La Fee Verte - Truth behind the Green Fairy-

Let your mind be free. Shed your inhibitions, discard those ideas…values.. Question their existence… only when you undo… you can come undone…

The Green Fairy is the English translation of La Fee Verte, the affectionate French nickname given to the celebrated absinthe drink in the nineteenth century. The nickname stuck, and over a century later, "absinthe" and "Green Fairy" continue to be used interchangeably by devotees of the potent green alcohol. Other names of this elusive green colored alcohol: poets and artists were inspired by the "Green Muse"; Aleister Crowley, the British occultist, worshipped the "Green Goddess". But no other nickname stuck as well as the original, and many drinkers of absinthe refer to the green liquor simply as La Fee - the Fairy.

Absinthe contains a lot more alcohol than most other liquors. Actual content varies by brand, but many absinthes are nearly twice as alcoholic as, say, scotch, gin or vodka. To put it another way, a shot of strong absinthe roughly equals two shots of whisky or similar spirit.
For easy reference, here is an example of alcohol content in a few of the better-known brands:
Typical whisky, gin or vodka: 40% alcohol
Absinthe Kubler: 53% alcohol
Pernod Absinthe: 60% alcohol
La Fee Absinthe: 68% alcohol
Hills Absinth: 70% alcohol
King of Spirits Absinth: 70% alcohol

The symbol of transformation
But Green Fairy isn't just another name for absinthe: she is a metaphorical concept of artistic enlightenment and exploration, of poetic inspiration, of a freer state of mind, of new ideas, of a changing social order.

To the original bohemians of 1890s Paris, the Fairy was a welcomed symbol of transformation. She was the trusted guide en-route to artistic innovativation; she was the symbol of thirst (for life) to Arthur Rimbaud, the first "punk poet": it was the Fairy who guided him -- and his fellow poet and partner Paul Verlaine -- on their quest to escape the conventional reality of their time into the sanctuary of the surreal.

It is said, as the cool water liberates the power of wormwood oil and the other herbal ingredients from the green concentrate, so will new ideas, concepts and notions be set free in the mind of the drinker -- be he a poet, an artist, a scientist, or the common man on the street.
Inspiring and liberating, the Green Fairy was a powerful symbol of the avant-garde elite that gathered in Parisian cafes at the turn of the last two centuries. In this sense, the Fairy was what pot later became to the hippie subculture of the 1960s. In her company -- or under her influence -- Belle Epoque writers and artists became lucid commentators on an emerging new world. With the stroke of a brush or a pen, they experimented, they rebelled, they provoked, and so they successfully subverted the stuffy conventions of the time.

As a metaphorical creature locked within a bottle of absinthe, the Green Fairy continued to earn her reputation as the artist's muse all over the Continent.