Imagine a universe in disorder, peopled by strange beings, that have no relation with each other, whose speech one supposes is jargon; where such houses as there are are built in different ways—none with straight lines, many in triangles; where the animals are unlike ours, some smaller than ants; where there are no churches, no apparent streets; but innumerable brothels. When one sees fires the smoke goes downward; flames leap out of the soil and turn into living serpents. Now one sees a serpent return into his proper flame. There seem to be no gods, nor idols nor priests nor shrines.
The seas storm the skies and swallow up Hell; and all that lives and all that dies seems indistinguishable. Suppose that—in an opium dream—Satan turns God. The soil might wither at his touch; Lesbians lament the loss of Lesbianism; and the word of God be abolished.
I have used the word vehement in regard to Haschisch. It violates the imagination, ravishes the senses; can disturb one physically; but never, if taken in measure, prove destructive. This green drug can create unheard-of excitations, exasperations; can create contagious laughter, evoke comical images, supernatural and fantastic.
Now take a world created by Opium. The soil wavers, moves always, in void space; a soil in which no seed nor weed grows. The men and women are veiled—none see their faces. There is light, but neither sun nor stars nor night. The houses have no windows; inside are no mirrors; but everywhere opium dens; everywhere the smoke—incessant—of pipes; everywhere a stench produced by opium and by their moral degradation. The streets are thick with grass; such animals as there are are stupefied. In fact, this inexorably moving world that has no foundations exhales—worse than pestilence—an inexplicable stupefaction.
And, symbolical as it must be, these excitable poisons are to a certainty one of the most terrible means employed by the Prince of the Powers of the Air to enslave deplorable humanity; but by no means to give him, what the drug can give him, the monstrous sense of the suddenness of space and time, as if one were hurled between them by two opposing whirlwinds.
Now appears suddenly the Women—furious, formidable—one calls Mephistophila, who having gazed on the Medusa becomes Medusa; who, rouged and pale as the dead, gives one the idea of that eternal minute which must be hell. Her very name trails like a coffin-lid. Abnormal, she is sinister. She is one of my hallucinations. Can she ever count the countless sins she has committed? Occult, she adores the Arcana. Her kisses on women's lips are cruel. Perhaps she is the modern Messalina. Elle est l'impératrice blême d'un macabre Lesbos.
She admits—I give here simply her confessions—to no abominations, nor does she specialize her vices. As certain of her damnation as of her existence—real, imaginary—she lives and loves and lies and forgives. She knows she has abandoned herself to all the impossible desires endured by such souls as hers, who expect annihilation. Elle est la reine, pas présente, mais acceptée, de la cour des miracles femelles du Mal.
She is not of those the Furies hate eternally, nor has she knowledge of man's mingled fates; yet certain Circes have shown her how to weave webs of spiritual spiders; she knows not where those are that turn the Wheels of Destiny. Whirlwinds have shaken her in her perfumed room as she lies in perfumed garments, considering her nakedness as sacred: she the impure, never the pure! She is so tired of having ravished souls from bodies and bodies from souls, that all she desires is sleep, sleep without dreams. Did sleep ever come to those who most desired it? Messalina, Helen of Troy, Faustina knew this; dust has closed their lips, the very dust they have trodden under foot, the dust that knows not whither it is drifting: none thinking of the inevitable end.
Has not this poisonous drug shown to me, as to her, shadows hot from hell? Not the shadows the sun casts on our figures as we walk on the grass; not the moon's shadows that make mockery of us; but the veritable heat and fire and flame and fumes of uttermost hell.
In her eyes persists an ardent and violent life, hateful and bestial. Depraved by insensible sensations, she imagines Caligula before her and maledictions not her own. I know her now in vision—she is more insatiable than Death—more ravenous after ravishment than Life. No vampire, no Lamia, she knows not that her body has been drenched with so many poisons that her breath might poison a man with one kiss. And now, now, her eyes are so weary, her eyeballs ache with such tortured nerves, that she desires nothing—nothing at all.