Drug Abuse

Indian, hemp has been in use far thousands of years. Records from the Ancient Egyptians and Assyrians mention it, and so do some of the earliest Chinese medical books. However, the first substantial literature on the subject comes from India where it appears as 'Soma' in the Rig-Veda.

Soma

A. L. Basham

The Rig-Veda is the chief of the four vedas of ancient India, which consist of hymns and prayers used in the worship of the gods. Research suggests that these hymns were being sung well before 800 BC.

Like wild winds the draughts have raised me up. Have I been drinking soma?
The draughts have borne me up, as swift steeds a chariot. Have I been drinking soma?
Frenzy has come upon me, as a cow to her dear calf. Have I been drinking soma?
As a carpenter bends the seat of a chariot, I bend this frenzy round my heart. Have I been drinking soma?
Not even as a mote in my eye do the five tribes count with me. Have I been drinking soma?
The heavens above do not equal one half of me. Have I been drinking soma?
In my glory I have passed beyond the sky and the great earth. Have I been drinking soma?
I will pick up the earth, and put it here or put it there. Have I been drinking soma?
(Rig-Veda X 119 2-9)

Soma was a divinity of special character. Soma was originally a plant, not certainly identified, from which a potent drink was produced, which was drunk only at sacrifices, and which caused the most invigorating effects. The Zoroastrians of Persia had a similar drink, which they called 'haoma', the same word as soma in its Iranian form; the plant identified with 'haoma' by the modern Parsis is a bitter herb, which has no specially inebriating qualities, and which cannot have been the soma of the Veda. The drink prepared from the plant can scarcely have been alcoholic, for it was made with great ceremony in the course of the sacrifice, when the herb was pressed between stones, mixed with milk, strained, and drunk on the same day. Sugar and honey, which produce fermentation, were not usually mixed with it, and the brief period between its brewing and consumption cannot have been long enough for the generation of alcohol in any appreciable quantity. The effects of soma, with vivid hallucinations, and the sense of expanding to enormous proportions, are rather like those attributed to such drugs as hashish. Soma may well have been hemp, which grows wild in many parts of India, Central Asia and South Russia, and from which modern Indians produce a narcotic drink called 'bhang.'

Like many ancient peoples, the Indians connected the growth of plants with the moon, with which Soma, the king of plants, was later identified. So important was the god Soma considered by the ancient editors of the Rig-Veda that they extracted all the hymns in his honor and placed them in a separate book (mandala), the ninth of the ten which constitute the whole.

Most of the gods were good-natured. Guilt-offerings and thank-offerings, of the kind offered by the ancient Hebrews, are almost unheard of in the Veda.

Nevertheless the ceremony must have had its element of awe and wonder. The worshippers, inebriated with soma, saw wondrous visions of the gods; they experienced strange sensations of power; they could reach up and touch the heavens; they became immortal; they were gods themselves. The priests, who alone knew the rituals whereby the gods were brought to the sacrifice, were masters of a great mystery. With these ideas, which are explicitly stated in the hymns, went others less obvious. Often in the Rig-Veda we read of a mysterious entity called 'brahman'; in some contexts brahman is the magical power in the sacred utterance (mantra), but often it has a wider connotation, and implies a sort of supernatural electricity, known to students of primitive religion as 'mana'.

The following translation describes Indra's fight with the cloud-dragon Vrtra. The hymn evidently refers to a well-known legend, which has since been forgotten, but which was probably a variant of the creation myth of Mesopotamia, in which the god Marduk slays the demon of chaos, Tiamat, and creates the universe.

Let me proclaim the valiant deeds of Indra, the first he did, the wielder of the thunder,
when he slew the dragon and let loose the waters, and pierced the bellies of the mountains.

He slew the dragon lying on the mountain, for Tvastr made him a heavenly thunderbolt. The waters suddenly, like bellowing cattle, descended and flowed on, down to the ocean.

In his strength he chose the soma— from three cups he drank the essence. The Generous seized his thunderbolt, and smote the first-born of the dragons.

When, Indra, you slew the first-born of dragons, and frustrated the arts of the sorcerers,
creating sun and heaven and dawn,
you found no enemy to withstand you.

The Vedic Hymns

Traditional

The following extracts, also from the Vedas, give an idea of the part that the Soma plant played in the religion of the ancient Hindus.

O Poet, O all-knowing Soma, you are the ocean. Yours is the space of the five regions of the sky! You have risen above the sky and the earth. You are the stars, the sun, O clear Soma!
(Rig-Veda IX 86, 29)

1
The wave of honey has risen from the breast of the ocean,
together with the stalk of Soma she has attained the land of the immortals, she has mastered the secret name of the ritual Ghee:
'tongue of the gods', navel of immortality.
2
We are going to proclaim the name of the ritual Ghee, we are going to sustain it by our praise in this sacrifice. As soon as it is spoken, may the priest take heed!
It comes from the Buffalo with four horns.
3
The Buffalo has four horns, three feet,
he has two heads and seven hands.
Held by three chains, the Bull roars powerfully:
the mighty god has entered the land of the mortals.
4
The gods discovered the ritual Ghee in the primordial Cow, although it had been concealed by the demons in three forms. Indra created one, the Sun another,
the last was extracted from the Poet's own flesh.
5
This flowing Ghee spreads from the ocean of spirits; a hundred barriers prevent the enemy from seeing it. I ardently contemplate this flowing Ghee,
which surrounds Soma's golden phallus.
6
Words flow like rivers,
clarifying through thought what is in the heart. These waves of Ghee spread
like gazelles who flee before a hunter.
7
Like whirlpools in the current of a river,
they leap forth and catch the wind,
these young waves of Ghee, like nuts growing wild which break their shells, swelling with the waves.
8
They sprinkle the Fire smiling
like beautiful women on their way to a feast. The waves of Ghee caress the logs,
and the Fire, happy to play their game, courts them.
9
I ardently contemplate them, they are like girls
who are painting their faces before being married.
There where the Soma is pressed, where the sacrifice is made, the flowing Ghee pours to be clarified.
10
Let glorious praise flow forth,
celebrate a tournament with abundant cattle,
bring us good fortune and wealth! Lead this our sacrifice to the gods! The flowing Ghee is clarified like honey.
11
The entire universe is fixed on your essence,
on the internal ocean, on the heart, on the number of life-breaths. May we master your wave made of honey
which was brought to the place where Soma is mixed with water in the presence of the gods!
(Rig-Veda IV 58)

1
May Indra conqueror of the demon drink Soma from Saryanavat
if he wishes to put strength in his soul to accomplish a heroic deed!
Flow, O liquor, for Indra all around!
2
Purify yourself, master of the dawns, Soma from Mount Arjika, O benefactor! You who are pressed with incantations, with truth, with belief and enthusiasm! Flow, O liquor, for Indra all around!
3
The daughter of the Sun brought along with her the Buffalo who was raised by the God of Rain. Celestial musicians greeted him,
they put into the Soma this fragrance.
Flow, O liquor, for Indra all around!
4
You speak like a holy man, you whose aura is holy, you speak in truth, you whose act is true,
you speak according to the belief, O King Soma, O Soma which the priest carefully prepares. Flow, O liquor, for Indra all around!
5
High, with power that is real,
its flowing blends together,
together blend the fragrances of the fragrant, purifying you by the formula, O wild god. Flow, O liquor, for Indra all around!
6
There where the priest, O purified Soma,
speaking the language of poets,
is exalted by Soma, holding in his hand the stone, creating ecstasy for himself through Soma.
Flow, O liquor, for Indra all around!
7
There where the light that cannot be extinguished is,
the world where the sun was placed, in this immortal world, O clear Soma, in this inexhaustible world place me! Flow, O liquor, for Indra all around!
8
There where the King of Death lives, at the frontier of the sky,
where the fountain of youth is, in that place make me immortal!
Flow, O liquor, for Indra all around!
9
There where beings move at will
in the third firmament, the third sky of the sky, there where the worlds made of light are,
in that place make me immortal!
Flow, O liquor, for Indra all around!
10
There where desires and inclinations are,
there where the sun is at its peak,
where the funeral ceremony is and the reward of the dead, in that place make me immortal!
Flow, O liquor, for Indra all around!
11
There where happiness and joy are, where pleasure and delight live,
where the desires of desires are fulfilled, in that place make me immortal!
Flow, O liquor, for Indra all around!
(Rig-Veda IX 113)

It is thanks to Soma that the gods are vigorous, thanks to Soma that the world is wide.
And even in the lap of the constellations
Soma has been placed.

People think they are drinking Soma when they crush the juice from the plant. But the Soma that the Brahmins know, nobody consumes it.

Guarded by those whose task it is to watch, protected by inhabitants of the sky, O Soma, you keep listening to the stones.
No terrestrial being consumes you.
(Rig-Veda X 85 2, 3, 4)

Eight wheels, nine doors
has the impregnable castle of the gods. In it resides the golden disc,
celestial and brilliant.

The golden castle, color of Soma, which shines from far away, all covered with glory—the Brahmin enters there, into this impregnable castle.
(Atharva-Veda x 2 31, 33)

Sanskrit Sources

Uday Chand Dutt And George King

The Cannabis sativa has been used from a very remote period both in medicine and as an intoxicating agent. A mythological origin has been invented for it. It is said to have been produced in the shape of nectar while the gods were churning the ocean with the mountain called Mandara. It is the favorite drink of Indra the king of gods, and is called 'vijaya', because it gives success to its votaries. The gods through compassion on the human race sent it to this earth so that mankind by using it habitually may attain delight, lose all fear, and have their sexual desires excited. On the last day of the Durga pooja, after the idols are thrown into water, it is customary for the Hindus to see their friends and relatives and embrace them. After this ceremony is over it is incumbent on the owner of the house to offer to his visitors a cup of 'bhang' and sweet-meats for tiffin.

An intoxicating agent with such recommendations cannot but be popular and so we find it in general use amongst all classes especially in the North-West provinces and Behar ... Sir William O'Shaughnessy has so well described the preparations of Indian hemp that I cannot do better than quote his account of them.

'Sidhee, Subjee, and Bhang (synonymous) are used with water as a drink which is thus prepared: About three tola's weight (540 troy grains) are well washed with cold water, then rubbed to powder, mixed with black pepper, cucumber and melon seeds, sugar, half-a-pint of milk and an equal quantity of water. This is considered sufficient to intoxicate an habituated person. Half the quantity is enough for a novice ... intoxication will ensue in half an hour. Almost invariably the inebriation is of the most cheerful kind, causing the person to sing and dance, to eat food with great relish, and to seek aphrodisiac enjoyments. In persons of a quarrelsome nature it occasions, as might be expected, an exasperation of their natural tendency. The intoxication lasts about three hours, when sleep supervenes. No nausea or
sickness of the stomach succeeds, nor are the bowels at all affected; next day there is slight giddiness and vascularity of the eyes, but no other symptom worth recording.

'The Majoon or hemp confection, is a compound of sugar, butter, flour, milk, and siddhi or bhang. The process has been repeatedly performed before us by Ameer, the proprietor of a celebrated place of resort for hemp devotees in Calcutta and who is considered the best artist in his profession. Four ounces of siddhi and an equal quantity of ghee are placed in an earthen vessel, a pint of water added, and the whole warmed over a charcoal fire. The mixture is constantly stirred until the water all boils away, which is known by the crackling noise of the melted butter on the sides of the vessel. The mixture is then removed from the fire, squeezed through cloth while hot, by which an oleaginous solution of the active principles and coloring matter of the hemp is obtained; and the leaves, fibers, etc., remaining on the cloth are thrown away. The green oily solution soon concretes into a buttery mass and is then well washed by the hand in soft water, so long as the water becomes colored. The coloring matter and an extractive substance are thus removed and a very pale green mass, of the consistence of simple ointment, remains. The washings are thrown away. Ameer says that these are intoxicating, and produce constriction of the throat, great pain and very disagreeable and dangerous symptoms.

'The operator then takes two pounds of sugar, and adding a little water, places it in a pipkin over the fire. When the sugar dissolves and froths, two ounces of milk are added; a thick scum rises and is removed; more milk and a little water are added from time to time, and the boiling continued about an hour, the solution being carefully stirred until it becomes an adhesive clear syrup, ready to solidify on a cold surface; four ounces of tyre (new milk dried before the sun) in fine powder are now stirred in, and lastly the prepared butter of hemp is introduced, brisk stirring being continued for a few minutes. A few drops of attar of roses are then quickly sprinkled in, and the mixture poured from the pipkin on a flat cold dish or slab. The mass concretes immediately into a thick cake, which is divided into small lozenge-shaped pieces ... The taste is sweet and the odor very agreeable. Ameer states that sometimes by special order of customers he introduces stramonium seeds, but never nux vomica; that all classes of persons including the lower Portuguese and especially their females consume the drug; that it is most fascinating in its effects, producing extaric [sic] happiness, a persuasion of high rank, a sensation of flying, voracious appetite and intense aphrodisiac desire.'

The leaves of Cannabis sativa are purified by being boiled in milk before use. They are regarded as heating, digestive, astringent, and narcotic. The intoxication produced by 'bhang' is said to be of a pleasant description and to promote talkativeness.

In sleeplessness, the powder of the dried leaves is given in suitable doses for inducing sleep and removing pain.

The Ancient Greeks

Pascal Brotteaux

It is estimated that roughly at the same time the Vedic Hymns were known to be in use in India, in 800 BC, Homer's Odyssey was being composed.

A controversial question is the one of Homer's 'nepenthe'. Is this drug hashish? Virey, Guyon, and Hahn seem to think so. They rest their case on the testimony of Diodorus of Sicily, who stated that the women of Thebes chased away anxiety with a drug whose active principle was hemp. It is well known that 'nepenthe' is derived from 'ne' negative and 'penthos' anxiety. What is one to think of this interpretation?

Telemachus, the son of Ulysses, has just left Ithaca to go and search for his father. Peisistratos, the son of Nestor, takes him from Pylos to Sparta, where Menelaus receives them hospitably. Telemachus describes the siege of Troy to them and insists on the painful losses of the Achaeans:

'Menelaus' words brought them all to the brink of tears. Helen of Argos, child of Zeus, broke down and wept. Telemachus and Menelaus did the same. Nor could Nestor's son keep his eyes dry when he thought of his brother ...'

At this moment, slaves are preparing the banquet. Thus, before the' meal:

'Helen, the child of Zeus, had a happy thought. Into the bowl in which their wine was mixed, she slipped a drug that had the power of robbing grief and anger of their sting and banishing all painful memories. No one that swallowed this dissolved in wine could shed a single tear that day, even for the death of his mother and father, or if they put his brother or his own son to the sword and he were there to see it done. This powerful anodyne was
one of many useful drugs which had been given to the daughter of Zeus by an Egyptian lady, Polydamna, the wife of Thon. For the fertile soil of Egypt is most rich in herbs, many of which are wholesome in solution, though many
are poisonous. And in medical knowledge the Egyptian leaves the rest of the world behind. He is a true son of Paeeon the Healer.

'When Helen had thrown the drug into the wine and seen that their cups were filled, she turned to the company once more ...'

It seems difficult to attribute this effect on the memory to hashish. As we will see further on, the intoxication produced by Indian hemp does not suppress the memory; however, it does produce a state of euphoria. In our opinion, the brew in question could have contained hemp, but probably associated in the proper proportions with some venomous herb of the 'solanum' family, such as henbane, datura, or belladonna which do act upon the memory. What confirms us in this opinion that 'nepenthe' was a complex preparation, is that in another passage of the Odyssey Homer substituted the term 'pharmakos' (drug) for the term 'nepenthe'. In any case, the use of hashish seems to have been widespread at the period when the author (or the authors) of the 'Odyssey' were writing.

This may well have been true also of the potion that the Old Man of the Mountain gave his followers. Hemp was too widely known in the Middle East at that time to explain by itself the unprecedented success his mixture had, although it was obviously one of the important ingredients.

Humphry Osmond, DPM states in A Review of the Clinical Effects of Psychotomimetic Agents that: 'The effect of datura on hashish has been known for many years in India, and it is said to have been used by professional robbers in that country to produce temporary madness in their victims'

Ancient Scythia And Iran

Mircea Eliade

The Getae were described by Herodotus as the most valiant and law-abiding of the Thracian tribes. What chiefly impressed the Greeks was their belief in the immortality of the soul. They were expert in the use of the bow and arrow while on horseback. Their name first appears in connection with the expedition of Darius Hystaspes against the Scythians {515 BQ. They were conquered briefly by the Romans, but regained their independence.

Only one document appears to indicate the existence of a Getic shamanism : it is Strabo's account of the Mysian Kapnobatai, a name that has been translated, by analogy with Aristophanes' Aerobates, as 'those who walk in clouds', but which should be translated as 'those who walk in smoke'. Presumably the smoke is hemp smoke, a rudimentary means of ecstasy known to both the Thracians and the Scythians. The Kapnobatai would seem to be Getic dancers and sorcerers who used hemp smoke for their ecstatic trances.

Herodotus has left us a good description of the funerary customs of the Scythians. The funeral was followed by purifications. Hemp was thrown on heated stones and all inhaled the smoke; 'the Scythians howl in joy for the vapor-bath'. Karl Meuli has well brought out the shamanic nature of the funerary purification; the cult of the dead, the use of hemp, the vapor bath, and the 'howls' compose a specific religious ensemble, the purpose of which could only be ecstasy. In this connection Meuli cites the Altaic séance described by Radlov, in which the shaman guided to the underworld the soul of a woman who had been dead forty days. The shaman -psychopomp is not found in Herodotus' description; he speaks only of purifications following a funeral. But among a number of Turko-Tatar peoples such purifications coincide with the shaman's escorting the deceased to his new home, in the nether regions ...

