Ever since the arrival of the first Europeans in the New World, Peyote has provoked controversy, suppression, and persecution. Condemned by the Spanish conquerors for its "satanic trickery", and attacked more recently by local governments and religious groups, the plant has nevertheless continued to play a major sacramental role among the Indians of Mexico, while its use has spread to the North American tribes in the last hundred years. The persistence and growth of the Peyote cult constitute a fascinating chapter in the history of the New World - and a challenge to the anthropologists and psychologists, botanists and pharmacologists who continue to study the plant and its constituents in connection with human affairs.

We might logically call this woolly Mexican cactus the prototype of the New World hallucinogens. It was one of the first to be discovered by Europeans and was unquestionably the most spectacular vision-inducing plant encountered by the Spanish conquerors. They found Peyote firmly established in native religions, and their efforts to stamp out this practice drove it into hiding in the hills, where its sacramental use has persisted to the present time.

How old is the Peyote cult? An early Spanish chronicler, Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, estimated on the basis of several historical events recorded in Indian chronology that Peyote was known to the Chichimeca and Toltec at least 1890 years before the arrival of the Europeans. This calculation would give the "divine plant" of Mexico an economic history extending over a period of some two millennia. Then Carl Lumholtz, the Danish ethnologist who did pioneer work among the Indians of Chihuahua, suggested that the Peyote cult is far older. He showed that a symbol employed in the Tarahumara Indian Peyote ceremony appeared in ancient ritualistic carvings preserved in Mesoamerican lava rocks. More recently, archaeological discoveries in dry caves and rock shelters in Texas have yielded specimens of Peyote. These specimens, found in a context suggesting ceremonial use, indicate that its use is more than three thousand years old.

The earliest European records concerning this sacred cactus are those of Sahagún, who lived from 1499 to 1590 and who dedicated most of his adult life to the Indians of Mexico. His precious, first-hand observations were not published until the nineteenth century. Consequently, credit for the earliest published account must go to Juan Cardenas, whose observations on the marvelous secrets of the Indies were published as early as 1591.

Sahagún's writings are among the most important of all the early chroniclers. He described Peyote use among the Chichimeca, of the primitive desert plateau of the north, recording for posterity: "There is another herb like tunas [Opuntia spp.] of the earth. It is called Peiotl. It is white. It is found in the north country. Those who eat or drink it see visions either frightful or laughable. This intoxication lasts two or three days and then ceases. It is a common food of the Chichimeca, for it sustains them and gives them courage to fight and not feel fear nor hunger nor thirst. And they say that it protects them from all danger."

It is not known whether or not the Chichimeca were the first Indians to discover the psychoactive properties of Peyote. Some students believe that the Tarahumara Indians, living where Peyote abounded, were the first to discover its use and that it spread from them to the Cora, the Huichol, and other tribes. Since the plant grows in many scattered localities in Mexico, it seems probable that its intoxicating properties were independently discovered by a number of tribes.

Several seventeenth-century Spanish Jesuits testified that the Mexican Indians used Peyote medicinally and ceremonially for many ills and that when intoxicated with the cactus they saw "horrible visions". Padre Andréa Pérez de Ribas, a seventeenth-century Jesuit who spent sixteen years in Sinaloa, reported that Peyote was usually drunk but that its use, even medicinally, was forbidden and punished, since it was connected with "heathen rituals and superstitions" to contact evil spirits through "diabolic fantasies".

The first full description of the living cactus was offered by Dr Francisco Hernández, who as personal physician of King Philip II of Spain was sent to study Aztec medicine. In his ethnobotanical study of New Spain, Dr Hernández described "peyotl", as the plant was called in the Nahuatl language of the Aztecs: "The root is of nearly medium size, sending forth no branches or leaves above the ground, but with a certain woolliness adhering to it on account of which it could not aptly be figured by me. Both men and women are said to be harmed by it. It appears to be of a sweetish taste and moderately hot. Ground up and applied to painful joints, it is said to give relief. Wonderful properties are attributed to this root, if any faith can be given to what is commonly said among them on this point. It causes those devouring it to be able to foresee and to predict things…."

In the latter part of the seventeenth century, a Spanish missionary in Nayarit recorded the earliest account of a Peyote ritual. Of the Cora tribe, he reported: "Close to the musician was seated the leader of the singing, whose business it was to mark time. Each had his assistants to take his place when he should become fatigued. Nearby was place a tray filled with Peyote, which is a diabolical root that is ground up and drunk by them so that they may not become weakened by the exhausting effects of so long a function, which they begin by forming as large a circle of men and women as could occupy the space that had been swept off for this purpose. One after the other, they went dancing in a ring or marking time with their feet, keeping in the middle the musician and choir-master whom they invited, and singing in the same unmusical tune that he set them. They would dance all night, from five o'clock in the evening to seven o'clock in the morning, without stopping nor leaving the circle. When the dance was ended, all stood who could hold themselves on their feet; for the majority, from the Peyote and wine which they drank, were unable to utilize their legs."

The ceremony among the Cora, Huichol, and Tarahumara Indians has probably challenged little in content over the centuries; it still consists, in great part, of dancing.

The modern Huichol Peyote ritual is the closest to the pre-Colonial Mexican ceremonies. Sahagún's description of the Teochichimeca ritual could very well be a description of the contemporary Huichol ceremony, for these Indians still assemble together in the desert 300 miles northeast of their homeland in the Sierra Madre mountains of western Mexico, still sing all night, all day, still weep exceedingly, and still so esteem Peyote above any other psychotropic plant that the sacred mushrooms, Morning Glories, "Datura", and other indigenous hallucinogens are consigned to the realm of sorcerers.

Most of the early records in Mexico were left by missionaries who opposed the use of Peyote in religious practice. To them Peyote had no place in Christianity because of its pagan associations. Since the Spanish ecclesiastes were intolerant of any cult but their own, fierce persecution resulted. But the Indians were reluctant to give up their Peyote cults established on centuries of tradition.

The suppression of Peyote, however, went to great lengths. For example, a priest near San Antonio, Texas, published a manual in 1760, containing questions to be asked of converts. Included were the following: "Have you eaten the flesh of man? Have you eaten Peyote?" Another priest, Padre Nidolas de Leon, similarly examined potential converts: "Art thou a soothsayer? Dost thou foretell events by reading omens, interpreting dreams or by tracing circles and figures on water? Dost thou garnish with flower garlands the places where idols are kept? Dost thou suck to blood of others? Dost thou wander about at night, calling upon demons to help thee? Hast thou drunk Peyote or given it to others to drink, in order to discover secrets or to discover where stolen or lost articles were?"

