The Lotos-Eaters: An Anthology of Opium Writings

THE LOTOS-EATERS:

An Anthology Of Opium Writings

Edited with an Introduction by

M. M. Owen

Copyright © 2013 Read Books Ltd.

This book is copyright and may not be

reproduced or copied in any way without

the express permission of the publisher in writing

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Contents

THE LOTOS-EATERS: An Anthology Of Opium Writings

Introduction to The Lotos-Eaters:An Anthology of Opium Fiction

KUBLA KHAN or, A Vision in a Dream. A Fragment.

CONFESSIONS OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER

THE LOTOS-EATERS

LIGEIA

THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD

A SEASON IN HELL

THE GATE OF A HUNDRED SORROWS

THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY

THE MAN WITH THE TWISTED LIP

THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ

THE OPIUM-SMOKER (In Eight Fugues)

Introduction to The Lotos-Eaters:

An Anthology of Opium Fiction

Weave a circle round him thrice,

And close your eyes with holy dread,

For he on honey-dew hath fed,

And drunk the milk of Paradise.

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Khan

Alcohol aside, few substances can be said to have occupied such a place in Western literature as the papaver somniferum plant. From the exuberant isolation of Romanticism to the the paranoia of postmodernism, opiates have influenced a host of writers across a range of time periods, carrying them to the furthermost reaches of ecstasy and despair. However, whether through a sense of moral responsibility or simple artistic taste, very few anthologies of writings related to the ancient poppy have emerged. This collection, therefore, is intended as something of a corrective: A bringing together of writings by some of the best authors in the Western literary canon, around a central theme which is fascinating for both historical and artistic reasons. After all, the story of opium within literature is about much more than simple intoxication; it is a narrative of medicine, empire, and ever-evolving social mores.

———

Human involvement with opium predates the ascendancy of Ancient Greece. As far back as the Early Neolithic Age, opium was being cultivated for purposes of ritual and anaesthesia. Excavations at the Cueva de los Murcielagos – a Neolithic site in Albunol, southern Spain – show that from 4200 BC poppy capsules were being used ceremoniously at burial sites. And from around 3400 BC onwards, it was cultivated widely in lower Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq), where the Sumerians referred to it as Hul Gil – ‘the joy plant’.

Knowledge of the medicinal power of opium was passed on by the Sumerians to the Assyrians, who in turn handed it on to the Babylonians, who in turn gifted it to the Ancient Egyptians. The opium trade flourished under a number of Pharaohs, and its trade included the Phoenicians and Minoans, who moved the profitable plant across the Mediterranean Sea into Greece, Carthage, and Europe. In around 460 BC, Hippocrates, the father of medicine, hailed opium’s usefulness as a narcotic and styptic in treating a range of diseases. A century later, Alexander the Great introduced it to the people of Persia and India.

Starting in 500 AD, as the power of Rome declined, Islamic Empires began to produce the most skilled physicians and scientists of the era, many of whom embraced the power of opium. In the 11th century AD, the famous Persian polymath Avicenna described the plant as the most powerful of stupefacients. By this point, Arab traders had introduced it to the Far East, where it would gradually become a hobby of the wealthy. During the 13th century, the Ancient Indian medical treatises The Shodal Gadanigrah and Sharangdhar Samahita appeared, both of which describe the effective use of opium for treating diarrhoea and sexual debility

Starting in the 14th century, opium abruptly disappeared from the European historical record. The Holy Inquisition had rendered it a taboo subject, connecting anything Eastern with the devil. However, in 1527, it was reintroduced into European medical literature, as laudanum, by the German-Swiss physician Paracelsus. By this time, recreational use of opium throughout India, Persia and the Ottoman Empire had begun to grow. In 1573, a Venetian visitor to the Ottoman Empire observed that many of the Turkish natives of Constantinople regularly drank a certain black water made with opium which sent them into a state of rapture, but to which they became so addicted that if they tried to go without they would quickly die.

By the 17th century, opium use was widespread across much of the world, and by 1620 it had become the main commodity of British trade with China. In 1750, the British East India Company assumed control of Bengal and Bihar, the major opium-growing districts of India, and by 1767 Britain was selling a staggering two thousand chests of opium per year. Cheaply importing opium to the homeland and profitably exporting opium to China quickly became the economic lifeblood of the British empire, and on both continents rates of both usage and addiction rose. China attempted to ban the trade, but without any success.