One fact, at least, is certain: shamanism and ecstatic intoxication produced by hemp smoke were known to the Scythians. As we shall see, the use of hemp for ecstatic purposes is also attested among the Iranians, and it is the Iranian word for hemp that is employed to designate mystical intoxication in Central and North Asia ...

The Cinvat bridge plays an essential role in Iranian funerary mythology; crossing it largely determines the destiny of the soul; and the crossing is a difficult ordeal, equivalent, in structure, to initiatory ordeals ...

The Gathas make three references to this crossing of the Cinvat bridge. In the first two passages Zarathustra, according to H. S. Ny-' berg's interpretation, refers to himself as a psychopomp. Those who have been united to him in ecstasy will cross the bridge with ease; the impious, his enemies, will be 'for all time ... dwellers in ... the House of the Lie'. The bridge, then, is not only the way for the dead; in addition—and we have frequently encountered it as such—it is the road of ecstadcs. It is likewise in ecstasy that Artay Viraf crosses the Cinvat bridge in the course of his mystical journey. According to Nyberg's interpretation, Zarathustra would seem to have been an ecstatic very close to a 'shaman' in his religious experiences. The' Swedish scholar considers that the Gothic term Maga is proof that Zarathustra and his disciples induced an ecstatic experience by ritual songs intoned in chorus in a closed, consecrated space. In this sacred space (Maga) communication between heaven and earth became possible—that is, in accordance with a universally disseminated dialectic, the sacred space became a 'centre'. Nyberg stresses the fact that the communion was ecstatic, and he compares the mystical experience of the 'singers' with Shamanism proper. This interpretation has been attacked by the majority of Iranists ... Thus, though the question of the possible 'shamanic' experience of Zarathustra himself must remain open, there is no doubt that the most elementary technique of ecstasy, intoxication by hemp, was known to the ancient Iranians ... The importance of the intoxication sought from hemp is further confirmed by the extremely wide dissemination of the Iranian term through Central Asia. In a number of Ugrian languages the Iranian word for hemp, Bangha, has come to designate both the pre-eminently shamanic mushroom ... and intoxication ... These facts prove that the magico-religious value of intoxication for achieving ecstasy is of Iranian origin. Added to the other Iranian influences on Central Asia ... Bangha illustrates the high degree of religious prestige attained by Iran ...

There is every reason to believe that the use of narcotics was encouraged by the quest for 'magical heat'. The smoke from certain herbs, the 'combustion' of certain plants had the virtue of increasing 'power' ... We must also take into consideration the symbolic value of narcotic intoxication. It was equivalent to a 'death', the intoxicated person left his body, acquired the condition of ghosts and spirits. Mystical ecstasy being assimilated to a temporary 'death' or leaving the body, all intoxications that produced the same result were given a place among the techniques of ecstasy.

Other authors have frequently stated that the Scythians threw hemp seeds on to burning coals and Inhaled the smoke. As any smoker knows, the seeds are the least interesting part of the plant to smoke. The Scythians were obviously throwing dried hemp flowers on the burning coals: the seeds being far less combustible than the dried flowers would be the last to burn, and would tend to drop down among the ashes, leaving the remains discovered by archaeologists and described by historians of antiquity who observed the rite without participating in it.

Remnants From Prehistoric Times

W. Reininger

Remnants of hemp dating from prehistoric times were discovered in 1896 in northern Europe when the German archaeologist, Hermann Busse opened a tomb containing a funerary urn at Wilmersdorf (Brandenburg). The vessel in question contained sand in which were mixed remnants of plants. It dated from the 5th century BC. The botanist, Ludwig Wittmaack (1839-1929), was able to find among this plant debris fragments of the seed and pericarp of Cannabis sativa L. At the session of the Berlin Society for Anthropology, Ethnology and Prehistory on May 15, 1897, Busse presented a report on his discovery and drew the conclusion that hemp had already been known in northern Europe in prehistoric times. But Rudolf Virchow (1821-1902), threw doubt on this interpretation that hemp had already been known in northern Europe at such an early time. He expressed the hypothesis that the hemp in question might have been introduced into the vase much later. The close examination of the place where the um was found, and of its position, which Busse undertook at the time of discovery showed that this conjecture could be discarded. Furthermore, one must agree with C. Hartwich that hemp was already employed in northern Europe at the same time that it was by the Chinese and the Scythians for food and
pleasure. All that remains is to determine whether hemp was imported from the Orient or whether it was already cultivated in the country.

The use of hemp in the manufacture of ropes and fabrics seems to have been introduced rather late. Not a single passage is to be found in the writings and mural inscriptions of the ancient Egyptians and' Hebrews which makes any allusion to such usage. Herodotus, on the other hand, reports that the inhabitants of Thrace made clothes from hemp fibers. It is related that Hiero (3rd century, BC), tyrant of Syracuse, had hemp brought from Rhodanus (the country of the Rhone?) in order to equip a ship. Pausanias (2nd century BC) mentions that hemp and other textile plants were cultivated in Elide; and Pliny the Elder (Ad 23-79), relates that the sails and cordage of the Roman galleys were made of hemp.

In the second century, Galen wrote that it was customary to give hemp to guests at banquets to promote hilarity and happiness. At the beginning of the third century, the Chinese physician Hoa-Thoa used hemp as an anesthetic in surgical operations.

In the thirteenth century, garments of hemp were in common use throughout Southern Europe.

Tracing One Word Through Different Languages

Sara Benetowa

As evidence now shows, in antiquity hemp was used in widely differing cultures. In the following article, Sara Benetowa of the Institute of Anthropological Sciences in Warsaw, attempts to find out through a comparative study of languages in what cultural environment hemp was first used as a narcotic.

After having compared the words meaning hemp in Indo-European, Finnish, Turkish and Tartar, and Semitic language groups, the conclusion was reached that, leaving aside all the obviously borrowed words, either Finnish, Turkish, Celtic, or Roman, there remained four groups to investigate: 1. Sanskrit—cana; 2. Slav—konopla; 3. Semitic, for example in Assyro- Babylon ia—kannab; 4. Greek: cannabis.

In all these languages the words meaning hemp have a common root: kan. This root with the double meaning of 'hemp' and 'cane' is common to almost all the languages of antiquity.

It is easy to show that 'canna' means both 'hemp' and 'cane'. But what is the meaning of the ending, 'bis'? The answer is not difficult to find if one notices an interesting detail encountered in several Semitic texts from Oriental antiquity. For example, let us look at the original text of the Old Testament and its Aramaic translation, the 'Targum Onculos'. The word 'kane' or 'kene' sometimes appears alone and sometimes linked to the adjective 'bosm' (in Hebrew) or 'busma' (in Aramaic) which means: odorous, smelling good, aromatic. As I demonstrate in detailed fashion in this study, the Biblical 'kane bosm' and the Aramaic 'kene busma' both mean 'hemp'. The linguistic evolution of the terms in question leads to the formation of the unique term 'kanabos' or 'kanbos'. This is encountered in the Mischna, the collection of traditional Hebrew law which contains many Aramaic elements. The astonishing resemblance between the Semitic 'kanbos' and the Scythian 'cannabis' lead me to suppose that the Scythian word was of Semitic origin. These etymological discussions run parallel to arguments drawn from history. The Iranian Scythians were probably related to the Medes, who were neighbors of the Semites and could easily have assimilated the word for hemp. The Semites could also have spread the word during their migrations through Asia Minor.

Taking into account the matriarchal element of Semitic culture, one is led to believe that Asia Minor was the original point of expansion for both the society based on the matriarchal circle and the mass use of hashish.

Let us look for factors which could have contributed to the start of mass use of hashish in the matriarchal circle. One important factor is-that in preparing fiber from the plant and during the harvest the strong odor intoxicates the workers. According to ancient customs still surviving in modern times, all work involving hemp is done in mass. Since antiquity the hemp harvest has been considered as a holiday, especially for the young people. In many countries the harvest is a sort of reunion to which guests come with or without masks and give all sorts of presents to the workers. Here we see an obvious link with the masculine secret societies in the matriarchal circle in which there is mass use of hashish. Another factor is the making of sacrifices to the ancestors, which is a common practice in the masculine secret societies.

Here is another obvious link between the character of this plant used in the cult of the dead and the masculine secret societies founded on this cult. Many particularities of the ancestor cult can be brought forth as evidence of this.

In Poland on the night before Christmas a ritual dish is served made of hemp seeds, called 'hemp soup', because according to popular superstition at that time the souls of the dead visit their friends and family to feast together. Another trace is the Polish habit of throwing a few hemp seeds in the fire 'as a sacrifice' during the harvest.

An obvious link between sacrifices in honor of the dead and the mass use of hashish is to be found in the Scythian funeral ceremony.

After the burial, the Scythians purified themselves in the following manner: they washed and anointed their heads and, after having planted posts in the ground and wrapped cloth around them, they threw hemp into receptacles filled with red-hot stones.

By comparing the old Slavic word 'kepati' and the Russian 'kupati' with the Scythian 'cannabis' Schrader developed and justified Meringer's supposition that there is a link between the Scythian baths and Russian vapor baths.

In the entire Orient even today to 'go to the bath' means not only to accomplish an act of purification and enjoy a pleasure, but also to fulfill the divine law. Vambery calls 'bath' any club in which the members play checkers, drink coffee, and smoke hashish or tobacco.

The tobacco imported from America spread so rapidly through Europe because the way had been prepared for it by hemp.

Names Of The Plant

anascha—Russia    kanebusma—Aramaic
banga—Sanskrit    kanep—Albania
bangi—Congo    kannab—Arabia
bhang—India    kanopia—Czechoslovakia
boo—USA    kendir—Tartar
cabza—India    kendiros—Tartar
canab—Brittany    khanchha—Cambodia
canaib—Ireland    kif—North Africa
canappa—Italy    kinder—Tartar
canna—Persia    konop—Bulgaria
cannapis—Rumania    konopie—Poland
chanvre—France    konopIja—Russia
charas—India    liamba—Brazil
charge—USA    loco weed (confused with datura)—USA
dagga—South Africa    maconha—Brazil
dawamesk—Algeria    majoun—North Africa, Middle East
diamba—Brazil    marihuana—Mexico, USA, Europe
djamba—South Africa    marijuana—Mexico, U.S.A., Europe
esrar—Turkey, Persia    mary jane—USA
ganjah—India    matakwane—Sotho (South Africa)
ganjika—Sanskrit    mbangi—Tanzania
gauge—USA    momea—Tibet
goni—Sanskrit    mora—Mexico
goo—USA    morisqueta—Mexico
grass—USA    mota—Mexico
grifa—Spain, Mexico    muggles—USA
haenep—Old English    muta—USA
hamp—Denmark    nena—Mexico
hampa—Sweden    nsangu—Zulu
hampr—Finland    pajuela—Mexico
hanf—Germany    pot—USA
hanpr—Norway    qunubu—Assyrian
haschisch—France    rap—India
hashish—Africa, Asia    reefer—USA
hemp—Great Britain    rosamaria—Mexico
hennep—Holland    rup—India
herbe—France    sana—Sanskrit
hierba—Mexico    sha'riapu—Sanskrit
hsien ma tze—China    shora—Mexico
Indian hay—USA    so-la-ra-dsa—Tibet
intsangu—South Africa    sonadora—Mexico
jive—USA    stick—USA
joint—USA    suruma—Ronga (Africa)
joy—USA    takrouri—Tunisia
juana—Mexico    tea—USA
juanita—Mexico    tiamba—Brazil
kanapes—Lithuania    tirsa—Mexico
kanas—Brittany    umya—Xhosa (Africa)
kanbun—Chaldean    weed—USA
kanebosm—Hebrew wheat—Europe

Fragments From A Search

Melvin Clay

The recipe from the wilderness. The Suama plant. The area around Tell Abu Matar. The recipe found on urns and cups, workmanship of high quality, used at religious feasts, the roots boiled and drunk or the leaves smoked.

'To report none of their secrets even though tortured to death.'

A holy hermit named Zin, also called Aqrabbim, first author of recipe, clothed only with what grew on trees, ate only wild food, took cold water baths, renounced pleasure other than his brew, devoted to peaceful acts, members of his family lived for over a hundred years, artisan and craftsman, would not make weapons, could read ancient symbols, wrote a new language of his own symbols, studied herbs and roots, always fasted the longest, would not offer animal sacrifice, excluded from the Temple of Jerusalem, made brews for foretelling the future.

'Studies have shown that the roots of the Suama plant were boiled to make a drink producing states of bliss and overt joy.'

The recipe: Suama plant found in region of Kadesh-barnea, northeastern Sinai, the site of the Ascent of Aqrabbim.

Dr W. F. Canwell of Oriental Institute has no recollection of recipe but speaks of leaves smoked and inhaled at a Palestine synagogue during the writing of the Hasteric Scrolls (Books of Joy). He adds that 'The Suama plant is known to us from the time of the Pentateuch. Some very early discoveries have been made concerning the Suama plant. We find it coming up again and again under different names. Smoking its leaves or using its roots as a herbal drink always produces states of flashing colors and euphoric bliss. Here is a specimen of a type of recipe credited to a hermit named Zin ...'

December 28th, 1963 ... heartiest congratulations ... discovery ... no possible doubt ... the Light of Zin ... hermit called Zin ... smoking the Suama plant ... brewing the roots ... recipes do exist ... third century BC ... incredible ... perhaps older ... not the slightest doubt ... preserved in caves ... visions and cures ... genuine ... incredible ...

The Song Of Solomon

It is possible that the word translated as 'calamus' in the following passage really refers to hemp.

Thy lips, O my spouse, drop as the honeycomb: honey and milk are under thy tongue; and the smell of thy garments is like the smell of Lebanon.

A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed.

Thy plants are an orchard of pomegranates, with pleasant fruits; camphire, with spikenard,

Spikenard and saffron; calamus and cinnamon, with all trees of frankincense; myrrh and aloes, with all the chief spices:

A fountain of gardens, a well of living waters, and streams from Lebanon.

Awake, O north wind; and come; thou south; blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out. Let my beloved come into his garden, and eat his pleasant fruits.
(CH.4,v. 11-16)

The Tale Of Two Hashish-Eaters

Traditional

There was once, my lord and crown upon my head, a man in a certain city, who was a fisherman by trade and a hashish-eater by occupation. When he had earned his daily wage, he would spend a little of it on food and the rest on a sufficiency of that hilarious herb. He took his hashish three times a day: once in the morning on an empty stomach, once at noon, and once at sundown. Thus he was never lacking in extravagant gaiety. Yet he worked hard enough at his fishing, though sometimes in a very extraordinary fashion. On a certain evening, for instance, when he had taken a larger dose of his favorite drug than usual, he lit a tallow candle and sat in front of it, asking himself eager questions and answering with obliging wit. After some hours of this delight, he became aware of the cool silence of the night about him and the clear light of a full moon above his head, and exclaimed affably to himself: 'Dear friend, the silent streets and the cool of the moon invite us to a walk. Let us go forth, while all the world is in bed and none may mar our solitary exaltation.' Speaking in this way to himself, the fisherman left his house and began to walk towards the river; but, as he went, he saw the light of the full moon lying in the roadway and took it to be the water of the river. 'My dear old friend the fisherman,' he said, 'get your line and take the best of the fishing, while your rivals are indoors.' So he ran back and fetched his hook and line, and cast into the glittering patch of moonlight on the road.

Soon an enormous dog, tempted by the smell of the bait, swallowed the hook greedily and then, feeling the barb, made desperate efforts to get loose. The fisherman struggled for some time against this enormous fish, but at last he was pulled over and rolled into the moonlight. Even then he would not let go his line, but held on grimly, uttering frightened cries. 'Help, help, good Mussulmans!' he shouted. 'Help me to secure this mighty fish, for he is dragging me into the deeps! Help, help, good friends, for I am drowning!' The guards of that quarter ran up at the noise and began laughing at the fisherman's antics; but when he yelled: 'Allah curse you, O sons of bitches! Is it a time to laugh when I am drowning?' they grew angry and, after giving him a sound beating, dragged him into the presence of the kadi.

At this point Shahrazad saw the approach of morning and discreetly fell silent.

Figure 1 A Water Pipe From Mecca often used for smoking hemp, made of brass, coconut and glass.

BUT WHEN
THE SEVEN-HUNDRED-AND-NINETY-EIGHTH NIGHT
HAD COME

She said:

Allah had willed that the kadi should also be addicted to the use of hashish; recognizing that the prisoner was under that jocund influence, he rated the guards soundly and dismissed them. Then he handed over the fisherman to his slaves that they might give him a bed for calm sleep.

After a pleasant night and a day given up to the consumption of excellent food, the fisherman was called to the kadi in the evening and received by him like a brother. His host supped with him; and then the two sat opposite the lighted candles and each swallowed enough hashish to destroy a hundred-year-old elephant. When the drug exalted their natural dispositions, they undressed completely and began to dance about, singing and committing a thousand extravagances.

