In another treatise in Sanscrit, of later date, the above is repeated; and in a religious treatise, called the Hindu Tantra, it is stated that Sidhee is more intoxicating than wine.
In the fifth chapter of the Institutes of Menu, Brahmins are prohibited to use Pabandoo or onions, Gunjara or Gunjah, and such condiments as have strong and pungent scents.
Persian and Arabic writers give, however, a fuller and more particular account of the early use of this substance. Makrisi treats of the hemp in his description of the ancient pleasure-grounds in the vicinity of Cairo. This quarter, after many vicissitudes, is now a mass of ruins. In it was situated a cultivated valley, named Djoneina, which was the theatre of all conceivable abominations. It was famous, above all, for the sale of the Hasheesha or Haschisch, which is still consumed by certain of the populace, and from the consumption of which sprung those excesses which gave rise to the name of “assassin,” in the time of the Crusades. This author states that the oldest work in which hemp is noticed is a treatise by Hassan, who states that in the year of the Hegira 658, the Sheikh Djafar Shirazi, a monk of the order of Haider, learned from his master, the history of the discovery of hemp. Haider, the chief of ascetics and self-chasteners, lived in rigid privation on a mountain between Nishabor and Rama, where he established a monastery of Fakirs. Ten years he had spent in this retreat, without leaving it for a moment, till one burning summer’s day, when he departed alone to the fields. On his return, an air of joy and gaiety was imprinted on his countenance; he received the visits of his brethren, and encouraged their conversation. On being questioned, he stated that, struck by the aspect of a plant which danced in the heat as if with joy, while all the rest of the vegetable creation was torpid, he had gathered and eaten of its leaves. He led his companions to the spot—all ate, and all were similarly excited. A tincture of the hemp-leaf in wine or spirits, seems to have been the favourite formula in which the Sheikh Haider indulged himself. An Arab poet sings of Haider’s emerald cup—an evident allusion to the rich green colour of the tincture of the drug. The Sheikh survived the discovery ten years, and subsisted chiefly on this herb, and on his death his disciples, by his desire, planted an arbour in which it grew about his tomb. From this saintly sepulchre, the knowledge of the effects of hemp is stated to have spread into Khorasan. In Chaldea it was unknown until the Mahommedan year 728, during the reign of the Caliph Mostansir Billah. The kings of Ormus and Bahrein then introduced it into Chaldea, Syria, Egypt, and Turkey.
In Khorasan, it seems that the date of the use of hemp is considered, notwithstanding the foregoing, to be far prior to Haider’s era. Biraslan, an Indian pilgrim, contemporary with Cosroes (whoever this same Cosroes may be, for it is a name often occurring, and applied as Cæsar or Czar to more than one generation), is stated to have introduced and diffused the custom through Khorasan and Yemen.
In 780 M.E. very severe ordinances were passed in Egypt against this practice of indulging in hemp. The Djoneina garden was rooted up, and all those convicted of the use of the drug were subjected to the extraction of their teeth. But in 792 M.E. the custom re-established itself with more than original vigour. A vivid picture is given by Makrisi of the vice and its victims:——“As a general consequence, great corruption of sentiments and manners ensued, modesty disappeared, every base and evil passion was openly indulged in, and nobility of external form alone remained to those infatuated beings.” In the “Sisters of Old,” some further memoranda will be found of the early history of this extraordinary narcotic.
Not only was its intoxicating power, but many other properties—some true, some fabulous—were known at the above periods. The contrary qualities of the plant—its stimulating and sedative effects—are dwelt on:——“They at first exhilarate the spirits, cause cheerfulness, give colour to the complexion, bring on intoxication, excite the imagination into the most rapturous ideas, produce thirst, increase appetite, excite concupiscence; afterwards, the sedative effects begin to preside, the spirits sink, the vision darkens and weakens, and madness, melancholy, fearfulness, dropsy, and such like distempers are the sequel.” Mirza Abdul Russac says of it: “It produces a ravenous appetite and constipation, arrests the secretions, except that of the liver, excites wild imagining, a sensation of ascending, forgetfulness of all that happens during its use, and such mental exaltation that the beholders attribute it to supernatural inspiration.” To which he also adds: “The inexperienced, on first taking it, are often senseless for a day, some go mad, others are known to die.”
Whether for the purpose of increasing its power, or for what other reason we know not, in India the seeds of Datura are mixed with hemp, in compounding some of the confections, as well as the powder of nux vomica. This is, however, exceptional, neither of these substances entering into the composition of the Majoon of Bengal any more than does corrosive sublimate form a proportion of the pills in general use by the opium-eater of Constantinople.
It is a custom with some people to blame, without limit, those who indulge in nervous stimulants of a nature differing from their own, while serving the same purpose. Thus, one who thinks that Providence never designed his corporeal frame to become a perambulating beer-barrel, eschews all alcoholic drinks, but at the same time eschews not the abuse of those who think fit to indulge in a little wine for their stomach’s sake, or a draught of porter for their bodily infirmities. These same abstainers still adhere to their tea and coffee, and though harmless enough as these dietetics may be, yet they in part serve the purposes for which others employ alcoholic stimulants. An eminent chemist states that persons accustomed to the use of wine, when they take cod liver oil, soon lose the taste and inclination for wine. The Temperance Societies should therefore canonise cod liver oil.
It is true that thousands have lived without a knowledge of tea or coffee; and daily experience teaches, that under certain circumstances they may be dispensed with without disadvantage to the merely animal vital functions. “But it is an error,” writes Liebig, “certainly, to conclude from this that they may be altogether dispensed with in reference to their effects; and it is a question whether, if we had no tea and no coffee, the popular instinct would not seek for and discover the means of replacing them. Science, which accuses us of so much in these respects, will have, in the first place, to ascertain whether it depends on the sensual and sinful inclinations merely, that every people of the globe has appropriated some such means of acting on the nervous life—from the shore of the Pacific, where the Indian retires from life for days, in order to enjoy the bliss of intoxication with coca, to the Arctic regions, where the Kamtschatdale and Koriakes prepare an intoxicating beverage from a poisonous mushroom. We think it, on the contrary, highly probable, not to say certain, that the instinct of man, feeling certain blanks, certain wants of the intensified life of our times, which cannot be satisfied or filled up by mere quantity, has discovered, in these products of vegetable life, the true means of giving to his food the desired and necessary quality. Every substance, in so far as it has a share in the vital processes, acts in a certain way on our nervous system, on the sensual appetites, and the will of man.” So, although some have no tobacco, they find in the use of hemp or opium a substitute for that vegetable which nature has denied them. There can be no doubt that had we never become acquainted with tobacco or gin, we should have discovered and used some other narcotic in the place of the one, and a no less fiery and injurious form of alcohol instead of the other. To talk of the degraded Chinese as barbarians, indulging to an awful extent in opium, and the ignorant Hindoo and Arab, as in madness revelling in debauches of hemp confections, is an evidence of the workings of the same narrow-minded prejudices under which some who abstain from alcoholic stimulants rail and rave at those whose feelings and habits lay in an opposite direction, charging upon the enjoyments of the many the excesses of the few. Friend Brooklove, drink thy tea, and re-consider thy verdict!