The Seven Sisters of Sleep: A Journey Through Intoxicants

Early users of tobacco in Russia had their noses cut off. Repeat offenders - their heads!

In Rome, Pope Innocent XII excommunicated anyone who dared to smoke inside St. Peter’s.

In 14th-century Egypt, marijuana users had their teeth yanked out — one by one — as punishment.

And in China, opium smokers were sometimes strangled in public as a warning to the rest.

Even betel chewers in colonial outposts were fined, flogged, or branded for staining the streets red.

That’s how terrified authorities in any geography, in any century, have always been of plants and mushrooms. As terrified as they are today. Because counterculture has always been nothing but government against nature. Then as now, rulers fought to crush the very substances that let people dream, rebel, and slip outside control.

These and other fun anecdotes come from a forgotten Victorian book called The Seven Sisters of Sleep by Mordecai Cooke. Published in 1860, it’s the first global catalog of intoxicants — opium, hashish, betel, tobacco, coca, mushrooms, and alcohol.

Seven sisters, seven lucid systems of sleep.

Cooke wasn’t using “sleep” in the narrow sense of bedtime rest. For him, sleep was a poetic umbrella for all states that soothed, intoxicated, transported, or expanded the mind. Each sister altered consciousness as well as brought oblivion, dream, and ecstasy.

The Forgotten Book: A Window into the Past

And here’s where it gets wild: a copy of Cooke’s book sat in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. A young mathematics lecturer named Charles Dodgson — better known as Lewis Carroll — was a regular visitor. Carroll, who had seven sisters of his own and who suffered lifelong insomnia, was instantly drawn to this strange volume. Did the Fly Agaric mushroom chapter help seed Alice in Wonderland? You tell me.

And - while it’s got nothing to do with our story - I can’t resist mentioning that Cooke was also the first editor of a magazine with the loveliest name: Science-Gossip: A Monthly Medium of Interchange and Gossip for Students and Lovers of Nature.

Don’t you love it? That’s what we - Lovers of Nature - do here: gossip about science.

Before we chase rabbits down holes, let’s linger on the beauty of this book. Cooke did something almost no Victorian dared: he wrote without prejudice about non-Europeans, treating their sacred plants with curiosity rather than disdain. That makes Seven Sisters of Sleep more than just a plant survey — it’s a Victorian door into consciousness itself.

The Sisters of Sleep: A Closer Look

So let’s meet the sisters, one by one.

Opium - The Eldest

Now, 19th-century medicine was obsessed with this stuff. If you had a cough — opium. Toothache — opium. Couldn’t sleep — opium. Child crying? Opium. Honestly, if your horse sneezed, probably opium too. It was the Swiss Army knife of Victorian pharmacology.

Cooke even complains in Seven Sisters of Sleep that samples of opium tested by doctors often contained… no opium at all. Already in the 1860s they were cutting and diluting it so badly that sometimes you were basically buying colored chalk. That’s the Victorian equivalent of today’s Amanita gummies on Etsy: 95% don’t even contain Amanita. Same scam, different century.

Meanwhile, polite society was having its own little opium romance. The same ladies who led temperance rallies — preaching against the evils of alcohol, demanding their husbands swear off whiskey — would come home from those meetings, nerves all frazzled, and quietly sip their laudanum drops. Which, by the way, is just opium in wine. ‘Say no to booze, darling — but excuse me while I micro-dose morphine.’

And this wasn’t just drawing-room gossip. This was geopolitics. Britain literally went to war with China in the 19th century to protect its right to sell opium. Imagine that: two Opium Wars, fought not to ban a drug, but to force another country to stay addicted. It’s the original Big Pharma play.

Fast-forward to now, and what do we have? The opioid epidemic. Doctors again prescribing it like candy, only this time with a Purdue Pharma label. Different logos, same addiction.

Cooke saw opium as the queen bee among the Seven Sisters. Today, we’d call it a case study in how medicine, commerce, and politics turn a flower into a global crisis.

And that little warning about adulterated opium? I’ll say it again: the same problem plagues Amanita now. Most products on the US market claiming to contain fly agaric actually don’t. You can’t farm Amanita; you can only forage it. So if anyone says otherwise — spit them in the eye.

Hashish — The Assassin Sister

Today cannabis is a wellness darling — CBD bath bombs, THC gummies, weed as self-care. But it still drags the same paranoia it’s carried since the 19th century. Authorities lumped it in with opium and morphine, painted it as guilty by association, and the stain never fully washed off.

Cooke tells the Crusader story: Saracen fighters blitzed on hashish, charging into Christian camps like lunatics, no fear of death. That’s where we get the word assassin. Cannabis literally rebranded murder.

And then there are the Scythians. We know of them from Herodotus. In the Fifth century BC, they called him the father of history. Honestly, more like the father of travel gossip. Half the time he’s documenting, half the time he’s making things up — but always entertaining.