Now it happened that the Sultan and his wazir were walking through the city, disguised as merchants, and heard a strange noise rising from the kadi's house. They entered through the unlatched door and found two naked men, who stopped dancing at their entrance and welcomed them without the least embarrassment. The Sultan sat down to watch his venerable kadi dance again; but when he saw that the other man had a dark and lively zabb, so long that the eye might not carry to the end of it, he whispered in his wazir's startled ear: 'As Allah lives, our kadi is not as well hung as his guest!' 'What are you whispering about?' cried the fisherman. 'I am the Sultan of this city and I order you to watch my dance respectfully, otherwise I will have your head cut off. I am the Sultan, this is my wazir; I hold the whole world like a fish in the palm of my right hand.' The Sultan and his wazir realized that they were in the presence of two hashish-eaters, and the wazir, to amuse his master, addressed the fisherman, saying: 'How long have you been Sultan, dear master, and can you tell me what has happened to your predecessor?' 'I deposed the fellow,' answered the fisherman. 'I said: "Go away!" and he went away.' 'Did he not protest?' asked the wazir. 'Not at all,' replied the fisherman. 'He was delighted to be released from the burden of kingship. He abdicated with such good grace that I keep him by me as a servant. He is an excellent dancer. When he pines for his throne, I tell him stories. Now I want to piss.' So saying, he lifted up his interminable tool and, walking over to the Sultan, seemed to be about to discharge upon him. 'I also want to piss,' exclaimed the kadi, and took up the same threatening position in front of the wazir. The two victims shouted with laughter and fled from that house, crying over their shoulders: 'God's curse on all hashish-eaters!'

Next morning, that the jest might be complete, the Sultan called the kadi and his guest before him. 'O discreet pillar of our law,' he said, 'I have called you to me because I wish to learn the most convenient manner of pissing. Should one squat and carefully lift the robe, as religion prescribes? Should one stand up, as is the unclean habit of unbelievers? Or should one undress completely and piss against one's friends, as is the custom of two hashish-eaters of my acquaintance?'

Knowing that the Sultan used to walk about the city in disguise, the kadi realized in a flash the identity of his last night's visitors, and fell on his knees, crying: 'My lord, my lord, the hashish spake in these indelicacies, not I!' But the fisherman, who by his careful daily taking of the drug was always under its effect, called somewhat sharply:

'And what of it? You are in your palace this morning, we were in our palace last night.' 'O sweetest noise in all our kingdom,' answered the delighted King, 'as we are both Sultans of this city, I think you had better henceforth stay with me in my palace. If you can tell stories, I trust that you will at once sweeten our hearing with a chosen one.' 'I will do so gladly, as soon as you have pardoned my wazir,' replied the fisherman; so the Sultan bade the kadi rise and sent him back forgiven to his duties.

The Assassins

Philip K. Hitti

The Assassin movement, called the 'new propaganda' by its members, was inaugurated by al-Hasan ibn-al-Sabbah (died in 1124), probably a Persian from Tus, who claimed descent from the Himyarite kings of South Arabia. The motives were evidently personal ambition and desire for vengeance on the part of the heresiarch. As a young man in al-Rayy, al-Hasan received instruction in the Batinite system, and after spending a year and a half in Egypt returned to his native land as a Fatimid missionary. Here in 1090 he gained possession of the strong mountain fortress Alamut, north-west of Qazwin. Strategically situated on an extension of the Alburz chain, 10,200 feet above sea level, and on the difficult but shortest road between the shores of the Caspian and the Persian highlands, this 'eagle's nest', as the name probably means, gave ibn-al-Sabbah and his successors a central stronghold of primary importance. Its possession was the first historical fact in the life of the new order.

From Alamut the grand master with his disciples made surprise raids in various directions which netted other fortresses. In pursuit of their ends they made free and treacherous use of the dagger, reducing assassination to an art. Their secret organization, based on Ismailite antecedents, developed an agnosticism which aimed to emancipate the initiate from the trammels of doctrine, enlightened him as to the superfluity of prophets and encouraged him to believe nothing and dare all. Below the grand master stood the grand priors, each in charge of a particular district. After these came the ordinary propagandists. The lowest degree of the order comprised the 'fida'is', who stood ready to execute whatever orders the grand master issued. A graphic, though late and secondhand, description of the method by which the master of Alamut is said to have hypnotized his 'self-sacrificing ones' with the use of hashish has come down to us from Marco Polo, who passed in that neighborhood in 1271 or 1272. After describing in glowing terms the magnificent garden surrounding the elegant pavilions and palaces built by the grand master at Alamut, Polo proceeds: 'Now no man was allowed to enter the Garden save those whom he intended to be his Ashishin. There was a fortress at the entrance to the Garden, strong enough to resist all the world, and there was no other way to get in. He kept at his Court a number of the youths of the country, from twelve to twenty years of age, such as had a taste for soldiering ... Then he would introduce them into his Garden, some four, or six, or ten at a time, having first made them drink a certain potion which cast them into a deep sleep, and then causing them to be lifted and carried in. So when they awoke they found themselves in the Garden.

'When therefore they awoke, and found themselves in a place so charming, they deemed that it was Paradise in very truth. And the ladies and damsels dallied with them to their hearts' content ...

'So when the Old Man would have any prince slain, he would say to such a youth: "Go thou and slay So and So; and when thou re-turnest my Angels shall bear thee into Paradise. And shouldst thou die, natheless even so will I send my Angels to carry thee back into Paradise.'

(from The Book of Ser Marco Polo, the Venetian, translated by Henry Yule, London, 1875.)

The assassination in 1092 of the illustrious vizir of the Saljuq sultanate, Nizam-al-Mulk, by a fida'i disguised as a Sufi, was the first of a series of mysterious murders which plunged the Muslim world into terror. When in the same year the Saljuq Sultan Malikshah bestirred himself and sent a disciplinary force against the fortress, its garrison made a night sortie and repelled the besieging army. Other attempts by caliphs and sultans proved equally futile until finally the Mongolian Hulagu, who destroyed the caliphate, seized the .fortress in 1256 together with its subsidiary castles in Persia. Since the Assassin books and records were then destroyed, our information about this strange and spectacular order is derived mainly from hostile sources.

As early as the last years of the eleventh century the Assassins had succeeded in setting firm foot in Syria and winning as convert the Saljuq prince of Aleppo, Ridwan ibn-Tutush (died in 1113). By 1140 they had captured the hill fortress of Masyad and many others in northern Syria, including al-Kahf, al-Qadmus and al-'Ullayqah. Even Shayzar (modern Sayjar) on the Orontes was temporarily occupied by the Assassins, whom Usamah calls Isma'ilites. One of their most famous masters in Syria was Rachid-al-Din Sinan (died in 1192), who resided at Masyad and bore the title shakkh aljabdT, translated by the Crusades' chroniclers as 'the old man of the mountain'. It was Rashid's henchmen who struck awe and terror into the hearts of the Crusaders. After the capture of Masyad in 1260 by the Mongols, the Mamluk Sultan Baybars in 1272 dealt the Syrian Assassins the final blow. Since then the Assassins have been sparsely scattered through northern Syria, Persia, 'Uman, Zanzibar and especially India, where they number about a hundred and fifty thousand and go by the name of Thojas or Mowlas. They all acknowledge as titular head the Aga Khan of Bombay, who claims descent through the last grand master of Alamut from Isma'il, the seventh imam, receives over a tenth of the revenues of his followers, even in Syria, and spends most of his time as a sportsman between Paris and London.

The Hodja

Traditional

Nasreddin Hodja is believed to have lived in the fourteenth century, though opinions vary. Stories concerning his feats have passed into the folklore of many Middle Eastern countries. The following is retold by Toner Baybars.

The Hodja was very curious to know how he would react to hashish. One day he plucked up the courage and bought himself a handful from the apothecary's, smoked it and then went to a Turkish bath. Some time passed, but he felt no change in himself. 'They must have given me the wrong thing', he kept on saying. 'I must go and find out. I'm not going to be cheated like this.'

So he rushed out naked.

Hodja, what is the matter?' people asked him. 'Where are you going like this, with nothing on~'

'Don't ask me,' he said. 'I thought smoking hashish would do something to me. But as you can see, I'm still what I was. I'm going to get the real stuff from the apothecary's. I have a feeling" he's cheated me.'

A Moroccan Folk Tale

Traditional

One day the Sultan woke up in a bad mood. He walked over to a group of his counselors and ordered them to make a chain of sand. They were silent. To say 'no' to a request from the Sultan meant instant death. To say 'yes' and then to be unable to carry it out meant instant death. To give no answer also meant instant death. The silence grew longer and heavier. But fortunately there was a man among them who smoked a lot of kif, and he said: 'If your majesty will show us how to start the chain, then we will be glad to finish it.' So they were spared from the wrath of the king.

The Herb Pantagruelion

Francois Rabelais

Pantagruel took leave of the good Gargantua, who offered up fervent prayers for the success of his son's voyage, and a few days later, he arrived at the port of Thalassa, near Saint Malo, accompanied by Panurge, Epistemon, Friar John of the Hashes, Abbot of Theleme, and others of the royal house, notably by Xenomanes, the great traveler and journeyer by perilous ways, who had come at Panurge's command, since he had some small holding in the domain of Salmigundia. When they got there, Pantagruel equipped a fleet of vessels, equal in number to those which Ajax of Salamis once gathered to escort the Greeks to Troy. He collected sailors, pilots, boatswains, interpreters, craftsmen, and soldiers, also provisions, artillery, munitions, clothes, money, and other such goods as were needed for a long and perilous voyage. These he took on board, and amongst the cargo I noticed a great store of his herb Pantagruelion,* both in its raw green state and also prepared and manufactured.

The herb Pantagruelion has a small, hardish, roundish root, ending in a blunt point, and does not strike more than a foot and a half into the ground. From the root grows a single round, umbelliferous stem, green on the outside, white within and hollow like the stems of Smyrnium, Olus atrum, beans, and gentian. It is woody, straight, friable, and slightly denticulated after the fashion of a lightly fluted column; and it is full of fibers, in which lie all the virtue of the herb, particularly in the part called Mesa, or middle, and in that called Mylasea. Its height is commonly from five to six feet. But sometimes it is taller than a lance; that is to say when it grows in a sweet, spongy, light soil, moist but not cold, like that of Olonne, and that of Rosea, near Praeneste in Sabine territory, and provided that it does not lack rain around the fisherman's festivals and the summer solstice. Then it grows higher than some trees, and so, on Theophrastus's authority, is called dendromalache, although the herb dies each year, and has not the root, trunk, peduncles, or permanent branches of a tree.
* This will prove to be hemp.

Great, strong branches issue from the stem. Its leaves are three times longer than they are wide. They are always green, slightly rough like alkanet; toughish, with sickle-shaped indentations all round, like betony; and terminating in points like a Macedonian pike or a surgeon's lancet. Their shape is not very different from that of ash or agrimony leaves; and it is so like hemp-agrimony that many herbalists have called it cultivated hemp-agrimony, and have called hemp-agrimony wild pantagruelion. The leaves sprout out all round the stalk at equal distances, to the number of five or seven at each level; and it is by a special favor of Nature that they are grouped in these two odd numbers, which are both divine and mysterious. Their scent is strong, and unpleasant to delicate nostrils.

The seeds form near the top of the stalk, and a little below. They are as numerous as those of any herb in existence, spherical, oblong, or rhomboid in shape, black, bright, or brown in color, hardish, enclosed in a light husk, and much loved by all such singing birds as linnets, goldfinches, larks, canaries, yellowhammers, and others. But in man they destroy the generative seed if eaten often and in quantity; and although the Greeks of old used sometimes to make certain kinds of cakes, tarts, and fritters of them, which they ate after supper as a dainty and to enhance the taste of their wine, still they are difficult to digest, lie heavy on the stomach, make bad blood, and, by their excessive heat, harm the brain, filling the head with noxious and painful vapors. Just as in many plants there are two sexes, male and female—as we see in laurels, palms, oaks, yews, asphodels, mandragora, ferns, agarics, birthwort, cypress, turpentine, pennyroyal, peonies, and others—so in this herb there is a male, which has no flower but plenty of seeds, and a female, which is thick and has little whitish useless flowers, but no seed to speak of; and as in other plants of this kind, the female leaf is larger but less tough than the male, and does not grow as high.

This pantagruelion is sown at the first coming of the swallows, and pulled out of the ground when the cicadas begin to get hoarse.

Pantagruelion is prepared at the autumn equinox in different ways according to the fancies of the people and to national preferences. Pantagruel's first instructions were to strip the stalk of its leaves and seeds; to soak it in still—not in running—water for five days, if the weather is fine and the water warm, and for nine to twelve if the weather is cloudy and the water cold; then to dry it in the sun, and afterwards in the shade, remove the outside, separate the fibers—in which, as has been said, lies all its use and value—from the woody part, which is useless except to make a fire blaze, as kindling, or for blowing up pigs' bladders to amuse children. Sometimes also gluttons will find a sly use for them, as syphons to suck up new wine through the bung-hole.

Some modern Pantagruelists, to avoid the manual labor entailed in making this separation, use certain pounding instruments, formed in the shape in which the angry Juno held the fingers of her hands together, to prevent the delivery of Alcmena, the mother of Hercules. With the aid of these they bruise and break up the woody part, making it useless, in order to recover the fibers. The only people who practice this process are those who defy the world's opinion, and in a manner considered paradoxical by philosophers earn their livings by walking backwards.* Those who want to make better and more valuable use of the fiber imitate the fabled pastime of the three sister Fates, the nocturnal recreation of the noble Circe, and the lengthy stratagem practiced by Penelope to ward off her amorous suitors during the absence of her husband Ulysses. In this way it can be put to all its inestimable uses, of which I will tell you some only—for it would be impossible for me to reveal them all—if first I may explain to you the plant's name.

* These are the ropemakers, who draw the fiber from a bag, and walk backwards as they plait the rope.

I find the plants are named in different ways. Some have taken their name from the man who first discovered them, recognized them, demonstrated them, cultivated them, domesticated them, and applied them to their uses; as dog's mercury from Mercury; panacea (all-heal) from Panace, the daughter of Aesculapius; artemisia from Artemis, who is Diana; eupatoria from king Eupator; telephium from Telephus; euphorbium from Euphorbus, king Juba's physician; clymenos (honeysuckle) from Clymenus; alcibiadion from Alcibiades; gentian from Gentius, King of Slavonia. And so highly valued of old was this prerogative of giving one's name to a newly discovered plant that, just as there was a controversy between Neptune and Pallas as to which should name the country discovered by them both jointly, which was afterwards called Athens from Athena, that is to say Minerva—even so did Lyncus, King of Scythia attempt treacherously to murder the young Triptolemus, who was sent by Ceres to show mankind wheat, which was till then unknown. For by the youth's death Lyncus hoped to give the grain his own name and, to his honor and immortal glory, to be called the discoverer of a food both useful and necessary to the life of man. But, for his treachery, he was transformed by Ceres into an ounce or lynx. Similarly, great and long wars were waged of old between certain kings in and around Cappadocia, their only difference being which of them should give his name to a certain herb. Owing to their quarrel, the name it eventually received was Pofemonia, since it was the cause of war.

Others have kept the names of the regions from which they were once brought; Median apples—or lemons—for instance from Media where they were first found; Punic apples—that is pomegranates—which were brought from the Punic country, which is Carthage; ligusticum—that is lovage—which came from Liguria, the coast of Genoa; rhubarb, from the barbarian river called Rha, as Ammianus testifies; also sontonica, fenugreek, chestnuts, peaches, Sabine juniper, and stoechas, which owe their name to my own islands of Hyeres, called in ancient days the Stoechades, also spica celtica, etcetera.

Others take their names by antiphrasis or irony; absinthe for instance, because it is the contrary of pynthe—the Greek for beverage—being unpleasant to drink; holosteon, which means all bone, because there is no herb in all Nature more fragile and tender.

Others derive their names from their properties and uses, as aristo-lochia, which helps women in childbirth; lichen, which heals the skin eruptions so called; mallow, which mollifies; callithricum, which beautifies the hair, alyssum, ephemerum, bechium, nasturtium—or nose-twister, which is a breath-catching cress—pig-nut, henbane, and others.

Others derive their names from the admirable qualities discovered in them, as heliotrope, or solsequium, follower of the sun, which opens as the sun rises, climbs as it ascends, declines as the sun sinks, and closes as it disappears; adiantum, or waterless, since it never retains any moisture, although it grows near the water, and even though it be plunged in water for a considerable time; also hieracia, eryngion, etcetera.

Others get their names from men or women who have been transformed into them, as daphne, the laurel, from Daphne; the myrtle from Myrsine; pitys, the stonepipe, from Pitys; cynara, which is the artichoke; narcissus; crocus, the saffron; smilax, etcetera.

Others from physical resemblance, as hippuris, or horse-tail, since it is like a horse's tail; alopecuros, which is like a fox's tail; psyllion, which is like a flea; delphinium, like a dolphin; bugloss, like an ox's tongue; iris, whose flowers are like a rainbow; myosotis, like a mouse's ear; coronopus, like a crow's foot, etcetera.

Reciprocally, some men have taken their names from plants; the Fabii from beans, the Pisones from peas, the Lentuli from lentils, and the Ciceros from chick-peas. And again from more exalted similarities come Venus' navel, venushair, Venus' basin, Jupiter's beard, Jupiter's eye. Mars's blood. Mercury's fingers, hermodactyls, etcetera.

Others again, are named from their form, as trefoil, which has three leaves; pentaphyllon, which has five leaves; serpillum, which creeps along the ground; helxine or pellitory from its clinging properties; petasites or sunshades, and myrobolan plums, which the Arabs call been, for they are acorn-shaped and oleaginous.

