The Queen of Sheba's Spices: Was Cannabis One?

17th-century AD painting of the Queen of Sheba from a church in Lalibela,
Ethiopia and now in the National Museum of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

The biblical Queen of Sheba, who also appears (unnamed) in the Quran and is claimed by the Ethiopians as theirs, famously brought gold and spices to King Solomon, circa 950 BC. But what exactly did she bring and where was she from?

Two ancient Yemeni peoples, the Mineans and the Sabaeans, were involved in the lucrative spice trade. Some archaeologists think the Queen of Sheba was a Sabaean from the Semitic civilization of Saba (1200 BC–275 AD) in Southern Arabia, now Yemen.

The inscription on a wooden sarcophagus of 264 BC from Egypt now in the Cairo Museum shows it contained the body of Zayd’il bin Zayd, a Minaean trader who “imported myrrh and calamus for the temples of the gods of Egypt.” Researcher Sula Benet argues that in the earliest Greek translations of the Old Testament, "kan" was rendered as "reed," leading to the erroneous translation as "calamus" for "cannabis."

Modern scholars still cannot pinpoint the origin or species of many ancient spices—for example, cinnamon—and they find it strange that myrrh is not among the names of incense inscribed on South Arabian incense burners. Ldn from these artifacts is translated as ladanum, and Qlm identifies with calamus, also known as scented reed, which Pliny described as having "a specially fine scent which attracts people even from a long way off,” according to Queen of Sheba: Treasures from Ancient Yemen (St. John Simpson, ed.).

In the oldest Sabaean inscriptions originating from the oasis of Marib, five deities are invoked, the most important being Athar, “behind whose name one recognizes the Babylonian Ishtar.” Athar was associated with the morning star (as was Ishtar). “The Sumerian herb called Sim.Ishara’, ‘aromatic of the Goddess Ishtar,’ is equated with the Akkadian qunnabu, ‘cannabis.'” (Erica Reiner, 1995, quoted by Chris Bennett in Entheogens and the Development of Culture, John Rush ed.)

Islamic legends of the Queen of Sheba (known as Bilqis) have a strange plot in which Solomon polishes the palace floor so that he can see the Queen’s legs, which were reputed to be the legs of a donkey. First-century AD author Josephus Flavius calls the Queen Nikaule or Nikaulis in his Jewish Antiquities.

This is one of the nicknames the Greeks gave to Empusa, the female demon famous for having the legs of a donkey mentioned in Aristophanes’ comedy The Frogs. Some think The Frogs focuses on the exiled general Alcibiades, who stole the sacrament kykeon from the temple of the grain goddess Demeter, and started partying with it at orgies at his home. The play brings in the sybaritic Dionysus as the new god of Eleusis, dethroning Demeter.

The Testament of Solomon, a Judaeo-Christian work dated between the first and third centuries AD, mentions Empusa under the name Onoskelis, which also means “donkey-legged woman.” The Testament, supposed to be the writings of the legendary King himself, says that he and Onoskelis were quite close and that she took an active part in the construction of the temple of Jerusalem by producing hempen ropes.

The Queen of Sheba, from a 15th-century manuscript
now at Staats - und Universitätsbibliothek Gottingen

This role is similar to that of the ancient Egyptian goddess Seshat, who was associated with the female Pharaoh Hathshepsut (1508–1458 BC) and “stretched the cord” made of hemp in temple-building rituals. In ancient Egyptian, Sheba means "star" or "seven," a number associated with Seshat, “She of the Seven Points” who has a seven-pointed leaf in her headdress. Wikipedia says: "In Egypt, beginning in the 18th dynasty, a Semitic goddess named Qudshu ('Holiness') begins to appear prominently, equated with the native Egyptian goddess Hathor. Some think this is Athirat/Ashratu [Asherah/Ishtar] under her Ugaritic name." Hathshepsut was from the 18th dynasty.

Solomon’s temple was dedicated "for the burning of the incense of sweet spices before him" (2 Chronicles 2:4). He built a temple to Asherah, which was later torn down by Josiah, as described in Kings 23:13.

