The Qalandars justified their outrageous behaviour with clever and, no doubt, hashish-strengthened logic, as they defiantly maintained their adherence to Islam and the teachings of the Prophet. They were, they would earnestly insist, engaged on the quest for God and enlightenment, and this, of course, entailed the suppression of ‘self’ and ‘selfishness’. Too many, they claimed, were the Sufis who trod the path of self-denial and asceticism and yet who were ultimately defeated and seduced by the demon of self-aggrandisement. Too often these same ascetics took secret satisfaction and pleasure from the acclaim and admiration they elicited from their disciples and admirers and relished the fame that their hardship engendered. Their egos increased in proportion to the miseries they endured, and their public acclaim defeated the worldly self-denial they cultivated. The Qalandars rejected such courting of public esteem and considered false this publicly paraded saintliness and piety. For them such public honour would undermine their attempts at self-abasement and true denial. It was therefore to avoid the pitfalls of public respect that they sought the opposite, namely public contempt and disgrace. They actively sought disapproval not only from the establishment but also from the public in general, and in this way they considered themselves freer to follow their spiritual path towards truth.
It was with this aim that the Qalandars adopted their distinctive dress and practices, and it was with this as their justification that they took up with relish the consumption of hashish. Alcohol, music and various forms of less common sexual practices, however, were also indulged in for the same pure reasons as mentioned above. The Qalandars were indulging in these excesses of sex, drugs and trance-inducing music merely to throw people off their trail, and to avoid the sin of vanity. They were not really hedonistic libertines but closet ascetics willing to endure public scorn and disgrace in the service of true humility.
Early Mongol Rule in 13th-Century Iran: a Persian Renaissance, 2001
Hassan Mohammed ibn-Chirazi
How Hashish Was Discovered
THE YEAR 658 [AD 1260], being at Tuster, I asked Sheik Hirazi, monk of the order of Haidar, on what occasion they discovered the properties of the herb of the devotees, and how, after being adopted by the devotees in particular, it had afterward come into general usage. Here is what he told me.
Haidar, chief of all the sheiks, practiced many exercises of devotion and mortification: he took but little nourishment, carried to a surprising extent the detachment from all wordly things, and was of an extraordinary piety. He was born at Nichapur, a city of Khorasan, and he made his home on a neighboring mountain. There he established a convent, and a great number of devotees came together around him. He lived alone in a corner of this convent, and spent more than ten years in this manner, never going out, and never seeing anyone at all except me, when I was acting as his servant. One day when it was very hot, at the hour of the very greatest heat, the sheik walked out alone into the countryside, and when he later returned to the convent, we saw on his face an expression of joy and gaiety very different from what we were accustomed to see there: he allowed his fellow devotees to come and visit him and began to converse with them. When we saw the sheik so humanized and conversing familiarly with us, after being for so long in an absolute retreat without any communication with men, we asked him the cause of this surprising effect.
‘While I was in my retreat,’ he replied, ‘it occurred to my spirit to go out alone into the countryside. When I had done so I noticed that all the plants were in a perfect calm, not experiencing the least agitation, because of the extreme heat untempered by the slightest breath of wind. But passing by a certain plant covered with foliage I observed that, in that air, it was moving softly from side to side with a soft light movement, like a man dizzied by fumes of wine. I began to gather the leaves of this plant and to eat them, and they have produced in me the gaiety that you witness. Come with me, then, that I may teach you to know it.’
So we followed him into the countryside, and he showed us that plant. We told him, on seeing it, that it was the plant they call hemp. On his orders, we took the leaves of this plant and ate them, and once back in the convent experienced in ourselves the same gay, joyous disposition that he had found impossible to hide from us. When the sheik saw us in that state, he charged us to keep secret the discovery that we had just made of the plant’s virtues and made us promise on oath never to reveal it to ordinary men and never to hide it from religious men.