The plant Pantagruelion got its name in all these ways—always excepting the mythological one. For Heaven forbid that we should in any way resort to myth in this most truthful history. Pantagruel was its discoverer; I do not mean the discoverer of the plant, but of a certain application of it. Thus applied, it is more loathed and abhorred by robbers, and is their more unremitting enemy than are dodder and choke-weed to flax, than reed to ferns, than horse-tail to mowers, than broom-rape to chick-peas, than darnel to barley, than hatchet-weed to lentils, than antranium to beans, than tares to wheat, than ivy to walls; than the water-lily Nymphaea heraclea to lecherous monks; than the strap and the birch to the scholars of the College of Navarre; than the cabbage to the vine, garlic to magnetic iron, onion to the eyes, fern-seed to pregnant women, the seed of willow to immoral nuns, and the yew-tree's shade to those who sleep beneath it; than wolf's bane to panthers and wolves; than the smell of a fig tree to mad bulls, than hemlock to goslings, than purslane to the teeth, than oil to trees. For we have seen many robbers end their lives high and briefly because of its use, after the manner of Phyllis, Queen of the Thracians; of Bonosus, Emperor of Rome; of Amata, wife of King Latinus; of Iphis, Auctolia, Lycambes, Arachne, Phaedra, Leda, Achaeus, King of Lydia, and others, whose only complaint was that, without their being otherwise sick, the channels through which their witticisms came out and their dainty snacks went in were stopped by the herb Pantagruelion, more scurvily than ever they could have been by the dire spasms or the mortal quinsy.

Others we have heard, at the moment when Atropos was cutting their life-thread, woefully lamenting and complaining that Pantagruel had them by the throat. But, gracious me, it wasn't Pantagruel at all. He never broke anyone on the wheel. It was Pantagruelion, doing duty as a halter, and serving them as a cravat. Besides they were speaking incorrectly and committing a solecism, unless they could be excused on the plea that they were using the figure synecdoche, taking the inventor for the invention, as one uses Ceres for bread, and Bacchus for wine. I swear to you here, by the wit residing in that bottle, cooling there in the tub, that Pantagruel never took anyone by the throat, except such men as neglect to ward off an impending thirst.

Pantagruelion is also so called by similarity. For when he was born into the world Pantagruel was as tall as the herb in question; and it was easy to make this measurement since he was born in a time of drought when they gather the said herb, and when Icarus's dog, by barking at the sun, makes every man a troglodyte, forcing the whole world to live in caves and subterranean places.

Pantagruelion owes its name also to its virtues and peculiarities. For as Pantagruel has been the exemplar and paragon of perfect jollity—I don't suppose that any one of you boozers is in any doubt about that—so in Pantagruelion I recognize so many virtues, so much vigor, so many perfections, so many admirable effects, that if its full worth had been known when, as the Prophet tells us, the trees elected a wooden king to reign over them and govern them, it would no doubt have gained the majority of their votes and suffrages. Shall I go further? If Oxylus, son of Oreius, had begotten it on his sister Hamadryas, he would have taken more delight in its worth alone than in his eight children, so celebrated by our mythologists, who have caused their names to be eternally remembered. The eldest, a daughter, was called the vine; the next, a son, was called the fig; the next, the walnut; the next, the oak; the next, the sorb-apple; the next, the mountain-ash; the next, the poplar; and the last, the elm, which was a great surgeon in its time.

I shall forbear to tell you how the juice of this herb, squeezed and dropped into the ears, kills every kind of vermin that may have bred there by putrefaction, and any other beast that may have got in. If you put some of this juice into a bucket of water, you will immediately see the water coagulate like curds, so great are its virtues; and this coagulated water is a prompt remedy for horses with colic and broken wind. Its root, boiled in water, softens hardened sinews, contracted joints, sclerotic gout, and gouty swellings. If you want quickly to heal a scald or a burn, apply some Pantagruelion raw; that is to say just as it comes out of the earth, without any preparation or treatment; and be sure to change it as soon as you see it drying on the wound.

Without it kitchens would be a disgrace, tables repellent, even though they were covered with every exquisite food, and beds pleasure-less, though adorned with gold, silver, amber, ivory, and porphyry in abundance. Without it millers would not carry wheat to the mill, or carry flour away. Without it, how could advocates' pleadings be brought to the sessions hall? How could plaster be carried to the workshop without it? Without it, how could water be drawn from the well? What would scribes, copyists, secretaries, and writers do without it? Would not official documents and rent-rolls disappear? Would not the noble art of printing perish? What would window screens be made of? How would church bells be rung? It provides the adornment of the priests of Isis, the robes of the pastophores, and the coverings of all human beings in their first recumbent position. All the woolly trees of Northern India, all the cotton plants of Tyios on the Persian Gulf, of Arabia, and of Malta have not dressed so many people as this plant alone. It protects armies against cold and rain, much more effectively than did the skin tents of old. It protects theatres and amphitheatres against the heat; it is hung round woods and coppices for the pleasure of hunters; it is dropped into sweet water and sea-water for the profit of fishermen. It shapes and makes serviceable boots, high-boots, heavy boots, leggings, shoes, pumps, slippers, and nailed shoes. By it bows are strung, arbalests bent, and slings made. And as though it were a sacred plant, like verbena, and reverenced by the Manes and Lemurs, the bodies of men are never buried without it.

I will go further. By means of this herb, invisible substances are visibly stopped, caught, detained and, as it were, imprisoned; and by their capture and arrest great, heavy mill-wheels are lightly turned to the signal profit of humankind. It astounds me that the practicability of such a process was hidden for so many centuries from the ancient philosophers, considering the inestimable benefit it provides and the intolerable labors they had to perform in their mills through lack of it. By its powers of catching the waves of the air, vast merchant ships, huge cabined barges, mighty galleons, ships with a crew of a thousand or ten thousand men are launched from their moorings and driven forward at their pilots' will. By its help nations which Nature seemed to keep hidden, inaccessible, and unknown, have come to us, and we to them: something beyond the power of birds, however light of wing, and whatever freedom to swim down the air Nature may have given them. Ceylon has seen Lapland, Java has seen the Riphaean Mountains, Phebol shall see Theleme; the Icelanders and Greenlanders shall see the Euphrates. By its help Boreas has seen the mansion of Auster, Eurus has visited Zephyrus; and as a result, those celestial intelligences, the gods of the sea and land, have all taken fright. For they have seen the Arctic peoples, in full sight of the Antarctic peoples, by the aid of this blessed Pantagruelion, cross the Atlantic sea, pass the twin Tropics, go down beneath the torrid zone, measure the entire Zodiac, disport themselves below the Equinoctial Line, and hold both Poles in view on the level of their horizon. In a similar fright the gods of Olympus cried: 'By the power and uses of this herb of his, Panta-gruel has given us something new to think about, which is costing us a worse headache than ever the Aloides did. He will shortly be married. His wife will bear him children. This is fated and we cannot prevent it. It has passed through the hands and over the spindles of the fatal sisters, the daughters of necessity. Perhaps his children will discover a plant of equal power, by whose aid mortals will be able to visit the sources of the hail, the flood-gates of the rain, and the smithy of the thunder; will be able to invade the regions of the moon, enter the territory of the celestial signs, and there take lodging, some at the Golden Eagle, others at the Ram, others at the Crown, others at the Harp, others at the Silver Lion; and sit down with us at table there, and marry our goddesses; which is their one means of rising to the gods.'

In the end they decided to deliberate on a means of preventing this, and called a council.

American Indians In 1626

Jean Leander

The following extract is taken from Traité du Tabac ou Panacée Universelle which was published in Lyon in 1626. Dr Leander is describing American Indian priests, whom he calls 'Bubites', obviously referring to the traditional tribal medicine men.

When they want to know the outcome of something, they perfume themselves with tobacco to ravish themselves into ecstasy, and when in this state question the devil as to the subject about which they want to know. The priest, having been questioned, bums dry tobacco leaves and, with a hollow stalk or a pipe such as is in common use among us, draws in the smoke and is transported to the point of losing all contact with his surroundings as if in ecstasy, letting himself fall to the ground, where he lies for the rest of the day or the night, completely relaxed and motionless. Then he pretends that he has talked with the devil and gives oracles, thus doing wrong to these unfortunate Indians. The doctors of these poor barbarians also used it in order to communicate with the gods.

Diary Notes

George Washington

The following entries from George Washington's Diary show that he personally planted and harvested hemp. As it is known that the potency of the female plants decreases after they have been fertilized by the males, the fact that he regrets having separated the male from the female plants too late {after fertilization) clearly indicates that he was cultivating the plant for medicinal purposes as well as for its fiber.

1765

May 12-13—Sowed Hemp at Muddy hole by Swamp.

August 7—began to seperate [sic] the Male from the Female hemp at Do—rather too late.

Two Celebrated Hashish Eaters

W. Reininger

The investigations on hashish and its effects that the physician J. J. Moreau de Tours carried out around 1840 led to the rise of a hashish fashion {mode du hachisch') among the bohemians of Paris to which a number of artists became addicted for some time. Of these, we must mention the poets Théophile Gautier (1811-1872) and Charles Baudelaire (1821- 1867) who published observations gathered in the course of experiments that they carried out by consuming hashish as was done in their circle. Quite apart from their literary value, these notes have some scientific importance since they are concerned with the determination of the effects of hashish. The first article published by Théophile Gautier in the journal La Presse, entitled 'Le Club des Hachischins,' was even reproduced by Moreau in his monograph on hashish that appeared in 1845 to characterize a kind of intoxication typical of hashish.

The 'Club des Hachischins' founded by Gautier held its meeting at the Hotel Pimodan on the He Saint-Louis. Gautier, and much later Baudelaire, occupied attic rooms in it for several years. It was Moreau who provided Gautier with the first samples of hashish. This is how the poet described his first hashish intoxication: 'At the end of several minutes, a general numbness spread through me! It seemed to me that my body dissolved and became transparent. In my chest I saw very clearly the hashish that I had eaten, in the form of an emerald that gave off millions of tiny sparkles. My eyelashes grew longer and longer without stopping, and like gold threads rolled up on little ivory spinning wheels that revolved completely alone with dazzling rapidity. Around me streamed and rolled precious stones of all colors. In space, flower patterns branched off ceaselessly in such a way that I know of nothing better with which to compare them than the play of a kaleidoscope. At certain moments, I saw my comrades again, but they were distorted; they appeared as half men, half plants, with the thoughtful air of an ibis, standing on an ostrich foot and beating their wings. So strange was this sight that I was convulsed with laughter in my comer and in order to join in the buffoonery of this spectacle I began to throw my pillows in the air, catching them again, and making them go around with the rapidity of an Indian juggler. One of these gentlemen began to converse with me in Italian, but which the hashish by its omnipotence translated into Spanish for me. The questions and answers were almost reasonable and dealt with trivial matters, with theatrical and literary news.

'The first bout reached its end. After several minutes, I had recovered completely my composure, without a headache or any of the symptoms that accompany intoxication produced by wine, and greatly astonished by what had happened—Hardly had half an hour passed when I again fell under the sway of hashish. This time the vision was more complicated and extraordinary. In an atmosphere of confusedly flitting lights there were thousands of swarming butterflies whose wings rustled like fans. Gigantic flowers with crystal calices, enormous hollyhocks, gold and silver lilies rose and opened around me with a crackling like a bouquet of fireworks. My hearing was prodigiously developed: I heard the sound of colors. Green, red, blue, and yellow sounds came to me in perfectly distinct waves. A glass that was upset, a creaking armchair, a softly spoken word vibrated and reechoed in me like the rumbling of thunder. My own voice seemed to me so powerful and loud that I dared not speak for fear of causing the walls to collapse or of making myself burst like a bomb. More than five hundred clocks sang the time with their flute-like, coppery, silvery voices. Each flowered object emitted a sound of a harmonica or of an aeolian harp. I swam or rather floated in an ocean of sound in which, like islands of light, were motifs from Lucia or the Barber (of Seville). Never had such waves of bliss filled my being. I was so much a part ' of the wave, so far from myself and so devoid of my own being, this odious witness which accompanies us everywhere, that I understood for the first time what the existence of elementary spirits, of angels and souls separated from the body may be like. I was like a sponge in the middle of the sea; each moment waves of happiness traversed me, entering and leaving by my pores, for I had become permeable and, to the tiniest capillary vessel, my entire being was injected with the color of the fantastic milieu in which I was plunged. Sounds, perfumes, light came to me through multitudes of tubes as thin as hairs, in which I heard the whistle of magnetic currents—According to my calculation, this state lasted about three hundred years, for the sensations were so numerous and followed each other so closely that any real appreciation of time became impossible—The attack passed, and I saw that it had lasted a quarter of an hour.

'What is distinctive of hashish intoxication is that it is not continuous. It seizes one and leaves one; you rise to the sky and come back to earth without transition—As in madness, one has moments of lucidity—A third attack, the last and the most bizarre ended my oriental soiree; in this last one I had double vision—Two images of each object were reflected on my retina and produced a complete symmetry. But soon the magic paste, completely digested, acted with great power on my brain and I became completely mad for an hour. All the pantagruelion dreams passed through my fantasy: ibises, bridled geese, unicorns, griffins, incubus, entire menageries of monstrous dreams trotted, skipped, fluttered about, yelped and squeaked through the room ... The visions became so queer and whimsical that I was seized by a desire to draw them, and to make in less than five minutes a portrait of the doctor ... (probably Dr Moreau de Tours, as he appeared to me, seated at the piano in a Turkish costume with the sun in the back of his jacket. The notes were represented as escaping from the piano in the form of firework rockets and capriciously corkscrewed spirals. Another sketch bearing this caption—an animal of the future—represented a live locomotive with a swan's neck ending in the face of a serpent from which spurted clouds of smoke and with monstrous paws composed of wheels and pulleys. Each pair of paws was accompanied by a pair of wings, and on the tail of the animal one saw the Mercury of antiquity who acknowledged himself vanquished despite his winged heels. Thanks to the hashish I was able to make a portrait of an elf from nature. Until the present I only heard them groaning and moving about in the night in my old buffet ...'

Under the same title, 'Le Club des Hachischins,' Théophile Gautier published another article on hashish in the Revue des Deux Monies of February 1, 1846. This article, however, contains a great deal more literary embellishment than the one quoted above and which it seems is in agreement with scientific observation. Nevertheless, Gautier's second article which is often mentioned in the literature has a certain importance for the history of hashish intoxication because of its exact descriptions of the milieu in which the club met.

Charles Baudelaire, who was introduced into the 'Club des Hachischins' in 1844 by the painter Joseph Ferdinant Boissard de Boisdenier (1813-1866) devoted to hashish a rather large study which first appeared in September, 1858, in the Revue contemporaine under the title, 'De I'idéal artificiel,' and which the poet republished two years later under the title 'Le poéme du hachisch in his book, Les paradis artificiels, of .which it constituted the first part. Much later, Baudelaire presented a brief extract of this study in an article entitled 'Du vin et du hashish, comparés commes moyens de multiplication de I'individualité~ "

As the Paradis artificiels of Baudelaire is well known, we will only mention the most characteristic passages that deal with hashish. In his historical expose of hashish addiction and in his description of hashish intoxication, Beaudelaire presents hardly any important new facts. That which gives this study a scientific value is the reflections of the author on the psychological attitude of the hashish eater and on the moral consequences of this passion. Under the heading, 'L'Homme-Dieu,' Baudelaire in the fourth paragraph of his essay presents an analysis, which is very interesting from the psychological point of view, of the exaltation of the personality aroused by the drug in the course of hashish intoxication, an exaltation which inspires, often to the point of madness, the feeling that one is about to become a truly all-powerful divinity. In the fifth paragraph, entitled 'Morale,' the poet explains this self-deification, which is manifested in hashish intoxication, by the desire of all hashish addicts to escape from the overwhelming reality of daily life, and he arrives at this conclusion:

'Every man who does not accept the conditions of life, sells his soul. It is easy to grasp the connection which exists between the satanic creations who are often devoted to stimulants. Man wanted to be God, but before long by virtue of an uncontrollable moral law, he fell even lower than his real nature. It is a soul which sells itself piece-meal.'

Although Baudelaire in his writings almost always speaks of the experiences of his friends with hashish, and only rarely mentions his own trials, it can be said that most of the details that he presents rest on observations made on himself. Some of the biographers of Baudelaire have even suggested that one of the causes of his death was his abuse of opium and hashish, but recent researches seem to contradict this assertion. Nevertheless, it is fairly well established that at the end of 1844 the poet repeatedly used these two intoxicants although at very irregular intervals and in varied doses.

Concerning Hashish

Charles Baudelaire

Sometimes strange things happen among the male and female workers during the hemp harvest. It seems as if some dizzy spirit rises from the harvest which circulates around their legs and mounts mischievously to the. brain. The head of the harvester is full of whirlpools, at other times loaded with day-dreams. The limbs weaken and refuse to be of service. Similar phenomena happened to me as a child when I was playing and rolling around in heaps of lucerne.

There have been attempts to make hashish out of hemp grown in France. So far they have all been unsuccessful, and the obstinate ones who wish to procure themselves enchanted enjoyment at no matter what price continue to use hashish from across the Mediterranean, that is to say made from Indian or Egyptian hemp. Hashish is composed of a decoction of Indian hemp, butter, and a little bit of opium.

Here is a green jam, strangely odorous, so odorous that it provokes a certain repulsion, as any fine odor does when carried to its maximum force and density. Take a piece as big as a walnut, fill a small spoon with it, and you possess happiness; absolute happiness with all its frenzies, its youthful follies, and also its infinite beatitudes. Happiness is there in the form of a little piece of jam; take it without fear, no one dies from it; the physical organs are hardly touched. Perhaps your will-power may be diminished, but that is another matter.

