Psychonauts by Mike Jay;

Author:Mike Jay;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300271515
Publisher: Yale University Press

20. The salle à manger in the Hôtel Pimodan, Paris, where the Club des Hashischins gathered.

Gautier’s report launched the Club des Hashischins as a literary sensation and a popular scandal. The sinister legend of the Assassins was still potent in French reactionary politics. In his History of the Assassins, originally published in 1818 after de Sacy’s identification of the mysterious order with hashish, the Orientalist and fervent monarchist Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall had sketched a secret history in which the Assassins were the ultimate source of libertinism and revolution. Their ideology had entered Europe via the Knights Templar, who had secretly propagated it through Freemasonry; hashish was their ultimate secret weapon, a brainwashing agent that made its initiates ‘able to undertake anything or everything’.43 The Club des Hashischins was a provocation that turned the Assassin legend on its head, claiming the myth as their own and glorying in its subversion of Christian civilisation. ‘Hashish has replaced champagne,’ Gautier announced in La Presse. ‘We believe we have conquered Algeria, but Algeria has conquered us.’44 The salon’s ironic self-mythologising, and the scandal it created, positioned it as a forerunner of modern drug counterculture: the jaded romantics of the July Monarchy cultivated an outlaw style of long hair and outlandish dress, and defined themselves with radical politics, all-night partying and sexual libertinism. If De Quincey was the archetype for the twentieth-century ‘drug fiend’, the Club des Hashischins set the template for the modern ‘drug scene’.

Like many of the secret societies it satirised, the Club des Hashischins was successful in launching an enduring myth while leaving many of its mundane historical details in doubt. Its reputation as a well-organised secret society with regular meetings and grades of initiation was carefully curated rumour, drawing on and parodying the Assassin legend. By some accounts it met regularly once a month; according to others, there were only a handful of meetings in total and its active life was over by 1845. Gautier himself wrote later that he gave up hashish ‘after some ten experiments’, partly because of the physical ordeal involved, and partly because the experience produced diminishing returns.45 The Hôtel Pimodan seems to have been used only for a short period, after which salons convened irregularly in smaller private rooms. Virtually every luminary of the mid-century Paris literary world has been associated with the club, and few denied it; some were doubtless glad to see their names added to the list of rumoured initiates without having to swallow several grams of bitter paste and submitting to an intense and prolonged derangement of the senses.

Honoré de Balzac was a case in point. According to Charles Baudelaire, he attended a meeting at the club in 1845 but refused his dose of the green paste, distrusting any substance that might sap his will.46 Gautier gave a fuller account of the evening, at which he claimed to have been present: it was fascinating, he wrote, to watch ‘the struggle between his almost infantile curiosity and his repugnance’ as Balzac asked questions,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.