Meanwhile, in 1803, German scientist Friedrich Sertürner discovered and distilled the active ingredient of the opium poppy – morphine. Lauded by physicians as God’s own medicine for its reliability and potency, morphine rapidly became available as a pill, tincture and potion in most of Britain’s pharmacies. Predictably, its use as a pharmaceutical panacea and exotic recreational drug became epidemic within all strata of British society. By 1830, it would reach an all-time high, with 22,000 pounds of opium being imported from Turkey and India.

British literature’s relationship with opium can be said to have begun in 1791, when founding Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge began using laudanum to relieve his rheumatism. Over time, Coleridge became increasingly addicted, using opium to treat his physical problems, as well as his frequent and crippling bouts of depression and anxiety. As he explains in his preface, he completed his famous Kubla Khan (1816) in a single sitting, after reading a work describing Xanadu – the summer palace of the Mongol ruler and Emperor of China Kublai Khan – and then slipping into an opium-tinged dream. Although the veracity of this tale is disputed by some scholars, Kubla Khan is undoubtedly one of the most important early works of opium-related fiction, and exactly the psychological curiosity which Coleridge dubs it.

1821 saw the (originally anonymous) publication of arguably the most famous piece of opium-related writing of all-time: Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. A floridly written and intimate account, the book was an incredible success, winning De Quincey fame almost overnight. It transformed opium’s place in the public consciousness from that of a respectable and useful medicine to that of an exotic, mind-altering drug, and – at a time when proper scientific study of narcotics wasn’t yet being performed – quickly became the authoritative text on the subject. Confessions dominated both public and academic perceptions of the drug for many years, and was read widely well into the nineteenth century. The two parts presented in this collection – ‘The Pleasures of Opium’ and ‘The Pains of Opium’ – are the two best-known and most elucidating sections of the text. It is worth noting that despite spelling out many of the perils of opium use, De Quincey was widely criticised for presenting his habit in too positive, and too enticing, a light. Indeed, a number of writers, including Branwell Brontë, experimented with the poppy after reading Confessions.

In 1832, Alfred Lord Tennyson published the famous poem to which this anthology owes its name: The Lotos-Eaters. Drawing heavily on Homer’s The Odyssey – in which ‘The Lotos-Eaters’, a mythical race of people living on a North African island carpeted with poppies, first appear – the poem was inspired by a trip Tennyson took to northern Spain in 1829. Whether, or to what degree, Tennyson himself dabbled in opium has been a matter of some debate: The late 1820s was the heyday of British opium consumption, and rumours that Tennyson was an addict swirled about him his whole life. However, he forever maintained that he wasn’t even a casual user, and some critics have seen The Lotos-Eaters as a piece which laments the lassitude and isolation the narcotic forces upon anyone those who consume it. Either way, The Lotos-Eaters is a significant piece of opium writing, and the final Romantically tinged piece in the collection.

It wasn’t just British society that became rapidly infatuated with opium; across the Atlantic, Americans sampled the plant’s powers too. Famously, New York’s John Jacob Astor – the first multi-millionaire in the United States – joined the opium smuggling trade in around 1816, purchasing tonnes of poppies from the Turkish, and by the 1830s, thousands of tonnes were being brought in, chiefly via the Eastern seaboard. Little surprise, then, that Gothic fiction master Edgar Allan Poe may well have experimented with the powerful intoxicant. However, despite his reputation to the contrary, as with Tennyson, there is little evidence to suggest that Poe was anything like a fully-fledged user. Indeed, ‘Ligeia’ – like a number of his other tales, such as ‘The Black Cat’ and ‘Hop-Frog’ – would appear to sound a cautionary note against the poppy’s cruel side effects.

By the mid-19th century, the British public’s attitude towards opium had begun to shift. What had originally been viewed as simply an exotic, heady plant was increasingly seen as a dangerous, degenerative and deeply foreign substance responsible for a string of bloody wars. In the press of the day, opium began to be presented as emblematic of the debauchery and licentiousness of the East, and as attack on the Victorian work ethic. In 1868, the Pharmacy Act was passed, which restricted the sale of opium, and the establishment of the Society for the Suppression of the Opium Trade. Charles Dickens’ final, unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870) is an excellent example of opium use being directly associated with degeneracy and decay: Its protagonist, John Jasper, is an addict who lives a troubled and seedy double life.