Usually in order to give the hashish all its strength and powers of development, it is mixed with very hot black coffee and drunk on an empty stomach. Supper should be taken late that evening, at about ten o'clock or midnight. A very light soup is the only food permitted. Breaking this simple rule produces either vomiting, as the food quarrels with the drug, or it cancels the effect of the hashish. Many ignorant or stupid people who have broken this rule accuse hashish of being powerless.

No sooner has the little amount of drug been swallowed (an act which requires a certain determination, as the mixture has such a strong odor that it provokes nausea in some people) than you find yourself placed in a state of anxious waiting. You have heard vaguely about the marvelous effects of hashish, your imagination has already formed its particular idea of an ideal intoxication, and you are impatient to find out if the result will in reality live up to your preconception. The amount of time that passes between drinking the drug and feeling the first effects varies according to temperaments and also according to habit. People who know their way around with hashish sometimes feel the first effects after half an hour.

I forgot to say that as hashish causes an exaggeration of the personality at the same time as a very sharp feeling for circumstances and surroundings, it is best to use it only in favorable circumstances and surroundings. All joy and happiness being super-abundant, all sorrow and anguish is immensely profound. Do not experiment with it if you have to accomplish some disagreeable matter of business, if you are feeling melancholy, or if you have a bill to pay. Hashish is not suited for action. It does not console as wine does, all it does is to develop immeasurably the human personality in the actual circumstances where it is placed. As far as possible, one should have a beautiful apartment or landscape, a free clear mind, and some accomplices whose intellectual temperament is akin to your own; and a little music too, if possible.

Novices at their first initiation almost always complain about how slow the effects are, and as it is not going fast enough to suit them, they begin boasting incredulously, which is very amusing to those who know about the way hashish works. It is not one of the least comic things to see the first effects appear and multiply themselves right in the middle of this incredulity. First a certain absurd and irresistible hilarity comes over you. The most ordinary words, the most simple ideas take on a strange new aspect. This gaiety becomes insupportable to you, but it is useless to revolt. The demon has invaded you, all the efforts you make to resist only accelerate his progress. You laugh at your own silliness and folly; your companions make fun of you, and you are not angry, for benevolence has begun to manifest itself.

This languishing gaiety, uneasiness in joy, insecurity, unhealthy indecision usually lasts only a short while. It sometimes happens that people not at all suited to word games improvise interminable series of puns, bringing the most improbable ideas together, made to mislead the strongest masters of this absurd art. After several minutes the relationships become so vague, the threads which connect your conceptions are so tenuous, that only your accomplices, members of the same religion, can understand you. Your folly, your bursts of laughter seem extremely stupid to anyone who is not in the same state as you.

The sobriety of this unfortunate person amuses you boundlessly, his composure pushes you to the last limits of irony; he seems to you the most insane and ridiculous of human beings. As for your comrades, you understand them perfectly. Soon you will only communicate with the eyes. The fact is that it is a very amusing situation: people enjoying a gaiety which is incomprehensible to anyone who is not situated in the same world as they are, regard him with profound pity. From then on the idea of superiority dawns on your mental horizon. Soon it will increase immeasurably.

I was a witness to two rather grotesque scenes during this first phase. A famous musician who knew nothing about the properties of hashish, and who had probably never heard of it, arrived in the middle of a group where almost everyone had taken it. They tried to make him understand its marvelous effects. He laughed it off politely, like a man who is willing to pose for a few minutes in a spirit of propriety because he has been well brought up. There was a lot of laughter; for the person who has taken hashish is endowed with a marvelous awareness of the comic during the first phase. Bursts of laughter, incomprehensible enormities, inextricable word games, baroque gestures continued. The musician declared that this 'charge' was bad for artists, and that besides it must be very tiring for them.

The joy increased. He said 'This charge may be good for you, but not for me.' One of the intoxicated egotistically replied 'It suffices that it be good for us.' Interminable bursts of laughter filled the room. The man got angry and wanted to leave. Someone locked the door and hid the key. Someone else kneeled down before him, and, speaking for the whole group, declared with tears in his eyes that although they were moved by a most profound pity for him and for his inferiority, they would not be any the less animated by an eternal benevolence.

He was begged to play some music, and finally agreed. The violin had hardly begun to be heard when the sounds spreading through the apartment took possession of some of the intoxicated here and there. Nothing but deep sighs, sobs, heart-breaking groans, torrents of tears. The horrified musician stopped, he thought he was in a lunatic asylum. He approached the one whose beatitude was making the most noise, and asked him if he was suffering very much, and what should be done to help him. A down-to-earth person, who also had not taken the beatific drug, suggested lemonade and bitters. The intoxicated one, ecstasy in his eyes, looked at him with unutterable contempt, only pride preventing the most serious insults. Indeed, what could be more exasperating to someone sick with joy than to want to cure him?

Here is a phenomenon that seems extremely curious to me: a servant who was asked to bring tobacco and refreshments to people who had taken hashish, upon seeing herself surrounded by strange heads with enormous eyes, by an unhealthy atmosphere, by a collective insanity, burst into hysterical laughter, dropped the tray which broke with all its cups and glasses, and fled in horror as fast as she could. Everybody laughed. She admitted the next day that she had felt something strange for several hours, to have been 'all queer, I don't know how'. However, she had not taken hashish.

The second phase announces itself by a sensation of coolness at the extremities, a great weakness; you have, as they say, butter-fingers, a heavy head, and general stupefaction in all your being. Your eyes get bigger, they are as if pulled in all directions by an implacable ecstasy. Your face becomes pale, then livid and greenish. The lips withdraw, shrink, and seem to want to enter the interior of your mouth. Raucous and profound sighs escape from your chest, as if your old nature could not support the weight of your new nature. The senses become extraordinarily delicate and sharp. The eyes pierce the infinite. The ear hears the tiniest sounds in the middle of the loudest noises.

The hallucinations begin. External objects take on monstrous appearances. They reveal themselves to you in previously unsuspected forms. Then they deform themselves, transform themselves, and finally they enter into your being, or else you enter into theirs. The most singular ambiguities, the most inexplicable transpositions of ideas take place. Sounds have a color, colors have a music. Musical notes are numbers, and you solve with frightening rapidity prodigious arithmetical calculations while the music unfolds in your ear. You are seated and you are smoking; you think that you are sitting in your pipe and it is you that your pipe is smoking; it is yourself that you exhale in the form of blue clouds.

You feel well, there is only one thing that bothers and worries you. How will you manage to get out of your pipe? This hallucination lasts for an eternity. An interval of lucidity permits you to make a great effort and look at the clock. The eternity has lasted one minute. Another current of ideas carries you off; it will carry you for a minute in its living whirlpool, and this minute will be another eternity. The proportions of time and of the being are upset by an innumerable multitude of intense sensations and ideas. One lives several human lives in the space of an hour. That is certainly the subject of 'Peau de Chagrin'. There is no longer an equation between the organs and the joys.

From time to time the personality disappears. The objectivity which some pantheist poets and great actors have becomes so great that you confuse yourself with external beings. Here you are a tree moaning to the wind and recounting vegetable melodies to nature. Now you are flying in the blue of an immensely enlarged sky. All pain has disappeared. You resist no longer, you are carried away, no longer your own master and no longer caring. Soon the idea of time will disappear completely. From time to time still a little awakening takes place. It seems to you that you are leaving a fantastic and marvelous world. It is true that you retain the ability to observe yourself, and the next day you will be able to remember some of your sensations. But you cannot make use of this psychological ability. I defy you to sharpen a pen or a pencil; it will be a labor beyond your strength.

At other times music recites infinite poems to you, placing you in frightening or fantastic dramas. It associates itself with objects that are before your eyes. Paintings on the ceiling come to life in a frightening way even if they are mediocre or bad. Clear enchanting water flows. Nymphs with radiant flesh look at you with large eyes clearer than water and the sky.' You take your place and your part in the most mediocre paintings, the crudest pictures hung on the walls of hotel rooms.

I have noticed that water takes on a frightening charm for artistically inclined natures illuminated by hashish. Running water, fountains, harmonious waterfalls, and the blue immensity of the sea roll, sleep, and sing at the bottom of your being. It might not be a good idea to leave a man in this condition on the bank of a clear stream; like the fisherman in the ballad, he might allow himself to be carried away by a water-sprite.

One can eat towards the end of the evening, but this operation is not accomplished without difficulty. You find yourself so much above material facts that you would certainly prefer to remain sprawled out in the depths of your intellectual paradise. Sometimes, however, the appetite develops in an extraordinary way, but it takes a lot of courage to move a bottle, a fork, and a knife.

The third phase, which is separated from the second by a redoubled crisis, a dizzying intoxication followed by a new uneasiness, is something indescribable. It is what Orientals call the 'kief, it is absolute happiness. It is no longer something spinning and tumultuous. It is a calm and motionless beatitude. All philosophical problems are resolved. All the difficult questions about which theologians argue and which make reasonable men despair are clear and transparent. All contradiction has become unity. Man has become god.

There is something in you which says: 'You are superior to all men, no one understands what you think, what you are feeling now. They are even incapable of understanding the immense love you have for them. But you must not hate them for that, you must have pity on them. An immensity of happiness and virtue is opening itself before you. No one will ever know what degree of virtue and intelligence you have reached. Live in the solitude of your thoughts, and avoid harming others.'

One of the grotesque effects of hashish is the fear of hurting anyone at all, which is pushed to the point of the most meticulous folly. If you had the strength, you would even disguise the extra-natural state in which you are in order to avoid upsetting the least important people.

In this supreme state among artistic and tender spirits love-making takes on the most singular forms and abandons itself to the most baroque combinations. Unbridled debauchery can be mixed with an ardent and affectionate fatherly feeling.*

* The hashish jam which Baudelaire ate probably contained cantharides and other drugs.

My final observation will not be the least curious. The next morning, when you see daylight in your room, your first sensation is one of profound astonishment. Time has completely disappeared. A little while ago it was night, now it is day. 'Have I slept, or have I not slept? Did my intoxication last all night, and the notion of time being suppressed the whole night flashed by in a second for me? Or else have I been buried in the veils of a sleep full of visions?' It is impossible to know.

You seem to feel a well-being and a marvelous lightness of spirit; no fatigue. But as soon as you stand up the aftermath of the intoxication manifests itself. Your weak legs carry you timidly, you are afraid of breaking yourself 'as though you were a fragile object. A great languor, which is not without its charm, takes over your spirit. You are incapable of work and active energy.

It is a merited punishment for the impious prodigality with which you have spent so much of your nervous energy. You have scattered your personality to the four winds, and now you have difficulty in regathering and concentrating it.

I do not say that hashish produces all the effects I have just described on all men. The phenomena I have described usually took place, with a few exceptions, among people of an artistic and philosophic spirit. But there are temperaments upon which the drug only develops a noisy insanity, a violent gaiety that resembles vertigo, dances, leaps, stamping, bursts of laughter. It can be said that their hashish is entirely materialistic. They are intolerable to those of a spiritual nature, who have great pity for them. The ugliness of their personalities becomes obvious. Once I saw a respectable judge, an honorable man, as people of this type call themselves, one of those men whose artificial gravity is always so imposing, at the moment when the hashish invaded him, suddenly begin to leap around doing a most indecent dance. The true internal monster revealed itself. This man who judged the actions of his fellows, this 'Togatus' had in secret learned how to do the can-can.

Thus it can be affirmed that this impersonal quality, this objectivity which I previously mentioned and which is only the excessive development of the poetic spirit, will never be found in the hashish of those other people.

Supernaturalist

Gerard de Nerval

The following is taken from Gerard de Nervals dedication of 'Les Filles de Feu' to Alexandre Dumas. Nerval was one of the founding members of the Club des Hachischins, to which Dumas also belonged. It is interesting that Nerval uses the word 'supernaturalist' to describe the state we modems call 'high'. This passage was quoted by André Breton in the first Surrealist Manifesto.

And since you have had the imprudence to cite one of the sonnets composed in that state of day-dreaming the Germans would call SUPERNATURALIST, you must hear them all. You will find them at the end of the volume. They are hardly more obscure than the metaphysics of Hegel or the 'Memorabilia' of Swedenborg, and would lose their charm by being explained, if such a thing were possible ...

Morning Of Drunkenness

Arthur Rimbaud

O my Good! O my Beautiful! Atrocious fanfare in which I do not falter! Enchanted rack! Hurrah for the undreamed-of work and for the marvelous body, for the first time! It began with the laughter of children, with their laughter it will end. This poison will remain in all our veins even when, by a turn of the fanfare, we shall be returned to the old disharmony. O may we now, so deserving of these tortures! fervently consummate that superhuman promise made to our created body and soul: that promise, that madness! Elegance, science, violence ! We have been promised that the tree of good and evil shall be buried in darkness, that tyrannical respectabilities shall be exiled, so that we may bring here our very pure love. It began with a certain amount of disgust and it ends—we being unable to seize at once this eternity—it ends in a riot of perfumes.

Laughter of children, discretion of slaves, austerity of virgins, horror of the faces and objects of this place, be you made holy by the memory of this vigil. It began in all vulgarity, behold it ends with angels of flame and ice.

Little drunken vigil, holy! if only for the mask you granted us. We affirm you, method! We do not forget that yesterday you glorified each one of our ages. We have faith in the poison. We know how to give our whole life every day.

Now is the time of the Assassins.

VOWELS

A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue: vowels, Some day I shall tell of your potential incarnations: A, black corset hairy with shining flies
Which buzz around cruel foul odors,

Gulfs of shadow; E, candours of vapors and of tents,
Lances of proud glaciers, white kings, tremors of flower bells; I, purples, spat blood, laughter from beautiful lips
In anger or drunk with penitence;

U, cycles, divine vibrations of green seas,
Peace of pastures dotted with animals, peace of the furrows Which alchemy prints on great studious foreheads;

O, supreme Trumpet-call full of strange urgency, Silences crossed by Worlds and by Angels;
O the Omega, violet ray of Her Eyes!

Nietzsche's Letter To Peter Gast

Friedrich Würzbach

From Nietzsche's letter to Peter Gast, Torino, Dec. 2nd, 1888: 'I have just returned from a great conceit, which made the strongest impression on me of any concert in my life—my face made grimaces constantly to overcome an extreme feeling of well-being, including for ten minutes the grimaces of tears.'

Biographer's note: If one did not know about the end of Nietzsche, no one would have considered the passage 'my face made grimaces constantly* to be of importance. It often occurs that someone makes grimaces in order to avoid strong emotions being noticed. However, in this context it counts as proof that Nietzsche had taken a drug which causes grimaces, laughing cramps, and gradual loss of self-control. This brings to mind the 'suspect' passage in 'Ecce Homo': 'When one wants to get rid of an insupportable pressure, one needs hashish.'

Nietzsche wants to explain his attitude to Wagner's music by this comparison. Had he therefore tried the action of hashish? His sister had said that Nietzsche received a bottle of a Javanese sedative* The Javanese sedative referred to was probably a mixture of hemp with other drugs. Nietzsche had his breakdown on January 3, 1889.

Sitting Bull's Vision Of Victory

Stanley Vestal

No one seems to know precisely what herbs, besides the bark of the red willow, went into the mixture Sitting Bull smoked before dancing into a prophetic trance, but hemp may well have been among the ingredients, since it is known to have grown wild in the region where Sitting Bull lived.

Sitting Bull did not spend all his time at councils of war. Horses and guns were needed, of course. But he soon went about something far more vital to his success. One day he loosened the braids of his long hair, removed the feathers from his head, washed off the red paint he habitually wore on his face, and filled his long pipe with tobacco. Then he bound silvery sprays of wild aromatic sage—a sacred plant—about his pipestem. When he was all ready to start, he called his nephew White Bull, his adopted brother Jumping Bull, and the son of his close friend and fellow-chief Black Moon. He asked them to go with him to the top of a butte some distance south of the old campsite, down-river. The four reached the hilltop about noon.

There Sitting Bull renewed his vow before witnesses. He stood facing the Sun, holding the pipestem upward and wailing for mercy. When he had wailed for a while, he made his prayer: 'My God, save me and give me all my wild game animals. Bring them near me, so that my people may have plenty to eat this winter. Let good men on earth have more power, so that all the nations may be strong and successful. Let them be of good heart, so that all Sioux people may get along well and be happy. If you do this for me, I will perform the sun-gazing dance two days, two nights, and give you a whole buffalo.'

Then all four smoked the pipe in communion, and after Sitting Bull had wiped his face with the sage, set out for camp.

* from a Dutchman, and that once when he took too much of it he was convulsed with laughing cramps on the floor. As we know, hashish has this effect. If we agree that Nietzsche had taken the poisonous exhilaration of narcotics, let us remember the words of Baudelaire, who described so well the effect of hashish, and who says quite rightly that one will not find anything admirable in hashish intoxication except one's own sharpened nature. Thus we get a Nietzsche with all his natural characteristics of genius strengthened and intensified.

Sitting Bull immediately went hunting. He shot three buffalo. Of these he chose the fattest. Then, with the help of his nephew, he rolled the cow upon her belly, and together they stretched out the legs in four directions to prop it so. The head was stretched out also. Then Sitting Bull stood with raised hands and wailed for pity. Afterwards, he prayed: 'Wakan Tanka, this is the one I offered you awhile back. Here it is.' In this manner he offered the buffalo to God, and made his vow good.

