ROLL AWAY THE STONE An Introduction to Aleister Crowley's essays on the Psychology of Hashish by ISRAEL REGARDIE with complete text of THE HERB DANGEROUS by Aleister Crowley “Where there is no vision the people perish.” ― Proverbs, xxix, 15 “I am the Snake that giveth Knowledge & Delight a bright glory, and stir the hearts of men with drunkenness. To worships me take wine and strange drugs whereof I will tell my prophet, & be drunk thereof! They shall not harm ye at all. It is a lie, this folly against self. ― Liber Legis, II, 22 ROLL AWAY THE STONE An introduction to Aleister Crowley's essays on the psychology of Hashish. I “O my Son, yester Eve came the Spirit upon me that I should eat the Grass of the Arabians,” wrote Aleister Crowley pontifically (in The Book of Wisdom or Folly) concerning hashish around 1917—18 in New York City. “And by Virtue of the Bewitchment thereof beheld that which might be appointed for the Enlightenment of mine Eyes. Now then of this may I not speak, seeing that it involveth the Mystery of the Transcending of Time, so that in One Hour of our Terrestrial Measure did I gather the Harvest of an Aeon, and in Ten Lives I could not declare it.” Some years before the above was written, this English poet and mystic had produced a series of ten large magazine-like volumes with board covers entitled The Equinox. The intention was to publish a separate issue every Spring and Autumn for five years—making ten numbers in all. Openly published in them were his superbly written essays on the psychology of hashish. These were his earliest overt admissions to the occasional use of hashish as a psychedelic agent. The first four issues of this periodical contained an important serial entitled The Herb Dangerous. The opening essay, The Pharmacy of Hashish, by an English chemist, E. Whineray, was a clinical and chemical analysis of Cannabis Indica, hashish, whose first cousin is marihuana, Cannabis Sattiva. The second essay entitled The Psychology of Hashish was written by Oliver Haddo, one of the innumerable pseudonyms used by Aleister Crowley. It was succeeded in the third issue by The Poem of Hashish, written by Charles Baudelaire, and translated beautifully from the French by Crowley himself. The final installment of the serial consisted of selections from a fantastic piece of writing by H. G. Ludlow entitled The Hashish Eater. Easily a rival to de Quincy's Confessions of an Opium Eater, Ludlow's book was published by Harpers (New York, 1857), and now being out of print should certainly be re- published in the near future. These are the four essays comprising the main body of this text. Who was this Aleister Crowley? An Englishman by birth, a great poet and essayist, he was also an intrepid explorer and a mountain climber of the Himalayas and other lofty peaks, and, above all these other talents, was a very great mystic. Despite these manifold claims to considerable fame, a sinister journalistic aura has gathered about him to obscure for all too long the vision of what the man was actually like. This obfuscation of the facts was partly due to his own vanity and lack of diplomacy, the other part to be laid at the door of the ignorance and vindictiveness of some journalists who preyed vulture-like on his least unconventional act. The tragic outcome, however, is that there are few people today who know what he really stood for. Some few may have heard the usual scandalous rumors that he used drugs, was profligate sexually, was wholly without morals, and for these reasons had been roundly condemned by both the British Press and by the Hearst publications in the United States. I can still remember from boyhood the full page spreads in the magazine section of one of the yellow Sunday newspapers giving the most lurid and sensational accounts of some of his activities. Insofar as Crowley was a mystic, he was known to the cultists of his day. Many of them considered him unequivocally evil and degenerate—though, despite this, some have not hesitated to steal much of his written material, using it altogether without acknowledgement. No one had a good word for him— save for an occasional reviewer of his verse, such as Gilbert K. Chesterton. Much the same is true of many of the “metafizzlers” of today. I have read some of their recent literature condemning psychedelic drugs outright, as if these were a diabolical threat to their particular brand of mysticism. The most recent attack appeared in a Hollywood metaphysical monthly penned by a sincere enough writer who represents himself as a disciple of a stout ridiculous-looking Hindu "avatar", who, sworn to absolute silence, has not opened his mouth to speak for years, so it is said. Instead — as if this were not speaking! — he uses a pointer and a printed alphabet-board through which he communicates his divine authoritative message to a God- hungry world. His face and neck, however, look as though he has used his mouth rather well for purposes other than talking. This is the type and symbol of many of Crowley's critics. Recent years have evolved a roster of new and eloquent voices to corroborate and to confirm many of Crowley's once outrageous views relative to the psychedelic agents: Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert — to name but a few among the more commonly known celebrities who in our day are directing attention to the dramatic fact that there is now a chemical door which gives promise to open to higher and mystical states of consciousness. This is what Crowley, amongst other things, had been trying to state more than a half a century ago. There is nothing radically new in their approach. But the one thing that is different is the laboratory development of a new chemical product which promises infinitely more reliability and effectiveness than, let us say, hashish, the drug that Crowley had once extolled in the absence of superior agents. He was not without awareness of the fact that hashish was an unpredictable drug, for he once wrote that the various preparations of Cannabis Indica are all alike in that their action is so uncertain as to be not easily or surely standardized. It is not even a question of reasonable limits, he said; of two samples seemingly alike one may apparently degenerate fifty percent in strength within a few days. Some samples may be totally inert. It is this fact that has led to the total abandonment of the use of the drug in medicine. But, at the time he was writing, it was the best one he had been able to discover. II How did Crowley first make the discovery that drugs could simulate or initiate the mystical state? To begin with, it is certain that he had become familiar with the Gifford Lectures of William James, whose experimental frame of mind would have been wholly pleasing to the eager, intense young man just down from Cambridge. He must have read that wonderful passage that James had written: “Some years ago I myself made some