During the last decade of the nineteenth century, the explorer Carl Lumholtz observed the use of Peyote among the Indians of the Sierra Madre Occidental of Mexico, primarily the Huichol and Tarahumara, and he reported on the Peyote ceremony and on various kinds of cacti employed with "Lophophora williamsii" or in its stead.

However, no anthropologist ever participated in or observed a Peyote hunt until the 1960s, when anthropologists and a Mexican writer were permitted by Huichols to accompany several pilgrimages. Once a year, the Huichols make a sacred trip to gather Hikuri. The trek is led by an experienced "mara'akame" or shaman, who is in contact with Tatewari (Our grandfather-fire). Tatewari is the oldest Huichol god, also known as Hikuri, the Peyote-god. He is personified with Peyote plants on his hands and feet, and he interprets all the deities to the modern shamans, often through visions, sometimes indirectly through Kauyumari (the Sacred Deer Person and culture hero). Tatewari led the first Peyote pilgrimage far from the present area inhabited by the nine thousand Huichols into Wirikuta, an ancestral region where Peyote abounds. Guided by the shaman, the participants, usually ten to fifteen in number, take on the identity of deified ancestors, as the follow Tatewari "to find their life".

The Peyote hunt is literally a hunt. Pilgrims carry tobacco gourds, a necessity for the journey's ritual. Water gourds are often taken to transport water back from Wirikuta. Often the only food taken for the stay in Wirikuta is tortillas. The pilgrims, however, eat Peyote while in Wirikuta. They must travel great distances. Today, much of the trek is done by car, but formerly the Indians walked some two hundred miles.

The preparation for gathering Peyote involves ritual confession and purification. Public recitation of all sexual encounters must be made, but no show of shame, resentment, or jealousy, nor any expression of hostility, occurs. For each offense, the shaman makes a knot in a string which, at the end of the ritual, is burned. Following the confession, the group, preparing to set out for Wirikuta - an area located in San Luís Potosí - must be cleansed before journeying to paradise.

Upon arriving within sight of the sacred mountains of Wirikuta, the pilgrims are ritually washed and pray for rain and fertility. Amid the praying and chanting of the shaman, the dangerous crossing into the Otherworld begins. This passage has two stages: first, the Gateway of the Clashing Clouds, and second, the opening of the Clouds. These do not represent actual localities but exist only in the "geography of the mind"; to the participants the passing from one to the other is an event filled with emotion.

Upon arrival at the place where the Peyote is to be hunted, the shaman begins ceremonial practices, telling stories from the ancient Peyote tradition and invoking protection for the events to come. Those on their first pilgrimage are blindfolded, and the participants are led by the shaman to the "cosmic threshold" which only he can see. All stop, light candles, and murmur prayers while the shaman, imbued with supernatural forces, chants.

Finally, Peyote is found. The shaman has seen the deer tracks. He draws his arrow and shoots the cactus. The pilgrims make offerings to this first Hikuri. More Peyote is sought, basketfuls of the plant eventually being collected. On the following day, more Peyote is collected, some of which is to be shared with those who remain at home. The rest is to be sold to the Cora and Tarahumara Indians, who use Peyote but do not have a quest.

The ceremony of distributing Tobacco is then carried out. Arrows are placed pointing to the four points of the compass; at midnight a fire is built. According to the Huichol, Tobacco belongs to fire. The shaman prays, placing the Tobacco before the fire, touching it with feathers, then distributing it to each pilgrim who puts it into his gourd, symbolising the birth of Tobacco.

The Huichol Peyote hunt is seen as a return to Wirikuta or Paradise, the archetypal beginning and end of a mythical past. A modern Huichol "mara'kame" expressed it as follows: "One day all will be as you have seen it there, in Wirikuta. The First People will come back. The fields will be pure and crystalline, all this is not clear to me, but in five more years I will know it, through more revelations. The world will end, and the unity will be here again. But only for pure Huichol."

Among the Tarahumara, the Peyote cult is less important. Many buy their supplies of the cactus, usually from Huichol. Although the two tribes live several hundred miles apart and are not closely related, they share the same name for Peyote - Hikuri - and the two cults have many points of resemblance.

The Tarahumara Peyote dance may be held at any time during the year for health, tribal prosperity, or for simple worship. It is sometimes incorporated into other established festivals. The principal part of the ceremony consists of dances and prayers followed by a day of feasting. Oak and pine logs are dragged in for a fire and oriented in an east-west direction. The Tarahumara name for the dance means "moving about the fire", and except for Peyote itself, the fire is the most important element.

The leader has several women assistants who prepare the Hikuri plants for use, grinding the fresh cacti on a metate, being careful not to lose one drop of the resulting liquid. An assistant catches all liquid in a gourd, even the water used to wash the metate. The leader sits west of the fire, and a cross may be erected opposite him. In front of the leader, a small hole is dug into which he may spit. A Peyote may be set before him on its side or inserted into a root-shaped hole bored in the ground. He inverts half a gourd over the Peyote, turning it to scratch a circle in the earth around the cactus. Removing the gourd temporarily, he draws a cross in the dust to represent the world, thereupon replacing the gourd. This apparatus serves as a resonator for the rasping stick: Peyote is set under the resonator, since it enjoys the sound.

Incense from burning copal is then offered to the cross. After facing east, kneeling, and crossing themselves, the leader's assistants are given deer-hoof rattles or bells to shake during the dance.

The ground-up Peyote is kept in a pot or crock near the cross and is served in a gourd by an assistant: he makes three rounds of the fire if carrying it to an ordinary participant. All the songs praise Peyote for its protection of the tribe and for its "beautiful intoxication".

As with the Huichol, healing ceremonies are often carried out. The Tarahumara leader cures at daybreak. He first terminates dancing by giving three raps. He rises, accompanied by a young assistant, and circling the patio, he touches every forehead with water. He touches the patient thrice, and placing his stick to the patient's head, he rasps three times. The dust produced by the rasping, even though infinitesimal, is a powerful health- and life-giver and is saved for medicinal use.

The final ritual sends Peyote home. The leader reaches toward the rising sun and rasps thrice. "In the early morning, Hikuli had come from San Ignacio and from Satapolio riding on beautiful green doves, to feast with the Tarahumara at the end of the dance when the people sacrifice food and eat and drink. Having bestowed his blessings, Hikuli forms himself into a ball and flies to his shelter at the time."

