The Equinox (Volume I, Number I)

THE EQUINOX intoxication (spoken of often in the “ Nights”) shows that he regards it as no more than a vice, and seems not to suspect that, vice or no, it had strange fruits; if not of the Tree of Life, at least of that other Tree, double and sinister and deadly... . Nay! forI am of the Serpent’s party; Knowledge is good, be the price what it may. Such little fruit, then, as I may have culled from her autumnal breast (mere unripe berries, I confess!) I hasten to offer to my friends. And lest the austerity of such a goddess be profaned by the least vestige of adornment I make haste to divest myself of whatever gold or jewellery of speech I may possess, to advance, my left breast bare, without timidity or rashness, into her temple, my hoped reward the lamb’s skin of a clean heart, the badge of simple truthfulness and the apron of innocence. In order to keep this paper within limits, I may premise that the preparation and properties of Cannabis indica can be studied in the proper pharmaceutical treatises, though, as this drug is more potent psychologically than physically, all strictly medical accounts of it, so far as I am aware, have been hitherto both meagre and misleading. Deeper and clearer is the information to be gained from the brilliant studies by Baudelaire, unsurpassed for insight and impartiality, and Ludlow, tainted by admiration of de Quincey and the senti- mentalists.* * At the time of writing this article, I had only glanced rapidly through Baudelaire’s essay. When I made the experiments, I knew only Ludlow, and the brief note in “ Martindale and Westcott.” My research results, therefore, 34