observations on this aspect of nitrous oxide intoxication, and reported them in print. One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and ray impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness, as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the flimsiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation . . .” Not long after he came down from Cambridge in 1898, Crowley was introduced to membership in The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a nineteenth century secret society which taught an archaic system of ritual magic. This system, which served as the basis for his own organization which he founded a decade later, needs brief description at least, together with its Eastern counterpart — yoga. How he came to unite and correlate yoga and magic into a single exalted discipline to lead to the inner heights and depths, certainly had roots in ancient traditions, but for him nonetheless was a stroke of individual genius. The Golden Dawn was an occult organization formulated out of some British high masonic lodges in the year 1878. Authorization for its institution in England seems to have come from the continent, from alleged descendants of mediaeval Rosicrucian groups. It was thus a secret Rosicrucian body. Its three chiefs, also high-grade Masons, believed, amongst other things, that women should not be disbarred from membership as they had been from Freemasonry. Artists, lawyers, physicians, actors, actresses, and humble men and women from all walks of life were included amongst its members. Many famous writers were also members — William Butler Yeats, Arthur Edward Waite, Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, J. W. Brodie-Innes and a host of other luminaries of the literary world. There were ceremonial grades and degrees not too dissimilar to those in the Masonic Order, the major difference being that certain occult teachings were transmitted to the aspirant during the ceremony. After he had successfully passed an examination that preceeded advancement to successively higher grades, he was given further teachings and certain exercises to do. Naturally Crowley sailed through these examinations and degrees with flying colors and at great speed. He was an intense and vigorous young man and poet. Since he had read widely and profoundly prior to joining the Order at the hoary age of 23 years, there was not much at first in the way of theory that the Order could surprise him with. As an occult organization, The Golden Dawn maintained the strictest secrecy. Initially its membership was selected with the utmost scrupulous¬ness, an attitude which later was definitely relaxed. Its teachings and methods of instruction were guarded by penalties attached to the most awe-inspiring obligations in order to ensure that secrecy. Later, as changes were made in the governance of the Order because of the death of one chief and the resignation of another, dictatorial powers were assumed by McGregor Mathers who was a Qabalist of some distinction. He was the translator of three mediaeval magical texts: The Greater Key of King Solomon, The Kaballah Unveiled (which consisted of certain portions from Knorr von Rosenroth's Latin rendition of the Zohar, prefixed by a lengthy introduction of some erudition), and The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage. With the passage of time, a revolt broke out amongst the rank, and file of the Order's membership, presumably because of the irrational dictator-like attitudes of Mathers. Of course there was the usual bickering, slander, and a lot of scandal, in which unfortunately Crowley came to play a prominent part. Internal dissension continued for some years until it came to a blistering head with one group of members expelling its own Chief. Mathers retained a small handful of loyal adherents. Yeats belonged to one of the dissident groups. Arthur E. Waite, whom Kenneth Rexroth has referred to amusingly as “a scholar”, formed another faction which he named the Reconstructed-Rosicrucian Order. It became stultified, burdened as it was by the massive weight of Waiters pompous jargon and ponderous literary style. Other groups were reorganized in various parts of Great Britain, all of them persisting in the prime work of the Order — to teach magical procedures as the Way to the Light. In a few words, Magic is the name for a primitive psychological system. Its goal was illumination, being “brought to the Light."” The transcendental experience to be reached by means of ritual and other technical procedures was the heart of the system, which can hardly be guessed at by the uninformed layman, but which some psychologists, including Carl G. Jung (and who form, what Abraham Maslow has called the Third School) have been profoundly impressed with. Some of the more ancient schools of initiation must have employed drugs of one kind or another in a sacramental manner. What, specific products they actually did use is not at all clear. Henbane, belladonna, hashish, opium and the solanaceas have all been suspected. The modern school, headed by Mathers in the last quarter of the 19th century, frowned upon all such methods, preferring the classical secret techniques of mind and spiritual training. Willis W. Harman, in a sensitively written essay “The Issue of the Consciousness-Expanding Drugs” (Main Currents, Vol. 20, No. 1, 1963) asserted that down through the ages of recorded history, various groups within the several religious traditions alike have insisted that man has far vaster potentiality for knowledge, and hence power over his fate, than he ordinarily dreams of as possible. These included the ancient Gnostics to the modern Theosophists, including also the Hindu, Buddhist, Moslem and Christian religions. They have always claimed that it is possible to know — in a way that is completely different from the mere accumulation of facts — to realize man's essential nature and his true relationship to the creative force behind or within the universe. There, wrote Harman, his fulfillment lies — that is, what it is he values most highly when the meaning of life is clearly seen. For this particular species of knowledge, men have followed religious teachers of every shade and opinion, and joined secret societies. They have willingly submitted to the travails of elaborate initiation procedures and trained for years in different yoga and meditation techniques. They have practiced fasting, flagellation and all kinds of austerity. Among them all, the experience of gnosis, of direct perception and knowledge, has been most highly prized of all human experiences and attainments. Magic then, being a primitive psychological technique that in .recent times was taught and practiced within the Golden Dawn, it is evident that Crowley had been fully exposed to it once he became a member. A few years after such initiation, when he had become proficient as a practicing student, he