The Hasheesh Eater
Encyclopedia
The Hasheesh Eater 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.
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. , two editions are in print, including an annotated hypertext CD-ROM version published in 2003.
state. 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."
The Hasheesh Eater is an uncomfortable book for many readers. 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." Conversely, he says of hashish
users: "Ho there! pass by; I have tried this way; it leads at last into poisonous wildernesses."
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.” 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.”
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.”
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
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:
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.”
At this point we are at the dawn of the resurgence of marijuana in the United States and the emergence of psychedelics in the English-speaking world. 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.
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:
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.”
The Hashish 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
Fitz Hugh Ludlow
Fitz Hugh Ludlow, sometimes seen as “Fitzhugh Ludlow,” was an American author, journalist, and explorer; best-known for his autobiographical book The Hasheesh Eater ....
describing the author's altered states of consciousness and philosophical flights of fancy while he was using a cannabis
Cannabis sativa
Cannabis sativa is an annual herbaceous plant in the Cannabaceae family. Humans have cultivated this herb throughout recorded history as a source of industrial fibre, seed oil, food, recreation, spiritual enlightenment and medicine...
extract.
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. , two editions are in print, including an annotated hypertext CD-ROM version 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." Many of his passages which may have seemed like fantastic myth-making to his contemporaries ring true today with more modern knowledge of the psychedelicPsychedelic
The term psychedelic is derived from the Greek words ψυχή and δηλοῦν , translating to "soul-manifesting". A psychedelic experience is characterized by the striking perception of aspects of one's mind previously unknown, or by the creative exuberance of the mind liberated from its ostensibly...
state. 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."
The Hasheesh Eater is an uncomfortable book for many readers. Ludlow describes the marijuana
Cannabis (drug)
Cannabis, also known as marijuana among many other names, refers to any number of preparations of the Cannabis plant intended for use as a psychoactive drug or for medicinal purposes. The English term marijuana comes from the Mexican Spanish word marihuana...
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." Conversely, he says of hashish
Hashish
Hashish is a cannabis preparation composed of compressed stalked resin glands, called trichomes, collected from the unfertilized buds of the cannabis plant. It contains the same active ingredients but in higher concentrations than unsifted buds or leaves...
users: "Ho there! pass by; I have tried this way; it leads at last into poisonous wildernesses."
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.
John Hay
John Hay
John Milton Hay was an American statesman, diplomat, author, journalist, and private secretary and assistant to Abraham Lincoln.-Early life:...
, who would become a close confidant of President Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln was the 16th President of the United States, serving from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. He successfully led his country through a great constitutional, military and moral crisis – the American Civil War – preserving the Union, while ending slavery, and...
and later U.S. Secretary of State, remembered Brown University
Brown University
Brown University is a private, Ivy League university located in Providence, Rhode Island, United States. Founded in 1764 prior to American independence from the British Empire as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations early in the reign of King George III ,...
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.”
Rediscovery
Ludlow’s writings crop up in a couple of places in pre-marijuana-prohibition 20th century America. The occultist Aleister CrowleyAleister Crowley
Aleister Crowley , born Edward Alexander Crowley, and also known as both Frater Perdurabo and The Great Beast, was an influential English occultist, astrologer, mystic and ceremonial magician, responsible for founding the religious philosophy of Thelema. He was also successful in various other...
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
Vedanta
Vedānta was originally a word used in Hindu philosophy as a synonym for that part of the Veda texts known also as the Upanishads. The name is a morphophonological form of Veda-anta = "Veda-end" = "the appendix to the Vedic hymns." It is also speculated that "Vedānta" means "the purpose or goal...
and Yogic
Yoga
Yoga is a physical, mental, and spiritual discipline, originating in ancient India. The goal of yoga, or of the person practicing yoga, is the attainment of a state of perfect spiritual insight and tranquility while meditating on Supersoul...