Flavius identifies Sheba as "the woman who ruled Egypt and Ethiopia." Some think her name Nikaulis is derived from the Egyptian goddess Neith by way of Hathshepsut, and that The Queen of Sheba was Hathsepsut herself or one of her descendants. Sheba’s Ethiopian name is Makeda and was derived from Hathsehpsut’s throne name, Ma’at-Ka-Re, honoring the goddess Ma’at, the Queen of Heaven, a moniker for Asherah or Ishtar.

UPDATE 10/15: I was informed by a DJ in Jamaica that the Rastas sing about the Queen of Sheba bringing ganja to King Solomon.

She is included in the book Tokin' Women: A 4000-Year Herstory.

Grace and Frankie Take a Trip

UPDATE 10/15: Both Tomlin and Fonda are included in the new book Tokin' Women: A 4000-Year Herstory. 

Tokin Women Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda, who intelligently addressed pot smoking as a means of empowering women in 9-5, have teamed up again for the Netflix series Grace and Frankie, along with Friends co-creator Marta Kauffman. In it, Tomlin and Fonda play 70-something women whose husbands (Martin Sheen and Sam Waterston) suddenly announce they're in love and want to marry each other.

The first episode was a revelation. Tomlin's character Frankie, after attempting to squash her heartbreak with junk food, alcohol and cigarettes, instead finds some peyote buttons in her freezer and begins a vision quest. As the clip shown on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon reveals, Fonda's uptight character Grace accidentally joins in the experience and is told, "Brace yourself for some light vomiting, followed by life-altering hallucinations."

Mary Kay Place, who smoked pot with William Hurt in The Big Chill, appears in Episode 2, wherein Grace opens Frankie's freezer and says, "Oh, a bag of pot. She's going to be just fine."

In Episode 4, Christine Lahti guests, and the exchange is:
Grace: “All your clothes reek of pot.”
Frankie: “Because I wear hemp and not dead snakes on my feet.”

Next, in Episode 5, Frankie is shown rolling a joint and then smoking it with Grace's daughter Brianna. "How did you survive her?" Frankie asks, meaning Grace. "This helped," is the reply (meaning the marijuana). Grace confronts her fears about the "drugs" that Frankie prefers.

All 13 episodes of Grace and Frankie are now available for binge-watching on Netflix.

Also see: 

When Will Women Have Fun with Weed on TV? (Season 2 review)

Grace & Frankie & Ruth & Maria (Season 4 review)

Grace & Frankie: Seniors Who Smoke (Cannabis Now review) 

Carly Fiorina: We Don't Need Your Stinkin' Tax Dollars

UPDATE: Fiorina has now said, "Drug addiction should not be criminalized" and has come out for states' right to legalize.

Carly Fioria has announced she’ll seek the Republicans nomination for President in 2016.

Named Fortune magazine’s “Most Powerful Woman in Business” in 1998, Fiorina took the helm of HP but failed to produce promised profits and was forced to resign. With a huge influx of her own cash, Fiorina won the Republican primary for Senate in California in 2010, challenging Senator Barbara Boxer (who recently co-sponsored the federal CARERS Act to legalize medical marijuana at the federal level just after announcing she will retire).

During her Senate race, Fiorina said the she opposed Prop. 19, which would have legalized adult use of marijuana in California, because “sending billions of dollars in new tax revenues to Sacramento is exactly the problem…because Sacramento—and Washington, DC—have a spending problem and will continue to spend the money we send them.”


Fiorina recently told Slate magazine she isn’t even for medical marijuana: “I remember when I had cancer and my doctor said, ‘Do you have any interest in medicinal marijuana?’ I did not,” she told Slate. “And they said, good, because marijuana today is such a complex compound, we don’t really know what’s in it, we don’t really know how it interacts with other substances or other medicines.”

Fiorina's announcement video (they have those now) took aim at Hillary, her opposing queen on the fast-filling chessboard. Also announcing today was Dr. Ben Carson, a neuroscientist not near as hot as Carl Hart who still quaintly believes in the gateway effect; expected in by the end of the week is Clinton nemesis and fellow Arkansas homeboy Mike Huckabee.

