Worlds of Pharmakopeia II: Cannabis Churning in the Mystical Orient

A cold wind was howling through the medieval streets of Rome during middle December. The days were real short. Darkness even shadowed the moon. This particular day was in the middle of the month, and the year was 1485. Christmas had its parties coming up, but the Pope Caesar had other nefarious plans tucked into his fat stomach. The sinister name of intolerance and hypocrisy was none other than Pope Innocent VIII, (the Eighth).

On this nefarious date he issued a strange papal bull against witchcraft and sorcery that seemed to infect the women of Europe, and especially the First Reich of Germany, bizarrely called, the Holy Roman Empire. This Empire was neither holy nor Roman.

Within this peculiar papal condemnation, he also cited the use of a demonic herb, called cannabis, often found, or imagined, in satanic religious rites. His informant-experts for these underground, conspiratorial satanic covens represented two German Dominican monks, Jakob Spengler and Heinrich Kramer. They would soon publish a nasty book, called ‘The Hammer of the Witches,’ which would help in the murder of close to 200,000 ‘witches,’ mostly marginalized women, during the next 250 years in Europe and in America.

Unfortunately for the plant ‘cannabis sativa,’ this strange and mystical herb from deep Asia, received the taint of evil with the papal stamp of approval. Yet, this same Pope Innocent the Eighth enjoyed some other mortal sins during his reign. He was obese and lived a life of extreme luxury inside the papal palace. He fathered two illegitimate children and had them married off into one of the strongest Families in Renaissance Italy, the Medici. He dipped some of the papal finances into the new Portuguese African Slave Trade. Meanwhile, he tried to revive the Papal Crusades of another Pope Innocent, in order to exterminate the Muslim Turks, the Protestant Waldensians in Northern Italy, and the Hussites in the Czech lands. All cannabis haters in history have shared three evil characteristics: intolerance, gross hypocrisy and state murder.

What is it about cannabis sativa that attracts such hatred and venom? The answer lies in its historical origins: the mystical rites for Lord Shiva and the Islamic Assassins in the medieval period. Cannabis still has these mystical, ‘orientalist’ associations to this actual day. Whether the foreign visitor enters the medinas of Morocco or the festivals dedicated to Shiva in India and Nepal, the scent of the cannabis herb inundates the consciousness.

From its evil oriental connections until its later appearances in the United States, cannabis would connect to a more infamous notoriety. African-American artists smoked the herb while they played their demonic, African sensualized beats, called jazz. Attractive white women even took off their shoes in the smoky clubs, and they danced with the demons. Mestizo, mixed race, Mexican fruit pickers and outlaws also smoked the leaf, called ‘mota,’ during their raucous partying. The dangerous, criminal classes, of course, used the oriental poison. The Amerikan Imperial thugs had taken notice. The historical hatred against cannabis has simply been another combined form of intolerance and murder.

Cannabis is actually a marvelous and natural soft drug. It relaxes and calms the mental nerves, and helps with bouts of nausea and gastrointestinal pains. Some doctors state that cannabis has other helpful healing properties. Cannabis can spark interior mental activity or engaging conversation. It stimulates the human appetites, both culinary and sexual. The drug goes perfectly with foods, entertainment, the arts and it especially compliments other natural drugs found on the Earth, such as alcohol, coffee and tea.

The only negatives to the drug are certain habitual users of it. It seems to have the similar effects of antidepressants on them, which produce lethargy, ego self-obsessions, or minor neuroses. But these are some excessive users. I have also personally met aggressive and successful attorneys that were avid smokers of the weed.

I return to cannabis’ ancient history and its orientalist associations. Lord Shiva, the God of both Creation and Destruction, the Cosmic Dance and the Holy Lingam, (phallic power), the revealer of mystical Tantra, patron of cows, yoga and the third sex, married to the goddess, Parvati, father to the god, Ganesh – also partook of the mystical drink, called ‘soma.’ Legend has it that the mystical drink was none other than ‘bhang,’ a milky concoction containing cannabis.

