European cannabis use remained quite secretive until the advent of the mid nineteenth century group, the elite "Le Club Des Haschischins," a name inspired by the nickname given to the hashish using Isma'ilis. The club members would gather together once a month costumed with turbans and daggers. "The prince of the Assassins" would go from member to member offering a spoonful of hashish with the statement "This will be taken from your share of paradise." This elite group included some of the most famous and creative artists and authors of that time (Dumas, Hugo, Gautier, Baudelaire, De Nerval, Balzac, etc.) and was founded by Dr. J. Moreau, an expert on the effects of hashish:
"There are two modes of existence — two modes of life — given to man," Moreau mused. "The first one results from our communication with the external world, with the universe. The second one is but the reflection of the self and is fed from its own distinct internal sources. The dream is an in-between land where the external life ends and the internal life begins." With the aid of hashish, he felt that anyone could enter this in-between land at will. — E. Abel, Marihuana: The first Twelve Thousand Years
The published works of the members of the Hashish club are now considered classics. They extol dignity and the freedom of the individual. Most of the members of the Hashish Club were steeped in esoteric knowledge and many of them wrote extensively about hashish. Dumas included in his Count of Monte Cristo an encounter with the hashish-eating Sinbad the sailor, whom he based on Hasan I-Sabah of the Assassins.
Club member Gerard De Nerval (1808–1855) used the word "supernaturalist" to describe what we moderns term "high" in the following excerpt reprinted in The Book of Grass:
And since you have had the prudence to cite one of the sonnets composed in the state of day-dreaming the Germans 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 charm by being explained, if such things were possible.
De Nerval first appeared on the French literary scene with a brilliant translation of Faust. His commentary on it revealed his vast knowledge and experience with the occult. In his classic tale, Journey To The Orient, De Nerval devoted an entire chapter to hashish in the tale of Caliph Hakim, a story set in the tenth century he says was related to him by a Druze Sheik named Saide-Eshayrazy. The tale is about a powerful Moslem, Caliph Hakim, who was in the habit of visiting the city disguised as a commoner. In one of these visits he enters a cavern which is frequented by members of the Sabian faith, and is befriended by a young man, Yousouf, who introduces the reluctant Caliph to hashish, telling him: "This box contains the paradise promised by your prophet and his believers. If you weren't so scrupulous I could soon put you into the Houris arms without making you pass over the bridge of Alsirat."[40]
After ingestion of the sacred paste, Caliph Hakim tells his new found friend, "Hashish renders you equal to God." The two friends in De Nerval's tale, were said to meet together to enjoy hashish on a number of occasions. And as Journey To The Orient tells us, their experiences included visionary dosages:
When both of them were deeply intoxicated by the hashish something strange occurred: the two friends entered into a certain communion of ideas and impressions. Yousouf imagined that his companion, kicking the earth which wasn't worthy of his glory, soared up towards the heavens and, taking him by the hand, carried him off into space amidst the whirling stars and glittering marvels of the Milky Way. Pale but crowned by a luminous ring, Saturn increased in size as it approached them, followed by seven moons borne along in the wake of its rapid advance. Then... but who could relate what happened when they had reached this divine home of their dreams? Human language can only reveal experiences conforming to our nature, and we must bear in mind that the two friends conversed together in this celestial dream even the names by which they addressed each other were no longer names which are known on earth.
At the end of the tale, De Nerval is told by his host, Sheik Saide-Eshayrazy, that the teachings of Caliph Hakim were the foundation of the secretive sect to which he belongs, the mysterious Druzes. De Nerval's contemporary and fellow member of the Hashish Club, Charles Baudelaire, commented on the effects of hashish:
On occasion the personality disappears. That concentration on the external, which is the hallmark of all great poets and master comedians grows and dominates your outlook. You become a wind whipped tree, regaling all nature with your organic music. Now you sweep formless into the immensity of an azure sky. — Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867), Les Paradis Atificieals
We know that members of the Haschischins Club in Paris, were aware of Rabelais ' esoteric reference to cannabis, for one of their most prominent members, Theophile Gautier (1811-1872), made cryptic references to it when describing his hashish visions: "What bizarrely contorted faces. What abdomens huge with Pantagruel ion mockeries. All the Pantagruelion dreams passed through my fantasy." Gautier also made some very interesting comments on the effects of hashish : "I was in this blessed phase of hashish which Orientals call 'Kief.' I could no longer feel my body; the links between mater and spirit were broken; I moved by my will alone in an atmosphere which offered no resistance. In this way I imagine, souls behave in the world which we go after death."
The first known historical reference to the phenomena known as the "contact high" also occurred at a meeting of the Hashish Club. The contact high is said to transpire when a person becomes high by simply being in the presence of a group of people who have consumed the herb. The Hashish Club incident took place when a woman was overcome with a peculiar feeling while serving coffee to this group of powerful personalities after they had ingested Dr. Moreau's emerald green hashish paste. She dropped her tray of drinks, and ran out of the room. Later she was calmed by her co-workers.