Arthur Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell (1873) is the most directly opium-influenced piece in the collection, reading like something of a hallucinatory memoir. It was composed following an extended stay in London, during which the Frenchman (aged just eighteen) was converted from imbibing absinthe to smoking opium. As reflected in its frenetic tone and sprawling make-up, large sections of the poem were composed while Rimbaud was heavily under the poppy’s influence. The poem had a strong influence on a number of later artistic movements, including Surrealism and the Beats.

‘The Gate of a Hundred Sorrows’ (1884) was Rudyard Kipling’s first published story, written at the age of eighteen while he was working for The Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore, India. Like Dickens’ The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), it exhibits the development of attitudes towards opium during the latter decades of the 19th century. Six years earlier, Britain had passed the Opium Act, restricting the use of opium to non-white immigrants, and Kipling’s story (like his 1901 novel, Kim) presents the Black Smoke as a powerfully degenerative and wasteful substance, heavily tied up with a dingy, squalid, and corrupting East.

Ideas such as these (which by today’s standards render Kipling not altogether politically correct, but which were pretty normal for his era) would play heavily into the development of the ‘Yellow Peril’ – a widespread fear that mass immigration of Asians to Western countries would have damaging, lasting effects on society. By the 1890s, invoked fears of the ‘Yellow Man’ were masquerading as pious anti-drug campaigns – with the classic example being William Randolph Hearst’s tabloid newspapers repeatedly publishing tales of white women being drawn into opium addiction by lascivious Chinese men.

Oscar Wilde’s only published novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), and Arthur Conan Doyle’s short story, ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’ (1891), are both reflective of these sentiments. In each piece, with regard to opium, the Romantic exuberance expressed by Coleridge has been replaced by an attitude of high Victorian moralism. In Dorian Gray, the opium den – described as a den of horror where the madness of old sins could be destroyed by the madness of sins that were new - is populated by aliens and outcasts. It is presented as a sordid representation of Dorian’s own darker nature; a place to which he flees in hope of finding refuge, but instead discovers more suffering.

Similarly, in ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’, the opium den is populated by grimy, shifty Chinese and Indians, and appears to be every inch a bed of corruption. In both works, the opium den is a moral slum, open only to those who have gone beyond the pale of Victorian respectability. It is an alien place of foreigners speaking unintelligible languages, in the heart of a London increasingly spooked by the ‘Yellow Peril’.

The eighth chapter of Frank L. Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) sees Dorothy and her companions wander into a field of sleep-inducing poppies. Undoubtedly a reference to opium, this scene long been a source of intrigue for readers. There is no evidence to suggest that Baum was a user himself, and interpretations of the chapter vary. Some scholars have seen in it an expression of Baum’s sympathy for the anti-imperialistic policies of the 1900 presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, with the poppy field representing the opium wars of the 19th century. Responsible parents, meanwhile, have related it to their children as a warning against the initially enticing but potentially fatal world of narcotics, while hippies of the late sixties and early seventies interpreted Dorothy’s whole adventure as an acid trip, and the poppy field scene as just one of a number of pointed references to consciousness expansion.

The last piece in the collection, Aleister Crowley’s ‘The Opium-Smoker’ (1909), first appeared in the second edition of The Equinox, the magazine and official organ of Crowley’s magical order, the A.’.A.’.. In 1895, German scientist Heinrich Dreser had discovered how to produce heroin from morphine, and by the early years of the 20th century, heroin was being used medicinally, despite the alarming rates of addiction. Crowley had been prescribed heroin for his asthma around the time that ‘The Opium-Smoker’ appeared, and remained addicted for more or less the rest of his life. He even published a memoir of his experiences with heroin (and various other substances) in 1922, entitled Diary of a Drug Fiend.

———

As the 20th century progressed, opium developed rapidly into a pariah poppy. In 1909, the US outlawed its importation, and a year later Britain dismantled the India-China trade arrangement. By 1925, heroin addiction rates were so high, and so chronic, that the substance was even banned for most medical purposes on both sides of the Atlantic. It quickly became a highly illegal and tightly controlled substance, and opposition to intoxicating drugs more generally became a reliable form of political capital.

The