The Hasheesh Eater: Encyclopedia II - The Hasheesh Eater - The Importance of The Hasheesh Eater

The Hasheesh Eater - The Importance of The Hasheesh Eater

It is Ludlow's remarkable talent to be able to put words to experiences which seem quite beyond the grasp of language. If he resorted to allegory or hyperbole to extend his verbal reach, we should not be surprised. As he said once, "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." That said, many of his passages which may have seemed like fantastic mythmaking to his contemporaries ring very true today with our slightly more advanced knowledge of the psychedelic state.

For instance, 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." How strange the plasticity of time and space must have seemed to Ludlow's sober 19th century contemporaries - today any teenager with a guitar, a blunt and a smattering of Albert Einstein or Timothy Leary can confidently wax poetic about morphing dimensions.

It is precisely because Ludlow could not count on his readers having any experience with such profoundly altered states of consciousness that he goes to such incredible lengths to describe them. And it is in turn because of this lucky fact that his work is so important today. In his quest to convey the vast scope of his experiences to others, using only the fragile medium of language, he takes nothing for granted and leaves no stone unturned.

In contrast, much of today's writing on the psychedelic experience (when it can be found - the psychedelic experience itself, as opposed to miscellaneous other issues surrounding psychedelics, is strangely infrequently discussed) is either simplified, non-threatening anti-prohibition propaganda intended for the general public, or is esoteric and jargon-filled for the hard-core dope-fiend already well-versed in the psychedelic literature of the last several decades. The context of Ludlow's discovery of cannabis makes all the difference.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "The Importance of The Hasheesh Eater", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki