aged 47.
I stumbled across that in following up something Sir John wrote about the ‘strong’ in the Golden Syrup motto having a subsidiary reference to a ‘wild beast’, from the Greek for which the English word treacle derives.
We all know about the treacle well in Alice, and the real treacle well at Binsey, and the verse in Jeremiah (viii:22) according to Coverdale’s translation: ‘I am hevy and abashed, for there is no more triacle in Galaad’ (which the Authorised Version makes a question, ‘Is there no balm in Gilead?’). So we know treacle used to be the name for something medicinal. The OED tells us more specifically if less demotically that it meant something alexipharmic — an antidote to poison. And there it is, already in the year 1000, in the Saxon Leechdom, in the form tyriac.
The Greek it came from was theriake (antidosis understood), feminine of theriakos, ‘pertaining to a wild beast’, ther. But I do not think that even the most assured Greek physician would prescribe his theriac, or theriacle, as an antidote to the bite of a lion. Reptiles or snakes would be the thing, hence Blount’s remark. For a little of the blameworthy beastie would be included in its antidote.
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