The HASHEESH EATER

The HASHEESH EATER
being passages from the Life of a Pythagorean (original publication 1857)
by Fitz Hugh Ludlow
(Compiler’s note: I recommend this book as a fascinating early document of the
continuing American fascination with chemically induced transcendence and the
exploration of altered states of consciousness to seek a deeper understanding of the
relationship between nature and culture. ~ Carey Wilson)
Contents page: http://www.lycaeum.org/~sputnik/Ludlow/THE/index.html
From Author's Introduction: We try to imitate Eastern narrative, but in vain. Our minds
can find no clew to its strange, untrodden by-ways of speculation; our highest soarings
are still in an atmosphere which feels heavy with the reek and damp of ordinary life. We
fail to account for those storm-wrapped peaks of sublimity which hover over the path of
Oriental story, or those beauties which, like rivers of Paradise, make music beside it. We
are all of us taught to say, "The children of the East live under a sunnier sky than their
Western brethren: they are the repositors of centuries of tradition; their semi-civilized
imagination is unbound by the fetters of logic and the schools." But the Ionians once
answered all these conditions, yet Homer sang no Eblis, no superhuman journey on the
wings of genii through infinitudes of rosy ether. At one period of their history, France,
Germany and England abounded in all the characteristics of the untutored Old-world
mind, yet when did an echo of Oriental music ring from the lute of minstrel, minnesinger,
or trouvére? The difference can not be accounted for by climate, religion, or manners. It
is not the supernatural in Arabian story which is inexplicable, but the peculiar phase of
the supernatural both in beauty and terror.
I say inexplicable, because to me, in common with all around me, it bore this
character for years. In later days, I believe, and now with all due modesty assert, I
unlocked the secret, not by a hypothesis, not by processes of reasoning, but by journeying
through those self-same fields of weird experience which are dinted by the sandals of the
glorious old dreamers of the East. Standing on the same mounts of vision where they
stood, listening to the same gurgling melody that broke from their enchanted fountains,
yes, plunging into their rayless caverns of sorcery, and imprisoned with their genie in the
unutterable silence of the fathomless sea, have I dearly bought the right to come to men
with the chart of my wanderings in my hands, and unfold to them the foundations of the
fabric of Oriental story.
The secret lies in the use of hasheesh.
From Chapter I.The Night Entrance
About the shop of my friend Anderson the apothecary there always existed a peculiar
fascination, which early marked it out as my favorite lounging-place. In the very
atmosphere of the establishment, loaded as it was with a composite smell of all things
curative and preventive, there was an aromatic invitation to scientific musing, which
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could not have met with a readier acceptance had it spoken in the breath of
frankincense…
Here many an hour have I sat buried in the statistics of human life or the history of
the make-shifts for its preservation. Here the details of surgical or medical experiment
have held me in as complete engrossment as the positions and crises of romance; and
here especially, with a disregard to my own safety which would have done credit to
Quintus Curitus, have I made 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.
In all these experiences research and not indulgence was my object, so that I never
became the victim of any habit in the prosecution of my headlong investigations. When
the circuit of all the accessible tests was completed, I ceased experimenting, and sat down
like a pharmaceutical Alexander, with no more drug-worlds to conquer.
From Chapter X.Nimium -- The Amreeta Cup of Unveiling
In the hasheesh expansion of seconds into minutes, or even according to a much mightier
ratio, there is an opportunity thoroughly to scrutinize the hitherto evanescent phenomena,
and the truth comes out. How any more such prophecies as these may have been rejected
through the gross habit of the body we may never know until spirit vindicates her claim
in a court where she must have audience.
At length the torture of my delirium became so great that I could no longer exist
unsustained by sympathy. To Bob, as possessing, from his own experience, a better
appreciation of that which I suffered, I repaired in preference to all others. “Let us walk,”
said I; “it is impossible for me to remain here.”
Arm-in-arm we passed down the front steps. And now all traces of the surrounding
world passed away from before me like marks wiped from a slate. When we first
emerged from the building, I noticed that the night was dark, but this was the last I knew
of any thing external. I was beyond all troubles from earth or sky; my agonies were in the
spiritual, and there all was terrific light. By the flame of my previous vision the corporeal
had been entirely burned off from about the soul, and I trod its charred ruins under foot
without a remembrance that they had ever been sensitive or part of me. A voice spoke to
me, “By the dissolution of fire hast thou been freed, to behold all things as they are, to
gaze on realities, to know principles, to understand tendencies of being.”