Fiorina may have been brought in to dilute any progressive shift on Hillary by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who co-sponsored the States' Rights to Medical Marijuana Act and voted against mandatory drug testing. His entry into the race prompted President Obama to joke that we could have another “pot-smoking socialist” in the White House.

Hillary is being pressured to go progressive on other issues. Her speech on racial disparities in our criminal justice system, where she said, “It's time to end the era of mass incarceration. We need a true national debate about how to reduce our prison population while keeping our communities safe,” was a welcome surprise to many and showed some of the old Hillary stuff.

Liz Mair and Marijuana

Rising (and sometimes falling) Republican strategist Liz Mair had expressed some interesting opinions about the War on Drugs on the April 24 edition of HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher.

The Libertarian-minded Mair wasn't so surprised at the blockbuster news that nearly every examiner in the FBI Laboratory's microscopic hair comparison unit gave flawed testimony over more than a two-decade period, including 32 death-penalty cases. Acknowledging it was "obviously a horrible situation," Mair added, "It's the government. We don't instinctively trust them with a great deal."

Responding to Maher's statement that the US, with 4% of the world's population, incarcerates 22% of the prisoners worldwide, Mair noted that we've locked up "a bunch of people who have put there for doing very minimal nonviolent things. You look at pot convictions....This is what makes people feel that we're going a good job of being tough tough on crime because they look at the numbers, but it's not substantiated in any way, shape or form."

Conservative Weekly Standard columnist Christopher Caldwell then opined that the War on Drugs had brought down the murder rate, to which Maher responded, "If you want to cut the murder rate, end the War on Drugs." Mair agreed, "at least in Mexico."

If Mair, a former online strategist for Rand Paul and Carly Fiorina, is an augur of things to come for the Republican party, liberals might find some GOP allies on ending the War on Drugs. But what else will we have to swallow: privatized police forces or prosecutors?

Meanwhile, 35 Congressional Republicans joined California Libertarian and former Reagan speechwriter Dana Rohrabacher in voting to allow VA doctors to recommend medical marijuana. Sadly, the amendment failed by only 3 votes as 8 Democrats voted against it, including Joe Kennedy III, whose cousin Patrick (a former Ambien addict) is banging the anti-marijuana drum with his group SAM.

Cecily is Strong at the Correspondents' Dinner

SNL's Cecily Strong, who hosted this year's White House Correspondents' dinner last night, told some good jokes, like, "I'm not going to try and tell you politicians how to do politics...That would be like you guys telling me what to do with my body. Can you even imagine?"

The 31-year-old comedienne got a round of applause after asking the journalists in the crowd to raise their hands and say, "I solemnly swear not to talk about Hillary's appearance, because that is not journalism." She added, "Also Cecily Strong looks great tonight."

Strong mock-defended the Secret Service, calling them, "the only law enforcement agency that will get in trouble if a black man gets shot."  She told Obama, "Your hair is so white now, it can talk back to police." (He laughed heartily at that.)

Strong got down to the drug war with the joke, "This year Obama supported putting women on money, as opposed to the DEA agents who prefer to put money on women.” She also brought up Chris Christie’s belief that marijuana is a gateway drug, asking, “so like a bridge to other drugs, and he wants to shut that bridge down?”

Watch video of Strong's performance.

Strong joked that she was the first heterosexual woman in 20 years to host the event. Paula Poundstone was the first solo female host in 1992, and Elayne Boosler hosted the following year. Wanda Sykes hosted in 2009. According to Wikipedia, "Until 1962, the dinner was open only to men, even though WHCA's membership included women. At the urging of Helen Thomas, President John F. Kennedy refused to attend the dinner unless the ban on women was dropped."

One of Strong's recurring characters on SNL is the pseudo-activist "Girl You Wish You Hadn't Started a Conversation With at at Party" who says things like, "Newsflash: Orphans are twice as likely not to have parents."

Meanwhile, Obama's "Anger Translator" from the event, Keegan-Michael Key, recently demonstrated with partner Jordan Peele Why Ganga is So Much Better than Coffee.

Joan Jett with a Joint

High Times has scored another interview with a female pot puffer, this time with rocker Joan Jett while on tour opening for The Who on their “The Who Hits 50” North American tour. 