Within a few days, the Sun Dance was begun. Black Moon conducted it, holding the office of Intercessor. Sitting Bull, having vowed the dance, was Chief of the Dancers.

That was a big Sun Dance, well remembered by the Sioux and Cheyennes, scores of whom now living were present. Because of the wonderful prophecy that Sitting Bull made there, and because he vowed the ceremony, it has ever since been known as 'Sitting Bull's Sun Dance.'

All the people—both Sioux and Cheyennes—went into camp in one big circle for the ceremony. The camp was on the west bank of the Rosebud, not far from the carved rocks, where the prehistoric pictures are. There the ceremony began. The virgin cut the sacred tree, the chiefs carried it into the camp circle on poles, as if it had been the body of an enemy. It was dedicated and decorated with its symbols and its offerings. A square 'bed' of ground was smoothed for the altar, a buffalo skull placed thereon, and a pipe set up against the little scaffold before the skull. All the elaborate ritual of the Sun Dance was gone through with. It was all familiar to Sitting Bull: he had danced the Sun Dance many times, and his breast and back bore the scars of the torture. At last it came time for him to fulfill his vow made last autumn—to give his flesh to Wakan Tanka. Naked to the waist, he went forward to the sacred pole.

This time he had decided to give one hundred pieces of flesh—that is to say, skin—from his arms. Jumping Bull had agreed to do the cutting.

Jumping Bull came forward, bringing a sharp steel awl, and a knife ground down to a thin, narrow blade, very sharp. He knelt beside Sitting Bull, who sat leaning back against the sacred pole, his legs straight out on the ground in front of him, and his relaxed arms resting on his thighs. Jumping Bull began at the bottom—near the wrist—of the right arm and worked upwards. He stuck the awl into the skin of the arm, lifted the skin clear of the flesh, and then used the knife. Each time he would cut out a small bit of skin, about the size of the head of a match. Then he would let the skin fall again, withdraw the awl, and begin again just above. Sitting Bull's arm was soon covered with blood.

All the time Jumping Bull was slowly and carefully cutting away on him. Sitting Bull remained perfectly still. He was wailing all the time—not because of the pain—but for mercy to Wakan Tanka, the Great Mysterious. When Jumping Bull had worked up to the top of the right arm and cut out fifty pieces of skin, he then got up and went over to the left side. There he cut in the same manner, beginning at the wrist and working towards the shoulder. Sitting Bull sat there, wailing, never wincing, while that endless piercing, endless cutting went on, cruel and sharp, over and over. Jumping Bull was careful, his hand was sure, he worked as rapidly as he could. But it was a painful ordeal for the half-hour it lasted. White Bull stood looking on. One Bull was dancing. Sitting White Buffalo was pierced at this dance, also. Everybody in camp was looking on.

Having paid his ounce of flesh, it now remained for Sitting Bull to dance the sun-gazing dance. He took his place, and, facing the Sun while the blood ran down his fingers and slowly congealed and closed his wounds, began to bob up and down, staring up towards the Sun. All that day he danced, and that night, and the next day about noon, the crowd noticed that he appeared faint and hardly able to stand.

Black Moon and others took Sitting Bull and laid him down. He was almost unconscious. They threw cold water on him to revive him. His eyes cleared, and he spoke in a low voice to Black Moon. He had had a vision: his offering had been accepted, his prayers were heard.

Black Moon walked out into the middle of the Sun Dance enclosure and called out in a loud voice: 'Sitting Bull wishes to announce that he just heard a Voice from above saying, "~ give you these because they have no ears." He looked up and saw soldiers and some Indians on horseback coming down like grasshoppers, with their heads down and their hats falling off. They were falling right into our camp.'

Then the people rejoiced. They knew what that meant. Those white men, who would not listen, who made war without just cause, were coming to their camp. Since they were coming upside down, the Indians knew the soldiers would be killed there. The people had what they wanted: Wankan Tanka would care for His own. The Sun Dance was swiftly brought to an end. It was June 14, '76.

Afterwards, Sitting Bull warned the people: 'These dead soldiers who are coming are the gifts of God. Kill them, but do not take their guns or horses. Do not touch the spoils. If you set your hearts upon the goods of the white man, it will prove a curse to this nation.' Twelve lesser chiefs heard this warning, but said nothing. All the people heard of this, but some of them had no ears.

The prophecy, so soon to be fulfilled, fired the Sioux and Cheyennes with martial spirit. Ice and Two Moon, Crazy Horse and Gall, all of them had faith in Sitting Bull, believed in him. They had heard him prophesy before, and nearly always his prophecies came true. Others also divined the future at this camp, and when Ouster's troops reached it, ten days later, the Ree scouts found traces of ceremonies that made them tell him, 'The Sioux are sure of winning.'

So long as old-time Indians retain their memories. Sitting Bull's Sun Dance on the Rosebud will never be forgotten. For many years the Sacred Pole where he shed his blood and had his vision of Custer's doom stood on the flat no great distance south of the Northern Cheyenne Reservation. Even after the pole fell, the stump remained, for no Indian would go near the site of a Medicine Lodge—that was holy ground. But at last some white men removed it. And now in the midst of the subdued grandeur of that lovely valley, which Sitting Bull worked so hard to hold his own, the site of that pole is lost beneath the modern motor-road.

Black Elk Speaks Of His Great Vision

John Neidardt

Black Elk was a friend of Sitting Bull, and fought beside him. He makes no specific reference to hemp itself, but pipes and herbs of power form an important motif in the theme of his vision.

The next morning the camp moved again, and I was riding with some boys. We stopped to get a drink from a creek, and when I got off my horse, my legs crumpled under me and I could not walk. So the boys helped me up and put me on my horse; and when we camped again that evening, I was sick. The next day the camp moved on to where the different bands of our people were coming together, and I rode in a pony drag, for I was very sick. Both my legs and both my arms were swollen badly and my face was all puffed up.

When we had camped again, I was lying in our tepee and my mother and father were sitting beside me. I could see out through the opening, and there two men were coming from the clouds, head-first like arrows slanting down, and I knew they were the same that I had seen before. Each now carried a long spear, and from the points of these a jagged lightning flashed. They came clear down to the ground this time and stood a little way off and looked at me and said: 'Hurry! Come! Your Grandfathers are calling you!'

Then they turned and left the ground like arrows slanting upwards from the bow. When I got up to follow, my legs did not hurt me any more and I was very light. I went outside the tepee, and yonder where the men with flaming spears were going, a little cloud was coming very fast. It came and stooped and took me and turned back to where it came from, flying fast. And when I looked down I could see my mother and my father yonder, and I felt sorry to be leaving them.

Then there was nothing but the air and the swiftness of the little cloud that bore me and those two men still leading up to where white clouds were piled like mountains on a wide blue plain, and in them thunder beings lived and leaped and flashed.

Now suddenly there was nothing but a world of cloud, and we three were there alone in the middle of a great white plain with snowy hills and mountains staring at us; and it was very still; but there were whispers.

Then the two men spoke together and they said: 'Behold him, the being with four legs!'

I looked and saw a bay horse standing there, and he began to speak: 'Behold me!' he said. 'My life-history you shall see.' Then he wheeled about to where the sun goes down, and said: 'Behold them! Their history you shall know.'

I looked, and there were twelve black horses yonder all abreast with necklaces of bison hoofs, and they were beautiful, but I was frightened, because their manes were lightning and there was thunder in their nostrils.

Then the bay horse wheeled to where the great white giant lives (the north) and said: 'Behold!' And yonder there were twelve white horses all abreast. Their manes were flowing like a blizzard wind and from their noses came a roaring, and all about them white geese soared and circled.

Then the bay wheeled round to where the sun shines continually (the east) and bade me look; and there twelve sorrel horses, with necklaces of elk's teeth, stood abreast with eyes that glimmered like the day-break star and manes of morning light.

Then the bay wheeled once again to look upon the place where you are always facing (the south), and yonder stood twelve buckskins all abreast with horns upon their heads and manes that lived and grew like trees and grasses.

And when I had seen all these, the bay horse said: 'Your Grandfathers are having a council. These shall take you; so have courage.'

Then all the horses went into formation, four abreast—the blacks, the whites, the sorrels, and the buckskins—and stood behind the bay, who turned now to the west and neighed; and yonder suddenly the sky was terrible with a storm of plunging horses in all colors that shook the world with thunder, neighing back.

Now turning to the north the bay horse whinnied, and yonder all the sky roared with a mighty wind of running horses .in all colors, neighing back.

And when he whinnied to the east, there too the sky was filled with glowing clouds of manes and tails of horses in all colors singing back. Then to the south he called, and it was crowded with many colored, happy horses, nickering.

Then the bay horse spoke to me again and said: 'See how your horses all come dancing!' I looked, and there were horses, horses everywhere—a whole skyful of horses dancing round me.

'Make haste!' the bay horse said; and we walked together side by side, while the blacks, the whites, the sorrels, and the buckskins followed, marching four by four.

I looked about, me once again, and suddenly the dancing horses without number changed into animals of every kind and into all the fowls that are, and these fled back to the four quarters of the world from whence the horses came, and vanished.

Then as we walked, there was a heaped up cloud ahead that changed into a tepee, and a rainbow was the open door of it; and through the door I saw six old men sitting in a row.

The two men with the spears now stood beside me, one on either hand, and the horses took their places in their quarters, looking inwards, four by four. And the oldest of the Grandfathers spoke with a kind voice and said: 'Come right in and do not fear.' And as he spoke, all the horses of the four quarters neighed to cheer me. So I went in and stood before the six, and they looked older than men can ever be—old like hills, like stars.

The oldest spoke again: 'Your Grandfathers all over the world are having a council, and they have called you here to teach you.' His voice was very kind, but I shook all over with fear now, for I knew that these were not old men, but the Powers of the World. And the first was the Power of the West; the second, of the North; the third, of the East; the fourth, of the South; the fifth, of the Sky; the sixth, of the Earth. I knew this, and was afraid, until the first Grandfather spoke again: 'Behold them yonder where the sun goes down, the thunder beings! You shall see, and have from them my power; and they shall take you to the high and lonely centre of the earth that you may see; even to the place where the sun continually shines, they shall take you there to understand.'

And as he spoke of understanding, I looked up and saw the rainbow leap with flames of many colors over me.

Now there was a wooden cup in his hand and it was full of water and in the water was the sky.

'Take this,' he said. 'It is the power to make live, and it is yours.'

Now he had a bow in his hands. 'Take this,' he said. 'It is the power to destroy, and it is yours.'

Then he pointed to himself and said: 'Look close at him who is your spirit now, for you are his body and his name is Eagle Wing Stretches.'

And saying this, he got up very tall and started running towards where the sun goes down; and suddenly he was a black horse that stopped and turned and looked at me, and the horse was very poor and sick; his ribs stood out.

Then the second Grandfather, he of the North, arose with a herb of power in his hand, and said: 'Take this and hurry.' I took and held it towards the black horse yonder. He fattened and was happy and came prancing to his place again and was the first Grandfather sitting there.

The second Grandfather, he of the North, spoke again: 'Take courage, younger brother,' he said; 'on earth a nation you shall make live, for yours shall be the power of the white giant's wing, the cleansing wind.' Then he got up very tall and started running towards the north; and when he turned towards me, it was a white goose wheeling. I looked about me now, and the horses in the west were thunders and the horses of the north were geese. And the second Grandfather sang two songs that were like this:

'They are appearing, may you behold! They are appearing, may you behold! The thunder nation is appearing, behold!

They are appearing, may you behold! They are appearing, may you behold! The white geese nation is appearing, behold!'

And now it was the third Grandfather who spoke, he of where the sun shines continually. 'Take courage, younger brother,' he said, 'for across the earth they shall take you!' Then he pointed to where the daybreak star was shining, and beneath the star two men were flying. 'From them you shall have power,' he said, 'from them who have awakened all the beings of the earth with roots and legs and wings.' And as he said this, he held in his hand a peace pipe which had a spotted eagle outstretched upon the stem; and this eagle seemed alive, for it was poised there, fluttering, and its eyes were looking at me. 'With this pipe,' the Grandfather said, 'you shall walk upon the earth, and whatever sickens there you shall make well.' Then he pointed to a man who was bright red all over, the color of good and of plenty, and as he pointed, the red man lay down and rolled and changed into a bison that got up and galloped towards the sorrel horses of the east, and they too turned to bison, fat and many.

And now the fourth Grandfather spoke, he of the place where you are always facing (the south), whence comes the power to grow. 'Younger brother,' he said, 'with the powers of the four quarters you shall walk, a relative. Behold, the living centre of a nation I shall give you, and with it many you shall save.' And I saw that he was holding in his hand a bright red stick that was alive, and as I looked it sprouted at the top and sent forth branches, and on the branches many leaves came out and murmured and in the leaves the birds began to sing. And then for just a little while I thought I saw beneath it in the shade the circled villages of people and every living thing with roots or legs or wings, and all were happy. 'It shall stand in the centre of the nation's circle,' said the Grandfather, 'a cane to walk with and a people's heart; and by your powers you shall make it blossom.'

Then when he had been still a little while to hear the birds sing, he spoke again: 'Behold the earth!' So I looked down and saw it lying yonder like a hoop of peoples, and in the centre bloomed the holy stick that was a tree, and where it stood there crossed two roads, a red one and a black. 'From where the giant lives (the north) to where you always face (the south) the red road goes, the road' of good,' the Grandfather said, 'and on it shall your nation walk. The black road goes from where the thunder beings live (the west) to where the sun continually shines (the east), a fearful road, a road of troubles and of war. On this also you shall walk, and from it you shall have the power to destroy a people's foes. In four ascents you shall walk the earth with power.'

I think he meant that I should see four generations, counting me, and now I am seeing the third.

Then he rose very tall and started running towards the south, and was an elk; and as he stood among the buckskins yonder, they too were elks.

Now the fifth Grandfather spoke, the oldest of them all, the Spirit of the Sky. 'My boy,' he said, 'I have sent for you and you have come. My power you shall see!' He stretched his arms and turned into a spotted eagle hovering. 'Behold,' he said, 'all the wings of the air shall come to you, and they and the winds and the stars shall be like relatives. You shall go across the earth with my power.' Then the eagle soared above my head and fluttered there; and suddenly the sky was full of friendly wings all coming towards

Now I knew the sixth Grandfather was about to speak, he who was the Spirit of the Earth, and I saw that he was very old, but more as men are old. His hair was long and white, his face was all in wrinkles and his eyes were deep and dim. I stared at him, for it seemed I knew him somehow; and as I stared, he slowly changed, for he was growing backward into youth, and when he had become a boy, I knew that he was myself with all the years that would be mine at last. When he was old again, he said: 'My boy, have courage, for my power shall be yours, and you shall need it, for your nation on the earth will have great troubles. Come.'

He rose and tottered out through the rainbow door, and as I followed I was riding on the bay horse who had talked to me at first and led me to that place.

Then the bay horse stopped and faced the black horses of the west, and a voice said: 'They have given you the cup of water to make live the greening day, and also the bow and arrow to destroy.' The bay neighed, and the twelve black horses came and stood behind me, four abreast.

The bay faced the sorrels of the east, and I saw that they had morning stars upon their foreheads and they were very bright. And the voice said: 'They have given you the sacred pipe and the power that is peace, and the good red day.' The bay neighed, and the twelve sorrels stood behind me, four abreast.

My horse now faced the buckskins of the south, and a voice said: 'They have given you the sacred stick and your nation's hoop, and the yellow day; and in the centre of the hoop you shall set the stick and make it grow into a shielding tree, and bloom.' The bay neighed, and the twelve buckskins came and stood behind me, four abreast.

Then I knew that there were riders on all the horses there behind me, and a voice said: 'Now you shall walk the black road with these; and as you walk, all the nations that have roots or legs or wings shall fear you.'

So I started, riding towards the east down the fearful road, and behind me came the horsebacks four abreast—the blacks, the whites, the sorrels, and the buckskins—and far away above the fearful road the daybreak star was rising very dim.

I looked below me where the earth was silent in a sick green light, and saw the hills look up afraid and the grasses on the hills and all the animals; and everywhere about me were the cries of frightened birds and sounds of fleeing wings. I was the chief of all the heavens riding there, and when I looked behind me, all the twelve black horses reared and plunged and thundered and their manes and tails were whirling hail and their nostrils snorted lightning. And when I looked below again, I saw the slant hail falling and the long, sharp rain, and where we passed, the trees bowed low and all the hills were dim.

Now the earth was bright again as we rode. I could see the hills and valleys and the creeks and rivers passing under. We came above a place where three streams made a big one—a source of mighty waters—and something terrible was there. Flames were rising from the waters and in the flames a blue man lived. The dust was floating all about him in the air, the grass was short and withered, the trees were wilting, two-legged and four-legged beings lay there thin and panting, and wings too weak to fly.

Then the black horse riders shouted 'Hoka hey!' and charged down upon the blue man, but were driven back. And the white troop shouted, charging, and was beaten; then the red troop and the yellow.

And when each had failed, they all cried together: 'Eagle Wing Stretches, hurry!' And all the world was filled with voices of all kinds that cheered me, so I charged. I had the cup of water in one hand and in the other was the bow that turned into a spear as the bay and I swooped down, and the spear's head was sharp lightning. It stabbed the blue man's heart, and as it struck I could hear the thunder rolling and many voices that cried 'Un-hee!', meaning I had killed. The flames died. The trees and grasses were not withered any more and murmured happily together, and every living being cried in gladness with whatever voice it had. Then the four troops of horsemen charged down and struck the dead body of the blue man, counting coup; and suddenly it was only a harmless turtle.

