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Leaves of Grass

An ode to the writers and scribes who got lit

By Michael Reid Busk

 

In his The Hasheesh Eater, 19th century writer Fitz Hugh Ludlow—the original scribe of cannabis—wrote of countless phantasmagoria, ghastly terrors of demonical monsters and yet also of paradisiacal glories never seen by the earthly eye; wild tapestries woven in prose fecund.

Across the Ocean of Atlantis, in the year of our Lord 1820 and years beyond,

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An ode to the writers and scribes who got lit

By Michael Reid Busk

 

In his The Hasheesh Eater, 19th century writer Fitz Hugh Ludlow—the original scribe of cannabis—wrote of countless phantasmagoria, ghastly terrors of demonical monsters and yet also of paradisiacal glories never seen by the earthly eye; wild tapestries woven in prose fecund.

Across the Ocean of Atlantis, in the year of our Lord 1820 and years beyond, a literary cadre—three musketeers who traded sabers for quills—Honoré de Balzac, Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas (the writer of The Three Musketeers) enjoyed the pleasures of cannabis among the ruffians and rascals of Paris’s Latin Quarter, whilst creating buxom winking duchesses, lecherous cardinals and swashbuckling heroes with handlebar moustaches as sharp as their rapiers, and rapiers as sharp as their wits.

 

“Sex is the lyric of the masses”

Scrawled Baudelaire on the soul of

Stinking revolutionary Paris

But on his own time he preferred hashish,

Writing that those who smoke it will revel

In the Playground of the Seraphim and

Become Man-Gods

 

What the Anglophone world knows of Baudelaire’s love for “strange drugs” it learned through the translations of Aleister Crowley, who was “the wickedest man in the world.” Crowley (who wrote The Psychology of Hashish) was a fringe Mason who was ejected from his own commune, a professional rabble-rouser who professed to know the secrets of blood and divinity and “sex magick” and, considering he was accused during his lifetime of human sacrifice, Satanism and pederasty, his penchant for marijuana was hardly his worst offense.

 

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

Of his Celtophilic madness,

W.B. Yeats smoked pot to aid his psychic powers

And shake off his native sadness.

He believed in ghosts and banshees,

Capricious pixies who were wee.

Was he high when he won the Nobel Prize?

You might ponder it by the Lake Isle of Innisfree.

 

A blue booze brother star child wanderlustful prophet, Beat king Jack Kerouac knocked off On the Road in a week of benzies and bloody fingers, but when he wasn’t blasting 60 Roman candle pages a day, he preferred the headache-free mind-hug of Lady Cannabis. If, as Kerouac said, “a hippie is someone who can be set down on any street corner in the world, and find marijuana,” he was aces as a hippie.

While pop astronomer Carl Sagan did not write billions and billions of books, he wrote many, famously claiming in one that “a galaxy is composed of gas and dust and stars—billions upon billions of stars.” If awe over the vastness of the cosmos seems like a particularly medicated pastime, you guessed right: a university of Chicago Ph.D., Sagan considered smoking marijuana crucial to many of his intellectual discoveries. His lungs were a galaxy full of oxygen and carbon dioxide and THC—billions and billions of marijuana bits.

But it was an earlier set of smoke-filled lungs (those of Alexandre Dumas) that uttered these words: “When you return to this mundane sphere from your visionary world, you would seem to leave a Neapolitan spring for a Lapland winter—to quit paradise for earth—heaven for hell! Taste the hashish, guest of mine—taste the hashish!”

 

A REAL PAGE TURNER

 

First published in 1857, Fitz Hugh Ludlow’s The Hasheesh Eater raised the profile of hash and hash use for flights of fancy (in modern times, the writer was dubbed a “Mark Twain on hashish.”). Soon after its publication, private hash parlors began spreading to major cities in the U.S. In 1876, tourists could stroll over to the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition and smoke from hash pipes . . . until the Illustrated Police News swayed public opinion when it wrote about the “Hasheesh Hell on Fifth Avenue.”

 

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