Companion to this article: an LLM meltdown about Francis Bacon
Cannabis history has a smoke problem. But not the good kind: rather like an uncontrolled forest fire. Here, the smoke problem is a claim, which gets repeated so often, by so many confident voices, that it calcifies into “fact” long before anyone checks whether there was ever actually a fire underneath it at all —and if so, where was it and how did it start. These are my (admittedly preliminary) thoughts about a historical fake news I consider of critical relevance.
Sometimes there is a fire, just not where you’d expect. Take the old chestnut that Queen Victoria used cannabis to ease her period pain, well studied by historian Virginia Berridge in her paper “Queen Victoria’s Cannabis Use: Or How History Does and Does Not Get Used in Drug Policy Making“. Strictly speaking: false. She did not ever take cannabis once, and we have very solid sources to prove it. But the thing is… beyond the Queen, plenty of Victorian women did use hemp preparations for exactly that reason, and the monarch simply got recruited, retroactively, as their most marketable spokesperson. Smoke, a real fire, but wrong assessment. The tree Victoria hiding the burning forest of ordinary women. The history of Cannabis has often to be separated between the flashy famous figures and their “claimed use of cannabis” —there’s Victoria but monarchwise, there’s also the Russian Tsar Nicholas II, French emperor Napoleon III, Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamid II, and others. It seems a monarch’s reputation is incomplete if rumors about her/his cannabis use are missing.
Then there’s the other kind of rumour — the smokescreen where finding the source, finding the fire, become challenging. And this is where I need to have a word with Michael Pollan.
The claim
In his Botany of Desire (2001), Pollan tells his readers the following (I am highlighting the various far-reaching claims present in these two paragraphs):
“simply this: In 1484, Pope Innocent VIII issued a papal condemnation of witchcraft in which he specifically condemned the use of cannabis as an “antisacrament” in satanic worship. The black mass celebrated by medieval witches and sorcerers presented a mocking mirror image of the Catholic Eucharist, and in it cannabis traditionally took the place of wine—serving as a pagan sacrament in a counterculture that sought to undermine the establishment church. The fact that witches and sorcerers were the first Europeans to exploit the psychoactive properties of cannabis probably sealed its fate in the West as a drug identified with feared outsiders and cultures conceived in opposition: pagans, Africans, hippies. The two stories fed each other and in turn the plant’s power: people who smoked cannabis were Other, and the cannabis they smoked threatened to let their Otherness loose in the land.
Witches the Church simply burned at the stake, but something more interesting happened to the witches’ magic plants. The plants were too precious to banish from human society, so in the decades after Pope Innocent’s fiat against witchcraft, cannabis, opium, belladonna, and the rest were simply transferred from the realm of sorcery to medicine, thanks largely to the work of a sixteenth-century Swiss alchemist and physician named Paracelsus.”
It’s a wonderful story. It has villains, martyrs, a moral arc, and a tidy explanation for several centuries of prohibition bridging hippies and middle ages, all in one paragraph. It is also, as far as evidence is concerned, 100% invented. Simply invented.
Yes, simply, because the repeated use of that term (twice in the quoted section) is not entirely casual. “Simple” is indeed rarely the first word that comes to mind when one starts to think about the past (let alone middle ages). So a quick ctrl+F in the PDF of the book yielded these insightful results:
- “simply”: 49 occurences (I also searched “simpl”: 74 occurences)
- “complex”: 25 occurences (I also checked “complicat”: 8 occurences)
What the Bull actually is
The bull in question, Summis desiderantes affectibus , is a real document, easily read in full online in Latin (and at the library for translations). Don’t get me wrong, defending a pope is one of the last thing I expected to be doing in my life, but here we go… Innocent VIII was, if anything, one of the more restrained popes of the period on the subject of witch-hunting.
In the case of this Bull (the name for a legal statement issued by the Pope and circulated around), Innocent was responding to a specific complaint from two local inquisitors in Germany, Sprenger and Kramer (later known for writing the book Malleus Maleficarum). Kramer and his colleague were having issues pursuing their mandate as inquisitors for a handful of dioceses along the Rhine — Mainz, Cologne, Trier, Salzburg, Bremen. People would not let them in, and slow down their investigations wherever they went.
So, first of all, that’s not “Germany,” let alone “Europe” or indeed “the West.” Since the Bull was a local regulation, extremely limited in its scope, we can ask ourselves what is its relevance beyond the regions concerned? And what about all the other Bulls by other popes about other regions?
Second, the Bull indeed a direct answer to Sprenger and Kramer’s concerns, and therefore “its purpose is clearly to remove the juridical obstacles preventing [them] from carrying out their witch-hunt” as explained by Alan Charles Kors and Edward Peters in Witchcraft in Europe: a Documentary History (ch. 6). Kors and Peters also note that the Bull is “squarely in the tradition of papal concerns for heresy and disbelief”, just another legal tool giving special powers to inquisitors. Or, more precisely, asking the Bishop of Strasbourg to, please please please, accept and enforce the special powers that the Pope was giving to Sprenger and Kramer and let them work.
What the Bull actually says
Nowhere in the bull is there any mention of hemp, cannabis, or indeed any other plant, ointment, sacrament of any kind. No antisacrament either. On the contrary, harvests and plants are mentioned very generally, once, as something that witches might affect and “kill” through their activities.