You see, I had been riding with the storm clouds, and had come to earth as rain, and it was drouth that I had killed with the power that the Six Grandfathers gave me. So we were riding on the earth now down along the river flowing full from the source of waters, and soon I saw ahead the circled village of a people in the valley. And a Voice said: 'Behold a nation; it is yours. Make haste. Eagle Wing Stretches!'

I entered the village, riding, with the four horse troops behind me—the blacks, the whites, the sorrels, and the buckskins; and the place was filled with moaning and with mourning for the dead. The wind was blowing from the south like fever, and when I looked around I saw that in nearly every tepee the women and the children and the men lay dying with the dead.

So I rode around the circle of the village, looking in upon the sick and dead, and I felt like crying as I rode. But when I looked behind me, all the women and the children and the men were getting up and coming forth with happy faces.

And a Voice said: 'Behold, they have given you the centre of the nation's hoop to make it live.'

So I rode to the centre of the village, with the horse troops in their quarters round about me, and there the people gathered. And the Voice said: 'Give them now the flowering stick that they may flourish, and the sacred pipe that they may know the power that is peace, and the wing of the white giant that they may have endurance and face all winds with courage.'

So I took the bright red stick and at the centre of the nation's hoop I thrust it in the earth. As it touched the earth it leaped mightily in my hand and was a rustling tree, very tall and full of leafy branches and of all birds singing. And beneath it all the animals were mingling with the people like relatives and making happy cries. The women raised their tremolo of joy, and the men shouted all together: 'Here we shall raise our children and be as little chickens under the mother prairie hen's wing.'

Then I heard the white wind blowing gently through the tree and singing there, and from the east the sacred pipe came flying on its eagle wings, and stopped before me there beneath the tree, spreading deep peace around it.

Then the daybreak star was rising, and a Voice said: 'It shall be a relative to them; and who shall see it, shall see much more, for thence comes wisdom; and those who do not see it shall be dark.' And all the people raised their faces to the east, and the star's light fell upon them, and all the dogs barked loudly and the horses whinnied.

Then when the many little voices ceased, the great Voice said: 'Behold the circle of the nation's hoop, for it is holy, being endless, and thus all powers shall be one power in the people without end. Now they shall break camp and go forth upon the red road, and your Grandfathers shall walk with them.' So the people broke camp and took the good road with the white wing on their faces, and the order of their going was like this:

First, the black horse riders with the cup of water; and the white horse riders with the white wing and the sacred herb, and the sorrel riders with the holy pipe; and the buckskins with the flowering stick. And after these the little children and the youths and maidens followed in a band.

Second, came the tribe's four chieftains, and their band was all young men and women.

Third, the nation's four advisers leading men and women neither young nor old.

Fourth, the old men hobbling with their canes and looking to the earth.

Fifth, old women hobbling with their canes and looking to the earth.

Sixth, myself all alone upon the bay with the bow and arrows that the First Grandfather gave me. But I was not the last; for when I looked behind me there were ghosts of people like a trailing fog as far as I could see—grandfathers of grandfathers and grandmothers of grandmothers without number. And over these a great Voice—the Voice that was the South—lived, and I could feel it silent.

And as we went the Voice behind me said: 'Behold a good nation walking in a sacred manner in a good land!'

Then I looked up and saw that there were four ascents ahead, and these were generations I should know. Now we were on the first ascent, and all the land was green. And as the long line climbed, all the old men and women raised their hands, palms forward, to the far sky yonder and began to croon a song together, and the sky ahead was filled with clouds of baby faces.

When we came to the end of the first ascent we camped in the sacred circle as before, and in the centre stood the holy tree, and still the land about us was all green.

Then we started on the second ascent, marching as before, and still the land was green, but it was getting steeper. And as I looked ahead, the people changed into elks and bison and all four-footed beings and even into fowls, all walking in a sacred manner on the good red road together. And I myself was a spotted eagle soaring over them. But just before we stopped to camp at the end of that ascent, all the marching animals grew restless and afraid that they were not what they had been, and began sending forth voices of trouble, calling to their chiefs. And when they camped at the end of that ascent, I looked down and saw that leaves were falling from the holy tree.

And the Voice said: 'Behold your nation, and remember what your Six Grandfathers gave you, for thenceforth your people walk in difficulties.'

Then the people broke camp again, and saw the black road before them towards where the sun goes down, and black clouds coming yonder; and they did not want to go but could not stay. And as they walked the third ascent, all the animals and fowls that were the people ran here and there, for each one seemed to have his own little vision that he followed and his own rules; and all over the universe I could hear the winds at war like wild beasts fighting. (At this point Black Elk remarked: 'I think we are near that place now, and I am afraid something very bad is going to happen all over the world.' He cannot read and knows nothing of world affairs.)

And when we reached the summit of the third ascent and camped, the nation's hoop was broken like a ring of smoke that spreads and scatters and the holy tree seemed dying and all its birds were gone. And when I looked ahead I saw that the fourth ascent would be terrible.

Then when the people were getting ready to begin the fourth ascent, the Voice spoke like some one weeping, and it said: 'Look there upon your nation.' And when I looked down, the people were all changed back to human, and they were thin, their faces sharp, for they were starving. Their ponies were only hide and bones, and the holy tree was gone.

And as I looked and wept, I saw that there stood on the north side of the starving camp a sacred man who was painted red all over his body, and he held a spear as he walked into the centre of the people, and there he lay down and rolled. And when he got up, it was a fat bison standing there, and where the bison stood a sacred herb sprang up right where the tree had been in the centre of the nation's hoop. The herb grew and bore four blossoms on a single stem while I was looking—a blue, a white, a scarlet, and a yellow—and the bright rays of these flashed to the heavens.

I know now what this meant, that the bison were the gift of a good spirit, and were our strength, but we should lose them, and from the same good spirit we must find another strength. For the people all seemed better when the herb had grown and bloomed, and the horses raised their tails and neighed and pranced around, and I could see a light breeze going from the north among the people like a ghost; and suddenly the flowering tree was there again at the centre of the nation's hoop where the four-rayed herb had blossomed.

I was still the spotted eagle floating, and I could see that I was already in the fourth ascent and the people were camping yonder at the top of the third long rise. It was dark and terrible about me, for all the winds of the world were fighting. It was like rapid gunfire and like whirling smoke, and like women and children wailing and like horses screaming all over the world.

I could see my people yonder running about, setting the smoke-flap poles and fastening down their tepees against the wind, for the storm cloud was coming on them very fast and black, and there were frightened swallows without number fleeing before the cloud.

Then a song of power came to me and I sang it there in the midst of that terrible place where I was. It went like this:

A good nation I will make live.
This the nation above has said.
They have given me the power to make over.

And when I had sung this, a Voice said: 'To the four quarters you shall run for help, and nothing shall be strong before you. Behold him!'

Now I was on my bay horse again, because the horse is of the earth, and it was there my power would be used. And as I obeyed the Voice and looked, there was a horse all skin and bones yonder in the west, a faded brownish black. And a Voice there said: 'Take this and make him over'; and it was the four-rayed herb that I was holding in my hand. So I rode above the poor horse in a circle, and as I did this I could hear the people yonder calling for spirit power, 'A-hey! a-hey! a-hey! a-hey!' Then the poor horse neighed and rolled and got up, and he was a big, shiny, black stallion with dapples all over him and his mane about him like a cloud. He was the chief of all the horses; and when he snorted, it was a flash of lightning and his eyes were like the sunset star. He dashed to the west and neighed, and the west was filled with a dust of hoofs, and horses without number, shiny black, came plunging from the dust. Then he dashed towards the north and neighed, and to the east and to the south, and the dust clouds answered, giving forth their plunging horses without number—whites and sorrels and buckskins, fat, shiny, rejoicing in their fleetness and their strength. It was beautiful, but it was also terrible.

Then they all stopped short, rearing, and were standing in a great hoop about their black chief at the centre, and were still. And as they stood, four virgins, more beautiful than women of the earth can be, came through the circle, dressed in scarlet, one from each of the four quarters, and stood about the great black stallion in their places; and one held the wooden cup of water, and one the white wing, and one the pipe, and one the nation's hoop. All the universe was silent, listening; and then the great black stallion raised his voice and sang. The song he sang was this:

'My horses, prancing they are coming. My horses, neighing they are coming; Prancing, they are coming.
All over the universe they come.
They will dance; may you behold them.
(4 times)

A horse nation, they will dance. May you behold them.'
(4 times)

His voice was not loud, but it went all over the universe and filled it. There was nothing that did not hear, and it was more beautiful than anything can be. It was so beautiful that nothing anywhere could keep from dancing. The virgins danced, and all the circled horses. The leaves on the trees, the grasses on the hills and in the valleys, the waters in the creeks and in the rivers and the lakes, the four-legged and the two-legged and the wings of the air—all danced together to the music of the stallion's song.

And when I looked down upon my people yonder, the cloud passed over, blessing them with friendly rain, and stood in the east with a flaming rainbow over it.

Then all the horses went singing back to their places beyond the summit of the fourth ascent, and all things sang along with them as they walked.

And a Voice said: 'All over the universe they have finished a day of happiness.' And looking down I saw that the whole wide circle of the day was beautiful and green, with all fruits growing and all things kind and happy.

Then a Voice said: 'Behold this day, for it is yours to make. Now you shall stand upon the centre of the earth to see, for there they are taking you.'

I was still on my bay horse, and once more I felt the riders of the west, the north, the east, the south, behind me in formation, as before, and we were going east. I looked ahead and saw the mountains there with rocks and forests on them, and from the mountains flashed all colors upwards to the heavens. Then I was standing on the highest mountain of them all, and round about beneath me was the whole hoop of the world. (Black Elk said the mountain he stood upon in his vision was Hamey Peak in the Black Hills. 'But anywhere is the centre of the world,' he added.) And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw, for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being. And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the centre grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy.

Then as I stood there, two men were coming from the east, head first like arrows flying, and between them rose the day-break star. They came and gave a herb to me and said: 'With this on earth you shall undertake anything and do it.' It was the day-break-star herb, the herb of understanding, and they told me to drop it on the earth. I saw it falling far, and when it struck the earth it rooted and grew and flowered, four blossoms on one stem, a blue, a white, a scarlet, and a yellow; and the rays from these streamed upwards to the heavens so that all creatures saw it and in no place was there darkness.

Then the Voice said: 'Your Six Grandfathers—now you shall go back to them.'

I had not noticed how I was dressed until now, and I saw that I was painted red all over, and my joints were painted black, with white stripes between the joints. My bay had lightning stripes all over him, and his mane was cloud. And when I breathed, my breath was lightning.

Now two men were leading me, head first like arrows slanting upwards—the two that brought me from the earth. And as I followed on the bay, they turned into four flocks of geese that flew in circles, one above each quarter, sending forth a sacred voice as they flew: Br-r-r-p, br-r-r-p, br-r-r-p, br-r-r-p!

Then I saw ahead the rainbow flaming above the tepee of the Six Grandfathers, built and roofed with cloud and sewed with thongs of lightning; and underneath it were all the wings of the air and under them the animals and men. All these were rejoicing, and thunder was like happy laughter.

As I rode in through the rainbow door, there were cheering voices from all over the universe, and I saw the Six Grandfathers sitting in a row, with their arms held towards me and their hands, palms out; and behind them in the cloud were faces thronging, without number, of the people yet to be.

'He has triumphed!' cried the six together, making thunder. And as I passed before them there, each gave again the gift that he had given me before—the cup of water and the bow and arrows, the power to make live and to destroy; the white wing of cleansing and the healing herb; the sacred pipe; the flowering stick. And each one spoke in turn from west to south, explaining what he gave as he had done before, and as each one spoke he melted down into the earth and rose again; and as each did this, I felt nearer to the earth.

Then the oldest of them all said: 'Grandson, all over the universe you have seen. Now you shall go back with power to the place from whence you came, and it shall happen yonder that hundreds shall be sacred, hundreds shall be flames! Behold!'

I looked below and saw my people there, and all were well and happy except one, and he was lying like the dead—and that one was myself. Then the oldest Grandfather sang, and his song was like this:

'There is someone lying on earth in a sacred manner. There is someone—on earth he lies.
In a sacred manner I have made him to walk.'

Now the tepee, built and roofed with cloud, began to sway back and forth as in a wind, and the flaming rainbow door was growing dimmer. I could hear voices of all kinds crying from outside: 'Eagle Wing Stretches is coming forth! Behold him!'

When I went through the door, the face of the day of earth was appearing with the daybreak star upon its forehead; and the sun leaped up and looked upon me, and I was going forth alone.

And as I walked alone, I heard the sun singing as it arose, and it sang like this :

'With visible face I am appearing.
In a sacred manner I appear.
For the greening earth a pleasantness I make.
The centre of the nation's hoop I have made pleasant. With visible face, behold me!
The four-leggeds and two-leggeds, I have made them to walk;
The wings of the air, I have made them to fly. With visible face I appear.
My day, I have made it holy.'

When the singing stopped, I was feeling lost and very lonely. Then a Voice above me said: 'Look back!' It was a spotted eagle that was hovering over me and spoke. I looked, and where the flaming rainbow tepee, built and roofed with cloud, had been, I saw only the tall rock mountain at the centre of the world.

I was all alone on a broad plain now with my feet upon the earth, alone but for the spotted eagle guarding me. I could see my people's village far ahead, and I walked very fast, for I was homesick now. Then I saw my own tepee, and inside I saw my mother and my father bending over a sick boy that was myself. And as I entered the tepee, someone was saying: 'The boy is coming to; you had better give him some water.'

Then I was sitting up; and I was sad because my mother and my father didn't seem to know I had been so far away.

Alice's Adventures In Wonderland

Lewis Carroll

Alice looked all around her at the flowers and the blades of grass, but she could not see anything that looked like the right thing to eat or drink under the circumstances. There was a large mushroom growing near her, about the same height as herself; and when she had looked under it, and on both sides of it, and behind it, it occurred to her that she might as well look and see what was on the top of it.

She stretched herself up on tiptoe, and peeped over the edge of the mushroom, and her eyes immediately met those of a large blue caterpillar, that was sitting on the top with its arms folded, quietly smoking a long hookah, and taking not the smallest notice of her or of anything else.

The Caterpillar and Alice looked at each other for some time in silence: at last the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth, and addressed her in a languid, sleepy voice.

' Who are you~' said the Caterpillar.

This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, 'I—I hardly know, sir, just at present—at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.'

'What do you mean by that?' said the Caterpillar sternly. 'Explain yourself!'

'I can't explain myself, I'm afraid, sir,' said Alice, 'because I'm not myself, you see.'

'I don't see,' said the Caterpillar.

'I'm afraid I can't put it more clearly,' Alice replied very politely, 'for I can't understand it myself to begin with; and being so many different sizes in a day is very confusing.'

'It isn't,' said the Caterpillar.

'Well, perhaps you haven't found it so yet,' said Alice; 'but when you have to turn into a chrysalis—you will some day, you know—and then after that into a butterfly, I should think you'll feel it a little queer, won't you?'

'Not a bit,' said the Caterpillar.

'Well, perhaps your feelings may be different,' said Alice; 'all I know is, it would feel very queer to me.'

'You!' said the Caterpillar contemptuously. 'Who are you?

Which brought them back again to the beginning of the conversation. Alice felt a little irritated at the Caterpillar's making such very short remarks, and she drew herself up and said, very gravely, 'I think you ought to tell me who you are, first.'

'Why?' said the Caterpillar.

Here was another puzzling question; and as Alice could not think of any good reason, and as the Caterpillar seemed to be in a very unpleasant state of mind, she turned away.

'Come back!' the Caterpillar called after her. 'I've something important to say!'

This sounded promising, certainly: Alice turned and came back again.

'Keep your temper,' said the Caterpillar.

'Is that all?' said Alice, swallowing down her anger as well as she could.

'No,' said the Caterpillar.

Alice thought she might as well wait, as she had nothing else to do, and perhaps after all it might tell her something worth hearing. For some minutes it puffed away without speaking, but at last it unfolded its arms, took the hookah out of its mouth again, and said, 'So you think you're changed, do you?'

'I'm afraid I am, sir,' said Alice; 'I can't remember things as I used—and I don't keep the same size for ten minutes together!'

'Can't remember what things?' said the Caterpillar.

'Well, I've tried to say "How doth the little busy bee," but it all came different!' Alice replied in a very melancholy voice.

'Repeat, "You are old. Father William,"' said the Caterpillar. Alice folded her hands, and began:—

'You are old, Father William,' the young man said, 'And your hair has become very white;
And yet you incessantly stand on your head— Do you think, at your age, it is right?'
'In my youth,' Father William replied to his son,
'I feared it might injure the brain;
But, now that I'm perfectly sure I have none,
Why, I do it again and again.'
'You are old,' said the youth, 'as I mentioned before,
And have grown most uncommonly fat; Yet you turned a back-somersault in at the door—
Pray, what is the reason of that?'
'In my youth,' said the sage, as he shook his grey locks, 'I kept all my limbs very supple
by the use of this ointment—one shilling a box— Allow me to sell you a couple?'
'You are old,' said the youth, 'and your jaws are too weak For anything tougher than suet;
Yet you finished the goose, with the bones and the beak— Pray how did you manage to do it?'
'In my youth,' said his father, 'I took to the law, And argued each case with my wife;
And the muscular strength, which it gave to my jaw, Has lasted the rest of my life.'
'You are old,' said the youth, 'one would hardly suppose That your eye was as steady as ever;
Yet you balanced an eel on the end of your nose—
What made you so awfully clever?'
'I have answered three questions, and that is enough,'
Said his father; 'don't give yourself airs! Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff?
Be off, or I'll kick you down stairs!'

