Editor’s Introduction to the 2003 Hypertext Edition of Fitz Hugh Ludlow’s The Hasheesh EaterFitz Hugh Ludlow was the son of a minister who was well-versed in the classics and who already knew the Christian Bible backwards and forwards and in the original Greek when he started on the adventures that he relates in The Hasheesh Eater. He peppers his writings with allusions to figures from the Bible, oratory from debates in the Roman senate, poetry from the 19th century canon, and a vocabulary unafraid of words that were obscure and archaic even in his time. Until this annotated version of The Hasheesh Eater, the modern reader (when she could find a copy at all) was justifiably flummoxed by all of this. Now you can experience something akin to the sense of bewilderment that Ludlow intended to impart, without getting lost instead in a maze of unfamiliar quotations and dead languages. That said, the bewilderment won’t quite be the same. Most readers of The Hasheesh Eater today, unlike almost all readers of the book when it was first published, have had at least a taste of cannabis intoxication. Things were different then. One reviewer of The Hasheesh Eater wrote in 1858 that “so little is known of hasheesh in this country that the name even is scarce familiar to the general reader…” This is hardly the case today. But even those readers who, with the benefit of the modern marijuana industry, have had extensive experience smoking marijuana or eating hash brownies are likely to react with incredulity to the tales of fantastic hallucinations contained in Ludlow’s book. Ludlow describes vivid, surreal and richly detailed visions, as well as symptoms of his intoxication (for instance, “my ability at times to feel sights, see sounds, &c.”) that sound much more like the symptoms of psychedelic drugs than of marijuana. You may be skeptical at first of the visions that Ludlow vividly relates in a style that Terence McKenna called “a wonderful distillation of all that was zany in the Yankee transcendentalist approach.” But you cannot help but be amazed at how closely his descriptions of cannabine visions resemble the descriptions of the psychedelic universe that came a century later. Oriana Josseau Kalant, in an article for The International Journal of the Addictions presents one solution to this dilemma by analyzing the “Tilden’s extract” that was Ludlow’s source of the drug: Ludlow consistently talked of “hasheesh” but in fact he took the solid extract of Cannabis Indica which was roughly twice as potent as the crude resin and ten times as potent as marijuana. A rough calculation shows that his intake was equivalent to about 6 or 7 marijuana cigarettes per dose, i.e. at the hallucinatory rather than at the euphoriant level prevalent in contemporary North American use. Ludlow was taking as much as a drachm of the stuff (3.9 grams, .14 ounces) in his largest doses — if Kalant’s figures are correct, this is equivalent to a quarter-ounce of resin or well over an ounce of marijuana! A more recent account — less touched by “all that was zany” in Ludlow’s literary background — of the ingestion of large amounts of hashish (in this case true hashish, about six grams worth, administered in “a deliberate overdose”) is given by Dr. Andrew Weil in The Natural Mind: The effects of the drug were felt within forty minutes and were pleasant but strong for about a half-hour. Thereafter, things became quite confusing. I could not understand what was said to me, felt physically sick, and soon was unfit to do anything but lie in bed and wait for morning. Auditory hallucinations were prominent, especially threatening voices that rose in volume to a crescendo, then faded out. For about twelve hours I remained in a stage of consciousness between sleeping and waking, marked by vivid nightmares. Lucid intervals were rare; for much of the time I did not know where I was, even thinking I was six years old and sick from measles. By morning, most of the worst symptoms had disappeared, but I had a powerful hangover that left me prostrate for another twenty-four hours. I would not willingly repeat the experience. So I am inclined to give Ludlow the benefit of the doubt when he says that his “narrative is one of unexaggerated fact… without one additional stroke of the pencil of an after-fancy thrown in to heighten the tone or harmonize the effect.” It is Ludlow’s remarkable talent to be able to put words to experiences which seem quite beyond the grasp of language. If he has resorted to allegory or hyperbole to extend his verbal reach, we should not be surprised. As he said once, “the entire truth of Nature cannot be copied” so “the artist must select between the major and minor facts of the outer world; that, before he executes, he must pronounce whether he will