the Equinox - The Hermetic Library

250
THE EQUINOX
I rose that I might test my reinstated powers, and see if the
restoration was complete. Yes, I felt not one trace of bodily
weariness nor mental depression. Every function had
returned to its normal state, with the one exception
mentioned; memory could not efface the traces of my having
passed through a great mystery.
No. I never should take it again.
I did not know myself; I did not know hasheesh. There
are temperaments, no doubt, upon which this drug produces,
as a reactory result, physical and mental depression. With me
this was never the case. Opium and liquors fix themselves as
a habit be becoming necessary to supply that nervous waste
which they in the first place occasioned. The lassitude which
succeeds their exaltation demands a renewed indulgence, and
accordingly every gratification of the appetite is parent to the
next. But no such element entered into the causes which
attached me to hasheesh. I speak confidently, yet without
exaggeration, when I say that I have spent many an hour in
torture such as was never known by Cranmer at the stake, or
Gaudentio di Lucca in the Inquisition, yet out of the depths
of such experience I have always come without a trace of its
effect in diminished strength or buoyancy.
Had the first experiment been followed by depression, I
had probably never repeated it. At any rate, unstrung muscles
and an enervated mind could have been resisted much more
effectually when they pleaded for renewed indulgence than
the form which the fascination actually took. For days I was
even unusually strong; all the forces of life were in a state of
pleasurable activity, but the memory of the wondrous glories