Observations placeholder
Ludlow, Fitz Hugh - The Weed of madness and witch plant of hell
Identifier
010493
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
Too much, too often
A description of the experience
The Hasheesh Eater – Fitz Hugh Ludlow
The judgement that must be passed upon the hasheesh life in retrospect is widely different from the one I formed during its progress.
Now the drug, with all its revelation of interior mysteries, its glimpses of supernatural beauty and sublimity, appears as the very witch plant of hell, the weed of madness.
At the time of its daily use, I forgave it for all its pangs, for its cruel exercise of authority, its resistless fascination, and its usurpation of the place of all other excitement, at the intercession of the divine forms which it created for my soul, and which, though growing rarer and rarer, when they were present retained their glory until the last.
Moreover, through many ecstasies and many pains, I still supposed that I was only making experiments, and that too, in the most wonderful field of mind which could be opened for investigation, and with an agent so deluding in its influence that the soul only became aware that the strength of a giant was needed to escape when its locks were shorn.