HASHISH (which is extracted from the flowering tops, and the tender parts of Indian hemp) is a drug which enslaves the imagination and changes the nature of the will. It is a magician who turns sounds into colors and colors into sounds. It annihilates space and time, and has the divinity of a sorceress, the charm of a dangerous and insidious mistress. It produces morbid effects on our senses and wakens fantastic visions in our half-closed eyes.

Like every form of drug intoxication the effects of hashish are malign, diabolical. When subjugated by it, a part of oneself becomes wholly dominated, so that it may truly be said of an addict: Il a voulu devenir ange; il est devenu bête.

After indulging in it, one sits, as in a theatre, seeing a drama acted on a stage. We see it all with eyes that —during these ecstatic hallucinations —behold an endless drama of dreams; that perceive the subtlest impressions, fairy pageants, ghostlike unrealities: eyes, in short, that envisage the borders of the infinite. Then—to show the fantastic nature of its miraculous powers—the grammar, the arid grammar itself, becomes, to the dreamer, something like an evoked sorcery. The words are alive—in flesh and in blood; the substantive, in its substantial majesty; the adjective, a transparent vestment that clothes it and colors it like a glacis; and the verb, an angel of movement, that gives a sort of rhythmic swing to the entire phrase.

WITH the coming of the hallucinations all exterior forms take on singular aspects; become deformed and transformed. Then come the transpositions of ideas, with unaccountable analogies that penetrate the spirit. Music, heard or unheard, seems immeasurable, more stirring and more sensual.

Sometimes, when one is under the spell of the drug, the idea of an evaporation—slow, successive, eternal—takes hold of your spirit and you soon apply this idea to your thoughts, to your mode of thinking. By a singular equivocation, by a kind of mental transportation, or intellectual quid pro quo, you find yourself evaporating. The instant becomes eternity; though the hallucination is sudden, perfect and fatal. One feels an excessive thirst, a physical restlessness, a nervous apprehension, which at last subsides into, that strange state which the Orientals call Kief.

Hashish has a more troubling effect on one than opium. It is more vehement, more ecstatic, more malign, more evocative, more unseizable. It lifts one across more infinite horizons and carries us more passionately over the passionate waves of unknown storms on unseen seas. It takes us, not into eternities, not into chaos, not into Heaven, not into Hell (though these may whirl before one's endazzled vision) but into an incredible existence over which no magician rules, over which no God or witch presides.

THE mental effects of hashish are, also, more active than those of opium. After smoking opium things grow somnolent, slow, wavering. Men and women become veiled—we never see their faces. There is light, but not the light of the sun, nor of the stars, nor of the moon. The houses have no windows; inside there are no mirrors. Everywhere, throughout the whole hallucination, one is aware of an odor, a stench—the stench superinduced by opium and by opium's moral degradations. The streets are thick with grass; such animals as one sees are, for some strange reason, stupefied. In fact, the sleeping world of opium has no foundations in action or life; the scenes in it exhale something worse than inaction—an inexplicable stupefaction.

The effects of hashish are more unexpected and more bizarre than those of opium. It is a drug which can separate ourselves from ourselves; change our very shapes into shapeless images; drown us in the deep depths of annihilation, out of which we emerge vaguely, slowly, pleasantly. It can bury us under the oldest roots of the earth; give us death in life and life in death; bestow upon us sleep that is not sleep, and waking dreams that are not any part of waking. There is nothing, in short, human or inhuman, moral or immoral, which this drug cannot give us.

Yet, all the time we are indulging in it, we know not what it is taking from us, nor what deadly exchange we are certain to be made to give for it; nor what intoxication will some day be produced beyond its intoxication; nor that it will soon become almost a habit of the Soul.

IMAGINE a universe in disorder, peopled by strange beings who have no relation to each other; whose speech is jargon; where such houses as one sees are built in unbelievable ways — none with straight lines, many in triangles; where the animals are wholly unlike ours, some smaller than ants, some larger than beasts of the forest; where there are no churches, no apparent streets; where we see shadows, but not the shadows which the sun casts from our figures as we walk on the grass; not the moon's shadows that make mockery of us; but shadows from the veritable fire and fumes and flames of Hell; where, if one sees fire, the smoke goes downward; where flames leap out of the soil again only to turn into living serpents. Now one sees a python return into his proper flame. There seem to be no gods in this fantastic land, nor idols, nor priests, nor shrines; but only chaos, and smoke, and music, and the sound of dancing and carousing in innumerable brothels.

The seas storm the skies. See! They have swallowed up Heaven; and all that lives and all that dies has become indistinguishable.

Hashish, with all that is agreeable about it, is one of the most insinuating and terrible means employed by the Princess of Dreams to enslave humanity, to give to her victims a monstrous sense of the horror of life, of the wickedness, not only of living beings, but of Space and Time as well. Those who taste long of this supreme poison seem fated to be hurled—always, without ending—between violent and opposing whirlwinds of horror.

The pale and shadowy Princess of Dreams has a habit of appearing, in proper person, to her votaries in their drowsy visions. She guides them and hovers over them, all the time becoming more vicious and more formidable. And, pale though she is, and dead, and abnormal, and sinister, yet does she still continue the heroine of all their dreams.

And the Princess has a way of becoming— month by month—more cruel, more merciless. In her eyes there burns a more ardent and violent light; she becomes more insatiable than Death—more ravenous than Life.

IT is, as a rule, the last sign of the drug's mastery over a man, when he begins to admire himself inordinately; when he glorifies himself; when he becomes the center of the whole universe; as certain of his virtues as of his genius and destiny. Then, with stupendous irony, he cries aloud: "I have become God." At last he wishes to tell the whole world of his divine attributes: to project himself out of himself—as if the will of a man liberated by intoxication had some magical and efficacious virtue—and to cry, again and again, with a cry that might strike down the scattered angels from the ways of the sky: "Look at me. Look at me well! I have become God."