‘God almighty,’ he told us, ‘has granted you, as a special favor, an awareness of the virtues of this leaf, so that your use of it will dissipate the cares that obscure your souls and free your spirits from everything that might hamper them. Keep carefully, then, the deposit he has confided in you, and be faithful in hiding the precious secret he has committed to you.’
Sheik Haidar thus made known to us this secret during his life, and ordered me to sow the plant around his tomb after his death, so I cultivated it in the convent. The sheik lived for ten more years after this event; during all the time I remained in his service not a day went by that he did not use this leaf, and he recommended to us to eat little food and to take the herb instead. Sheik Haidar died in the convent in the mountain in the year 618 [AD 1221]. They erected over his tomb a great chapel, and the inhabitants of Khorasan, full of veneration for his memory, came there on pilgrimage, bringing many presents to fulfil their vows and developing a great respect for his disciples. Before his death he had recommended to his companions to tell their secret to the most distinguished people of the province, and by instructing them in the virtues of the plant they adopted its use. Thus hashish spread rapidly in Khorasan and in the various departments of Fars province, but they knew nothing about its use in Iraq until the year 628 [AD 1231], in the reign of Calif Mustansir. At that time, two princes, whose states were among the maritime countries situated on the Persian Gulf, the Sovereign of Ormuz and the Prince of Bahrein, having come into Iraq, men of their retinue brought with them some hashish and taught the Iraqis to eat it. The drug spread in Iraq, and the people of Syria, Egypt and the lands of Rum, having heard tell of it, took up the use of it.
From: A Treatise on Hemp, 1300
Carl Kerenyi
Dionysos
IT SEEMS PROBABLE that the Great Mother Goddess, who bore the names Rhea and Demeter, brought the poppy with her from her Cretan cult to Eleusis, and it is certain that in the Cretan cult sphere, opium was prepared from poppies.
The making of opium from poppies requires a special procedure. A pharmacobotanist discovered that ‘the poppies on the lead of the goddess figurine found in Gazi reveal incisions which the artist colored more deeply than the rest of the flower to make them plainly visible’. This is a most significant discovery, because opium is obtained through such incisions. The coloring of the incisions was a way of displaying one of the goddess’s gifts to her worshipers. They were reminded of experiences that they owed to her. This is concrete evidence that should not be blurred by vague reference to ‘medicines’ (pharmaha) or to an unspecified ecstasy connected with the gifts of this goddess. What she bestowed through opium cannot have been essentially different in the late Minoan period from today. What was it?
We may turn to the modern classics on opium, from which I shall cite a few of the passages least conditioned by our own culture and closest to the atmosphere of Minoan art. ‘The ocean with its eternal breathing, on which, however, a great stillness brooded, symbolized my mind and the mood that then governed it . . . a festive peace. Here . . . all unrest gave way to a halcyon serenity.’
These are De Quincey’s words, quoted by Baudelaire. Baudelaire himself, in ‘Le Poison’ (Les Fleurs de Mal), speaks of extending, not shattering, the limits of nature:
Opium enlarges the boundless,
Extends the unlimited,
Gives greater depth to time . . .
Others, however, have spoken of a ‘world in which “one can hear the walk of an insect on the ground, the bruising of a flower.”’ A
ccording to Cocteau, ‘opium is the only vegetable substance that communicates the vegetable state to us.’
It may be presumed that toward the end of the late Minoan period, opium stimulated the visionary faculty and aroused visions which had earlier been obtained without opium. For a time, an artificially induced experience of transcendence in nature was able to replace the original experience. In the history of religions, periods of ‘strong medicine’ usually occur when the simpler methods no longer suffice. This development may be observed among the North American Indians. Originally mere fasting sufficed to induce visions. It was only in the decadent period of Indian culture that recourse was taken to peyote, or mescaline. Earlier it was unnecessary. This powerful drug had not always been an element in the style of Indian life, but it helped to maintain this style consonant with the style of Minoan culture and helped to preserve it.
