Books - The Hasheesh Eater

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	Books - The Hasheesh Eater

The Hasheesh Eater is an autobiographical book by Fitz Hugh Ludlow, first published in 1857.

The Hasheesh Eater describes Ludlow’s altered states of consciousness and philosophical flights of fancy while he was using a cannabis extract. It is Ludlow's best-known book (only one other, The Heart of the Continent, has seen a new edition since the 19th Century).

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 cannabis 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.” 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 several decades. The context of Ludlow's discovery of cannabis makes all the difference.

The Effects of "The Hasheesh Eater"

Predictably, the popularity of The Hasheesh Eater led to interest in the drug it described. 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, who would become President Lincoln’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 Rediscovery of "The Hasheesh Eater"

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 , 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.

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