Seshat was the ancient Egyptian goddess of mathematics, creative thought, knowledge, books and writing. Often depicted in coronation ceremonies wearing a leopard-skin garment, Seshat's emblem is a seven-pointed leaf in her headdress. She wore it while performing the "stretching the cord" ceremony before building the Great Pyramids, with a rope made from hemp. It is perhaps hemp's psychoactive effect that is acknowledged in the saying that, "Seshat opens the door of heaven for you."
INDIA - Parvati
Parvati is the Hindu mother goddess of love, fertility and devotion. She was called the Daughter of the Mountain, or the Daughter of Heaven. Maha Shivarati, the holiday when Nepal relaxes its laws to allow the partaking of the holy ganga, celebrates the day that Shiva married Parvati. By one legend, the goddess saved her marriage by giving Shiva some ganga to smoke, after which the two invented tantric yoga.
Magu is a Taoist xian ("inspired sage," "ecstatic") whose name means Hemp Maiden or Goddess. Her harvest festival, when cannabis is traditionally gathered, celebrates the time “when the world was green.” Magu was also goddess of Shandong's sacred Mount Tai, where cannabis "was supposed to be gathered on the seventh day of the seventh month," wrote Joseph Needham in Science and Civilization in China (1959). Needham wrote, “there is much reason for thinking that the ancient Taoists experimented systematically with hallucinogenic smokes…at all events the incense-burner remained the centre of changes and transformations.”
NORWAY - Viking Volvas
In 1903, near the Oseberg Farm in Norway, a Viking ship built around 820 AD was discovered containing the remains of two women, along with two cows, fifteen horses, six dogs, several ornately carved sleighs and beds, plus tapestries, clothing, and kitchen implements, and—it was discovered in 2007—a small leather pouch containing cannabis seeds. One or both of the women, whose ages have been estimated at 50 and 70, may have been a Völva (“priestess” or “seeress”).
The discovery is similar to 2500-year-old mummy known as the "Ice Princess," whose elaborately tatooed body was buried with six saddled horses and other acoutrements including a container of cannabis in the Altai mountains, along the trade routes where where Russia, China, Mongolia, and Kazakhstan come together.
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Marie Laurençin's painting Les Invités is a record of an infamous 1908 dinner party where hashish pills were taken at Azon's restaurant in Paris. Laurençin's self portrait is upper left, with knowing eyes, flanked by Picasso and Apollinaire.
Laurençin was named chevalier of the Légion d'honneur in 1937 and in 1983, the Marie Laurençin Museum in Nagano-Ken, Japan was inaugurated to celebrate the centenary of her birth.
SERBIA - Djuka Tesla
In Nikola Tesla's autobiography My Inventions, he describes fashioning "of a kind of pop-gun which comprised a hollow tube, a piston, and two plugs of hemp. The art consisted in selecting a tube of the proper taper from the hollow stalks." Tesla wrote that mother Georgina (aka Djuka) "invented and constructed all kinds of tools and devices and wove the finest designs from thread which was spun by her. She even planted the seeds, raised the plants and separated the fibers herself."
IRELAND - Maud Gonne
Irish revolutionary Maud Gonne took hashish with William Butler Yeats in Paris in 1894. "I have to thank you for the dream drug which I have not tried as yet being very busy & having need of all my energy & activity for the moment but I mean to try it soon," Gonne later wrote to Yeats.
On Easter 1900, Gonne founded the Daughters of Ireland, a revolutionary women's society for Irish nationalist women who, like herself, were considered unwelcome in male-dominated societies. In 1918, after the Irish Free State was established and Yeats named a Senator and a Nobel laureate, Gonne was arrested in Dublin and imprisoned in England for six months. She participated in a hunger strike while incarcerated, and used her experiences to further publicize the scandalous prison conditions.
DENMARK - Isak Dinesen
In Nikola Tesla's autobiography My Inventions, he describes fashioning "of a kind of pop-gun which comprised a hollow tube, a piston, and two plugs of hemp. The art consisted in selecting a tube of the proper taper from the hollow stalks." Tesla wrote that mother Georgina (aka Djuka) "invented and constructed all kinds of tools and devices and wove the finest designs from thread which was spun by her. She even planted the seeds, raised the plants and separated the fibers herself."
Irish revolutionary Maud Gonne took hashish with William Butler Yeats in Paris in 1894. "I have to thank you for the dream drug which I have not tried as yet being very busy & having need of all my energy & activity for the moment but I mean to try it soon," Gonne later wrote to Yeats.
On Easter 1900, Gonne founded the Daughters of Ireland, a revolutionary women's society for Irish nationalist women who, like herself, were considered unwelcome in male-dominated societies. In 1918, after the Irish Free State was established and Yeats named a Senator and a Nobel laureate, Gonne was arrested in Dublin and imprisoned in England for six months. She participated in a hunger strike while incarcerated, and used her experiences to further publicize the scandalous prison conditions.
DENMARK - Isak Dinesen
Danish author Isak Dinesen was portrayed by Meryl Streep in Out of Africa, with Robert Redford as her love interest Denys Finch Hatton. She and Denys "liked to experiment with the sensations hashish, opium, or miraa could give them. Denys arranged the cushions on the floor before the fire and reclined there, playing his guitar. Tania sat 'cross-legged like Scheherazade herself' and told him stories."(Miraa is kava, an indigenous African herb that has a mild hallucinogenic effect. Dinesen refers to it in her story "The Dreamers" by its other name, murungu.)
Blues diva Bessie Smith smoked and sang about "reefers" throughout her career. In 1933, she recorded "Gimmie a Pigfoot," featuring Benny Goodman and Jack Teagarden, for John Hammond's Okeh record label. In the last verse she sings, "Gimmie a Reefer."
Smith "was more than merely famous, she was a living symbol of personal freedom: she did what she liked; she spoke her mind, no matter how outrageous her opinion; she flouted bourgeois norms and engaged in alcohol, drugs, and recreational sex," wrote Buzzy Jackson in A Bad Woman Feeling Good.
SCOTLAND - Annie Ross
In 1952, jazz singer Annie Ross penned and sang scat-style lyrics to saxophonist Wardell Gray's composition "Twisted" and it became an underground hit, later covered by Joni Mitchell and Bette Midler.
According to Sassy: The Life of Sarah Vaughan by Leslie Gourse, "As a very young woman, Annie, like Sassy, had enormous energy for a life in the fast lane; together they stayed up all night, drinking and smoking. Sassy liked marijuana and cocaine. Later Annie would switch to herbal tea, but in the 1950s, she too liked to get high."
At the age of 81, Ross sang "Twisted" at the 2011 MAC Awards, where she was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award. A documentary about Ross's life, titled No One But Me, premiered at the Glasgow Film Festival in 2012. She was reportedly working on her autobiography and still singing when she died in 2020.
Order the book Tokin' Women: A 4000-Year Herstory.
1 comment:
Excellent list!
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