Another experimenter with this mysterious herb was the Belgium poet Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891), who penned the following poem while under the influence of hashish :
The Time of Assassins
Oh my Good! Oh my Ideal! Atrocious fanfare which does not make me lose my balance! Fantastic prop! Hurrah for the wonderful work and the marvelous body; for this initiation! It began amidst the laughter of children and it will end there too.
This poison will remain in our veins, even when — the fanfare shifting its tone — we shall have returned to the old lack of harmony.
But now let us — so worthy of these tortures — fervently recall the superhuman promise made to our body and soul at their creation. Let us recall this promise — this madness! Elegance, Science, Violence!
To us promise was made that the Tree of Knowledge should be buried in the shade, that tyrannical respectabilities should be deported in order that our pure love should be indulged.
It began with certain aversions, and ended — we being unable to grasp eternity at the moment — with a confusion of perfumes, laughter of children, discretion of slaves, austerity of virgins, dread of earthly things and beings — holy be ye held by the memory of that evening!
It began with every sort of boorishness; it ended with angels of flame and ice. Little evening of intoxication, blessed be you! Rule and method, we are your champions!
We do not forget how last night you glorified each one of us, young and old. We have faith in your poison. We know how to sacrifice our entire life every day.
The time of Assassins is here!
The famed 19th century Russian born mystic, world traveler, feminist, Theosophical Society co-founder, and author of occult classics Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine, Helena Petrova Blavatsky (1831-1891) is also reputed to have been a user of cannabis:
She [Blavatsky] wrote, sometimes under the influence of hashish, several books filled with esoteric lore, which owed a great deal to Hindu and Buddhist systems of thought, and brought to public awareness in the West such concepts as karma, prana, kundalini, yoga and reincarnation." — Benjamin Walker, Tantrism: Its Secret Principles and Practices
A.L. Rawson, a close friend of Blavatsky for over forty years, stated concerning her relationship with cannabis:
She had tried hasheesh in Cairo with success, and she again indulged in it in this city under the care of myself and Dr. Edward Sutton Smith, who had had a large experience with the drug among his patients at Mount Lebanon, Syria. She said: "Hasheesh multiplies one's life a thousandfold. My experiences are as real as if they were ordinary events of actual life. Ah! I have the explanation. It is a recollection of my former existences, my previous incarnations. It is a wonderful drug and it clears up profound mystery."[41]
Ronald K. Siegel, Ph.D. mentions other scientifically conducted 19th century experiments with hashish in his book Intoxication:
While Gautier and his literary colleagues were exploring the romances of these feelings, another small group of Frenchmen was using dosages of hashish ten times greater to follow the soul's ecstatic journey out of the body into the spiritual world. Under the tutelage of psychopharmacologist Louis-Alphonse Cahagnet, these subjects documented visions of death and the afterlife, experiences identical to those known as "near-death experience." The prototypical experience started with the user being pulled out of time into sacred stillness. A feeling of peace and well-being captured the soul as it separated from the body, then flung it into a bright moment of supreme happiness. Some subjects find it impossible to describe all that happens; others describe a panoramic review of their lives, encounters with departed spirits, celestial music, and profound visions and thoughts. Geometrically sculpted images introduce themes of cosmic importance. The forms parade across the mind's eye so fast that the cherubs melt into gargoyles, then a crypt of one's own body. The blue geometric forms become towering cathedrals filled with the white light of the Universal Being. The visions evaporated.