He says the Scythians — wild horse nomads of the steppe of modern Ukraine — would toss hemp seeds onto red-hot stones, shut themselves inside little tents, and then just… scream. Full-on, lungs-out shrieking. Rolling around in the smoke, naked, ecstatic. He literally writes: ‘they shout for joy.’

That’s the world’s first Burning Man. No DJs, no costumes — just warriors turning a sweat tent into a cannabis volcano. First hotbox rave in human history.

Imagine the reviews: Five stars. Naked, screaming, real. Would totally hotbox again.

And back to Cooke’s time: cannabis was everywhere in America. Pharmacies sold it. Hemp grew in fields. No one panicked. Until suddenly, the script flipped - mild little hashish became a menace. Reefer madness was born.

That’s cannabis. Sacred smoke. Assassin fuel. Scythian scream therapy. Hippie herb. Wellness aisle darling. And still, somehow, contraband.

Betel - The Red-Mouthed Sister

Not psychedelic, not narcotic — more like the Monster Energy of the tropics. People across South and Southeast Asia have chewed areca nut wrapped in betel leaf with a dash of lime for centuries.

The effect? Mild buzz, little kick. And the side effect? Your spit turns bright red. So the streets look like a zombie crime scene, and everyone’s smiles straight out of a horror movie.

Colonial officers freaked out. They fined people, flogged them, even branded them for spitting. Imagine being branded a criminal because you stained the sidewalk. Meanwhile, the locals are like, ‘What’s the problem? This is networking. This is flirting. This is how I say hi.’

That’s the thing: betel was social glue. You didn’t swipe right — you offered a betel nut. You didn’t close a deal with a contract — you closed it with a chew. Whole empires running on red spit.

The third sister of sleep: Betel. Less of a high, more of a lifestyle. The original energy can — just a little messier. Some like it red.

Tobacco — The Diva Sister

This one went global faster than TikTok. Smoked, chewed, snuffed — it was everywhere.

The name ‘nicotine’ comes from Jean Nicot, a 16th-century French diplomat. He brought tobacco seeds from Portugal to France and presented them to Catherine de’ Medici as medicine for her headaches. Imagine showing up to the queen with a joint like, ‘*Ma’am, this will fix your migraines.’* And she bought it. In France, tobacco became known as herbe à Nicot — Nicot’s herb. That’s how we got nicotine. A cure that turned into a curse.

Cooke’s book is full of delicious little stories. During the plague, it was said that tobacconists never caught it. Probably because everyone stayed six feet away from the smoke. At Eton, schoolboys were literally beaten if they refused their morning pipe. Can you imagine? ‘Headmaster, I swear, I’m not addicted yet!’ Whack.

And Havana? Cooke writes that outside the shops they hung little iron boxes filled with burning coals, so anyone passing by could light a cigar. Like public Wi-Fi, but for smoke.

Victorian language was priceless. He calls a person who hates tobacco a misocapnic. That’s right. Not a non-smoker, not an anti-smoker — a misocapnic. Honestly sounds like a Marvel villain. Doctor Misocapnic: sworn enemy of cigars.

And my favorite line in this chapter: ‘An American is no more furnished without his pipe or cigar than a house is furnished without a looking glass.’ Translation: no cigar, no personality.

But here’s what Cooke didn’t see — the real story started long before Nicot, long before Havana, long before Eton. Tobacco wasn’t invented for addiction. It was a medicine of clarity. Indigenous nations used it in ceremony, with intention. Not to numb, but to sharpen. Not a party trick — a sacred tool.

And look at what it became. Packaged, sold, industrialized, weaponized. The pipe of clarity turned into the Marlboro pack. The medicine turned into mass marketing. And someone had to push that shift. Was it the people? Or was it the machine that governs what people consume?

That’s tobacco: clarity twisted into commerce. From sacred leaf to global empire. The diva with a cigar, and a long trail of smoke behind her.

Coca — The Sweetheart Sister

Not cocaine. Coca. The leaves chewed in the Andes for thousands of years.

High altitude, thin air, endless work in the fields — coca was the loving helper. You tuck a handful of leaves in your cheek, mix it with a little lime, and suddenly you can breathe easier, walk longer, carry heavier. It wasn’t about a buzz; it was about survival. The plant said: I’ve got you.

And then along comes Europe. And instead of listening, they did what they always do — they took a sacred leaf, put it in a lab, cranked it up to 100, and made a monster. Powdered it, snorted it, injected it, bottled it. Suddenly the gentle Andean helper turned into a party drug for rich idiots.

