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Interestingly enough, as researched by Mike Jay in his newest book Psychonauts, cannabis consumption in the 19th century and before rarely took the form of cult

Interestingly enough, as researched by Mike Jay in his newest book Psychonauts, cannabis consumption in the 19th century and before rarely took the form of cultivating and smoking the flower of the cannabis plant like we have seen in the last century and was more so focused around creating the tar-like hashish which was sometimes smoked but often times cooked into food and consumed in that way. It was also, as it has been through most of history, a drug that had a reputation tied to social class which in turn could have led to fewer artistic renditions of its everyday use surviving to this day. Not taking away from the fact that there does seem to be a lack of blatant art focusing on the consumption of cannabis from this region in this time frame, just an interesting note.

nerdponx 3y ago
I don't know how it was in general, but for example in The Count of Monte Cristo I think the Count and his guests primarily consumed hashish in food, rather than by smoking. It's portrayed as exotic and foreign and borderline magical. So it's possible that there were people using it in Europe for centuries, but not a lot of them, and maybe not enough of them for it to appear in whatever secular contemporary art is preserved from the 17th century.
benbreen 3y ago
Yes, this is right on (and great book rec - Mike Jay is a friend and a brilliant writer on drug history). The concept of smoking cannabis is not quite so surprisingly new as that of smoking opium (which apparently emerged in Southeast Asia as recently as ~300 years ago). However although there is archaeological evidence of cannabis smoking in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa stretching back quite a long time, there is virtually no evidence that it reached Europe before the 19th century. I wrote an article about this for Lapham's Quarterly (https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/our-strange-addiction https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/our-strange-addi...) that gets into one intriguing piece of inconclusive evidence from earlier: >In 1689 the natural philosopher Robert Hooke gave a firsthand report on the effects of Indian cannabis to the Royal Society of London: “The patient understands not, nor remembers anything that he sees, hears, or does in that ecstasy, but becomes, as it were, a mere natural, being unable to speak a word of sense; yet is he very merry, and laughs, and sings, and speaks words without any coherence.” Hooke described cannabis as being “chewed or swallowed” but specified the dose only ambiguously, as “about as much as may fill a common tobacco-pipe.” It is still not clear to what extent cannabis smoking, as opposed to edible or drinkable preparations, was practiced in Hooke’s time outside of the cannabis-smoking regions of South Asia and Africa. I made a pretty thorough search of the textual mentions of cannabis in the 16th and 17th centuries and couldn't find any evidence that Europeans were aware you could smoke it. In other words, it's entirely possible that someone who sat for a portrait in the Renaissance had consumed cannabis orally -- in the form of either hashish or mixed in an "electuary" with things like nutmeg and sugar -- but I would be very, very surprised to see any visual evidence of it being smoked, because the textual records don't support it.
- bitcurious 3y ago
  > However although there is archaeological evidence of cannabis smoking in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa stretching back quite a long time, there is virtually no evidence that it reached Europe before the 19th century. Herodotus wrote of the Scythians smoking what was presumed to be cannabis. This article details a bit of it: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/article/150522-scythians-marijuana-bastard-wars-kurgan-archaeology https://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/article/150522-...
  - benbreen 3y ago
    Not quite smoking (in the sense of using pipes), as he describes them as throwing cannabis seeds on hot stones and inhaling the smoke. I mention it in my Lapham's Quarterly article: “The Scythians then take the seed of this hemp [kannabis] and, crawling in under the mats, throw it on the red-hot stones, where it smolders and sends forth such fumes that no Greek vapor bath could surpass it. The Scythians howl in their joy at the vapor bath.” One thing that's interesting about this is that "Scythian" was a pretty broad category in Herodotus's time, in some senses meaning a specific tribe around present-day Bulgaria, in others broadly referring to something like "Indo-European nomadic horse people." So it could be that Herodotus is actually passing along an account of Indo-Aryan or Indo-Scythian practice that is part of the larger South Asian culture of cannabis use (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Scythians https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Scythians).

nerdponx 3y ago

I don't know how it was in general, but for example in The Count of Monte Cristo I think the Count and his guests primarily consumed hashish in food, rather than by smoking. It's portrayed as exotic and foreign and borderline magical. So it's possible that there were people using it in Europe for centuries, but not a lot of them, and maybe not enough of them for it to appear in whatever secular contemporary art is preserved from the 17th century.

benbreen 3y ago

Yes, this is right on (and great book rec - Mike Jay is a friend and a brilliant writer on drug history). The concept of smoking cannabis is not quite so surprisingly new as that of smoking opium (which apparently emerged in Southeast Asia as recently as ~300 years ago). However although there is archaeological evidence of cannabis smoking in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa stretching back quite a long time, there is virtually no evidence that it reached Europe before the 19th century. I wrote an article about this for Lapham's Quarterly (https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/our-strange-addiction https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/our-strange-addi...) that gets into one intriguing piece of inconclusive evidence from earlier: >In 1689 the natural philosopher Robert Hooke gave a firsthand report on the effects of Indian cannabis to the Royal Society of London: “The patient understands not, nor remembers anything that he sees, hears, or does in that ecstasy, but becomes, as it were, a mere natural, being unable to speak a word of sense; yet is he very merry, and laughs, and sings, and speaks words without any coherence.” Hooke described cannabis as being “chewed or swallowed” but specified the dose only ambiguously, as “about as much as may fill a common tobacco-pipe.” It is still not clear to what extent cannabis smoking, as opposed to edible or drinkable preparations, was practiced in Hooke’s time outside of the cannabis-smoking regions of South Asia and Africa. I made a pretty thorough search of the textual mentions of cannabis in the 16th and 17th centuries and couldn't find any evidence that Europeans were aware you could smoke it. In other words, it's entirely possible that someone who sat for a portrait in the Renaissance had consumed cannabis orally -- in the form of either hashish or mixed in an "electuary" with things like nutmeg and sugar -- but I would be very, very surprised to see any visual evidence of it being smoked, because the textual records don't support it.

bitcurious 3y ago
> However although there is archaeological evidence of cannabis smoking in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa stretching back quite a long time, there is virtually no evidence that it reached Europe before the 19th century. Herodotus wrote of the Scythians smoking what was presumed to be cannabis. This article details a bit of it: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/article/150522-scythians-marijuana-bastard-wars-kurgan-archaeology https://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/article/150522-...
- benbreen 3y ago
  Not quite smoking (in the sense of using pipes), as he describes them as throwing cannabis seeds on hot stones and inhaling the smoke. I mention it in my Lapham's Quarterly article: “The Scythians then take the seed of this hemp [kannabis] and, crawling in under the mats, throw it on the red-hot stones, where it smolders and sends forth such fumes that no Greek vapor bath could surpass it. The Scythians howl in their joy at the vapor bath.” One thing that's interesting about this is that "Scythian" was a pretty broad category in Herodotus's time, in some senses meaning a specific tribe around present-day Bulgaria, in others broadly referring to something like "Indo-European nomadic horse people." So it could be that Herodotus is actually passing along an account of Indo-Aryan or Indo-Scythian practice that is part of the larger South Asian culture of cannabis use (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Scythians https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Scythians).