I now perceived that I was to pass through some awful revelation. It proved to be both
Heaven and Hell, the only two states in the universe which together comprehend all freeagent creatures, whether in the Here or the hereafter. Of both I drank tremendous
draughts, holding the cup to my lips as may never be done again until the draught of one
of them is final.
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From Chapter XIV.Hail! Pythagoras
Suddenly there came a sense as if some invisible presence walking the dread paths of the
vision with me, yet at a distance, as if separated from my side by a long flow of time.
Taking courage, I cried, “Who has ever been here before me? who, in years past, has
shared with me this unutterable view?” In tones which linger with me to this day, a grand,
audible voice responded "Pythagoras!" In an instant I was calm. I heard the footsteps of
that sublime sage echoing upward through the ages, and in celestial light I read my vision
unterrified, since it had burst upon his sight before me.
Tell me not that from Phoenicia he received the wand at whose signal the cohorts of
the spheres came trooping up before him in review, unveiling the eternal law and
itinerary of their revolutions, and pouring on his spiritual ear that tremendous music to
which they marched through space. No. During half a lifetime spent in Egypt and India,
both mother-lands of this nepenthe, doubt not that he quaffed its apocalyptic draught, and
awoke, through its terrific quickening, into the consciousness of that ever-present and allpervading harmony “which we hear not, because the coarseness of the daily life hath
dulled our ear.” The dim penetralia of the Theban Memnonium, or the silent spice-groves
of the upper Indus, may have been the gymnasium of his wrestling with the mighty
revealer; a priest or a gymnosophist may have been the first to anoint him with the
palæstric oil, but he conquered alone. On the strange intuitive characteristics of his
system; on the spherical music; on the government of all created things, and their
development according to the laws of numbers; yes, on the very use of symbols, which
could alone have force to the esoteric disciple (and a terrible significancy, indeed, has the
simplest form to a mind hasheesh-quickened to read its meaning) -- on all of these is the
legible stamp of the hasheesh inspiration.
It would be no hard task to prove, to a strong probability, at least, that the initiation to
the Pythagorean mysteries, and the progressive instruction that succeeded it, to a
considerable extent consisted in the employment, judiciously, if we may use the word, of
hasheesh, as giving a critical and analytic power to the mind, which enabled the neophyte
to roll up the murk and mist from beclouded truths till they stood distinctly seen in the
splendor of their own harmonious beauty as an intuition.
From Labyrinths and Guiding Threads
Long before I had known hasheesh, and walked its weird uplands in pursuit of the secrets
of mind, a revelation flashed upon me which, by its powers of amazement and perplexity,
made the time and place of its occurrence forever memorial within me. It was a revelation
in the same way that lightning is a revelation, clear in itself, yet showing hitherto
unknown hills of unbroken midnight in the distance. While yet a mere boy, I was
standing one afternoon by the side of two thinkers who talked metaphysics without taking
me into their counsels, for they had no thought of my busying myself with any thing but
the outside of nature as I met her laughing in my rambles.
“Yes, it is beyond dispute that our senses give us only appearances and not things -certain qualities of the essence, not the essence out of which they rise.”
In these words there was nothing to frighten a mind of ordinarily reflective habits; no
barricade of "subjective" and “objective,” or any thing else technical which I had not yet
learned to scale. I was smitten with a sudden interest; I did not perfectly appreciate the
meaning of the sentence, but wandered to a little distance to sit down and think it over till
I had made it mine. There was a meaning there which held out the strongest fascinations
to discovery.
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“Our senses give us only appearances, qualities, and not things.” Perhaps, thought I,
this is only a sophism hurled down as a sort of challenge for argument. These
metaphysicians love to argue. …
For at least half a century previous, the speculative mind of the greater part of Europe
(dynamically as well as numerically greater) had been under the dominion of John Locke,
whose "Essay upon the Human Understanding" had been brought to light in 1690. It is
perhaps rather an insincere compliment to speak of any mind as “speculative” which
expatiated merely within his prescribed area. The system which bore his name is too well
known to ask a statement, especially within these limits. Its parent he could hardly be
called; certainly not with any more justice than we could ascribe to the man who casually
remarks that it is a cloudy day the parentage of that meteorological phenomenon. His
system consists mainly in the discovery that people generally get such and such ideas
about their thinking faculty; that the said people have pretty nearly hit the nail on the
head, and that he is glad to tell them so; all authenticated by John Locke, his mark. The
majority of mankind attend to the knowledge secured through their bodily organs more
closely than to any other; they elaborate truth by thinking upon this knowledge; and thus
all truth comes to us through the organs, modified to a greater or less extent by reflection.