embody the essential effect, that which steals on the soul and possesses it without painful analysis, or the separate details which belong to the geometrician and destroy the effect.” That said, many of his passages which may have seemed like fantastic mythmaking to his contemporaries ring very true today with our slightly more advanced knowledge of the psychedelic state. For instance, Ludlow writes of one hallucination: “And now, with time, space expanded also… The whole atmosphere seemed ductile, and spun endlessly out into great spaces surrounding me on every side.” How strange the plasticity of time and space must have seemed to Ludlow’s sober 19th century contemporaries — today any teenager with a guitar, a blunt and a smattering of Albert Einstein or Timothy Leary can confidently wax poetic about morphing dimensions. It is precisely because Ludlow could not count on his readers having any experience with such profoundly altered states of consciousness that he goes to such incredible lengths to describe them. And it is in turn because of this lucky fact that his work is so important today. In his quest to convey the vast scope of his experiences to others, using only the fragile medium of language, he takes nothing for granted and leaves no turn unstoned. In contrast, much of today’s writing on the psychedelic experience (when it can be found — the psychedelic experience itself, as opposed to miscellaneous other issues surrounding psychedelics, is strangely infrequently discussed) is either simplified, non-threatening anti-prohibition propaganda intended for the general public, or is esoteric and jargon-filled for the hard-core dope-fiend already well-versed in the psychedelic literature of the last few decades. The context of Ludlow’s discovery of cannabis makes all the difference. Not that the use of inebriating substances was entirely unknown in mid-nineteenth century America. When Ludlow started his interest in intoxicating drugs, the recreational and medicinal use of such drugs as ether, laudanum (opium), and nitrous oxide was already a social phenomenon in Europe and America, and alcohol, of course, had long been part of the culture. Events at which participants were asked to inhale one inebriating gas or another were considered interesting curiosities, akin to circus side-shows, and people amused themselves watching audience members climb on stage to get high. Even hashish was known of, in a vague sense, through works like The Arabian Nights, which contained such sketches as “The Tale of Two Hashish-Eaters.” Ludlow had read at least a bowdlerized version of these stories, as he says: “The singular energy and scope of imagination which characterize all Oriental tales, and especially that great typical representative of the species, the Arabian Nights, were my ceaseless marvel from earliest childhood,” in his introduction to The Hasheesh Eater. Other references to hashish that Ludlow may have drawn upon to pique his curiosity were an account in The Count of Monte Cristo (where hashish was described as an aphrodisiac, providing “a dream of passion like that promised by the Prophet to the elect. Lips of stone turned to flame, breasts of ice became like heated lava… love was a sorrow and voluptuousness a torture, as burning mouths were pressed to his thirsty lips, and he was held in cool serpent-like embraces.”) and John Greenleaf Whittier’s 1854 abolitionist poem “The Haschish” which used the legendary drug as a symbolic device, determining that for making “fools or knaves of all who eat it… The hempen Haschish of the East / Is powerless to our Western Cotton!” (Théophile Gautier’s “Club des Hachichins” in Paris, which would turn on the likes of Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud and Alexander Dumas about a decade before Ludlow’s experiments was not well-known across the Atlantic until after Ludlow’s hashish tales became public.) Certainly inspiring to Ludlow was the hashish-vision described by Bayard Taylor which was published in Putnam’s magazine and later in Taylor’s book The Lands of the Saracen. Taylor had tried a weak cannabis preparation in Egypt and had enjoyed the “exquisite lightness and airiness… [and] a wonderfully keen perception of the ludicrous” provided by the drug. When, out of curiosity, he downed a teaspoonful of a stronger preparation (and then another half-spoonful an hour later when nothing seemed to be happening), he got more than he bargained for, describing visions and experiences much like those Ludlow would later recount: My curiosity was now in a way of being satisfied; the Spirit (demon, shall I not rather say?) of Hasheesh had entire possession of me. I was cast upon the flood of his illusions, and drifted helplessly whithersoever they might choose to bear me. The