When Minoan culture came to an end, the use of opium died out. This culture was characterized by an atmosphere which in the end required such ‘strong medicine.’ The style of Minoan bios is discernible in what I have called the ‘spirit’ of Minoan art. This spirit is perfectly conceivable without opium.
Dionysos, 1976
Opium teaches only one thing, which is that aside from physical suffering, there is nothing real
Andre Malraux
Charles Dickens
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
AN ANCIENT ENGLISH Cathedral Tower? How can the ancient English Cathedral Tower be here? The well-known massive grey square tower of its old Cathedral? How can that be here! There is no spike of rusty iron in the air, between the eye and it, from any point of the real prospect. What is the spike that intervenes, and who has set it up? Maybe it is set up by the Sultan’s orders for the impaling of a horde of Turkish robbers, one by one. It is so, for cymbals clash, and the Sultan goes by to his palace in long procession. Ten thousand scimitars flash in the sunlight, and thrice ten thousand dancing-girls strew flowers. Then, follow white elephants caparisoned in countless gorgeous colours, and infinite in number and attendants. Still the Cathedral Tower rises in the background, where it cannot be, and still no writhing figure is on the grim spike. Stay! Is the spike so low a thing as the rusty spike on the top of a post of an old bedstead that has tumbled all awry? Some vague period of drowsy laughter must be devoted to the consideration of this possiblity.
Shaking from head to foot, the man whose scattered consciousness has thus fantastically pieced itself together, at length rises, supports his trembling frame upon his arms, and looks around. He is in the meanest and closest of small rooms. Through the ragged window-curtain, the light of early day steals in from a miserable court. He lies, dressed, across a large unseemly bed, upon a bedstead that has indeed given way under the weight upon it. Lying, also dressed and also across the bed, not longwise, are a Chinaman, a Lascar, and a haggard woman. The two first are in a sleep or stupor; the last is blowing at a kind of pipe, to kindle it. And as she blows, and shading it with her lean hand, concentrates its red spark of light, it serves in the dim morning as a lamp to show him what he sees of her.
‘Another?’ says this woman, in a querulous, rattling whisper. ‘Have another?’
He looks about him, with his hand to his forehead.
‘Ye’ve smoked as many as five since ye come in at midnight,’ the woman goes on, as she chronically complains. ‘Poor me, poor me, my head is so bad. Them two come in after ye. Ah, poor me, the business is slack, is slack! Few Chinamen about the Docks, and fewer Lascars, and no ships coming in, these say! Here’s another ready for you, deary. Ye’ll remember like a good soul, won’t ye, that the market price is dreffle high just now? More nor three shillings and sixpence for a thimbleful! And ye’ll remember than nobody but me (and Jack Chinaman t’other side the court; but he can’t do it as well as me) has the true secret of mixing it? Ye’ll pay up accordingly, deary, won’t ye?’
She blows at the pipe as she speaks, and, occasionally bubbling at it, inhales much of its contents. ‘O me, O me, my lungs is weak, my lungs is bad! It’s nearly ready for ye, deary. Ah, poor me, poor me, my poor hand shakes like to drop off! I see ye coming-to, and I ses to my poor self, “I’ll have another ready for him, and he’ll bear in mind the market price of opium, and pay according.” O my poor head! I makes my pipes of old penny ink-bottles, ye see, deary – this is one – and I fits-in a mouthpiece, this way, and I takes my mixter out of this thimble with this little horn spoon; and so I fills, deary. Ah, my poor nerves! I got Heavens-hard drunk for sixteen year afore I took to this; but this don’t hurt me, not to speak of. And it takes away the hunger as well as wittles, deary.’
She hands him the nearly-emptied pipe, and sinks back, turning over on her face.