In fine, sense, and reflection on its data, the sources of all knowledge, form the governing
principle, the “articulum stantis aut cadentis ecclesiæ” of the Lockian philosophy.
Into this philosophy Hume, like all the other contemporary minds of his nation, was
born as regularly as into the monarchical form of government. It was the nursery of his
childhood and the school of his youth; his mind, when it wanted exercise, must run out
and play in John Locke’s small back yard, or not stretch its limbs at all.
Now there came a time when David Hume arrived at the very same point of
speculation which I have previously mentioned as reached, on my supposition, by most
of us who think. Let us see how he reasoned. Suppose him in soliloquy:
“I find that my senses give me nothing but the phenomena of things -- tell me merely
how objects act upon me. My eye acquaints me with color and outline; my ear with
vibrations of diverse intensities; and so on with all the rest of the organs. All give
qualities of things, operations which things have a capability to perform on me,
appearances of things, but never things themselves. How do I know that they do not? By
reflection, certainly; reflection on the data afforded by sense. But why do we all believe,
and act upon the belief, that we see, hear, feel, smell, and taste things? It must no doubt
be sense that tells us so; that is the only conjoint source of knowledge with reflection.
Then I have within me, and so has every one else, two exactly opposite verdicts. I do
know things, and I do not know them. Now which is the lie?”
Hume did not decide. He did not pretend to stand arbiter between these two
conflicting juries, which Locke fifty years before had impanneled to settle infallibly, and
without appeal, all the questions of human science. He only hung in perfect equipoise
between the reality and the nonentity of all being, himself necessarily included. He
became, as a strictly logical consequence of that teaching which he had drunk with his
mother's milk, and which he would have rejected as much in peril of being called an
unnatural son by all his contemporaries, a Pyrrhonist, a universal doubter. And who, in
the name of all candor, was the parent of his Pyrrhonism? Who but John Locke, who,
while a believer himself, because he did not bowl far enough in his own direction, had
nevertheless opened up an easy track to the most comprehensive system of skepticism in
the universe.
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I have dwelt thus long upon Hume and the circumstances which have tended to give
him his present reputation, and to set upon the stamp of an odium in many respects
unjust, because he is an example not less striking than painful of the evil which may be
wrought for a man by some unnoticed error in his mental philosophy. How easily an error
which is the germ of all things hurtful may escape the notice of men who accept without
examining, can be seen from the fact that the good John Locke (for he was good) was
never advised of the skeptical inference from his doctrine, but died as perfectly satisfied
with it as he had lived.
Most gratefully do I remember that, at the time of my first discovery of the legitimate
domain of the senses, I was not left, like many others in similar case, and Hume as the
representative of them all, to retreat hopelessly into a negation of all knowledge.
Other interesting aspects of Ludlow and his work:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitz_Hugh_Ludlow#The_Heart_of_the_Continent
In 1863 Albert Bierstadt was at the peak of a career that would make him America’s top
landscape artist. Ludlow considered Bierstadt’s landscapes representative of the best
American art of the era and used his position as art critic at the New York Evening Post to
praise them.
Bierstadt wanted to return West, where in 1859 he had found scenes for some of his
recently successful paintings. He asked Ludlow to accompany him. Ludlow’s writings
about the trip, published in the Post, San Francisco's The Golden Era, the Atlantic
Monthly and then later compiled into book form, according to one biographer of
Bierstadt, “proved to be among the most effective vehicles in firmly establishing
Bierstadt as the preeminent artist-interpreter of the western landscape in the 1860s.”[40]
His impressions of the Mormons came when Utah was seen by many of his readers
back home as rebellious and dangerous as those states in the Confederacy.