Discussing shoulder problems the righteous guitarist has been dealing with, HT asked about the batch of high-CBD balms and lotions they sent to her, "How did they work out for your recovery?"

"Useful, very useful," she replied. "I don’t understand why marijuana was made into this evil thing so long ago. Beyond whether or not you smoke joints, you can’t deny the medical benefits of legalizing. It’s been definitely found to work for various issues."

"I saw an interview yesterday with a woman whose son was hurt in some kind of accident—head injury," she continued. "He’d have these pain explosions, and none of the drugs that the doctors could give him relieved it. But his mother gave him some pure cannabis oil, and that stopped his pain. But now the mother’s possibly in trouble. This kind of stuff is ridiculous—ridiculous. And that’s just on the medical side of things."

"On the personal side: Of course I smoke pot," she said. "It’s not a big deal. I think you have to be responsible, like with anything." 

On April 18, she was deservedly inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In her induction speech, Tokin' Woman Miley Cyrus said, "I'm going to start off this induction with the first time I wanted to have sex with Joan Jett. We were doing Oprah together, and I go up to Joan's hotel room. Joan opens the door, and I come in, and Kenny Laguna is laying in bed. I don't know what the fuck is going on. There's towels shoved underneath all the door cracks, shower caps around all the smoke detectors. Joan is running around spraying orange-smelling cleaner to mask the smell of 'the pot' (that's what you guys call it), and we go into her bathroom [where they smoked and talked]." She then talked about how Joan was the first woman to start her own record label, after all the other ones turned her down.

"I come from a place where Rock and Roll means something," Jett said in her acceptance speech. "It's the language of a subculture of integrity, rebellion, frustration, alienation, and the glue that sets several generations free of unnatural societal and self suppression. Rock and Roll is political. It is a meaningful way to express dissent, upset the status quo, stir up revolution, and fight for human rights." 

Jett's portrait by Mark Seliger in today's Rolling Stone profile (pictured above) shows her puffing on a phatty, and in case there's any doubt about what's in it, the story begins, "And she has a fat, torpedolike joint hanging from her mouth. The smoking, Jett says later, loosens up the edges and range of her distinctively craggy voice."

She also has "the best shit," according to Laguna, Jett's manager, co-producer and co-songwriter for the past 35 years. "Keith Richards had some of that," he announces with a hearty laugh, as Jett rolls her number on the mixing board before the take. "Said it gave him flashbacks to 1968."

UPDATES: In the 2018 documentary about Jett, Bad Reputation, Laguna is shown handing her a joint, which she smokes. The beginning of the Cyrus Hall of Fame intro is shown, but not the part about "the pot." The film interviews Tokin' Woman Kristen Stewart, who starred as Jett in the 2010 film The Runaways, along with Cyrus, Debbie Harry, Iggy Pop, Billie Joe Armstrong, Pete Townsend, Dave Grohl, and Michael J. Fox. It's said that Chrissie Hynde advised Jett to get herself together when she was drinking a lot after the breakup of her breakthrough all-female rock band The Runaways; perhaps pot helped with that. 

Jett and Cyrus performed together at the 2021 Superbowl TikTok Halftime Show. 

Drug War Victim Billie Holiday at 100

UPDATE 10/15: Holiday is included in the new book Tokin' Women: A 4000-Year Herstory.

"By the 1930s, even before marijuana was criminalized, Billie Holiday's name had become a kind of password among marijuana smokers who had formed an ad hoc network of users across the country," wrote Buzzy Jackson in A Bad Woman Feeling Good. "Whenever you went to different cities," Holiday's friend Marie Bryant remembered, "soon enough a guy would knock on your hotel door with a phonograph and Louis's [Armstrong] and Billie's records...and a little thing of pot....And this happened all over the country, a society of people who just loved Billie."

The popular singer-like-no-other, born 100 years ago Tuesday, began to smoke marijuana in the early 1930s when you could buy a couple of joints for twenty-five cents. (Source: Meg Greene, Billie Holiday: A Biography)

In her autobiography  Lady Sings the Blues, Billie recounts telling her mother that she'd been smoking "reefers" for a year while in her teens. "If you'd seen any change in me," I tried to tell her, "you'd have been sure to let me know about it. And you didn't. So doesn't that prove that smoking reefers has done me no harm?"

