the Equinox - The Hermetic Library

244
THE EQUINOX
minnesinger, or "trovère ? The difference can not be accounted
for by climate, religion, or manners. It is not the supernatural
in Arabian story which is inexplicable, but the peculiar phase
of the supernatural both in beauty and terror.
I say inexplicable, because to me, in common with all
around me, it bore this character for years. In later days, I
believe, and now with all due modesty assert, I unlocked the
secret, not by a hypothesis, not by processes of reasoning, but
by journeying through those self-same fields of weird experience
which are dinted by the sandals of the glorious old
dreamers of the East. Standing on the same mounts of vision
where they stood, listening to the same gurgling melody that
broke from their enchanted fountains, yes, plunging into their
rayless caverns of sorcery, and imprisoned with their genie in
the unutterable silence of the fathomless sea, have I dearly
bought the right to come to men with the chart of my
wanderings in my hands, and unfold to them the foundations
of the fabric of Oriental story.
The secret lies in the use of hasheesh. A very few words
will suffice to tell what hasheesh is. In northern latitudes the
hemp plant (Cannabis sativa) grows almost entirely to fibre,
becoming, in virtue of this quality, the great resource for mats
and cordage. Under a southern sun this same plant loses its
fibrous texture, but secretes, in quantities equal to one-third
of its bulk, an opaque and greenish resin. Between the
northern and the southern hemp there is no difference, except
the effect of diversity of climate upon the same vegetable
essence; yet naturalists, misled by the much greater extent of
gummy secretion in the later, have distinguished it from its
brother of the colder soil by the name Cannabis indica. The