I have to confess a painful adventure. In disbelief, I initially thought another Bull was somehow mentioning Cannabis and Pollan’s was a mismatch more than an invention. In disbelief, I went to the library to consult the text of other papal Bulls. Of course, my reading was far from comprehensive. I read all of Innocent’s Bulls, and his predecessors and successors.I also consulted the thematic indexes, and eventually did searches online and ctrl+Fs in the online versions. Cannabis, or indeed specifics about any other plant or remedy, are conspicuous by their absence.
Thinking better, after a traumatising day of Bull-reading, I realised the whole claim probably built up somewhere in twentieth-century, probably in popular writing… and probably Jack Herrer’s The Emperor Wears No Clothes from where it seems to have been picked up, repeated, and served as established history. Pollan cementing it. Did he go to the library to read the Bull before publishing on it?
We need to be careful and fair here, because these two cases distinct. Herrer was a self-taught volunteer activist, working with limited means and under repression to attempt transmitting popular history, his community’s memory. That the timeline he assembled turns out to be shaky in places is, frankly, a normal outcome for such a pioneering grassroots work, done without institutional support. It does not diminish what he achieved in dragging cannabis history into public conversation. Pollan is a different matter. He is a professional, well resourced, well published writer, with every means available to check a source before drawing on it. Pollan did not verify, and that is not due to limitations: that is laziness, or, if you prefer, poor professional ethics. Laziness and poor professional ethics that are contagious, for his claim has been cited, translated, recirculated as settled fact by readers, listeners, viewers, who had every reason to trust him. (I even once noted it in a MIT Press publication…!)
“Witches,” as if it meant one thing
There is another problem lurking under this story (more than history), one that infects a great deal of pseudo-history about cannabis and witchcraft generally: the assumption that “the witch” was a stable, continent-wide category, uniform from the Basque country to Bavaria, and that Europe in the 1400s operated with something like the coherence of a modern EU issuing binding directives. It did not. And “witch” were not a uniform body of people. That some may have used cannabis has no reason to be generalised — something which, in turn, is just like today.
What got prosecuted as witchcraft in rural Britain was not what got prosecuted in Strasbourg, and what got prosecuted in Salamanca was not necessarily what got prosecuted in Salamanca’s own surrounding countryside twenty miles out. Different lords, different confessors, different folk taxonomies of heresy, healing, and witchcraft, different Bulls, different inquisitors, different local dynamics and politics… but also different herbal pharmacopoeia and different crops and different plants available to use or not, changing again and again every river you cross, and every other year.
“Cannabis,” as if it meant our thing
There’s finally the main issue, Cannabis. Hemp, as Cannabis has evolved to be called in the English language, grows wild in Europe since prehistory. It was even there before Homo sapiens in some areas of the continent. But the real question is: when, why,and how did humans start transforming hemp plants into products that get you high? Nobody has yet any clear answers to it. There are bits and pieces of archives and other sources of information from the past that resemble psychoactive “high” — from written texts to archaeological analysis of plant or human remains… A lot of bits and pieces, particularly texts, in the 18th century. Slightly less in the 17th century. And from the 16th century down, every time less mentions, as we get every time less archives available and preserved-enough to be readable. But the older we get, the less coherence and certainty about the meaning of the written discussions of Cannabis, the relevance they had in their time, their reach, etc. Psychoactivity was around — “simply” because it is an intrinsic part of the hemp plant, which has THC in all its varieties — but humans using it? That’s a more difficult question to answer. The fact is that, alleging widespread use of cannabis, smoked, and as a countercultural product, is a mad idea. In fact, it’s not just about Cannabis.
Alleging the use of any plant as such is problematic in a Middle Age, where mixture was everything. Rarely could you find any “pure” product — how could one have attested purity without the science and technology to enable it? Everything was mixed. (consult Pierre Duhem’s Mixture and Chemical Combination for an insightful historical and philosophical introduction to the topic).
- You wouldn’t have found “hemp paper”, paper was made out of used rags, hemp and other materials, mixed.
- You wouldn’t have found hempseeds, seeds were mixed and pressed with other grains to obtain oils, beers, horchattas. Mixtures.
- You wouldn’t have found haschish, but instead, a paste made out of a mixture of Cannabis resin, opium, pepper and other pungent spices
No Pope Ever Banned Cannabis
Consider all of the above a working dispatch, not a verdict carved in stone. I may still find someday a missing Bull addressing Cannabis, who knows? This is part of an ongoing investigation into cannabis’s genuinely psychoactive — and genuinely under-examined — role in early modern Europe, and further sources, corrections, and counter-evidence are not just welcome but actively invited. You have a direct line with the Pope? A readers card to the Vatican secret archives? Or simply a good pdf copy of that greatly insightful chapter you know I will read 4 times and highlight in 3 colours? Please send! (there should be a “reach out” button somewhere in the menu).
Some closing thoughts:
- Cannabis history really doesn’t need embellishment. The real archive — fragmentary, regionally stubborn, and maddeningly specific, and full of mixture mixture and mixture — is more interesting than the folklore built on top of it or than projecting our marijuana and our industrial hemp into the past. Writers who are paid, and well paid, to get it right owe their readers the modest effort of actually checking.
- Also: Cannabis history simply doesn’t need simplification. At least not until we have already properly mapped out the complexity that we need to simplify…
- Finally: the world, life, needs less “simply” and more nuance. Yes, the Popes and their witch hunt was brutal and inhumane. But it was not today’s war on drugs. Yes, the crusades were horrible, but it was not today’s genocides. It’s not about scaling, it’s about recognising the world is not black and white — and even when it is, there’s black in the white and white in the black.