thrills which ran through my nervous system became more rapid and fierce, accompanied with sensations that steeped my whole being in unutterable rapture. I was encompassed by a sea of light, through which played the pure, harmonious colors that are born of light. While endeavoring, in broken expressions, to describe my feelings to my friends, who sat looking upon me incredulously — not yet having been affected by the drug — I suddenly found myself at the foot of the great Pyramid of Cheops. The tapering courses of yellow limestone gleamed like gold in the sun, and the pile rose so high that it seemed to lean for support upon the blue arch of the sky. I wished to ascend it, and the wish alone placed me immediately upon its apex, lifted thousands of feet above the wheat-fields and palm-groves of Egypt. I cast my eyes downward, and, to my astonishment, saw that it was built, not of limestone, but of huge square plugs of Cavendish tobacco! Words cannot paint the overwhelming sense of the ludicrous which I then experienced. I writhed on my chair in an agony of laughter, which was only relieved by the vision melting away like a dissolving view; till, out of my confusion of indistinct images and fragments of images, another and more wonderful vision arose. Ludlow himself began his teenaged drug pursuits not in the lands of the Saracen, nor at a back-alley opium den, but at the local pharmacy — “with a disregard to my own safety” making upon myself the trial of the effects of every strange drug and chemical which the laboratory could produce. Now with the chloroform bottle beneath my nose have I set myself careering upon the wings of a thrilling and accelerating life, until I had just enough power remaining to restore the liquid to its place upon the shelf, and sink back into the enjoyment of the delicious apathy which lasted through the few succeeding moments. Now ether was substituted for chloroform, and the difference of their phenomena noted, and now some other exhilarant, in the form of an opiate or stimulant, was the instrument of my experiments, until I had run through the whole gamut of queer agents within my reach. Then a new drug, a cannabine lockjaw remedy called “Tilden’s Extract” came through the door. The medicinal use of cannabis had been known in the English-speaking world since the 1840s, when the results of English physician and chemist Dr. W. B. O’Shaughnessy’s studies with the drug in Calcutta were published in London, and when the founder of the American Journal of Insanity reviewed in that journal the use of cannabis to treat mental illness at Bicêtre by Dr. Jacques Moreau de Tours (who would also introduce the drug to the “Club des Hachichins” literary set). In the United States, the medicinal use of cannabis was just beginning when Ludlow came across it. Ludlow consulted such standard pharmacological texts as Dr. Pereira’s Elements of Materia Medica and Robley Dunglison’s New Remedies: Pharmaceutically and Therapeuticallly Considered to determine the action of the new drug and what a safe dose would be. The Dispensatory of the United States of America (“wherein all the specifics of the materia medica had been brought together for a scientific conversazione”) recommended doses as high as twenty grains for tetanus, and noted that “it alleviates pain, exhilarates the spirits, increases the appetite, acts decidedly as an aphrodisiac, produces sleep, and in large doses, occasions intoxication, a peculiar kind of delirium, and catalepsy.” But, “[t]he sum of my discoveries,” Ludlow wrote, “may be found, with much additional information, in that invaluable popular work, Johnston’s Chemistry of Common Life.” If readers of The Hasheesh Eater did as Ludlow recommended, and consulted chapter eighteen of that book, “The Narcotics We Indulge In: Indian Hemp,” they would have discovered that This wide use of the plant implies that the effects of hemp upon the system are generally very agreeable. In India it is spoken of as the increaser of pleasure, the exciter of desire, the cementer of friendship, the laughter-mover, and the causer of the reeling gait, — all epithets indicative of its peculiar effects. The experiences of Dr. Moreau (who “appears indeed to have fallen into the habit of using [hashish] even after his return to France”) were summarized: When taken in small doses, its effect, he says is simply to produce a moderate exhilaration of spirits, or at most a tendency to unseasonable laughter. Taken in doses sufficient to induce the fantasia… this is followed by an intense feeling of happiness, which attends all the operations of the mind. The sun shines upon every thought that passes through the brain, and every movement of the body is a source of enjoyment. And Moreau was quoted on the subject as saying