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- Herausgeber: Anubis Books
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
The Psychology of Hashish
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The Psychology of Hashish
Aleister Crowley
Published by Anubis Books, 2019.
Copyright
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The Psychology of Hashish by Aleister Crowley. First published in The Equinox, Volume I, Number 2, September 1909.
Annotated edition with footnotes and images published 2019 by Anubis Books.
Original footnotes ©Anubis Books. All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-359-41573-1.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Chapter XIX
Chapter XX
Further Reading: Diary of a Drug Fiend
Chapter I
“The girders of the soul, which give her breathing, are easy to be unloosed... Nature teaches us, and the oracles also affirm, that even the evil germs of matter may alike become useful and good.”
— Zoroaster.*
*Ancient Persian prophet, also known as Zarathustra.
Note: Crowley penned this 1909 work in The Equinox, Vol. 1 pt. 2, under the pseudonym Oliver Haddo, the eponymous name of The Magician in the satirical 1908 novel by Somerset Maugham.
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COMPARABLE TO THE ALF Laylah was Laylah itself, a very Tower of Babel, partaking alike of truth both gross and subtle inextricably interwoven with the most fantastic fable, is our view of the herb—hashish—the Herb Dangerous. Of the investigators who have pierced even for a moment the magic veil of its glamour ecstatic many have been appalled, many disappointed.
Few have dared to crush in arms of steel this burning daughter of the Jinn; to ravish from her poisonous scarlet lips the kisses of death, to force her serpent-smooth and serpent-stinging body down to some infernal torture-couch, and strike her into spasm as the lightning splits the cloud-rack [cluster of moving clouds], only to read in her infinite sea green eyes the awful price of her virginity: black madness.
Even supreme [British explorer and Orientalist Sir Richard Francis] Burton, who solved nigh every other riddle of the Eastern Sphinx, passed this one by. He took the drug for months “with no other symptom than increased appetite,” and in his general attitude to hashish intoxication, spoken of often in the [1885 translation by Burton of The Arabian Nights] “Nights,” shows that he regards it as no more than a vice, and seems not to suspect that, vice or no, it had strange fruits; if not of the Tree of Life, at least of that other Tree, double and sinister and deadly....
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Depiction of Zoroaster from alchemy text Clavis Artis.
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Richard Burton in 1876
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NAY! FOR I AM OF THE Serpent’s party: Knowledge is good, be the price what it may. Such little fruit, then, as I may have culled from her autumnal breast (mere unripe berries, I confess!), I hasten to offer to my friends.
And lest the austerity of such a goddess be profaned by the least vestige of adornment I make haste to divest myself of whatever gold or jewelry of speech I may possess, to advance, my left breast bare, without timidity or rashness, into her temple, my hoped reward the lamb’s skin of a clean heart, the badge of simple truthfulness and the apron of innocence.
In order to keep this paper within limits, I may premise that the preparation and properties of Cannabis indica can be studied in the proper pharmaceutical treatises, though, as this drug is more potent psychologically than physically, all strictly medical account of it, so far as I am aware, have been hitherto both meagre and misleading.
Deeper and clearer is the information to be gained from the brilliant studies by [French poet Charles] Baudelaire [who wrote about hashish and was a member of the Parisian Le Club des Hashischins, which counted Victor Hugo and Alexander Dumas among its members] unsurpassed for insight and impartiality, and [Fitz Hugh] Ludlow [author of The Hasheesh Eater, 1857], tainted by admiration of [Thomas] de Quincey [Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, 1821] and the sentimentalists. My contribution to the subject will therefore be strictly personal, and so far incomplete; indeed in a sense valueless, since in such a matter personality may so largely outweigh all other factors of the problem.
At the same time I must insist that my armour is more complete in several directions than that of my predecessors, inasmuch as I possess the advantage not only of a prolonged psychological training, a solid constitution, a temperament on which hashish acts by exciting perception (Sañña), quite unalloyed by sensation (Vedana) and a perfect scepticism; but also of more than an acquaintance with ceremonial drunkenness among many nations and with the magical or mystical processes of all times and all races.
It may fairly be retorted upon me that this unique qualification of mine is the very factor which most vitiates my results. However...
With the question of intoxication considered as a key to knowledge let me begin, for from that side did I myself first suspect the existence of the drug which (as I now believe) is some sublimated or purified preparation of Cannabis indica.
Charles Baudelaire by Étienne Carjat, 1863.
Chapter II
“Labour thou around the Strophalos of Hecate.”
—Zoroaster.
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IN 1898-99 I HAD JUST left [Trinity College] Cambridge and was living in rooms in Chancery Lane, honoured by the presence of Allan Bennett (now Bhikkhu Ananda Metteyya) as my guest. Together for many months we studied and practised Ceremonial Magic, and ransacked the ancient books and manuscripts of the reputed sages for a key to the great mysteries of life and death. Not even fiction was neglected, and it was from fiction that we gathered one tiny seed-fact, which (in all these years) has germinated to the present essay.
Following image: The Alchemist in Search of the Philosopher's Stone, by Joseph Wright, 1771.
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THROUGH THE AGES, WE found this one constant story. Stripped of its local and chronological accidents, it usually came to this: the writer would tell of a young man, a seeker after the Hidden Wisdom, who, in one circumstance or another, meets an adept; who, after sundry ordeals, obtains from the said adept, for good or ill, a certain mysterious drug or potion, with the result (at least) of opening the gate of the Otherworld.
This potion was identified with the El [...]
