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Page 1 of 21910 · PDF PAGE 277
THE HASHEESH EATER I myself became insane, and leaping up and down, mimicked them all, and drank their demented spirit. Hasheesh is indeed an accursed drug, and the soul at last pays a most bitter price for all its ecstasies; moreover, the use of it is not the proper means of gaining any insight, yet who shall say that at that season of exaltation I did not know things as they are more truly than ever in the ordinary state? Let us not assert that the half-careless and uninterested way in which we generally look on nature is the normal mode of t…
1910 · PDF PAGE 283
THE HASHEESH EATER longer anything to do with horizons, and the boundary which was at once our barrier and our fortress is removed, until we almost perish from the inflow of perceptions. It would be no hard task to prove, to a strong probability, at least, that the initiation to the Pythagorean mysteries, and the progressive instruction that succeeded it, toa considerable extent consisted in the employment, judiciously, if we may use the word, of hasheesh, as giving a critical and analytic power to the mind, which enabled the neophyte to roll u…
1910 · PDF PAGE 288
THE EQUINOX nobody else might be affected so.” This was said to me quite frequently when, early in the hasheesh life, I enthusiastically related the most singular phenomena of my fantasy. But there is no such thing true of the hasheesh effects. Just as inevitably as two men taking the same direction, and equally favoured by Providence, will arrive at the same place, will two persons of similar temperament come to the same territory in hasheesh, see the same mysteries of their being, and get the same hitherto unconceived facts. It is this charac…
1910 · PDF PAGE 269
THE HASHEESH EATER which I had beheld wooed me continually like an irre- sistible sorceress. I could not shut my eyes for midday musing without beholding in that world, half dark, half light, beneath the eyelids, a steady procession of delicious images which the severest will could not banish nor dim. Now through an immense and serene sky floated luxurious argosies of clouds continually changing form and tint through an infinite cycle of mutations. Now, suddenly emerging from some deep embowerment of woods, I stood upon the banks of a broad riv…
1910 · PDF PAGE 259
Iv THE HERB DANGEROUS PART IV A FEW EXTRACTS FROM H.G. LUDLOW, THE HASHEESH EATER WHICH BEAR UPON THE PECULIAR CHARACTERISTICS OF THE DRUG’S ACTION
1910 · PDF PAGE 278
THE EQUINOX delicious dreams, I had not yet returned to the perfectly natural state. I now began to experience a law of hasheesh which developed its effects more and more through all future months of its use. With the progress of the hasheesh life, the effect of every successive indulgence grows more per- during until the hitherto isolated experiences become tangent to each other; then the links of the delirium intersect, and at last so blend that the chain has become a continuous band, now resting with joyous lightness as a chaplet, and now mi…
1910 · PDF PAGE 271
THE HASHEESH EATER put itto my lips. Ha! asurprise! It was not water, but the most delicious metheglin in which ever bard of the Cymri drank the health of Howell Dda. It danced and sparkled like some liquid metempsychosis of amber; it gleamed with the spiritual fire of a thousand chrysolites. To sight, to taste it was metheglin, such as never mantled in the cups of the Valhalla. Hasheesh I called the “ drug of travel,” and I had only to direct my thoughts strongly toward a particular part of the world previously to swallowing my bolus to make m…
1910 · PDF PAGE 272
THE EQUINOX of hasheesh delirum, another dose, however small—yes, though it be no larger than half a pea—be employed to prolong the condition, such agony will inevitably ensue as will make the soul shudder at its own possibility of endurance without annihilation. By repeated experiments, which now occupy the most horrible place upon my catalogue of horrible remem- brances, have I proved that, among all the variable phenomena of hasheesh, this alone stands unvarying. The use of it directly after any other stimulus will produce consequences as ap…
1910 · PDF PAGE 263
THE HASHEESH EATER resin of the Cannabis indica is hasheesh. From time im- memorial it has been known among all the nations of the East as possessing powerful stimulant and narcotic properties; throughout Turkey, Persia, Nepaul, and India it is used at this day among all classes of society as an habitual indulgence. The forms in which it is employed are various. Sometimes it appears in the state in which it exudes from the mature stalk, as a crude resin; sometimes it is manufactured into a conserve with clarified butter, honey, and spices; some…
1910 · PDF PAGE 281
THE HASHEESH EATER the time of their first presence considered trivial acts—as small as the cutting of a willow wand, all fled by his sense in arrow-flight; yet he remembered them as real incidents, and recognised their order in his existence. This phenomenon is one of the most striking exhibitions of the state in which the higher hasheesh exaltation really exists. It is a partial sundering, for the time, of those ties which unite soul and body. That spirit should ever lose the traces of a single impression is impossible. In the morning he awok…
1910 · PDF PAGE 285