Peyote is employed as a religious sacrament among more than forty American Indian tribes in many parts of the United States and western Canada. Because of its wide use, Peyote early attracted the attention of scientists and legislators and engendered heated and, unfortunately, often irresponsible opposition to its free use in American Indian ceremonies.

It was the Kiowa and Comanche Indians, apparently, who in visits to a native group in northern Mexico, first learned of this sacred American plant. Indians in the United States had been restricted to reservations by the last half of the nineteenth century, and much of their cultural heritage was disintegrating and disappearing. Faced with this disastrous inevitability, a number of Indian leaders, especially from tribes re-located in Oklahoma, began actively to spread a new kind of Peyote cult adapted to the needs of the more advanced Indian groups of the United States.

The Kiowa and Comanche were apparently the most active proponents of the new religion. Today it is the Kiowa-Comanche type of Peyote ceremony that, with slight modifications, prevails north of the Mexican border. This ceremony, to judge from the rapid spread of the new Peyote religion, must have appealed strongly to the Plains tribes and later to other groups.

Success in spreading the new Peyote cult resulted in strong opposition to its practice from missionary and local governmental groups. The ferocity of this opposition often led local governments to enact repressive legislation, in spite of overwhelming scientific opinion that Indians should be permitted to use Peyote in religious practices. In an attempt to protect their rights to free religious activity, American Indians organised the Peyote cult into a legally recognised religious group, the Native American Church. This religious movement, unknown in the United States before 1885, numbered 13,300 members in 1922. Membership of the Native American Church at the present time is claimed to be a quarter of a million Indians.

Indians of the United States, living far from the natural area of Peyote, must use the dried top of the cactus, the so-called mescal button, legally acquired either by collection or purchase and distribution through the United States postal services. Some American Indians still send pilgrims to gather the cactus in the fields, but most tribal groups in the United States must procure their supplies by purchase and mail.

A member may hold a meeting in gratitude for the recovery of health, the safe return from a voyage, or the success of a Peyote pilgrimage: it may be held to celebrate the birth of a baby, to name a child, on the first four birthdays of a child, for doctoring, or even for general thanksgiving. The Kickapoo held a Peyote service for the dead, and the body of the deceased is brought into the ceremonial teepee. The Kiowa may have five services at Easter, four at Christmas and Thanksgiving, six at New Year. Especially among the Kiowa, meetings are held only on Saturday night. Anyone who is a member of the Peyote cult may be a leader or "roadman". There are certain taboos which the roadman, and sometimes all participants, must observe. The older men refrain from eating salt the day before and after a meeting, and they may not bathe for several days following a Peyote service. There seem to be no sexual taboos, as in the Mexican tribes, and the ceremony is free of licentiousness. Women are admitted to meetings to eat Peyote and to pray, but they do not usually participate in the singing and drumming. After the age of ten, children may attend meetings but do not take part until they are adults.

Peyote ceremonies differ from tribe to tribe. The typical Plains Indian service takes place usually in a teepee erected over a carefully made altar of earth or clay; the teepee is taken down as soon as the all-night ceremony is over. Some tribes hold the ceremony in a wooden round-house with a permanent altar of cement inside, and the Osage and Quapaw Indians often have electrically lighted round-houses.

The Father Peyote (a large "mescal button" or dried top of the Peyote plant) is placed on a cross or rosette of sage leaves at the center of the altar. This crescent-shaped altar, symbol of the spirit of Peyote, is never taken from the altar during the ceremony. As soon as the Father Peyote has been put in place, all talking stops, and all eyes are directed toward the altar.

Tobacco and corn shuck or blackjack oak leaves are passed around the circle of worshippers, each making a cigarette for use during the leader's opening prayer. The next procedure involves purification of the bag of mescal buttons in cedar incense. Following this blessing, the roadman takes four mescal buttons from the bag which is then passed around in a clockwise direction, each worshipper taking four. More Peyote may be called for at any time during the ceremony, the amount consumed being left to personal discretion. Some peyotists eat up to thirty-six buttons a night, and some boast of having ingested upwards of fifty. An average amount is probably twelve.

Singing starts with the roadman, the initial song always being the same, sung or chanted in a high nasal tone. Translated, the song means: "May the gods bless me, help me, and give me power and understanding."

Sometimes, the roadman may be asked to treat a patient. This procedure varies in form. The curing ritual is almost always simple, consisting of praying and frequent use of the sign of the cross.

Peyote eaten in ceremony has assumed the role of a sacrament in part because of its biological activity: the sense of well-being that it induces and the psychological effects (the chief of which is the kaleidoscopic play of richly colored visions) often experienced by those who indulge in its use. Peyote is considered sacred by native Americans, a divine "messenger" enabling the individual to communicate with God without the medium of a priest. It is an earthly representative of God to many peyotists. "God told the Delawares to do good even before He sent Christ to the whites who killed him…" an Indian explained to an anthropologist. "God made Peyote. It is His power. It is the power of Jesus. Jesus came afterwards on this earth, after Peyote…. God (through Peyote) told the Delawares the same things that Jesus told the whites."

Correlated with its use as a religious sacrament is its presumed value as a medicine. Some Indians claim that, if Peyote is used correctly, all other medicines are superfluous. Its supposed curative properties are responsible probably more than any other attribute for the rapid diffusion of the Peyote cult in the United States.

The Peyote religion is a medico-religious cult. In considering native American medicines, one must always bear in mind the difference between the aboriginal concept of a medicinal agent and that of our modern Western medicine. Primitive societies, in general, cannot conceive of natural death or illness but believe that they are due to supernatural interference. There are two types of "medicines": those with purely physical effects (i.e., to relieve toothache or digestive upsets); and the medicines, "par excellence", that put the medicine man into communication, through a variety of hallucinations, with the malevolent spirits that cause illness and death.

The factors responsible for the rapid growth and tenacity of the Peyote religion in the United States are many and interrelated. Among the most obvious, however, and those most often cited, are: the ease of legally obtaining supplies of the hallucinogen; lack of federal restraint; cessation of intertribal warfare; reservation life with consequent intermarriage and peaceful exchange of social and religious ideas; ease of transportation and postal communication; and the general attitude of resignation toward encroaching Western culture.

If the doors of perception were cleansed every
thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.
For man has closed himself up, till he sees all
things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.