In 1860 Sigmund freaking Freud turned 4 years old. A quarter-century later he becomes a father of psychoanalysis, as well as the original cocaine influencer. This man was writing love letters to coke. He thought it cured depression, indigestion, fatigue, you name it. He literally prescribed it to his friends, his patients, even his fiancée. The guy who built modern psychology was out here pushing rails like a hype man at Studio 54.

And he wasn’t alone. Doctors, writers, politicians — everybody in Europe was enamored. Coca wine, coca tonics, coca cigarettes. It was the Red Bull of the 19th century. Except instead of giving you wings, it gave you nosebleeds and heart attacks.

Meanwhile, in the Andes, people just kept chewing their leaves. The same way they always had. Loving, steady, supportive.

That’s coca - A medicine of endurance and breath. Until the West kidnapped her, stripped her down, and turned her into cocaine.

Amanita Muscaria — The Polka Dot Sister

The red-capped, white-dotted Amanita muscaria — the fairy tale mushroom, the Siberian sacrament. Dear to my heart. And that’s why I was dying to see what Cooke would say.

And here’s the thing: he doesn’t give us much. A whole book on intoxicants, written by a mycologist — a mushroom man — and Amanita is almost an afterthought. But what he does say is fascinating. He talks about Siberia, where the shamans used it for ecstasy and visions. Not just eating it, but passing it on — literally drinking the urine of someone who had already consumed it, because the active compounds survive digestion and come out stronger the second time around. That was the recycling system. Cooke also notes its presence in northern Europe, in Norway and Lapland, where reindeer were known to eat the caps and stagger around drunk on it.

And then… silence. He stops. That’s it. As if Amanita wasn’t worth more than a footnote. Which to me is insane. This mushroom is a universe.

I wonder what Cooke would say about it today. Would he talk about how people keep confusing Amanita with psychedelic mushrooms like psilocybin? Different families, different chemistry, different journey. It’s like comparing an ant with a whale — no common ground at all.

Would he notice how modern products that claim to have Amanita usually don’t? How it’s been turned into a gimmick, packaged and sold, stripped of its real power, misunderstood and abused?

In Cooke’s England, Amanita was folklore. Fly poison. A naturalist’s curiosity. In Siberia, it was a doorway to spirit. And today, it’s a mushroom everybody talks about but almost nobody actually understands. Amanita is something stranger, older, harder to pin down. A sister who refuses to be simplified.

Alcohol — The Respectable Sister

Fermented drinks, from Andean chicha to European wine to Victorian gin. Cooke throws her in almost casually, like: oh yeah, the drunk sister too.

And isn’t it funny? The one intoxicant that actually wrecks more lives than all the others combined… is the one we dress up in tuxedos and serve at weddings. Opium, hashish, coca — scandal, prison, war. Alcohol? Champagne toast.

Cooke lists it alongside the exotic sisters as if it’s just another curiosity. But by the 19th century, booze was the backbone of empire. Gin for the working class. Rum for the colonies. Brandy for the officers. Every culture had its brew, its daily ritual of knocking yourself sideways.

That’s the irony of this whole lineup: the deadliest sister got the best PR. She was the respectable one, the normal one, the legal one. And yet she’s the one that toppled families, bankrupted men, filled graveyards.

This sister is neither exotic nor mysterious. She’s just everywhere. The one standing next to you at weddings, board meetings, funerals. The one clinking glasses in victory and drowning sorrows in defeat. Alcohol isn’t holding society’s hand as it stumbles down the stairs — alcohol is the stairs. And half the time, she pulls the whole house down with her.

The Legacy of the Seven Sisters

And that brings us to today. Because here’s the thing: when it comes to the Seven Sisters, what survives isn’t the substance itself, it’s the myth. The panic. The misunderstanding. People don’t know their facts. We fret about the wrong dangers, we demonize the wrong plants, we normalize the wrong poisons.

That’s why we gossip about science here. Not to romanticize, not to demonize — but to learn. To tell the difference between medicine and abuse, between myth and fact, between what helps you live mindfully and what just numbs you until the weekend.

Yes, I see addiction all the time — alcohol in boardrooms, cocaine in finance, stimulants in the fast track. People terrified of innocent mushrooms like Amanita, while they’re already dependent on whiskey or coffee. The irony is, Amanita can actually help break alcohol dependency. It’s not a crutch; it’s a reset — when used intentionally, with respect.

So what do we do with the sisters? We don’t banish them. We learn their stories. We recognize that each one — opium diluted, coca powdered, tobacco twisted, alcohol glorified, Amanita misunderstood — reflects a human desire: to soothe, to endure, to heal, to transcend.

Let’s meet the sisters without fear. Let’s learn, understand, live mindfully, and tell better stories about the tools we use to survive. Because the only dependency worth worrying about is the one that steals your future without you even noticing.

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And if you’ve been wondering why I mix meditation, breathwork, mushrooms, and all that book-and-movie wisdom into career coaching — the answer is here