Shiva’s wandering followers called ‘sadhus,’ still partake of the magical perfumed medicine. During my travels around the world, I have seen these holy men, and some thieving-fakers claiming to exist as sadhus, smoking cannabis out of funnel type ceramic pipes called ‘chillum.’ Watching those holy men in action with their long dread locks, scruffy beards, blue and white-painted dyes, bodies smeared with cow dung, rope necklaces and bracelets, and dirty loin cloths, added to the whole Indian-Asian mystical effect.

On a more common level, during the Hindu festival of Holi, which happens around springtime, young Indians and Nepalese drink the marvelous liquid ‘bhang’ shakes, or ‘lassies,’ and later, hit the public streets throwing brightly colored dyes on the surrounding partiers and walkers. They hit me too – which added to the great fun during that day. Shiva’s gift was a truly a wonderful act.

Islam conquered the northern regions of the Indian subcontinent in the middle of the eleventh century. The cannabis magic of Shiva would also influence the Sufi Muslim mystics that lived in those regions. Even the great Sufi poet and mystic, Rumi, praised the herb and the wine. Cannabis entered the Islamic world: it stayed and it prospered. Still today in the Islamic world from North Africa to Afghanistan, the traveler can spot old men sitting in cafes, wearing their ‘chalaba’ long outfits with hoods. They smoke the green and brown ‘kif’ in their long pipes, while they sip on herbal mint tea, Turkish coffee and chew on honey snacks. Religious controversies have continued between the Sunni, Shia and Sufi branches of Islam – but smoking the flowering buds united them all.

One of the truths of human history has been its reign of absurdity. Cannabis had attached itself to one of the Shia sects of medieval Islam – ‘the Assassins.’ The Assassins were part of the Ismaili sect or the ‘Seveners.’ They also drank the luscious wine and smoked the enchanting herb.

The medieval Japanese Shogunates had their ‘ninjas’; while Medieval Islamic World Culture had their assassins. The assassins lived outside of society. Those disciplined holy warriors squatted in abandoned, foreboding military castles in northern Syria, Iraq and Iran. Their founder, Hassan i Sabbah, or ‘The Old Man of the Mountain,’ organized this Shia sect military order into a hierarchical brotherhood. Inside the castle, the warriors studied religious and philosophical texts, scientific works, learned various languages, and most importantly, the arts of killing. Their three preferred methods moved towards the silent variety: the dagger, the poison and strangulation.

Their victims were always political leaders within the Islamic world. If the Islamic political hack instituted unjust acts, mandated cruel laws, oppressed the poor, allowed poverty to accumulate, or stole lots of money from the just – then the Assassins went on the attack.

The Assassins first left a note pinned with a small dagger within the confines of the caliph or sultan’s palace. If that didn’t work, then the spiritual leader picked an Assassin to fulfill the last deed – a violent death. The Assassins always reached their victims, and after killing the state bum, they would often let frightened onlookers see the terminating work. Many of the assassins never returned from their ultimate missions.

Only one Islamic political-military ruler survived them – Saladin the Great. He survived three attempts on his life. They aroused fear in both the Islamic potentates and the European royal Crusaders. One of the Crusader kings even used the Assassins as allies against his Islamic rivals. Their enemies called them, ‘hashasheen’ in Arabic, or the Troublemakers.

From this Arabic word, the European Crusaders, and especially the Venetian merchant, Marco Polo, tied some connections between the sinister Oriental herbal paste, ‘hashish,’ with Assassin lore. According to the ignorant Euro-experts, hash was the powerful ingredient that transformed the Assassins into fanatical killers. This corrupted link also transformed European languages on the continent.

Most European languages have a separate word for killing and for murder: ‘matar,’ in Spanish, ‘tuer,’ in French, and ‘uccidire,’ in Italian. But these three languages share the same original word for murder, ‘asesinar, assassiner, assassinare.’ This outrageous relation between cannabis and irrational violence even stayed well into the 1930s USA with crap movies such as ‘Reefer Madness.’