William Blake
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793)

In 1954 the famous English writer Aldous Huxley introduced mescaline to popular attention, when he published The Doors of Perception, a chronicle of his personal experience with this strange and mysterious drug. In 1931, while working on his novel Brave New World, Huxley had read "with a passionate and growing interest" the English translation of Louis Lewin's 1924 treatise on psychoactive drugs, Phantastica. Huxley wrote two short essays that year, describing the need for "a new pleasure," a non-toxic, beneficent pharmacological means "to take occasional holidays from reality" and said "the man who invents such a substance will be counted among the greatest benefactors of suffering humanity." Huxley gave literary creation to such a substance in Brave New World, and called it Soma after the ancient Aryan entheogen. His Soma was purely imaginary, with three effects, "euphoric, hallucinant, or sedative," in Huxley's own words, "an impossible combination." On 6 May 1953, Canadian psychiatrist Humphry Osmond administered 400 mg of mescaline sulfate to Huxley, which cleansed his "doors of perception" and inspired his famous and controversial essay by that name. Huxley was to devote the last decade of his life to research on what he called "phanerothymes" or "psychodelics"—entheogens—and in his final book, Island, the fanciful Soma of Brave New World gave way to the moksha-medicine, a cultivated mushroom patterned after the Mexican teonanácatl which had recently been discovered by V.P. and R.G. Wasson. Among other uses, Huxley's moksha-medicine was employed by residents of Pala, the Asian tropical island of his final book's title, to ease the transition from life to death, a use first proposed by V.P. Wasson five years earlier. Huxley availed himself of the moksha-medicine for the great transition, taking two 100 mcg doses of LSD as he lay dying of cancer on 22 November 1963.

Huxley (like Blake) was a visionary, and his essay on the effects of mescaline was destined to stimulate widespread interest in, and use of mescaline and other entheogenic drugs. By the late sixties, when the non-scientific use of entheogens had attained its maximum visibility, mescaline was, next to LSD, the best-known and most widely-used entheogenic substance... or was it? Although authentic mescaline was available as a research drug until 1965, there is no evidence that it was widely distributed to the general public. Legislation proscribing mescaline and allied entheogens, enacted between 1965 and 1968, combined with the high cost of manufacture, led to the virtual disappearance of mexcaline from the market. What, then, of the millions of doses of "mescaline" or "organic mescaline" which were widely sold throughout the United States and other countries in the late sixties and early seventies... which are still being sold to this day? What of the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of individuals who speak with reverence of their mescaline experiences, contrasting them with experiences with LSD, which is almost invariably considered to be inferior?

One thing is certain. Mescaline has been more widely misinterpreted than any other entheogenic drug on the illicit market. It is highly unlikely that more than a few tens of thousands of people have ever ingested authentic mescaline in pure form. Everyone else has been "ripped off" as the saying goes. This... will explain in detail where mescaline comes from, what mescaline is and how it may be identified. Moreover, it will trace the etiology of this most persistent and pervasive drug hoax, an interesting study which promises to afford great insight into the influence of user expectation on the effects of an entheogenic drug. Along the way, the reader may peruse some interesting information, penetrating at once the arcanum arcanorum of New World Indian spirituality and the obscurity of modern science.

Pre-Columbian Horizons

Mescaline is the main active principle of Lophophora williamsii, a small, hemispherical, spineless cactus native to northern Mexico and the southwestern United States. Lophophora williamsii grows in calcareous desert, in river valleys, generally under vegetation. Its growth is painfully slow, and the plant may require 15 years to mature. At maturity the cactus may attain a diameter of 12 cm, rising some 3-6 cm above the surface of the ground. The plant has a long, tapering, carrot-like root which may be 30 cm or more in length at maturity. Often accessory heads will sprout from this root, and small, tight clusters of heads are common. The flowers are pink to whitish, solitary, appearing at the crown of the cactus, surrounded by a mass of whitish hairs.

In 1560, Spanish Franciscan friar Bernadino de Sahagún first wrote about this plant:

Peiotl or péyotl was the name of this cactus in the Náhuatl language, tongue of the Mexicas (or Aztecs, as they are today known; the Chichimecas were their forefathers). The word probably meant something like "furry thing" to the Aztecs, as it referred at once to a species of silky caterpillar and the cactus under discussion, which is crowned with tufts of silky hairs. There is every indication that the Aztecs (who lived in the Valley of Mexico, site of the modern capital) and other indigenous groups who lived in northern Mexico revered this cactus and used it as an adjunct to their religious rites. R.G. Wasson has proposed that the name péyotl is the origin of a contemporary Mexicanism, piule, referring to entheogens in general, as the term is applied to various inebriants, including some species of entheogenic mushrooms and entheogenic morning glory seeds. This etymology was proposed independently by B.P. Reko.

Under Cortés, the Spaniards conquered Mexico or the Aztec empire in 1521). A Bloody auto-de-fé in persecution of the native religions ensued, destined to convert the unfortunate Indians to the "holy Catholic faith." For the Indians, apostasy alone gave them a chance at survival. There is no indication that any of the Spanish friars like Sahagun ever ingested péyotl or seriously studied its use (indeed, Sahagún's extravagant statement that the effects of péyotl lasted two or three day testifies to this fact). Rather, on 19 June 1620, the "Inquisitors against heresy, depravity and apostasy" formally decreed in Mexico City that:

In a word, use of péyotl and other entheogenic plants was vigorously persecuted by the Spaniards. The document continues:

It bears testimony to the sincerity and integrity of the Mexican Indians, that they continued in the face of this persecution to use péyotl and other entheogenic plants. This use has survived to the present.

In northern Mexico, péyotl is still used as a ritual drug by the Tarahumara, Huichol, Cora and other indigenous groups; the most common name for péyotl in northern Mexico is the Huichol (and Tarahumara) hikuri or hikuli, and variants thereof. These indigenous groups have been the object of anthropological scrutiny for the past century (Anderson 1980; Blosser 1992; Bye 1979a; Furst 1972; Furst 1976; Gerber 1975; La Barre 1938a; La Barre 1957; La Barre 1960; Labra 1991; Lumholtz 1894; Mooney 1896; Myerhoff 1970; Myerhoff 1974; Schultes 1937a; Schultes 1937b; Schultes 1938; Stewart 1987; Urbina 1903; Wasson 1963).

