A Damsel With A Dulcimer

"A damsel with a dulcimer

In a vision once I saw..."

Out of 'Kubla Khan' by Coleridge, obviously.

Although I am personally not a fan of incense, and of opium generally, still I am quite familiar with it in the Chinese culture, having grown up among people and having been in places where opium was imbibed by some of those people.

Tengri Mongolian shamanic culture
has this, too...

We ought not to presume some of the French Bohemians were not fully aware of the deeper aspects of the Oriental opium culture, and there are a lot of hints of the culture present in the French absinthe traditions of that time.

Chinese classical scholar Taoists, know how to 'read the smoke...'

This is what they do, in darkened, quiet and rather airless, still rooms, where they burn various kinds of ancient woods, like Chinese oud and amber (the real thing has a tremendous scent when burned, although none at all as a 'stone/resin') resin. There are many great secrets to this practice, including the use of 'purple' dye - same as what the Hebrew 'tent-of-the-presence' priests use.

They 'read the smoke.'

The Romantic Poets (1800 - 1850) were also known to have an interest in opium.

I just told a fanatical Campbell's Soup X-tian: 'Did you come back with the feather that you plucked from the angelic being that you were with when you were last up there?'

That kind of talk doesn't necessarily shut anyone up, of course.

But here, here is some music they play up there though...

Helps if you are being louche while you listen. ('Louche' is the French expression for the dripping process of water through a sugar cube into the absinthe that turns it to the pearlescent white liquid which has all the components required to make the green fairy appear. I mean sure, I could tell you the real secret to it - that is, what you can do in modern times when they have supposedly toned-done the active ingredients in the commercially-available absinthe. Simple too. Do you want to know?

Also, maybe you have to adopt the same postures that the romance poets all seem to have done, when they were being portrait painted... Notice how they all stick their hands under their chins like that? LOL

Must be 'a thing.' Better do that, then.