At the famous Café Society in New York City, "everyone in that group smoked pot," remembered trumpeter Doc Cheatham. "They had a little room off the bandstand and some, including Mary Lou [Williams] and Billie [Holiday], would smoke pot in there. They would put me outside the door in a chair smoking a pipe that would cover the fumes of the pot." (Source: Morning Glory, a biography of Williams by Linda Dahl).

John Szwed’s 2015 book, Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth, tells a story of the actor Charles Laughton and his wife Elsa Lanchester staying in New York with music producer John Hammond while Laughton cruised Harlem and met Holiday at the Alhambra Grill. Holiday took Laughton home to dinner with her mother Sadie, and “when he was leaving at dawn, he rather formally asked Billie if he might have 'some of those cigarettes to take to the ladies of London.' With the four hundred dollars that he gave her, she went around the corner to the apartment of white jazzman Mezz Mezzrow and bought every reefer he had. She fully expected that Laughton would share some of them with her, but he left without offering her even one stick.” 

At a 1937 recording session, Hammond managed to convince a record company executive that the marijuana smoke he smelled wasn't a problem. The result was "considered among the greatest recording sessions in jazz history." Holiday's voice interplayed with VIP Lester Young's saxophone on "He Ain't Got Rhythm," "This Year's Kisses," "Why Was I Born" and "I Must Have That Man," and lead to a lifelong collaboration.

ANSLINGER TARGETS HOLIDAY 

Holiday was hunted down by no less than Harry J. Anslinger, the first and longtime "drug czar" who engineered laws and international treaties banning marijuana. According to newly published research by Johann Hari, Holiday got  her first threat from Anslinger's FBN (Federal Bureau of Narcotics) after she recorded "Strange Fruit," a lament against lynching, in 1939. Anslinger assigned agent Jimmy Fletcher to track Holiday's movements; he tried nailing her but ended up becoming an admirer. "She was the type who could make anyone sympathetic because she was the loving type," wrote Fletcher.

Later, "Holiday's ability to consume drugs and alcohol was legendary." (Greene.) She took stimulants to get through her performance schedule and afterwards took pills, drank, and smoked pot, eventually shooting heroin as well. No wonder: according to Hari's book Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs her manager/pimp Louis McKay beat her so badly she would have to tape her ribs to go onstage. McKay sought out Anslinger and met with him in DC, agreeing to set Billie up for a bust for which she went to trial. Asking to be sent to a treatment facility, instead Holiday was forced to go cold turkey in jail while serving a year's sentence. Afterwards, she was stripped of her cabaret license as an ex-con and was unable to perform in any venue where alcohol was served.

But the persecution didn't stop there. Anslinger sent another agent, George White, to stalk Holiday in San Francisco, possibly planting drugs in her hotel room as he had with other women. “The hounding and the pressure drove me,” she wrote, “to think of trying the final solution, death.” Although a jury found her not guilty, the ordeal took a toll on her reputation and her health. Nonetheless, she refused to stop singing "Strange Fruit" even though other singers were too intimidated to do so.

Szwed's book mentions Tokin' Woman Tallulah Bankhead’s unsuccessful attempt to intervene personally with J. Edgar Hoover to exonerate Holiday of drug charges. It characterizes Holiday’s autobiography Lady Sings the Blues as the first cautionary tale of drugs by a celebrity, which she wrote in part so that she could get her cabaret card back and appear in clubs that served alcohol. The “gimmick” to sell it as a confessional backfired when it left her with “a life reduced to drugs.” The Laughton story, and others involving celebrities, e.g. Orson Wells, were omitted from the book due to objections from the publisher (and Bankhead). 

At the age of 44, Holiday was hospitalized after collapsing, and was arrested again when narcotics agents claimed they found a small amount of heroin in her room. Pressuring her to reveal her dealer, agents confiscated her record player, radio, candy, and flowers and handcuffed her to her bed. Two policeman stood at her door and turned away friends who tried to visit. Suffering from cirrhosis of the liver, Billie was once more forced to withdraw from heroin without treatment. She died in her hospital bed on July 15, 1959.