North American Hegira

Use of péyotl has not just survived in modern Mexico. Sometime around 1870, as a central feature of the pan-Indian movement, use of this entheogenic cactus began to spread, diffusing to the north, and péyotl was adopted as a ritual drug by North American indigenous groups. The probable route of diffusion, according to La Barre's classic study The Peyote Cult, was initially to the nomadic Mescalero Apache of the southwest, who learned of péyotl from native groups in northern Mexico. From the Mescalero thence its use spread to the Kiowa-Comanche and ultimately to myriad Plains Indian tribes in the United States and Canada. Some have theorized that péyotl use among these groups supplanted the use of a red bean, the seed of Sophora secundiflora, known and the "mescal bean". However, this assumption has been contested vigorously in a thorough monograph.

There is no question that use of péyotl came to the Plains Indians at the height of the persecution and destruction of Indian culture by whites. Predictably, péyotl use was stigmatized and used by some of the whites to attack the Indians' ways, in such bigoted articles as "Habit indulgence in certain Cactaceous plants among the Indians". In self-defense, and in an attempt to salvage something uniquely Indian from the onslaught of white acculturation, Indian péyotl users allied with anthropologists and civil libertarians to seek protection under the constitutional guarantees of religious freedom. After a tough battle, one of the few Indians were to win, Cheyenne, Kiowa, Ponca, Otoe and Comanche leaders succeeded in incorporating the "Native American Church" in Oklahoma in 1918, with péyotl use as a sacramental observance. Soon the Church had spread to other states, and to Canada in 1954, and there are now more than a quarter of a million members. It is interesting to note that péyotl use met with some resistance among older Indians, still clinging to their cultural heritage. Use of péyotl now includes members of many North American tribes, and this use is grudgingly sanctioned, in spite of federal and state legislation making péyotl a controlled substance. As late as 1964, however, Indians were being convicted of péyotl-related offenses. Presently, there is no uniform federal law in the United States sanctioning the religious use of péyotl by Indians, and at least twenty-three states specifically exempt Indian péyotl users from controlled substances laws, while the state of New York extends such religious exemption also to non-Indians. A New York federal court ruled in 1979 that sacramental use of péyotl could not be restricted solely to Indians, and that same year the "Peyote Way Church of God" was incorporated in the state of Arizona, open to all worshipers, regardless of race.

Péyotl (and later mescaline) was the first entheogen made available to westerners. As previously mentioned, mescaline was at once the first entheogenic compound isolated in pure form, and the first to be synthesized. S. Weir Mitchell and Havelock Ellis are generally credited with bringing the drug to popular attention, although its effects had been studied earlier by others. Mitchell ingested a liquid extract of péyotl afternoon in 1896 (this was an infusion of about six dried cactus heads or "peyote buttons"). After finding himself "deliciously at languid ease" and noticing patterns like stained glass with his eyes closed, he went into a dark room. There he experienced visions that were to lead him to commend péyotl to the world. He was later to describe:

Mitchell sent a supply of dried péyotl to William James, author of The Varieties of Religious Experience, and the man who described the consciousness-altering properties of nitrous oxide. James ateonly one péyotl button, and was "violently sick for 24 hours." He never repeated the experiment, saying he would "take the visions on trust."

One year later, after reading Mitchell's paper, Havelock Ellis ingested a decoction of three péyotl buttons in London. His self-experiment was carried out in a room lit only by flickering firelight, as Ellis felt this would be conducive to visions such as the Indians might experience. His visions were profound, and he wrote vivid accounts of them for the Contemporary Review and the Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution. The former account included the first published description of entheogen-induced synaesthesia. Ellis introduced a number of his friends to péyotl, including poets who were later to write about their visions. He also published an important and pioneering paper on péyotl in the medical literature.

Stimulated by the descriptions of Mitchell and Ellis, European scientists began studies of the psychological effects of péyotl, of extracted mescaline sulfate and, after 1919, of synthetic mescaline. Before the First World War, mescaline research on human subjects was underway at the Kräpolin Clinic in Munich, where researchers Knauer and Maloney injected subcutaneous doses of up to 200 mg mescaline into volunteers who experienced entheogenic effects within four hours. Soon after the end of the war, the German scientist Kurt Beringer conducted approximately sixty mescaline sessions, using as subjects male and female physicians and medical students. The results of this research, in which doses of up to 600 mg were injected subcutaneously, were published in 1927. Meanwhile in Paris, the French pharmacologist Alexandre Rouhier was studying the effects of a péyotl extract on a few volunteers. He published his pharmacological data in an interdisciplinary study of the plant entitled La Plante qui fait les Yeux Émerveilles—Le Peyotl. Heinrich Klüver, an American psychologist, also carried out research into the nature of mescaline inebriation, and published a monograph entitled Mescal [sic]: The "Divine" Plant and its Psychological Effects. In 1933, a Swiss pharmacy began to advertise Peyotl [sic] as a sort of adaptogen, to "restore the individual's balance and calm and promote full expansion of his faculties," leading the Swiss Federal Public Health Service to recommend Peyotl be made available only with a prescription. On the heels of the Europeans and Americans, Erich Guttmann gave mescaline to more than sixty subjects at London's Maudsley Hospital. This research produced some of the best descriptions of mescaline inebriation. During World War II, Nazi physicians at the infamous Dachau concentration camp studied the effects of mescaline as an interrogation aid on thirty prisoners.

Louis Lewin, perhaps the best known researcher of péyotl, published a book about psychoactive drugs in 1924. This was written in German, and bore the title Phantastica: Die Betäubenden und Erregenden Genufsmittel. Für Arzte und Nichtärzte. There was a chapter on péyotl, classified with other drugs as Phantastica, the word Lewin coined for entheogens. The English version of this important work, published in London in 1931, as expained in the introduction to this chapter, caught the attention of Aldous Huxley, and fired his interest in pschopharmaka, eventually leading to his famous mescaline experience in May 1953, immortalized in his essay The Doors of Perception (Huxley 1954). This was an important stimulus to use of entheogens in the sixties, as were the publications on self-experiments with mescaline by French writer Henri Michaux. Sometime before Huxley's famous initiation to entheogens, the American novelist William Burroughs ingested péyotl. He reported on the effects, and mentioned that the drug was legal, in his first book, Junk, originally published as Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict under the pseudonym William Lee. Burroughs commented that, after ingesting four "buttons," "everything I saw looked like a peyote plant," and, other than that curious visual alteration, "I didn't feel any different from ordinary except high like on benny [Benzedrine]. Burroughs' writing on drugs had considerable influence on the Beats, many of whom, like Allen Ginsberg, began to experiement with péyotl, and there were reports in the sixties of "trips" by non-Indians. As a result, the existing legal mail-order market for péyotl buttons began to expand.