He rises unsteadily from the bed, lays the pipe upon the hearthstone, draws back the ragged curtain, and looks with repugnance at his three companions. He notices that the woman has opium-smoked herself into a strange likeness of the Chinaman. His form of cheek, eye, and temple, and his colour, are repeated in her. Said Chinaman convulsively wrestles with one of his many Gods or Devils, perhaps, and snarls horribly. The Lascar laughs and dribbles at the mouth. The hostess is still. ‘What visions can SHE have?’ the waking man muses, as he turns her face towards him, and stands looking down at it. ‘Visions of many butchers’ shops, and public-houses, and much credit? Of an increase of hideous customers, and this horrible bedstead set upright again, and this horrible court swept clean? What can she rise to, under any quantity of opium, higher than that! – eh?’
The Mystery of Edwin Drood, 1870
Opium is the only vegetable substance that communicates the vegetable state to us. Through it we get an idea of that other speed of plants
Jean Cocteau
Jack Beeching
The Chinese Opium Wars
THE LINKAGE THAT comes at once to mind between the word Chinese and the word opium might make one suppose that the Chinese had been drugging themselves with the stuff for thousands of years. In fact the Chinese took to opium a long while after Europeans first started drinking coffee or smoking tobacco. The opium poppy travelled from Asia Minor along Arab routes into Persia, reaching India only with the Mongols, and China even later.
When, in the mid-eighteenth century, they conquered Bengal, the soldier-merchant-administrators of Britain’s Honourable East India Company inherited, along with much else worth having, the Moghul Emperor’s monopoly of selling Patna opium, which came in 1778 under the direct control of the Bengal government. Into their hands had accidentally fallen abundant supplies of a product which any keen merchant might be forgiven for regarding as the answer to his dream – an article which sold itself, since any purchaser who has acquired a taste for opium always comes back anxiously for more, cash in hand.
As well as being a painkiller, opium is a specific against dysentery, and the word then current in China for opium was a-fu-jung, derived from Arabic, and signifying foreign medicine. In 1678 the Chinese had put a duty on the small quantity of opium they imported for medical needs, and for the next seventy-seven years the annual import of the drug was fairly steady, never rising above 200 chests a year. As a medicine, opium was swallowed raw. Meanwhile, the remotest western provinces of inland China were becoming familiar with opium as a drug of addiction, the poppy having reached them by overland trade routes through Tibet and Burma. The ban on opium-smoking was apparently not complete. By 1767 the Chinese were importing 1,000 chests of opium a year.
Opium-smoking was, however, strongly condemned in China, since according to Confucian morality the smoker’s body was not his own, to demolish exactly as he chose, but had been entrusted to him by his ancestors as their link with his descendants. Since using the drug habitually led to this gross offence against filial piety, the Imperial decree against opium-smoking was supported by public opinion . . .
In 1799 a new and more thoroughgoing Imperial decree condemned a growing traffic in opium. Observing that opium-smoking was now beginning to spread
inland from the coastal provinces of Kwangtung and Fukien, the Emperor’s Edict prohibited both the smoking of the drug and its importation. Opium alone was to be exempted from the ‘free interchange of commodities’ permitted with the foreign nations at Canton. ‘Foreigners obviously derive the most solid profits and advantages,’ said the decree of the opium trade, ‘. . . but that our countrymen should pursue this destructive and ensnaring vice . . . is indeed odious and deplorable.’
During ten days of its annual life cycle, the seed-box of the white poppy exudes a milky juice of extraordinary chemical complexity, not yet fully understood, and from this is derived a bitter, brown, granular powder: commercial opium.
The white poppy had been grown as a crop in antiquity in Egyptian Thebes. Later, opium and poppy seeds were carried in the caravans of Arab traders all through Asia. Some time before 1750 the white poppy was being grown as a crop in Szechwan, a remote Chinese province on the borders of Tibet, but the opium habit remained local there. What encouraged the spread of the drug on the sea coast of China was the new technique of opium-smoking. The taste of raw opium in the mouth was somewhat repugnant and its absorption into the body slow; smoking overcame both these disadvantages. The smoker dipped a needle into his prepared extract, dried it over a flame, and put the bead of flame-dried opium into a tiny pipe-bowl of tobacco. The smoke reached the bloodstream through the lungs, giving a quick narcotic effect.