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 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”
In 1953, Union College
Union College
Union College is a private, non-denominational liberal arts college located in Schenectady, New York, United States. Founded in 1795, it was the first institution of higher learning chartered by the New York State Board of Regents. In the 19th century, it became the "Mother of Fraternities", as...
selected the alumnus Fitz Hugh Ludlow as a “Union Worthy” and invited three academics to compose speeches for the occasion. Morris Bishop
Morris Bishop
Morris Gilbert Bishop was an American scholar, historian, biographer, author, and humorist.Raised in Canada and New York, he attended Cornell from 1910–1913, earning a Bachelor's in 1913 and then a Master of Arts degree in 1914...
(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 DanteDante AlighieriDurante degli Alighieri, mononymously referred to as Dante , was an Italian poet, prose writer, literary theorist, moral philosopher, and political thinker. He is best known for the monumental epic poem La commedia, later named La divina commedia ...
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 DaliSalvador DalíSalvador Domènec Felip Jacint Dalí i Domènech, Marquis de Púbol , commonly known as Salvador Dalí , was a prominent Spanish Catalan surrealist painter born in Figueres,Spain....
and other surrealistsSurrealismSurrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....
. The writer’s passion gives his work an intensity which the reader recognizes and sympathetically feels. This is a very considerable literary achievement.
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.”
At this point we are at the dawn of the resurgence of marijuana in the United States and the emergence of psychedelics in the English-speaking world. Researchers, like pioneering mescaline
Mescaline
Mescaline or 3,4,5-trimethoxyphenethylamine is a naturally occurring psychedelic alkaloid of the phenethylamine class used mainly as an entheogen....
researcher Heinrich Klüver
Heinrich Klüver
Heinrich Klüver was a German-American psychologist born in Holstein, Germany.After having served in the Imperial Germany Army during World War I, he studied at both the University of Hamburg and the University of Berlin from 1920-23. In the latter year, he arrived in the United States to attend...
, looked to Ludlow’s seminal writings on the psychedelic experience for insight on the new drugs that were being discovered and synthesized.
In 1960, The Hasty Papers: A One-Shot Review, a beat
Beat generation
The Beat Generation refers to a group of American post-WWII writers who came to prominence in the 1950s, as well as the cultural phenomena that they both documented and inspired...
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
David Solomon
David Solomon may refer to:* David Solomon , television director and producer* David Solomon , educator, scholar and writer* David A...
. 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.
The mid 1970s saw two new editions of The Hasheesh Eater in print, one by San Francisco’s City Lights Books
City Lights Bookstore
City Lights is an independent bookstore-publisher combination that specializes in world literature, the arts, and progressive politics. It also houses the nonprofit City Lights Foundation, which publishes selected titles related to San Francisco culture. It was founded in 1953 by poet Lawrence...
, and a well-annotated and illustrated version edited by Michael Horowitz
Michael Horowitz
*For the British poet, see Michael Horovitz.*For the U.S. electrical engineer see Michael J. HorowitzMichael Horowitz is an American author and archivist in San Francisco....
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
Terence McKenna
Terence Kemp McKenna was an Irish-American philosopher, psychonaut, researcher, teacher, lecturer and writer on many subjects, such as human consciousness, language, psychedelic drugs, the evolution of civilizations, the origin and end of the universe, alchemy, and extraterrestrial beings.-Early...
, 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
Hunter S. Thompson
Hunter Stockton Thompson was an American journalist and author who wrote The Rum Diary , Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 .He is credited as the creator of Gonzo journalism, a style of reporting where reporters involve themselves in the action to...
.… Part genius, part madman, Ludlow lies halfway between Captain Ahab
Captain Ahab
Captain Ahab may refer to:* Ahab , the captain of the Pequod in Herman Melville's 1851 novel Moby-Dick* Captain Ahab , a Los Angeles based pop/electronic band...
and P.T. Barnum, a kind of Mark Twain
Mark Twain
Samuel Langhorne Clemens , better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist...
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.”
The Hashish 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