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EXTASIA, FANTASIA AND ILLUMINATI
24. Sidney Sime’s illustration of Théophile Gautier’s hashish
hallucination, in which Gautier visualised the drug as a jewel sitting
in his stomach.
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SATURNALIA OF THE SENSES
mausoleum full of treasures, its domed ceiling dimly lit by a green
censer lamp:
The air was heavy with the scented odour of this light, and the
fumes of the narcotic cannabis sativa – the base of the bhang of the
Mohammedans – in which I knew it to be the habit of my friend to
assuage himself. The hangings were of wine-coloured velvet, heavy,
gold-fringed and embroidered at Nurshedabad . . . The general
effect was a bizarrerie of half-weird sheen and gloom. Flemish
sepulchral brasses companied strangely with runic tablets, minia-
ture paintings, a winged bull, Tamil scriptures on lacquered leaves
of the talipot, medieval reliquaries richly gemmed, Brahmin gods.
81
Holmes, the cocainist, was always in vigorous pursuit of his cases,
leaping into cabs and trains and materialising unexpectedly in distant
corners of Britain. The hashish-smoking Zaleski, by contrast, appeared
never to leave his room. He simply issued forth ‘a delightful stream of
that somnolent and half-mystic talk’ into which he was wont to lapse
after consuming his fastidiously prepared drug, plucked a few antiquarian volumes from his shelves and solved the most baffling criminal
cases using nothing more than his library and the contents of his exquisite mind.
82
Hashish became a familiar trope in the decadent novels inspired by
J.K. Huysmans’s À Rebours, which the poet Stéphane Mallarmé had
characterised as ‘an absolute vision of the paradise of pure sensation,
which is revealed to an individual when placed before pleasure’.83
Huysmans’s protagonist, Des Esseintes, had been too overstimulated
by his aesthetic mise-en-scène to experiment with any psychoactive
substance stronger than perfume, but several of his successors used it as
a major theme. Hashish by Oscar Schmitz, first published in German
in 1902, was written in the decadent Paris of the fin-de-siècle where, as
a young poet, Schmitz had been a regular at the symbolist author
Rachilde’s celebrated Tuesday salon. He had met Jean Lorrain and
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EXTASIA, FANTASIA AND ILLUMINATI
Alfred Jarry, immersed himself in the occult works of Eliphas Lévi and
attended the rituals of a Martinist group, the same company in which
Yeats had been introduced to hashish. He considered the drug to be the
perfect stimulus for what he called the ‘débauche mentale’, an inner
decadence in which morbid fantasies could be indulged without limits
but without danger.
84
Schmitz’s novel opens in a Latin Quarter inhabited by dandies,
ruined aristocrats and inscrutable wanderers. His protagonist was careful
never to take hashish at home: like Jean Lorrain, he feared that uncanny
experiences would end up haunting his everyday life. ‘You never know
what parts of the fantasies will linger in the furniture,’ he explains; ‘my
room must remain pure.’85 The action shifts to a private hashish club
among the bohemian cafés of the Batignolles district, where:
A mild smell of burning resin mingled with the lighter smoke of
English cigarettes. On the dark red walls hung deep-black etchings
and engravings, in which barely discernible images, like the visions
of an incubus, stared down on us. In the corners, between exotic
plants, I could make out antique musical instruments like strange
reptiles . . . we lowered ourselves down onto pillows. From a table
standing between us the count took some tablets of hashish and
smiling, offered me the bowl.
