The Hasheesh Eater (1857) is an autobiographical book by Fitz Hugh Ludlow describing the author's altered states of consciousness and philosophical flights of fancy while he was using a cannabis extract. In the United States, the book created popular interest in hashish, leading to hashish candy and private hashish clubs. The book was later popular in the counter-culture movement of the 1960s.
First published in 1857, 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. As of 2006[update], two editions are in print, including an annotated version first published in 2003.
Literary significance
Ludlow said, "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."[1] Many of his passages, which may have seemed like fantastic myth-making to his contemporaries, ring true today with more modern knowledge of the psychedelic state.[2] 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."[3]
Ludlow describes 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."[4] Conversely, he says of hashish users: "Ho there! pass by; I have tried this way; it leads at last into poisonous wildernesses."[4]
Cultural effect
The popularity of The Hasheesh Eater led to interest in the drug it described. Not long after its publication, the Gunjah Wallah Co. in New York began advertising "Hasheesh Candy":
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.[5]
John Hay, who would become a close confidant of President Lincoln and later U.S. Secretary of State, remembered Brown University as the place “where I used to eat Hasheesh and dream dreams.”[6] 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.”[7]
Within twenty-five years of the publication of The Hasheesh Eater, many 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 buy hashish at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, the Illustrated Police News would write about “The Secret Dissipation of New York Belles… a Hasheesh Hell on Fifth Avenue.”[8]
Howard Phillips Lovecraft owned a copy of The Hasheesh Eater, bought in 1925 from fellow writer and bookseller Samuel Loveman.[9] In a 1927 letter to Bernard Austin Dwyer, Lovecraft declared the influence of Ludlow's writings on his own:
Have I read Fitzhugh Ludlow's Hasheesh Eater? Why, Sir, I possess it upon mine own shelves; and wou'd not part with it for any inducement whatever! I have frequently reread those phantasmagoria of exotic colour, which proved more of a stimulant to my own fancy than any vegetable alkaloid ever grown and distilled. [...] The reeling panoramas out of space and time have an unmistakable tinge of authenticity, and even the metaphysical speculations were far from arid."[10]
Rediscovery
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.”[11]
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 that 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”[12]
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 later attempts at fiction, writing that 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 on the other hand:
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.[13]
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.’”). DeRopp suspected that “in many places scientific impartiality has been sacrificed in the interests of literary effect.”[14]
At this point in time, there occurred a resurgence of interest in marijuana in the United States and the emergence of psychedelics in the English-speaking world as a whole. Researchers, like pioneering mescaline researcher Heinrich Klüver, looked to Ludlow’s seminal writings on the psychedelic experience for insight on the new drugs that were being discovered and synthesized.[citation needed]
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 book 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-savvy 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:
…it is evident that Ludlow recognized, with remarkable insight, most of the characteristic subjective effects of cannabis. He also noted, and interpreted essentially correctly, such pharmacological points as the relation of dose to effect, inter- and intra-individual variations in response, and the influence of set and setting. Most importantly, perhaps, he recorded the development of his dependence on cannabis more comprehensively and astutely than anyone to date. The initial motives — including features of his own personality and temperament — the constant rationalization, compulsive use despite obvious untoward effects, the progression to a state of almost continuous intoxication, the inability to reduce his dose gradually, and the intense craving and depression after abrupt withdrawal, all are clearly described. Ludlow recognized also the lack of physical symptoms during withdrawal, and the difference from opium withdrawal in this respect.
With the benefit of hindsight, we can also identify in Ludlow’s account a number of other features consistent with present knowledge, but which even scientists of his day could not possibly have known. For example, the initial change in tolerance, the continuum between euphoria and hallucinations, the differentiation between the hallucinatory process and the affective reactions to it, the relation between spontaneous and drug-induced perceptual changes, the similarity between the effects of cannabis and those of other hallucinogens, the attempts at drug substitution therapy (opium, tobacco), and the role of psychotherapy and abreactive writing, are all in keeping with contemporary thought. These points permit the modern reader to feel even greater confidence in the extraordinary accuracy and perceptiveness of Ludlow’s record.[15]
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.
In the 2000s, 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 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.”[16]
The Hasheesh Eater remains Ludlow's most remembered work. Only one other of his books, The Heart of the Continent, has seen a new edition since the 19th Century.
↑ Kalant, O.J. “Ludlow on Cannabis” The International Journal of the Addictions 6(2) June 1971, pp. 309-322
↑ Ludlow, Fitz Hugh "The Night Entrance", The Hasheesh Eater 1857
1 2 Ludlow, Fitz Hugh "The Visionary", The Hasheesh Eater 1857
↑ ad reproduced on page 201 of the Level Press edition of The Hasheesh Eater (edited by Horowitz, M., Level Press: San Francisco, 1975)
↑ in The Life and Letters of John Hay (William Roscoe Thayer, 1916) the quote is given but not referenced to a specific letter. John Hay’s A Poet in Exile: The Early Letters of John Hay (ed. Caroline Ticknor, 1910, p.22-23) contains the complete letter to the poet Nora Perry dated 2 January 1859, in which he says “The city of Wayland… is shrined in my memory as a far-off mystical Eden where the women were lovely and spirituelle, and the men were jolly and brave; where I used to haunt the rooms of the Athenæum, made holy by the presence of the royal dead; where I used to pay furtive visits to Forbes’ forbidden mysteries (peace to its ashes!), where I used to eat Hasheesh and dream dreams.”
↑ Thayer, William Roscoe The Life and Letters of John Hay v. 1, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1916, p. 47; see also Thayer, William Roscoe American Statesman: John Hay Vol. 1 (1908) p. 47. The quote comes from Rev. J. H. Gilmore: “On one occasion, at least, his enthusiasm for literature was carried to excess. ‘The Hasheesh Eater’ had recently appeared (1857) and Johnny 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. It’s fifty-six years ago; but I remember it well.”