In response to spreading use of entheogenic drugs, especially LSD, in the sixties, most countries followed the lead of the United States and illegalized these drugs, in effect making them available, with bureaucratic difficulties, to scientists only. Both péyotl and mescaline were classified as controlled substances with "a high potential for abuse" and "no currently accepted medical use". Simple possession of péyotl and mescaline became criminal offenses. Prior to this legislation, péyotl and mescaline were rather freely available, at least in the United States. There is, however, no evidence that mescaline in pure form was ever widely used by the general public. Rather, most sixties users were introduced to entheogenic drugs by taking LSD. Being inexpensive to manufacture (on a perdose basis), LSD continued to be available after federal and state legislation made it illegal. Mescaline, on the other hand, all but disappeared from the market. Today it is available to researchers as the hydrochloride, hemi-sulfate or sulfate salt, for $71.10 per gram (or $30-$40 for a decent does) from Sigma Chemical Co. (1993), which sells such research compounds labeled "not for drug use." Researchers in the United States must, however, be licensed by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in order to buy mescaline, and must have on file with the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) a research protocol demonstrating their "legitimate" need for the drug. Laboratories using mescaline and other controlled substances are subject to inspection by DEA agents, must have their licenses on display, and must have provisions for safeguarding the drugs, to avoid "diversion" (a curious bureaucratic double entendre).

Mescaline sulfate, probably synthetic, is today available in limited amounts on the illicit market, selling for about $250 a gram. The entire supply however, seems to be taken up by the elite of the illicit drug trade, and this rare compound is not widely distributed. Note that at this price, an average 500 mg dose would cost at least $125! Péyotl "buttons" are considerably more economical. In 1966, the going rate was $15 for 1000 buttons. Owing to the increasing demand and limited supply, this price had jumped to $80 per thousand buttons by 1983; although "green" (fresh) péyotl could still be had for $15 per thousand buttons. By 1987, the price had again jumped to $100 for a thousand buttons, the current price. These prices refer to the legitimate trade between professional peyoteros and the Native American Church. Even at the 1987 price, a five-button dose could be had wholesale for only 50¢—a true bargain!

Drugs alleged to be mescaline have been widely sold on the illicit market since the sixties. Analysis of street drug samples sold as "mescaline" almost invariably shows these to be LSD or PCP (phencyclidine or Sernyl, a veterinary tranquilizer). Amphetamines have on occasion been detected in putative mescaline samples. The rare specimens found to contain mescaline have been crystals or white powder; capsules, not tablets.

Summarizing analyses of 640 putative mescaline samples in four different American laboratories, Brown and Malone reported only 18 mescaline samples and 8 péyotl samples (1.2%). The remainder were as follows: 376 LSD (58.8%); 130 LSD plus PCP (20.3%); 27 PCP (4.2%); and 81 "other" (12.7%) including a few mixtures of LSD plus amphetamines; "STP" or DOM; a few amphetamine samples, etc. The alleged "mescaline" tablets or capsules weighed from 10-150 mg each, insufficient to provoke a mescaline "trip" even were they 100% mescaline! In similar analyses made in Munich, Germany, only 1 of 14 putative mescaline samples (7.1%) was found to be genuine. Of 61 purported mescaline preparations analyzed by PharmChem Laboratories in Palo Alto, California in 1973, 52 or 85% contained LSD, while only 4 samples (6.6%) actually contained mescaline.

Virtually all American users of entheogenic drugs claim to have tried mescaline at some point in their careers. Clearly, the vast majority have simply tried LSD or PCP under an assumed name. There can be no doubt about this conclusion—mescaline has always been in short supply, and numerous studies on street drug samples support this view. Moreover, a 400-600 mg dose of pure mescaline sulfate will fill two or three large "00" capsules, and most users report having ingested only one capsule or tablet. Yet "sophisticated" users, when confronted with these facts, will usually claim that they have certainly tried the real thing, that they know the difference between LSD and mescaline, being connaisseurs; that LSD has this or that attribute, whereas mescaline may be distinguished by various superior qualities.

To put it plainly, this is hogwash. Not only have the great majority of entheogen users never tried authentic mescaline but, I submit, under proper experimental conditions, few would be able to discern much diffference between mescaline and LSD. IN fact, the effects of these compounds are remarkably similar, and these drugs (as well as psilocybine and psilocine) show cross-tolerance, suggesting they produce their effects by similar neural mechanisms. There is some evidence they may all bind to the same receptor in brains of experimental animals.

Why then, all this fanfare about mescaline, the philosophers' "stone" of psychedelia? If street "mescaline" is only LSD, why do users invariably believe it to be different, superior, "cleaner," more desirable than LSD? I must digress a bit to arrive at a satisfactory answer.

In the late fifties, a new tranquilizer known as Thalidomide was admitted for medical use in Germany and other countries. It became apparent that the drug was strongly teratogenic, that is, that it produced grave birth defects if taken at the wrong time by pregnant women. The tragic result was a generation of "Thalidomide babies" with hideous and crippling deformities. The drug was immediately taken off the market, and regulations concerning the introduction of new drugs were tightened considerably in many countries.

At this time, under the trade name Delysid, LSD was being distributed as an experimental drug by Sandoz Ltd. of Switzerland. Since the drug was thought to produce a "model psychosis," Sandoz felt it might ultimately be an effective psychotherapeutic agent, and indeed it showed considerable promise in early trials. When in 1967 a report in the New England Journal of Medicine alleged that LSD caused chromosome damage, the scare was on. No matter that the report did not support this allegation, which in later controlled experiments proved to be false, or show that LSD is teratogenic (it is not). The media and governments seized this allegation as a means of attacking LSD use, which was spreading rapidly. The media mounted a vigorous scare campaign against LSD, which continues to this day.

LSD users in the sixties were principally in their late teens or early twenties, and many had vivid memories of the well-publicized Thalidomide tragedy, which had been graphically and luridly chronicled by the press. Many people came to fear LSD as a result of the scare campaign. Popular interest in LSD had stimulated interest in other entheogenic drugs. One result was the reprinting of Huxley's and Kluver's hitherto obscure books on mescaline, and an increasing awareness that LSD was not the only entheogenic drug.