This marvelous soft drug of cannabis has had its absurd orientalist associations. The real issue of cannabis was not its properties, but the European hatred for ‘the other,’ which still fuels the sociopathology of the Amerikan Empire. The murderous and hateful world empire still hunts for its victims through its continuous War against Cannabis, and all other ‘illegal drugs.’ The CIA can deal whatever it wants, yet the same US government prefers smokers to rot inside its hundreds of overpopulated prisons. In spite of all of this hate, Lord Shiva’s precious gift still wafts its distinctive breeze throughout all the lands of the Earth.

Anarcho-historian Lesson #1: The Discernment of Ideologies

The historical period was the 1550s in both Europe and in the Americas. European colonization and warfare had existed within two full continents on the globe, (Europe and the Americas), and Europe’s disease ridden, stench-filled warriors were moving well into African and Asian territories. These madmen from this small continent in the north knew that they were on to something greater than themselves. Somehow, God or the Cosmos itself was involved.

However, the supremacy of the Roman Catholic Church had lost its power in most of northern Europe, the exceptions surviving with Ireland in the west, and the Polish-Lithuanian Empire in the east. The Protestant Reformation was successful. The noxious dream of a great empire of western Christendom was over. The Roman Catholic Papacy had earlier rejoiced in the Turkish sack of Constantinople, renamed Istanbul, and so the Greek Orthodox Church, which still claimed the papal supremacy of Rome, was scattered in the east. Only the Czar of Russia claimed some authority over the defense of Orthodoxy. But he was in the eastern European frontier, and the Mongol Muslim Khanates still had their power bases in central Asia counterbalancing Russia. Out of this geo-political stalemate, which still survives somewhat today, a religious-ideological leader emerged.

There were many prophets and self-proclaimed leaders in those days, (like in our days), but one ideological movement changed world history – and even without military conquests. The religious ideologue was a Basque soldier turned religious mystic, Iñigo de Loyola, and his new religious order, the Jesuits, or the Society of Jesus. This religious order in defense of the Roman Catholic Church was no ordinary order of monks, like the Benedictines or the Carmelites, nor was it simply a preaching order, such as the Franciscans and the Dominicans. These warriors of the Lord obeyed Paul’s principles in his second letter to Timothy, to both live and die as good soldiers in Christ. So, they did everything for the greater glory of God.

They became the confessors to Catholic monarchs, advisers to Catholic princes, opened numerous schools and taught the sons of elites. They occupied the most prestigious posts of scholarship in Catholic universities, wrote endless theology pamphlets, books, histories, poetry compendiums, philosophical treatises, and scientific theses. They directed new forms of painting, sculpture, architecture, theater, music and ritual performance, which history refers to as the Baroque. They even ventured to the extreme parts of the Earth as missionaries to convert the heathens and heretics.

By the turn of the century, the 1600s, they transformed the Roman Catholic Church, which history refers to as the Tridentine Church. Vatican II would officially change this Tridentine Church in the 1960s. They also changed the face of the world. Their doctrines, such as the Good Death practice, and intensive church building, laid the Order’s foundations in most of the capitals of Europe, (the exceptions being the Protestant ones, such as London), and within their colonies, such as Bahia, Brazil, Lima, Peru, Mexico City, Goa, India, Congo, Africa, and Macao, China. Their missions in the interior of Paraguay with the Guarani nation created a successful Christian community of Herbal Matte, or Yerba Mate, commerce, and armed self-defense against Portuguese, mixed race slave raiders, called Paulistas based in the small coastal city of Sao Paolo. The 1600s or seventeenth-century was their century.

By the 1700s, the eighteenth-century, these same staunch Catholic monarchs began to hate them. They were jealous of their power, and conspiracy theories emerged. How did this religious order become so successful, so powerful and so respected, and even their Protestant enemies admired them? Many believed that the Jesuits simply stole and manipulated their willing dupes, wealthy ones mostly, into handing over their loot. Pope Clement XIV suppressed the order in the late eighteenth-century due to pressures from the courts of Catholic monarchs. After the Napoleonic Wars in Europe, around 1815, the Pope lifted the suppression.

The real reason for the ‘power of the Jesuits’ was their practice of the Discernment of Spirits, or more honestly, the Discernment of Ideologies. Loyola advocated this practice incessantly. A good Jesuit had to read enormously and devour the written works of humanity, and even the texts of enemies in order to debate them and counter their propaganda. This Jesuit practice possessed the name of Propaganda Fide, or Propaganda in defense of the Faith. This practice works and it still works. Think on the Anarchist Propaganda of the Word and of the Deed.