86
The hashish den was a staple of such fictions. It was in part a transposed
version of a more familiar literary locus, the opium den, but it also had
models in the real world, where the social smoking of hashish was
becoming more common in the multicultural cities of Europe and the
US. In the American journalist T.W. Coakley’s novel Keef (1897),
the protagonist, a native of Tangier and habitué of its kif den, known
as the House of Visions, moves to New York. Drifting aimlessly, he
wanders into a tobacconist off Union Square to buy cigarettes and
notices, from behind a red fustian curtain at the back of the shop, ‘the
subtle and unmistakable incense of keef’.87 Smoking parlours, offering
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SATURNALIA OF THE SENSES
shisha water-pipes, were often to be found in the back rooms of the city’s
Turkish tobacconists, and some now offered long-stemmed pipes and
kif to smoke. There were also, by the 1880s, a small number of private
smoking rooms, referred to as ‘hasheesh houses’ in the true-crime magazines, where they were portrayed as luxurious vice dens for the jaded
thrill seeker.
The most detailed account of these dens, ‘A Hashish House in New
York’, by the New York physician and addiction specialist Harry Hubbell
Kane, appeared in Harper’s Monthly in 1883 in the guise of a sensational
vice exposé, though it was plainly modelled on Théophile Gautier’s
fantastical account of the Club des Hashischins. Kane described an
excursion to the lower reaches of 42nd Street and a walk through the
gloomy warrens of Hell’s Kitchen, before knocking on the door of a darkened house that opened to reveal a scene of ‘Oriental magnificence’. The
spectacle, Kane wrote, ‘brought to my mind the scenes of the Arabian
Nights, forgotten from boyhood until now’. He and his guide were
invited in, asked to exchange street clothes for Oriental finery – gown,
tasselled smoking cap and slippers – and offered a kif pipe and black
lozenges of majoun with a gnomic benediction, in this case John Dryden’s
line ‘Take the good the gods provide thee’. When Kane marvelled to his
guide, ‘Why is everything so magnificent here? Is it a whim of the proprietor, or an attempt to reproduce some such place in the East?’ – he
received an answer that might have been given by Jacques-Joseph Moreau:
The color and peculiar phases of a hashish dream are materially
affected by one’s surroundings just prior to sleep. The impressions
that we have been receiving ever since we entered, the sights, odors,
sounds and colors, are the strands which the deft fingers of imagi-
nation will weave into the hemp reveries and dreams, which seem
as real as those of everyday life, and always more grand.
This extravagant scene is the prelude to Kane’s hashish visions, a
lurid fantasia that makes the familiar transit from dream to nightmare
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EXTASIA, FANTASIA AND ILLUMINATI
in the high style of Fitz Hugh Ludlow. At its conclusion, like Gautier at
the stroke of eleven in the Hôtel Pimodan, the author is thrust out onto
the grimy streets, dazed and marvelling at ‘the cradle of dreams rocking
placidly in the very heart of a great city, translated from Bagdad to
Gotham’.88 In his more sober medical writings, Kane reported that the
use of hashish in New York was rare, and that its users were a mixture of
native New Yorkers and European immigrants, often from Greece and
Turkey (the proprietor of his fictionalised hashish house was Greek).
Women participated alongside men, sometimes in private side chambers for discretion. Like the larger demi-monde in Paris, New York’s
drug scene drew a polyglot and cosmopolitan crowd, in which the
intoxicants of different cultures mingled: Kane claimed to have been
served coca-leaf tea in his hashish den, in Andean style with globeshaped bowls and silver straws.
89
In this age of mass global travel and migration, drugs from different
cultures had begun to combine in distinctively modern ways. The thrill
of discovery is captured in the memoirs of the British engineer James
Lee who, after his initiation into morphine and cocaine by his Indian
doctor, proceeded through the 1890s and beyond to self-experiment by
combining the products of Western pharmacy with the traditional
medicines of Asia. The most interesting drug effects, he wrote, came
from such combinations, tested judiciously before ‘increasing the doses
in a carefully thought out system’.90 He encountered hashish soon
enough in the hills of northern Bengal, and found that it could be
added to his regimen to create fascinating synergies and potent visionary
effects:
Under the influence of very large doses, combined with a certain
proportion of cocaine, it is possible to experience anything one
wishes, quite realistically . . . The most pleasing effect, I find, is
produced by the mixture of cocaine and hashish, the cocaine injected
followed by a dose of the other smoked. The hashish seems to improve
the quality of the cocaine, and give it a strange intoxicating effect.