A similar out-of-body account from around the same period is given by a Lord Dunsany:
It was about the time that I got the hashish from the gypsy, who had a quantity he did not want. It takes one literally out of oneself. It is like wings. You swoop over distant countries and into other worlds. Once I found out the secret of the universe. I have forgotten what it was, but I know that the Creator does not take Creation seriously, for I remember he sat in Space with all His work in front of him and laughed. I have seen incredible things in fearful worlds. As it is your imagination that takes you there, so it is only by your imagination can you get back. Once out in the aether I met a battered, prowling spirit, that had belonged to a man whom drugs had killed a hundred years ago; and he led me into a region that I had never imagined; and we parted in anger beyond the Pleiades, and I could not imagine my way back. And I met a huge gray shape that was the spirit of some great people, perhaps of a whole star, and I besought it to show me the way home, and it halted beside me like a sudden wind and pointed, and, speaking quite softly, asked me if I discerned a certain tiny light, and I saw a far star faintly, and then it said to me, "That is the Solar System," and strode tremendously on. And somehow I imagined my way back, and only just in time, for my body was already stiffening in a chair in my room; and the fire had gone out and everything was cold, and I had to move each finger one by one, and there were pins and needles in them, and dreadful pains in the nails, which began to thaw; and at last I could move one arm, and reached a bell, and for a long time no one came because everyone was in bed. But at last a man appeared, and that got a doctor; and he said it was hashish poisoning, but it would have been all right if I hadn't met that battered prowling spirit.[42]
Dusany's experience of seeing the Creator laughing over Creation is somewhat echoed in the following comments made by another Englishman, Aleister Crowley , who was also known to experiment with visionary doses of hashish :
If creation did possess an aim, (it does not) it were only to make hash of that most "high" and that most holy game, Shemhamphorash! — Aleister Crowley, The Book of Lies (1913)[43]
British mountain climber, magician and cabalist, Aleister Crowley , (1875-1947), was influenced by the experiences recorded in the writings that came out of Paris's Hashish Club, as well as those of Rabelais . In fact Crowley paid the highest homage to Rabelais, taking his magical word, "Thelema," and law, "Do as thou wilt," from Rabelais' Gargantua. Crowley 's writings show he was also more than familiar with the powerful mystic properties available in hemp :
Through the ages we found this one constant story. Stripped of its local chronological accidents, it usually came to this — the writer would tell of a young man, a seeker after hidden Wisdom, who, in one circumstance or another, meets an adept; who, after sundry ordeals, obtains from the said adept, for good or ill, a certain mysterious drug or potion, with the result (at least) of opening the gate of the other world. This potion was identified with the Elixir Vitae of the physical Alchemists, or one of their "tinctures" most likely the "white tincture" which transforms the base metal (normal perception of life) to silver (poetic conception). — A. Crowley, "Psychology of Hashish"
Crowley felt he had found this substance in hashish, and went on to state in "The Psychology of Hashish:"
...if not the Tree of Life, at least of that other Tree, double and sinister and deadly…. Nay! for I am of the serpent's party; Knowledge is good, be the price what it may. Such little fruit, then, as I may have culled from her autumnal breast (mere unripe berries, I confess!) I hasten to offer to my friends. And lest the austerity of such a goddess be profaned by the least vestige of adornment I make haste to divest myself of whatever gold or jewelry of speech I may possess, to advance, my left breast bare, without timidity or rashness, into her temple, my hoped reward the lamb's skin of a clean heart, the badge of simple truthfulness and apron of Innocence. In order to keep this paper within limits, I may premise that the preparation and properties of Cannabis indica can be studied in the proper pharmaceutical treatises, though, as this drug is more potent psychologically than physically, all strictly medical accounts of it, so far as I am aware, have been hitherto both meager and misleading. Deeper and clearer is the information to be gained from the brilliant studies by Baudelaire , unsurpassed for insight and impartiality, and Ludlow, tainted by admiration of de Quincey and the sentimentalists…. This was my hypothesis: Perhaps hashish is the drug which "loosens the girders of the soul," but is in itself neither good nor bad. Perhaps, as Baudelaire thinks, "it merely exaggerates and distorts the natural man and his mood of the moment." The whole of Ludlow's wonderful introspection seemed to me to fortify this suggestion. Well, then, let me see whether by first exalting myself mystically and continuing my invocations while the drug dissolved the matrix of my diamond Soul, that diamond might not manifest limpid and sparkling, a radiance "not of the Sun, nor the Moon, nor the Stars;" and then, of course, I remembered that this ceremonial intoxication constitutes the supreme ritual of all religions. — A. Crowley, "The Psychology of Hashish"
The famous Irish Poet and Occultist W.B. Yeats (1865–1939), also experimented with hashish . Yeats met, and was influenced heavily by H.B. Blavatsky, as well as being a member of the famous turn of the century occult group the Golden Dawn, which counted among its members Dion Fortune, A.E. Waite and Aleister Crowley .[60] Yeats commented on his experiences with hashish in "The Trembling of the Veil," (1926):
I take hashish with some followers of the 18th-century mystic Saint Martin. At one in the morning, while we are talking wildly, and some are dancing, there is a tap at the shuttered window; we open it and three ladies enter, the wife of a man of letters who thought to find no one but a confederate, and her husband's two young sisters whom she brought secretly to some disreputable dance. She is very confused at seeing us, but as she looks from one to another understands that we have taken some drug and laughs; caught in our dream we know vaguely that she is scandalous according to our code and all codes, but smile at her benevolently and laugh.
Yeats was introduced to the writings of the members of the Hashish Club by friend and fellow poet Arthur Symons (1865–1945), who left us the following mystical piece:
Behind the door, beyond the light
Who is it waits there in the night ?
When he has entered he will stand,
imposing with his silent hand
Some silent thing upon the night.
Behold the image of my fear.
O rise not, move not, come not near!
That moment, when you turned your face
A demon seemed to leap through space;
His gesture strangled me with fear.
And yet I am lord of all,
And this brave world magnificent,
Veiled in so variable a mist
It may be rose or amethyst,
Demands me for lord of all !
Who said the world is but a mood
In the eternal thought of God?
I know, real though it seems
The phantom of a hachisch dream
In that insomnia which is God
— Arthur Symons (1865-1945)
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