'That is not said right,' said the Caterpillar.

'Not quite right, I'm afraid,' said Alice, timidly; 'some of the words have got altered.'

'It is wrong from beginning to end,' said the Caterpillar decidedly, and there was silence for some minutes.

The Caterpillar was the first to speak.

'What size do you want to be?' it asked.

'Oh, I'm not particular as to size,' Alice hastily replied; 'only one doesn't like changing so often, you know.'

'I don't know,' said the Caterpillar.

Alice said nothing: she had never been so much contradicted in all her life before, and she felt that she was losing her temper.

'Are you content now~' said the Caterpillar.

'Well, I should like to be a little larger, sir, if you wouldn't mind,' said Alice: 'three inches is such a wretched height to be.'

'It is a very good height indeed!' said the Caterpillar angrily, rearing itself upright as it spoke (it was exactly three inches high).

'But I'm not used to it!' pleaded poor Alice in a piteous tone. And she thought to herself, 'I wish the creatures wouldn't be so easily offended!'

'You'll get used to it in time,' .said the Caterpillar; and it put the hookah into its mouth and began smoking again.

This time Alice waited patiently until it chose to speak again. In a minute or two the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth and yawned once or twice, and shook itself. Then it got down off the mushroom, and crawled away into the grass, merely remarking as it went, 'One side will make you grow taller, and the other side will make you grow shorter.'

'One side of what? The other side of what?' thought Alice to herself.

'Of the mushroom,' said the Caterpillar, just as if she had asked it aloud; and in another moment it was out of sight.

Congo Cult

W. Reininger

The explorer Hermann von Wissmann (1853-1905), visited the Baloubas, a Bantu tribe of the Belgian Congo, as well as the tribes subject to them. He relates that in 1888 KalambaMoukenge, the Balouba chief, in order to strengthen the kingdom that he had founded by conquest, and to link together in one cult the diverse subjugated tribes, had the ancient fetishes burned publicly, and replaced the worship of these idols with a new ritual which consisted essentially in the smoking of hashish.

On all important occasions such as holidays, or the conclusion of a treaty or alliance, the Balouba smoke hemp in gourds which may be as much as one meter in circumference. In addition, the men gather each evening in the main square where they solemnly smoke hemp together. But hemp is also used for punishment. The delinquent is compelled to smoke a particularly strong portion until he loses consciousness. The subjects of Kalamba began to smoke hemp with such passion that they ended by calling themselves 'benaRiamba' (sons of hemp), after the name which this plant has in their language.

A Remedy For The Present

John Addington Symonds

'What is left for us modem men? We cannot be Greek now. The cypress of knowledge springs, and withers when it comes in sight of Troy; the cypress of pleasure likewise, if it has not died already at the root of cankering Calvinism; the cypress of religion is tottering. What is left? Science, for those who are scientific. Art for artists; and all literary men are artists in a way. But science falls not to the lot of all; Art is hardly worth pursuing now. What is left? Hashish, I think: Hashish of one form or another. We can dull the pangs of the present by living the past again in reveries or learned studies, by illusions of the fancy and a life of self-indulgent dreaming. Take down the perfumed scrolls; open, unroll, peruse, digest, intoxicate your spirit with the flavor. Behold, here is the Athens of Plato in your narcotic visions; Buddha and his anchorites appear; the raptures of St Francis and the fire-oblations of St Dominic; the phantasms of mythologies; the birth-throes of religion, the neurotism of chivalry, the passion of past poems; all pass before you in your Maya world of hashish, which is criticism.'

The Herb Dangerous

E. Whineray

Although 'charas' has been properly described as 'a foul and crude drug, the use of which is properly excluded from civilized medicine', it is imported into British India [1909] to the value of 120,000 pounds sterling per annum, a total exceeding the combined value of all the other medicinal imports, so that it is an article which deserves more than passing notice. Indian hemp, when grown in the East, secretes an intoxicating resinous matter on the upper leaves and flowering spikes, the exudation being marked in plants growing throughout the Western Himalayas and Turkestan, where charas is prepared as a commercial article. Formerly it was cultivated in fields in Turkestan, but now it is grown as a border around other crops (such as maize), the seeds of both being sown at the same time. A sticky exudation (white when damp and grayish when dry) is found on the upper parts of the plant before the flowers show, and in April and May, when the plants attain a height of four or five feet and the seeds ripen, the Cannabis is gathered, after reaping the crops, and stored in a cool, dry place. When dry the powdery resinous substance can be detached by even slight shaking, the dust being collected on a cloth. In some districts the plants are cut close to the roots, suspended head downwards, and the dust or gard shaken from them and collected on sheets placed on the floor. The leaves, seeds, etc., are picked out, and sand, etc., separated by passing through a fine sieve, the powder being collected and stored in cloth or skin bags, when it is ready for export. In some villages the charas or extract is made up into small balls, which are collected by the middleman.

On reaching British territory all charas is weighed before the nearest magistrate, by whom it is sealed, a certificate of weight signed by the Deputy Commissioner being given to the owner. The trader, before leaving the district, obtains a permit allowing him to take the drug to a special market. The zamindars of Chinese Turkestan are the vendors of the drug, the importers being Yarkhandis or Ladakhis, who dispose of it at Hoshiapur and Amritsar principally, returning with piece-goods, or Amritsar merchants who trade with Ladakh. The drug in this way reaches the chief cities of the Punjab during September and October. Thence it is distributed over the Central and United Provinces as far as Bombay and Calcutta, and is used everywhere for smoking. Charas, though a drug, plays the part of money to a great extent in the trade that is carried on at Ladakh, the price of the drug depending on the state of the market, and any fluctuations causing a corresponding increase or decrease in the value of the goods for which it is bartered. The exchange price of charas thus gives rise to much gambling. Five years ago the Kashgar growers, encouraged by the high prices, sowed a large crop and reaped a bumper harvest, only to find the market already overstocked and. prices on the Leh Exchange fallen from Rs. 60 to Rs. 30 per mauod.

Small quantities of charas are made, chiefly for local consumption, in the Himalayan districts of Nepal, Kumaon, and Garwhal, and in Baluchistan. Samples of Baluchistan charas made in the Sarawan division of the Kalat State have been sent to the Indian Museum by Mr. Hughes-Buller.

The following is the mode of preparation:

'The female "bhang" plants are reaped when they are waist high and charged with seed. The leaves and seeds are separated and half-dried. They are then spread on a carpet made of goats' hair, another carpet is spread over them, and slightly rubbed. The dust containing the narcotic principle falls off, and the leaves, etc., are removed to another carpet and again rubbed. The first dust is the best quality, and is known as "nup"; the dust from the second shaking is called "tahgalim", and is of inferior quality. A third shaking gives
"gania", of still lower quality. Each kind of dust is made into small balls called "gabza", and kept in cloth bags. The first quality is recognized by the ease with which it melts.'

Small quantities of charas find their way from Tibet into British and Native Garwhal, and a little is prepared in Simla and Kashmir; while other sources are Nepal and the hill districts of Almora and Garwhal. In preparing Nepal charas, the ganja-plant is squeezed between the palms of the hands, and the sticky resinous substance scraped off. 'Momea', black wax-like cakes, valued at Rs. 10 per seer, and 'Shahjehani', sticks containing portions of leaf, valued at Rs. 3 per seer, are the two kinds of Nepal charas, a few maunds being exported annually to Lucknow and Cawnpore. No charas is made in the plains of India, except a small quantity in Gwalior, the Bengal ganja yielding no charas in all the handling it undergoes in the process of preparation—thus emphasizing the fact that the intoxicating secretion is developed in plants growing where the altitude and climate are suitable, as in the Himalayas and Turkestan.

Adulterations—Aitchison in 1874 stated that no charas of really good quality ever came to Leh, the best charas in the original balls being sent to Bokhara and Kokan. He said the chief adulterant is the mealy covering of the fruits of the wild and cultivated Trebizond date (Eloeagnus horfensis). The impression in the United Provinces and the Punjab is that the Yarkhand drug is sophisticated, and a preference is given in some quarters to the Nepal and other Himalayan forms, which command a higher price. The Special Assistant in Kashgar declares there is no advantage in increasing the weight, as when dealers in India buy the drug they test it, otherwise they would pay a heavy duty on the adulterant as well as, on ' the charas itself; so no exporter at present would spoil his charas by adding extraneous substances.

According to Fluckiger and Hanbury, charas yields one-fourth to one-third of its weight of amorphous resin, and it has been stated that good samples yield 78% of resin. The average yield in the North Indian samples is 40%, the highest being from Kashgar and the lowest from Baluchistan and from Kumaon wild plants, the last-named corresponding to a good sample of ganja.

Captain J. F. Evans, I.M.S., Chemical Examiner to the Government of Bengal, also gave results of his physiological tests in the Indian Hemp Drug Commission's Proceedings for 1893-4. His experiments were made with alcoholic extracts, and only one sample—Amritsar best charas—approached in definite physiological effects the extract, taken as a standard prepared from Bengal ganja The best Amritsar charas is thirty-two times as potent as the Gwalior product, the latter from plants grown in the plains, while the amount of alcoholic extract bears no relation to the physiological activity of the drug.

Professor Greenish in his well-known work on Materia Medico, says that Cannabis Indica is an annual dioecious herb indigenous to Central and Western Asia, but largely cultivated in temperate countries for its strong fibers (hemp) and its oily seed (hemp-seed) and in tropical countries also for the resinous secretions which it there produces. The secretion possesses very valuable and powerful medicinal properties; but it is not produced in the plant when grown in temperate climates; on the other hand the fiber of the plant under the latter condition is much stronger than that of the tropical plant.

The hemp plant grown in India differs, however, in certain particulars from that grown in Europe; and the plant was formerly considered a distinct species and named Cannabis Indica, but this opinion is now abandoned.

The cultivation of hemp for its seed and fiber dates from very remote periods. It was used as an intoxicant by the Persians and Arabians in the eleventh and twelfth centuries and probably much earlier, but was not introduced into European medicine until the year 1838. For medicinal use it is grown in the districts of Bogra and Rajshaki to the North of Calcutta and westward, thence through Central India to Gujerat. Very good qualities of the drug are purchased in Madras, but the European market is chiefly supplied with inferior grades from Ghalapur.

The pistillate plants by which alone the resin is secreted in any quantity are pruned to produce flowering branches, the tops of these flowering branches are collected, allowed to wilt, and then pressed by treading them under the feet into more or less compact masses. This forms the drug known as 'Aganjah', or (on the London market) Guaza.

The larger leaves are collected separately; when dried they are known as 'bhang'.

During the manipulations to which the plant is subjected in preparing the drug, a certain quantity of the resin is separated; it is collected and forms the drug known as charas. Charas is also prepared by rubbing ganjah between the hands or by men in leather garments brushing against the growing plants, in any case separating part of the active adhesive resin; hence the official description limits the drug to that from which the resin has not been removed.

All these forms of the drug are largely used in India for producing an agreeable form of intoxication; ganjah and charas are smoked, while bhang is used to prepare a drink or sweetmeat.

The drug has a powerful odor, but is almost devoid of taste.

Cannabis Indica was formerly used as a hypnotic and anodyne but is uncertain in its action.

It is administered in mania and hysteria as an anodyne and anti-spasmodic.

Mr. E. M. Holmes, F.L.S., Curator of the Pharmaceutical Society's Museum, writing on the subject of Cannabis Indica says 'The Dervishes make a preparation by macerating the resinous type in almond oil and give a small quantity of it in soup to produce prolonged sleep.'

A strong dose of Cannabis produces curious hallucinations abolishing temporarily the ideas of time and distance; but the ordinary drug as imported is never the current crop, which the Hindus keep for their own use. The active principle Cannibinol (as far as is known) rapidly oxidizes and loses its properties so that if a really active preparation is required, it is best to get it made in India, using absolute alcohol and the fresh tops, or recently made charas, which, being a solid mass, does not readily oxidize.

Before closing it might be well to notice in detail the final investigations made by Messrs Wood, Spivey, and Easterfield.

The following is reprinted from the 'Proceedings of the Chemical Society' for 1897-8, and is to be found on page 66.

'At the beginning of our observations careful search of the literature on the subject was made to determine the toxicity of hemp. Not a single case of fatal poisoning have we been able to find reported, although often alarming symptoms may occur. A dog weighing twenty-five pounds received an injection of two ounces of an active U.S.P. fluid extract in the jugular vein with the expectation that it would certainly be sufficient to produce death. To our surprise the animal, after being unconscious for about a day and a half, recovered completely. This dog received, not alone the active constituents of the drug, but also, the amount of alcohol contained in the fluid extract. Another dog received about seven grams of Solid Extract Cannabis with the same result. We have never been able to give an animal a sufficient quantity of a U.S.P. or other preparation of the Cannabis (Indica or Americana) to produce death.

'There is some variation in the amount of extractive obtained, as would be expected from the varying amount of stems, seeds, etc., in the different samples. Likewise there is a certain amount of variation in the physiological action, but in every case the administration of 0.01 gram of the extract per kilo body weight, has elicited the characteristic symptoms in properly selected animals.

'The repeated tests we have made convince us that Cannabis Americana properly grown and cured is fully as active as the best Indian drug.

'Much has been written relative to the comparative activity of Cannabis Sativa grown in different climates (Cannabis Indica, Mexicana and Americana). It has been generally assumed that the American-grown drug was practically worthless therapeutically, and that Cannabis grown in India must be used if one would obtain physiologically active preparations.

'Furthermore, it has been claimed that the best Indian drug is that grown especially for medicinal purposes, the part used consisting of the flowering tops of the unfertilized female plants, care being taken during the growth of the drug to weed out the male plants. According to our experience, this is an erroneous notion, as we have repeatedly found that the Indian drug which contains large quantities of seed is fully as active as the drug which consists of the flowering tops only, provided the seed be removed before percolation.
'Several years ago we began a systematic investigation of the American-grown Cannabis Sativa. Samples from a number of localities were obtained and carefully investigated. From these samples fluid and solid extracts were prepared according to the Pharmacopoeial method, and carefully tested upon animals for physiological activity, and eventually they were standardized by physiological methods. Repeated tests have convinced us that Cannabis Americana properly grown and cured is fully as active as the best Indian drug, while on the other hand we have frequently found Indian Cannabis to be practically inert.

'Before marketing preparations of Cannabis Americana, however, we placed specimens of the fluid and solid extracts in the hands of experienced clinicians for practical test; and from these men, all of whom had used large quantities of Cannabis Indica in practice, we have received reports which affirm that they have been unable to determine any therapeutic difference between Cannabis Americana and Cannabis Indica. We are, therefore, of the opinion that Cannabis Americana will be found equally as efficient as, and perhaps more uniformly reliable than Cannabis Indica obtained from abroad, since it is evident that with a source of supply at our very doors proper precautions can be taken to obtain crude drug of the best quality.

'The proper botanical name of the drug under consideration is Cannabis Sativa. The Indian plant was formerly supposed to be a distinct species per se, but botanists now consider the two plants to be identical. The old name of Cannabis Indica, however, has been retained in medicine. Cannabis Indica simply means Cannabis Sativa grown in the Indies, and Cannabis Americana means Cannabis Sativa grown in America. Its introduction into Western medicine dates from the beginning of the last century, but it has been used as an intoxicant in Asiatic countries from time immemorial, and under the name of "hashish", "bhang", "ganja", or "charas" is habitually consumed by upwards of two hundred millions of human beings.

'Cannabis differs from opium in producing no disturbance of digestion and no constipation. The heart is generally accelerated in man when the drug is smoked. Its intravenous injection into animals slows the pulse, partly through inhibitory stimulation and partly through direct action upon the heart muscle. The pupil is generally somewhat dilated. Death from acute poisoning is extremely rare, and recovery has occurred after enormous doses. The continued abuse of hashish by natives of the East sometimes leads to mania and dementia, but does not cause the same disturbance of nutrition that opium does; and the habitual use of small quantities, which is almost universal in some Eastern countries, does not appear to be detrimental to health.

'Cannabis Americana is employed for the same medicinal purposes as Cannabis Indica, which is frequently used as a hypnotic in cases of sleeplessness, in nervous exhaustion, and as a sedative in patients suffering from pain. Its greatest use has perhaps been in the treatment of various nervous and mental diseases, although it is found as an ingredient in many cough mixtures. In general, Cannabis Americana can be used when a mild hypnotic or sedative is indicated, as it is said not to disturb digestion, and it produces no subsequent nausea or depression. It is of use in cases of migraine, particularly when opium is contra-indicated. It is recommended in paralysis agitans to quiet the tremors, in spasm of the bladder, and in sexual, impotence not the result of organic disease, especially in combinations with nux vomica and ergot.

'The advantages of using carefully prepared solid and fluid extracts of the home-grown drug are apparent when it is considered that every step of the process, from the planting of the drug to the final marketing of the finished product, is under the supervision of experts. The imported drug varies extremely in activity and much of it is inert or flagrantly adulterated.'

The writer desires to acknowledge the able assistance given him in preparing the above notes by Mr. E. M. Holmes, F.L.L., and Mr. S. Jamieson, M.P.S. (Parke, Davis and Co.).

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