THE HASHEESH EATER of producing muscular weakness, yet the universal law of constantly accelerating diabolisation of visions held good as much in my case as in any others; but a thing of horror once experienced became a «ria & dei, an inalienable dower of hell; it was certain to reproduce itself in some—to God be the thanks if not in all—future visions. I had seen, for instance, in one of my states of ecstasy, a luminous spot on the firmament, a prismatic parhelion. In the midst of my delight of gazing on it, it had transferred itself mysteriou…
1910 · PDF PAGE 264
THE EQUINOX I had now almost come to the conclusion that I was absolutely unsusceptible of the hasheesh influence. Without any expectation that this last experiment would be more successful than the former ones, and indeed with no realisa- tion of the manner in which the drug affected those who did make the experiment successfully, I went to pass the evening at the house of an intimate friend. In music and conversation the time passed pleasantly. The clock struck ten, reminding me that three hours had elapsed since the dose was taken, and as ye…
1910 · PDF PAGE 267
THE HASHEESH EATER may remain unchanged. I may be happy in Paradise and happy at the sources of the Nile, but seldom, either in Paradise or on the Nile, twice in succession. I may writhe in Etna and burn unquenchably in Gehenna, but almost never, in the course of the same delirium, shall Etna or Gehenna witness my torture a second time. Second, after the full storm of a vision of intense sublimity has blown past the hasheesh-eater, his next vision is generally of a quiet, relaxing, and recreating nature. He comes down from his clouds or up from…
1910 · PDF PAGE 279
THE HASHEESH EATER of the eyelid, followed at last by a comatose state, lasting for hours, out of which it was almost impossible fully to arouse the energies. These symptoms, together with a peculiar rigidity of the muscular system, and inability to measure the precise compass and volume of the voice when speaking, brought the case nearer in resemblance to those recorded by Dr. O'Shaughnessy, of Calcutta, as occurring under his immediate inspection among the natives of India, than any I have ever witnessed. At half-past seven in the evening, an…
1910 · PDF PAGE 265
THE HASHEESH EATER cient for the action of a drama; the last left me in complete ignorance of any point far enough back in the past to date the commencement of the sentence. Its enunciation might have occupied years. I wasnot in the same life which had held me when I heard it begun. And now, with time, space expanded also. At my friend’s house one particular arm-chair was always reserved for me. I was sitting in it at a distance of hardly three feet from the centre table around which the members of the fantily were grouped. Rapidly that distanc…
1910 · PDF PAGE 268
…t efface the traces of my having passed through a great mystery. No. I never should take it again. I did not know myself; I did not know hasheesh. There are temperaments, no doubt, upon which this drug produces, as a reactory result, physical and mental depression. With me this was never the case. Opium and liquors fix them- selves as a habit by becoming necessary to supply that nervous waste which they in the first place occasioned. The lassitude which succeeds their exaltation demands a renewed indulgence, and accordingly every gratification …
1910 · PDF PAGE 282
…he is in reality the sibyl; but the misconception takes place in such a microscopic portion of time that detection is impossible. In the hasheesh expansion of seconds into minutes, or even according to a much mightier ratio, there is an opportunity thoroughly to scrutinise the hitherto evanescent phenomena, and the truth comes out. How many more such prophecies as these may have been rejected through the gross habit of the body we may never know until spirit vindicates her claim in a court where she must have audience. In this world we are but …
1910 · PDF PAGE 280
…ands and rescue a brother writhing in the pangs of immortality. There are men in Oriental countries who make it their business to attend hasheesh-eaters during the fantasia, and profess to be able to lead them constantly in pleasant paths of hallucination. If indeed they possess this power, the delirium which they control must be a far more ductile state than any I have witnessed occurring under the influence of hasheesh at its height. In the present instance I found all suggestion powerless. The inner actuality of the visions and the terror of…
1910 · PDF PAGE 287
THE HASHEESH EATER unloosed, I might run for my life, and hope to distance him in my own recovered territory. This end I sought to accomplish by diminishing the doses of the drug. The highest I had ever reached was a drachm, and this was seldom necessary except in the most unimpres- sible states of the brain, since, according to the law of the hasheesh operation which I have stated to hold good in my experience, a much less bolus was ordinarily sufficient to pro- duce full effect at this time than when I commenced the indulgence. I now reduced …
1910 · PDF PAGE 262
…he chart of my wanderings in my hands, and unfold to them the foundations of the fabric of Oriental story. The secret lies in the use of hasheesh. A very few words will suffice to tell what hasheesh is. In northern latitudes the hemp plant (Cannabis sativa) grows almost entirely to fibre, becoming, in virtue of this quality, the great resource for mats and cordage. Under a southern sun this same plant loses its fibrous texture, but secretes, in quantities equal to one-third of its bulk, an opaque and greenish resin. Between the northern and the…