235
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SATURNALIA OF THE SENSES
On this combination he often experienced vivid waking visions; if they
took on a menacing quality, he discovered that injecting a grain of
morphine in solution caused the fear to vanish, ‘this being the effect of
just the right quantity of morphia following on top of the other drugs’.
Under a full moon, staying in a remote hut lent to him by a Naga tribal
family with whom he traded rubber, he went for a walk in the jungle
and found himself face to face with a tiger:
We stood staring into each other’s eyes for I don’t know how long,
as time had no meaning for me then. I felt no fear, only curiosity,
and I seemed to be able to read its inmost thoughts . . . I took some
steps forward, and then I noticed that it was still the same distance
from me as before, and I knew that it was a vision. I relaxed and
allowed my mind to become passive, and then I noticed that it
seemed to be drawing nearer . . . with a concentrative effort, I
banished the vision, and returned to my hut, where some pipes of
opium brought me back to a normal condition.
92
In these adventures, Lee considers himself a pioneer. He seems
unaware of the echo-chamber of Arabian Nights pastiche in which
literary accounts of hashish were typically framed, and into which
other global travellers like Silas Burroughs reflexively lapsed. In its
absence, and with the addition of intravenous cocaine, he employed
hashish much as the occultists did: to extend the capacities of the
imagination, and allow himself to inhabit and control a visionary inner
world. He was resolutely secular in his outlook, and regarded these
visions as products of his mind rather than any external or supernatural
power, but they also took him on cosmic journeys in which he saw
the future evolution of humanity spread out before him in a vast
panorama.
Another way to escape the imaginal hold of the Assassins and The
Arabian Nights was through a more profound immersion in their
source. A few years after Silas Burroughs’s experiment with kif in
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EXTASIA, FANTASIA AND ILLUMINATI
25. Isabelle Eberhardt around 1900, during her travels in
Morocco and Algeria.
Tangier in 1892, Isabelle Eberhardt, daughter of the Russian nihilist
Alexander Trophimowsky, came to live in the city after travelling with
her mother from Algeria. They learned Arabic and converted to Islam,
and she came of age smoking kif nightly in Tangier’s cafés.
Eberhardt was determined to become a writer, and to document
these secret worlds. She was initiated into a Sufi brotherhood and
adopted male dress, allowing her to travel among the nomadic tribes of
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SATURNALIA OF THE SENSES
the largely unexplored interior. She wrote sketches of desert life that
were found with her dead body in 1904, after the mud house where
she was staying in the remote garrison town of Ain Sefra was washed
away during a flash flood. They were finally published in 1920. One of
the last pieces she wrote described the time she spent with the kif
smokers of Kénadsa, in the deep desert at the Algeria–Morocco border,
who met each evening in a partially ruined house in the old medina. In
contrast with the bejewelled palaces of Western imagination, their
aesthetic was one of sparse simplicity: a reed mat, an old chest for a
table, a kettle and teapot, a basket of kif leaves: ‘The little group of kif-
smokers requires no other decoration, no other mise-en-scène. They
are people who like their pleasure.’93 They gather as the late afternoon
sun illuminates the room; one places red-hot coals in the pipes, another
plays a guinbri, its two strings fastened to a tortoise shell:
The seekers of oblivion sing and clap their hands lazily; their dreamvoices ring out late into the night, in the dim light of the micapatterned lantern. Then little by little the voices fall, grow muffled,
the words are slower. Finally the smokers are quiet, and merely stare
at the flowers in ecstasy. They are epicureans, voluptuaries; perhaps
they are sages. Even in the darkest purlieu of Morocco’s underworld
such men can reach the magic horizon where they are free to build
their dream-palaces of delight.
94
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PART IV
LOST AND FOUND
239
26. William Burroughs’s first novel, written under a pseudonym, presaged
the twentieth-century revival of interest in drugs and altered consciousness.
240