↑ Joshi, Sunand Tryambak, Lovecraft's Library: A Catalogue, Revised & Enlarged, 2002, n. 556.
↑ Lovecraft, Howard Phillips, Selected Letters, Arkham House, 1964, II, pp. 118-119.
↑ Haddo, Oliver (pseud. for Crowley, Aleister) “The Psychology of Hashish” The Equinox 2, Sept. 1910
↑ Walton, Robert P. Marihuana: America’s New Drug Problem Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1976 (originally published in 1938)
↑ Bishop, Morris “Fitz Hugh Ludlow” Union Worthies 8, Union College, 1953
↑ DeRopp, Robert S. Drugs and the Mind New York: Dell 1976 (originally published in 1957)
↑ Kalant, O.J. “Ludlow on Cannabis” The International Journal of the Addictions 6(2) June 1971, pp. 309-322
↑ McKenna, Terence Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge New York: Bantam, 1992, pp. 163-164: “After Bayard Taylor the next great commentator on the phenomenon of hashish was the irrepressible Fitz Hugh Ludlow. This little-known bon vivant of nineteenth-century literature began a tradition of pharmo-picaresque literature that would find later practitioners in William Burroughs and Hunter S. Thompson… There is in Ludlow’s cannabis reportage a wonderful distillation of all that was zany in the Yankee transcendentalist approach. Ludlow creates a literary persona not unlike the poet John Shade in Nabokov’s Pale Fire, a character who allows us to see deeper into his predicament than he can see himself. 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.”
Hashish, usually abbreviated as hash, is a compressed form of powdered marijuana. As a psychoactive substance, it is consumed plain or mixed with tobacco. It has a long history of use in countries such as Afghanistan, Egypt, India, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Morocco, and Pakistan.
Recreational drug use is the use of one or more psychoactive drugs to induce an altered state of consciousness, either for pleasure or for some other casual purpose or pastime. When a psychoactive drug enters the user's body, it induces an intoxicating effect. Recreational drugs are commonly divided into three categories: depressants, stimulants, and hallucinogens.
Thomas Penson De Quincey was an English writer, essayist, and literary critic, best known for his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821). Many scholars suggest that in publishing this work De Quincey inaugurated the tradition of addiction literature in the West.
Les Paradis Artificiels is a book by French poet Charles Baudelaire, first published in 1860, about the state of being under the influence of opium and hashish. Baudelaire describes the effects of the drugs and discusses the way in which they could theoretically aid mankind in reaching an "ideal" world. The text was influenced by Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Suspiria de Profundis.
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Fitz Hugh Ludlow, sometimes seen as Fitzhugh Ludlow, was an American author, journalist, and explorer; best known for his autobiographical book The Hasheesh Eater (1857).
Cannabis, commonly known as marijuana, weed, and pot, among other names, is a non-chemically uniform drug from the cannabis plant. Native to Central or South Asia, the cannabis plant has been used as a drug for both recreational and entheogenic purposes and in various traditional medicines for centuries. Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) is the main psychoactive component of cannabis, which is one of the 483 known compounds in the plant, including at least 65 other cannabinoids, such as cannabidiol (CBD). Cannabis can be used by smoking, vaporizing, within food, or as an extract.
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) is an autobiographical account written by Thomas De Quincey, about his laudanum addiction and its effect on his life. The Confessions was "the first major work De Quincey published and the one that won him fame almost overnight".
Tilden's Extract was a 19th-century medicinal cannabis extract, first formulated by James Edward Smith of Edinburgh.
The Fitz Hugh Ludlow Memorial Library is a library of psychoactive drug-related literature created in 1970 by Michael D. Horowitz, Cynthia Palmer, William Dailey, and Robert Barker, who merged their private libraries. It was named for Fitz Hugh Ludlow, author of the first full-length work of drug literature written by an American, The Hasheesh Eater (1857). It was the largest such library in the world and was based in San Francisco, California. The Ludlow Library became part of the Ludlow Santo Domingo Library in Geneva, Switzerland, in 2003. After the death of its owner, Julio Mario Santo Domingo, Jr., his family loaned the book collection to the Houghton Library at Harvard University and the music collection to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland, Ohio.
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A psychoactive drug, mind-altering drug, or consciousness-altering drug is a chemical substance that changes brain function and results in alterations in perception, mood, consciousness, cognition, or behavior. The term psychotropic drug is often used interchangeably, while some sources present narrower definitions. These substances may be used medically; recreationally; to purposefully improve performance or alter one's consciousness; as entheogens for ritual, spiritual, or shamanic purposes; or for research, including psychedelic therapy. Some categories of psychoactive drugs, which have therapeutic value, are prescribed by physicians and other healthcare practitioners. Examples include anesthetics, analgesics, anticonvulsant and antiparkinsonian drugs as well as medications used to treat neuropsychiatric disorders, such as antidepressants, anxiolytics, antipsychotics, and stimulant medications. Some psychoactive substances may be used in the detoxification and rehabilitation programs for persons dependent on or addicted to other psychoactive drugs.
Fitz is a male given name and nickname which may refer to:
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Licit and Illicit Drugs: The Consumers Union Report on Narcotics, Stimulants, Depressants, Inhalants, Hallucinogens, and Marijuana–including Caffeine, Nicotine and Alcohol is a 1972 book on recreational drug use by medical writer Edward M. Brecher and the editors of Consumer Reports.
The history of cannabis and its usage by humans dates back to at least the third millennium BC in written history, and possibly as far back as the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B based on archaeological evidence. For millennia, the plant has been valued for its use for fiber and rope, as food and medicine, and for its psychoactive properties for religious and recreational use.
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