Those Christian missionaries were quite hateful and intolerant, but at least they put their words into practice, and most importantly, they were prepared for any contingency because they knew the ideologies of the world during the 1600s: Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Pietism, Puritanism, Mystical Illuminism, Jansenism, Anabaptist-Quakerism, Calvinism, Lutheranism, Manichaeism, Sufism and even Atheism.

Nowadays, there are thousands of more ideologies, whether political, intellectual, religious or philosophical, across the globe. They all share a desire for power and the violent use of power over others. As Anarchists, they are our enemies and we fight them. But first, and like the Jesuits of old, we must also read about them. We do not have to read the entirety of their badly written books, but we can see their emphases, analyze their key words and points that they harp on, and we can possess an overall view of their conniving tactics. Some examples of the more dangerous ideologies of today are American Exceptionalism, Zionism, Communitarianism, Psychobabble, the End of History, Postmodernism, Communalism, Feminist-Puritanism, Christian Evangelical Dominionism, Media Objectivism and Global Neoliberalism.

But we are living in times that are more dangerous because the above nefarious ideologies often disguise their sinister and violent ideals through ‘anti-system’ tactics. Even well read Anarchists have fallen into their traps. We forget that the European Fascist movements of the twenties and thirties started on the streets. Both Mussolini and Hitler were ‘anti-establishment’ figures. Even the Zionists were revolutionary terrorists at one time in their history. As Anarchists, we must remain careful in supporting the first protests, demonstrations, riots, rebellions and revolutions that we watch against a particular State. Some good examples are the actual ‘rebellions’ against regimes in west Asia and in northern Africa.

Is the current rebellion in Turkey, which actually started last May Day, a true spirit of Anarchist rebellion against a corrupt state? May Day in Turkey often has more representation from Communist groups and Kurdish separatists than Turkish Anarchists. The current regime is corrupt like all states, but some of those courageous ‘street revolutionaries’ are also Kemalists, meaning that they support a Fascist platform for Turkish political-cultural supremacy in both the Balkans and in west Asia. Nazi Germany also organized Turkic-Albanian-Bosnian SS divisions during WWII. Also, when disguised fronts for Anglo-American Imperialism and Genocide, such as Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch, condemn the ‘despotic regime’ under duress, then this should make the Anarchist think again about defending all of the street rebels.

We can add the racist murderers and revolutionaries in Libya supported by the US, Britain and France, or the Wahhabi-Salafist religious extremists and murderers of Christians and Shiites, supported by the US, Britain, France, Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia in Syria. These fighters are in rebellion against a corrupt, dictatorial State, yet whose side are those fighters truly on? As Anarchists, we ought to look upon our sick and evil world the same way our state enemies look at it, and the same way the Jesuit Order looked upon it during the 1600s.

The Discernment of Ideologies then comes into full practice. We see the corporate media announce the street rebellion on ‘the news,’ and soon, the Leftist alternative media plays with the campaign. Yet, we also know that the Leftists are often the willing idiots of the state institutions. They want reforms; Anarchists, on the other hand, want true revolutionary change. The Anarchist has to make a choice: join the revolutionary practice or sit and wait. If we join, we might have to make temporary alliances with our mortal enemies, the Communist gangs, (like in Spain 1936), support the revolt in propaganda writing, (such as Indymedia), or we can act separately against a few open targets of power through hit and run, partisan-guerrilla tactics.

I would choose the latter. In world history, no matter who wins the recall, the resignation or the ‘reelection,’ the regular people always lose. Read between the media lines first, and then decide. Discern the different ideologies on the street first, and then act with force, or disengage for a later date. Once the Anarchist masters the Discernment of Ideologies, he or she becomes greatly more powerful. No state system or self-proclaimed leader can control such a revolutionary. The Jesuits always had the institutional support of the papacy throughout their reign of power. The Anarchist rather, stands alone, or works within small cells, ready with his or her weapon of choice.