It is really happiness which is produced by the haschisch; and by this I mean an enjoyment entirely moral, and by no means sensual, as might be supposed. This is a very curious circumstance, and some remarkable inferences might be drawn from it…. For the haschisch-eater is happy, not like the gourmand, or the famishing man when satisfying his appetite, or the voluptuary in the gratification of his amative desires — but like him who hears tidings which fill him with joy, or like the miser counting his treasures, the gambler who is successful at play, or the ambitious man who is intoxicated with success. It is no wonder, with the combination of such high praise for hashish as this, combined with the popularity of Ludlow’s book, that the drug would enjoy a spell of popularity. Not long after The Hasheesh Eater hit the shelves, the Gunjah Wallah Co. in New York began advertising “Hasheesh Candy” (possibly similar to the “dawamesk” used by the Club des Hachichins): The Arabian “Gunjh” of Enchantment confectionized. — A most pleasurable and harmless stimulant. — Cures Nervousness, Weakness, Melancholy, &c. Inspires all classes with new life and energy. A complete mental and physical invigorator. John Hay, an adviser to President Lincoln who later became U.S. Secretary of State, remembered Brown University as the place “where I used to eat Hasheesh and dream dreams.” And a classmate recalls that after reading Ludlow’s book, Hay “must needs experiment with hasheesh a little, and see if it was such a marvelous stimulant to the imagination as Fitzhugh Ludlow affirmed. ‘The night when Johnny Hay took hasheesh’ marked an epoch for the dwellers in Hope College.” Within twenty-five years of the publication of The Hasheesh Eater, most major cities in the United States had private hashish parlors. And there was already controversy about the legality and morality of cannabis intoxication. In 1876, when tourists could stroll over to the Turkish exhibit at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition and smoke hash pipes in a comfortable lounge, the Illustrated Police News would write about “The Secret Dissipation of New York Belles… a Hasheesh Hell on Fifth Avenue.” The Hasheesh Eater went through four editions in the late 1850s and early 1860s, each put out by Harper & Brothers. In 1903, another publishing house put a reprint of the original edition — and the last complete edition until 1970. Ludlow’s writings crop up in a couple of places in pre-marijuana-prohibition 20th century America. The occultist Aleister Crowley found The Hasheesh Eater to be “tainted by admiration of de Quincey and the sentimentalists” but admired Ludlow’s “wonderful introspection” and printed significant excerpts from the book in his journal The Equinox. Using the pseudonym Oliver Haddo, Crowley also wrote at length about his own cannabis experiences, comparing and contrasting them to those of Ludlow. He “was struck by the circumstance that [Ludlow], obviously ignorant of Vedantist and Yogic doctrines, yet approximately expressed them, though in a degraded and distorted form.” After the prohibition of marijuana, the writings of Ludlow were interpreted by two camps. On the one hand, there were the prohibitionists, who pointed out Ludlow’s addiction to “hasheesh” and his horrifying hallucinations; on the other, those who believed that cannabis deserved a second chance and saw Ludlow as a literate chronicler of the mystical heights which could be reached using the drug. In 1938, shortly after the federal government cracked down on marijuana, the prohibitionist warning was carried in the book Marihuana: America’s New Drug Problem. The book included several pages of excerpts from The Hasheesh Eater and noted that It was Ludlow… who contributed the most remarkable description of the hashish effects. He not only described the acute hashish episode with great intensity and fidelity but recorded the development of an addiction and the subsequent struggle which resulted in his breaking the habit. As an autobiography of a drug addict it is, in several respects, superior to De Quincey’s “Confessions” In 1953, Union College selected the alumnus Fitz Hugh Ludlow as a “Union Worthy” and invited three academics to compose speeches for the occasion. Morris Bishop (who would later include his impressions in his book Eccentrics), criticized Ludlow’s “abuse of a ready-made poetic vocabulary, as self-consciously picturesque as Bierstadt’s paintings,” and wrote that while his short stories “are today stale and meaningless… echoes of all the other magazine stories of his time, originating in literature, not in life, and conducted with no regard for truth and with little for verisimilitude” in The Hasheesh Eater: is a sincerity, a reality, which he could not recapture