In 1968 Carlos Castaneda published The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, which referred to péyotl use, and must have stimulated interest in mescaline, since Castaneda imputed to Don Juan, supposedly a Mexican shaman, the belief that Mescalito was the spirit of péyotl. This is certainly spurious. As I have shown, European scientists in the last century confused péyotl with mescal, a word originally referring to a completely different plant, and mescaline as the active principle of péyotl is decidedly a misnomer. Are we to believe that a Mexican shaman is party to this confusion?

Meanwhile, there was already a sizable black market LSD industry in place, and wily drug dealers seized on "mescaline" as a means to offset any declining sales of LSD brought on by the big scare. They labeled LSD as "mescaline" or "organic mescaline" and foisted the specious preparation on the unsuspecting public. The term "organic mescaline" is significant—organic mescaline was preferred by the connaisseur to ordinary or (we must presume) synthetic mescaline! What is the meaning of the term "organic"? To the chemist organic chemistry is the chemistry of carbon compounds, such diverse compounds as LSD, mescaline, Thalidomide, strychnine, DDT, TNT (and literally millions of others, whether made by a plant or by a chemist) are alike organic compounds. The meaning imputed to "organic mescaline" was that it was a natural compound, from a plant, in contrast to LSD, which was a creation of the chemist not found in nature (at least not yet). Thus, I submit, was born the great mescaline hoax. Some users of entheogens came to fear LSD because of a scare campaign by governments and the press. LSD was, after all, an artificial compound, and an unknown quantity. It had not existed prior to 1938 and little was known about the long-term consequences of its use. Mescaline, on the other hand, was extracted from a plant which had been used by human beings for millennia (though most "psychedelic" users did not know this), was a natrual compound—it was "organic" and therefore safe!

Thus was born a linguistic confusion which persists to this day. Debate still rages about the relative virtues of "natural" versus "synthetic" vitamins, "processed" versus "organic" foods. Whether synthesized by a chemist or by a plant, any given vitamin samples of identical chemical structure have identical biological effects. The same is true for drugs. Mescaline made by the péyotl cactus is the same as mescaline made by a chemist. As a rule, however, synthetic natural products (whether drugs or vitamins) are of superior purity to their natural counterparts as these normally are available commercially.

I have seemingly touched on a modern example of the primal fear of the gods. Drugs and vitamins made by human beings are thought to be unnatural and dangerous, whereas identical drugs and vitamins made by plants are god-given and safe. To presume to make things formerly made only by the gods is to commit the sin of Prometheus, to steal fire from the gods!

I have explained why LSD came to be misrepresented as mescaline, but why did LSD users consider it to be a superior high, if in fact street "mescaline" were simply LSD under an assumed name, the wolf in sheep's clothing? It is well known that user expectation or "set" is an important determining factor in the quality of entheogenic drug experiences. Users wanted to believe that "mescaline" was different, so they could join the cognoscenti who alone were party to superior knowledge of a drug safer and more desirable than the suspect LSD. Drug sellers readily reinforced this tendency in the gullible users. An elaborate folklore grew to surround mescaline, in spite of the fact that hardly anyone had ever tried it! "Mescaline" was usually priced higer than LSD, which was at once conducive to expanded profit for the seller, and a heightened feeling on the part of the user that (s)he was a member of the elite. It is now widely known among users that "mescaline" sold on the street is and has ever been almost invariably misrepresented. Nonetheless, nearly everyone believes that (s)he has actually tried the real thing, that (s)he is a part of a yet smaller elite, and that it is everyone else who has been duped!

In the 1980s, as part of a widespread "nature tourism" or "ecotourism" movement (I first heard the term ecotourism, in Spanish, from the lips of a Quijos Quichua ayahuasquera in Amazonian Ecuador!) there arose the phenomenon of Mexican "péyotl tours" to the land of the Huichol. Advertised in magazines like Magical Blend Magazine and Shaman's Drum: A Journal of Experientational Shamanism, such tours invited prospective clients to visit Huichol "places of power" and to study "advanced techniques of shamanic healing" with Huichol shamans. In the Fall of 1986 issue of Shaman's Drum (which featured articles on the Huicholes), there were no fewer than three advertisements for "péyotl tours." To the credit of the magazine's publishers, there was also a letter to the editor by S. Valadez, wife of a Huichol artist whose work was depicted in the issue, decrying "Guided tour spiritualty: Cosmic way or cosmic rip-off?" ... Valadez warned:

Westerners who participate in peyote pilgrimages with Huichols... are endangering the Huichols who escort them. The soldiers patrolling the peyote desert are not impressed by Americans who claim they come for enlightenment. The Mexicans think the outsiders come for dope, and accuse the Huichols of dealing drugs to the "gringo Hippies."

I have seen a similar phenomenon surrounding entheogenic mushroom use in Oaxaca in the seventies (even María Sabina was sent to prison for "dealing drugs to the gringo hippies"), and I share Valadez's concerns, which also include cultural disruption and spreading of diseases by highly-mobile outsiders to isolated communites of unimmunized Indians. Finally, as outlined below, excessive and destructive harvesting is endangering the small, slow-growing species Lophophora williamsii, which has a restricted range. I personally think outsiders should stay home and take LSD or grown their own San Pedro.

This is the state of affairs today, with mescaline virtually unavailable on the illicit market. Should one encounter alleged mescaline, common sense will enable one to ascertain whether one is being offered the real thing. First, if the material is in the form of a tablet, forget it. If it is in a capsule, one should open this and carefully examine the material. Is it a white or colorless crystalline substance, and is it extremely bitter? It had better be a large capsule, since it takes at least 200 milligrams of pure mescaline to produce much of an entheogenic effect, and 500-600 mg is a more desirable dose. A “OO” capsule will hold only about 200 mg of crystalline mescaline sulfate, so one should be wary if a single capsule is reputed to represent a strong dose. The purist may wish to determine the solubility and melting point of the reputed sample, although such analytical work may be improper unless a large quantity is involved (which is unlikely, owing to limited supply).