“The Mormon system,” wrote Ludlow, “owns its believers — they are for it, not it for
them. I could not help regarding this ‘Church’ as a colossal steam engine which had
suddenly realized its superiority over its engineers and... had declared once for all not
only its independence but its despotism.”[42] Furthermore, “[i]t is very well known in Salt
Lake City that no man lives there who would not be dead tomorrow if Brigham willed it
so.”[42] Ludlow spent considerable time with Orrin Porter Rockwell, who had been
dubbed the “Destroying Angel” for his supposed role as Brigham Young’s assassin of
choice. Ludlow wrote a sketch of the man which Rockwell’s biographer, Harold
Schindler, called “the best of those left behind by writers who observed the Mormon
first-hand.”[citation needed] Ludlow said, in part, that he “found him one of the pleasantest
murderers I ever met.”[42]
http://www.lycaeum.org/~sputnik/Ludlow/THE/Biography/biography.html
Stories of abolitionist heroes and martyrs were “[a]mong the earliest stories which were
told me in the nursery,” and as young Fitz Hugh so often saw guests at his home who
had come there after having preached against slavery to hostile crowds, he wrote that
even as an adult “I find it hard to rid myself of an instinctive impression that the common
way of testifying disapprobation of a lecturer in a small country-town is to bombard him
with obsolete eggs, carried by the audience for that purpose.” His father was also a
“ticket-agency on the Underground Railroad.”
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“I was four years old when I learned that my father combined the two functions of
preaching in a New England college town and ticket-agency on the Underground
Railroad. Four years old has a sort of literal mindedness about it.... So I could be
pardoned for going down cellar and watching behind old hogsheads by the hour to see
where the cars came in.”
The Hasheesh Eater was a success, going through a few printings in short order, and
Ludlow, although he published both the book and his earlier article "The Apocalypse of
Hasheesh" anonymously, was able to take advantage of the book's notoriety. Harper's
New Monthly Magazine wrote that:
Unequal to De Quincey in literary culture and in the craft of book-making,
the author of this work compares favorably with him in the passion for
philosophical reflection, in the frankness of his personal revelations, and
in perternatural brilliancy of fancy. In point of compact and orderly
method in the narration of his story he has a decided advantage over De
Quincey. The comparative merits of hasheesh and opium as a stimulant to
the intellect and the source of wild, imaginative dreams, may be learned
from a comparison of the two volumes.... The experience of the author in
its use is here frankly and fully related, in a narrative which is equally rich
in psychological illustration and in imaginative vision.
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Below, samples of Bierstadt’s illustrations from Ludlow’s Heart of theC ontinent.
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http://articles.sfgate.com/2011-10-02/opinion/30237116_1_ipad-app-print-edition-marktwain
Passed unnoticed recently was the anniversary of a certain stoned walk down Clay Street
in San Francisco in the 1860s…. The San Francisco Dramatic Chronicle (which you hold
in your hands today as The Chronicle) ran this little item on Sept. 18, 1865: “It appears
that a ‘Hasheesh’ mania has broken out among our Bohemians. Yesterday, Mark Twain
and the ‘Mouse-Trap’ man were seen walking up Clay street under the influence of the
drug, followed by a ‘star,’ who was evidently laboring under a misapprehension as to
what was the matter with them.”
Samuel Clemens, who had just begun to call himself Mark Twain, visited San
Francisco in June 1863 and was hired as the San Francisco Daily Morning Call's Nevada
correspondent. In the city, he crossed paths with Fitz Hugh Ludlow, well known for
writing "Confessions of a Hasheesh Eater," published in 1857.
Twain soon wrote his mother: "And if Fitzhugh Ludlow, (author of the ‘Hasheesh
Eater,’) comes your way, treat him well also. He published a high encomium upon Mark
Twain, (the same being eminently just & truthful, I beseech you to believe,) in a San
Francisco paper.’
Twain was referring to an article Ludlow wrote for the Golden Era newspaper,
published in November 1863. Ludlow wrote, “In funny literature, that Irresistible Washoe
Giant, Mark Twain, takes quite a unique position. He makes me laugh more than any
Californian ... He is a school by himself.” Ludlow suggested that Twain should focus on
his humor rather than straight news writing.
In October 1865, one month after Twain was seen on Clay Street, he wrote to his
brother Orion: “I have had a ‘call’ to literature, of a low order - i.e. humorous.”
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