when he tried to construct stories solely from his imagination… He finds lyric phrasing to convey the unearthly beauty of his visions, and the unearthly horror of the evil fantasia which succeeded his bliss. He is a drugged Dante in reverse, descending from the Paradiso to the Inferno. His descriptions, drawing from his subconscious a strange mingling of the sublime and the grotesque, often suggest the work of Dali and other surrealists. The writer’s passion gives his work an intensity which the reader recognizes and sympathetically feels. This is a very considerable literary achievement. Robert DeRopp, in the 1957 book Drugs and the Mind, was perhaps the first to express skepticism at Ludlow’s “addiction” story, noting that “[n]o one seriously interested in the effects of drugs on the mind should fail to read Ludlow’s book,” but accusing Ludlow of a “hypertrophy of the imagination and an excessive dependence on the works of De Quincey” (although he also found The Hasheesh Eater to be “more lively and more colorful reading than… the grossly overrated confessions of that ‘English opium-eater.’”) and suspecting that “in many places scientific impartiality has been sacrificed in the interests of literary effect.” At this point we are at the dawn of the resurgence of marijuana in the United States and the emergence of psychedelics in the English-speaking world. Researchers, like pioneering mescaline researcher Heinrich Klüver, looked towards Ludlow’s seminal writings on the psychedelic experience for insight on the new drugs that were being discovered and synthesized. In 1960, The Hasty Papers: A One-Shot Review, a beat literature journal, devoted most of its pages to reprinting the first edition of The Hasheesh Eater in its entirety, and David Ebin’s The Drug Experience included three chapters from The Hasheesh Eater. In 1966, excerpts were published in The Marijuana Papers edited by David Solomon. In 1970, a reprint of the 1857 edition was put out by Gregg Press, and the Berkeley Barb reprinted several chapters. By this time Ludlow had been rediscovered, both by mainstream researchers into drugs and addiction, and by the growing drug-oriented counterculture. Oriana J. Kalant, in 1971 in The International Journal of the Addictions found The Hasheesh Eater to be a remarkable description of the effects of cannabis:
Prominent prohibition critic Dr. Lester Grinspoon discussed the works of Ludlow at length in his 1971 book Marihuana Reconsidered but was very critical of Ludlow’s writing. “There are a number of indications that Ludlow may have exaggerated, plagiarized, and invented many of his alleged ‘hashish experiences,’” he wrote. His criticism centers around three articles which appeared in Putnam’s Monthly Magazine in the mid-1850s. The first, appearing in April of 1854 and entitled “The Vision of Hasheesh,” is Bayard Taylor’s story of his use of hashish in Damascus (although more than one source has wrongly attributed the article to Ludlow) which would be incorporated into Taylor’s 1855 book The Land of the Saracens. The second article, “The Hasheesh Eater,” appears in the September 1856 issue and starts: “It was at Damascus that I took my first dose of hasheesh, and laid the foundations of that habit which, through the earlier years of my manhood, imprisoned me like an enchanted palace.” The story becomes a “Reefer Madness” scenario, in which the anonymous author is compelled by his hallucinations to commit murder as a necessary sacrifice to attain godhood: “I bent over her and placed the knife to her throat without the least pity or hesitation, so completely had all love, all nobleness, all humanity, been extinguished in me by the abominable demon of hasheesh.” But this murder, and the nightmare visions which follow, are thankfully as hallucinatory as the menacing voice that called him to the sacrifice. The third article was published three months later and is entitled “The Apocalypse of Hasheesh.” Also published anonymously, it is clearly Ludlow’s work, containing his hallmark speculations on hashish use by Pythagoras, for instance. It contains no mention of travel in the Near East, nor any references to the events in the September article except to say that the author had read the article and found it to be very similar to his own experiences (“The recital given there seemed written out of my own soul.”). As an aside, it is revealing that the magazine would publish three separate accounts of hashish intoxication in as many years (and, in fact, an additional fictional treatment in the very first issue of Putnam’s in 1853, which, to me, seems even more similar to Ludlow’s work), but the confusion centers on whether Taylor or Ludlow or someone else wrote the second article (different sources have attributed the article to each). When Harper’s New Monthly Magazine published Ludlow’s obituary in December of 1870, for instance, it ignored “The Apocalypse of Hasheesh” and instead attributed “The Hasheesh Eater” to Ludlow as his first published article. Ludlow himself tells the story this way in the pages of The Hasheesh Eater:
Lester Grinspoon, in Marihuana Reconsidered, is skeptical of Ludlow’s story. He writes that “the supposedly ‘anonymous’ article reads so much like Ludlow’s own account (his book has the same title), and contains so many curious, coincidental resemblances to Ludlow’s experience and reading, that it is at least possible that Ludlow himself wrote the article (his book was also published anonymously). Perhaps he did so to give credence to his own exaggerated report and to bolster sales of his soon-to-be-published work, or perhaps as a first experiment and attempt at expiation (the book certainly seems to serve, among other functions, that of the confessional type of self-therapy).” I disagree with Dr. Grinspoon. I don’t believe the evidence he gives is very strong. It remains possible that Ludlow, emerging from his hashish use, wrote a fictionalization based on his own experiences and on the experiences of Taylor that he read about in Putnam’s or in The Lands of the Saracen. Then he would write yet another essay, which contradicts the first and asserts himself to be a different author, and still manage to pass this off on the Putnam’s editors. This would have been an elaborate hoax to pull, with very little advantage likely to come from doing so — and of course the possibility that the editors of Putnam’s would expose the lie and thereby cast public doubt on the rest of his story. Be that as it may, the controversy, such as it was, did little to dampen Ludlow’s reputation, and the mid 1970s saw two new editions of The Hasheesh Eater in print, one by San Francisco’s City Lights Books, and a well-annotated and illustrated version edited by Michael Horowitz and released by Level Press. By the late 1970s, you could even find the face of Fitz Hugh Ludlow on a T-shirt, thanks to his alma mater Union College, which had thrown a “Fitzhugh Ludlow Day” celebration in 1979. More recently, Ludlow has been introduced to a new generation of psychedelics users through Terence McKenna, who read chapters from The Hasheesh Eater for a set of tapes (“Victorian Tales of Cannabis”) put out by Sound Photosynthesis, and who regularly praised Ludlow in his books, saying that Ludlow “began a tradition of pharmo-picaresque literature that would find later practitioners in William Burroughs and Hunter S. Thompson…. Part genius, part madman, Ludlow lies halfway between Captain Ahab and P.T. Barnum, a kind of Mark Twain on hashish. There is a wonderful charm to his free-spirited, pseudoscientific openness as he makes his way into the shifting dunescapes of the world of hashish.” Whatever the critical reception of Ludlow’s works eventually becomes, its popular one may be quite different. The Hasheesh Eater is an uncomfortable book for many readers. People who have a knee-jerk reaction toward marijuana and are comfortable stereotyping its users as burnt-out hedonists will not enjoy Ludlow’s description of the marijuana user as one who is reaching for “the soul’s capacity for a broader being, deeper insight, grander views of Beauty, Truth and Good than she now gains through the chinks of her cell.” Similarly, today’s drug enthusiasts will be put off by Ludlow’s final warning: “Ho there! pass by; I have tried this way; it leads at last into poisonous wildernesses.” But this is the best test of a work which is meant to be challenging and not merely to reinforce prejudices. The person who reads this book hoping for more evidence that marijuana leads to madness and depravity cannot help but come face to face with Ludlow’s crystal clear perceptions of reality and the urgency with which he conveys the motivation for seeking out Truth in visions. The reader who wants to find evidence of cannabine “amotivational syndrome” in Ludlow’s life will be surprised to find a man who tried on the roles of doctor, lawyer, teacher, editor, and author and traveled overland across the continent all before his thirtieth birthday, and who graduated from college as one of its honored alumni having taken huge quantities of hashish on a daily basis at some points of his college life, and having at no point while at college been wholly sober. But, on the other hand, if you come to these pages believing that marijuana is harmless and unaddictive, you may not put down this book with the same impression. The reader who only wants to read trippy stories of drug-induced fancy will come away from these pages never again to utter the words “it’s only marijuana.” — David M. Gross |