Mescaline-containing cacti are far more readily available than the pure drug. Péyotl is still widely used by the “Native American Church,” and, at least in some states, non-Indians may seek membership in the church. There is some trade in dried péyotl as a ludibund drug, although this would appear to be minor. Because péyotl has such a restricted range, and since the cactus requires more than a decade to mature, the supply is naturally limited. Because of the CITES (“Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species”) treaty, it is illegal to traffic in any species of wild cactus, although sale of cultivated material is permitted. There is some concern that the péyotl cactus may become extinct, owing to the depredations of eager collectors, the legitimate collection by the Huichol and other Mexican indigenous groups, and the demands of the Native American Church and the modern, Arizona-based “Peyote Way Church of God”. One rancher from south Texas, within the natural range of péyotl, said that in 1945 the plant was so abundant on his property that it was like “walking on a mattress.” According to a professional peyotero, in 1972 he and five assistants were able to harvest 19,000 péyotl tops in 8 hours in a collecting area of Starr County, Texas, which three years later yielded the same crew only 200-300 tops in eight hours of collecting. There is evidence the range of the plant is shrinking southward owing to agricultural and development activities. Destructive harvesting is also to blame for increasing scarcity of the plant. According to G.R. Morgan, “most Indians use improper tools for harvesting, especially long shovels, which tend to mutilate the plant”.

A more abundant plant source of mescaline is the Peruvian San Pedro cactus, Trichocereus pachanoi, or one of the other Trichocereus species which contains mescaline, particularly T. peruvianus, which contains the highest concentrations, rivaling mescaline amounts found in the péyotl cactus. Mature specimens may grow nearly a meter at 12 cm diameter in a year. Slices of mature T. peruvianus as thin as 1-2 cm contain threshold-level doses of mescaline. T. peruvianus, like T. pachanoi, is a large, fast-growing, columnar cactus, and may be available through plant stores and cactus dealers. In 1987, however, a Berkley, California nursery was wantonly destroyed by narcotics agents and its growing stock confiscated or killed, on the basis of a search warrant referring to sales of San Pedro and other mescaline-containing cacti. Charges were later dropped, but the owner was never compensated for the damage, and was thus forced out of business. The seeds of Trichocereus contain no mescaline and are thus legal, and are sold by mail-order. San Pedro is easily grown from seed. I suggest the “Native American Church” and “Peyote Way Church of God” establish Trichocereus peruvianus gardens in the United States, as a means of ensuring a continued supply of sacramental cactus for their rites, and of removing the pressure of extinction from remaining wild stands of the péyotl cactus in Texas. Perhaps South American San Pedro shamans could be invited to assist in the syncretistic integration of San Pedro and péyotl mythologies.

The tops of the péyotl cactus alone are eaten, and may be harvested without killing the root of the plant, which in any case contains only traces of mescaline. The tops are severed at about ground level, leaving the root in the ground, so it may sprout more “heads.” These tops or peyote buttons” (as the severed heads are known) are then dried, and will retain their activity indefinitely. As mentioned, mescaline has been detected in 1000-year-old péyotl found in an ancient burial in Mexico.

At the crown of the péyotl plant there is a shallow depression in which the flower develops. This depression is filled with tufts of fine silky white hairs. Today’s péyotl eater is wont to pluck these hairs from the dried buttons before ingesting them. Popular opinion has it that these hairs contain strychnine, which causes the nausea often associated with péyotl ingestion. It is difficult to explain how this widespread and pervasive drug myth originated. No part of the péyotl plant contains strychnine, nor is this compound found in any other species of cactus. Strychnine is an alkaloid from seeds of Strychnos nux-vomica, and is unrelated to the péyotl alkaloids. Some users claim that the hairs contain lophophorine (a péyotl alkaloid which produces strychnine-like effects), or another alkaloid of péyotl, and do indeed cause nausea. It has also been suggested that the hairs cause nausea by irritating the lining of the stomach. This is all smoke of opinion. Ingestion of a large dose of the hairs produced no noticeable effect. Chemical analysis has shown that no alkaloids occur in these hairs, nor has nausea been demonstrated to occur following their ingestion. Mexican Huichol Indians consider the tufts of silky hairs to be the tails of the sacred deer, and carefully remove them to use as sacred offerings—they are never simply disposed of. This may be the origin of contemporary péyotl hair removal rituals.

About 4-12 of these péyotl buttons are chewed and swallowed to produce inebriation. Some Indian users have been seen to ingest up to 50 buttons at a sitting. As mentioned above, the taste is dreadfully bitter, and many users have difficult ingesting enough material to experience the entheogenic effects. Sometimes a tea is brewed with the chopped or ground péyotl buttons (an electric coffee mill will serve as a grinder). Since mescaline is soluble in hot water, it will be extracted into the tea. This is, however, an exceedingly bitter brew, guaranteed to delight neither the eye nor the palate. Chewing raw or dried péyotl or imbibing this bitter cup should be avoided assiduously by the squeamish or faint-hearted.

It is also difficult to ingest San Pedro or other Trichocereus species. Besides being bitter, San Pedro has a strange consistency of “sandy jelly.” The bitterness is unavoidable, since one must ingest enough cactus flesh to contain at least a half a gram of mescaline, an intensely bitter substance, which is accompanied in the cactus by many other bitter alkaloids. However romantic it seems, this “organic” means of ingesting mescaline is in my opinion strictly for the masochists and penitents. Many novice users succumb to the fate of William James, viz. they become so sickened by the taste of the drug that they cannot stomach enough to know the delights of an entheogenic dose of mescaline.

Some péyotl users will grind the dried buttons and extract them by boiling the ground material in water, filtering off the residue, then concentrating the resultant mescaline-enriched extract into a gummy “mescaline tar” which is then stuffed into large capsules for ingestion (the laborious ritual of removing the silky hairs from the buttons is unnecessary, unless one wishes to make an offering as do the Huicholes). In the case of San Pedro, it appears that most of the mescaline is concentrated in the green skin of the cactus, which is carefully peeled away and dried at low temperatures, to then reduce to a powder. Some users will place this powdered San Pedro skin in large capsules for ingestion (it is said that the skin of about a 30 cm long piece of San Pedro cactus represents a dose of Trichocereus pachanoi). In the case of Trichocerieus peruvanus, the skin of only about a 3 cm section is said to represent a strong dose. Some users of mescaline-containing Trichocereus species prefer to make an infusion of the powdered cactus skin, and to drink this as a tea, despite its bitterness.

When one ingests either pure mescaline or “peyo-tea,” San Pedro tea or “mescaline tar” in capsules, there is a chance of slight nausea. This is due to the fact that such a large amount of alkaloidal material must be ingested to experience entheogenic effects. To overcome this annoying syndrome, some users ingest a pill of Dramamine half an hour before taking the mescaline preparation. On the other hand, some users clearly like the “purgative” aspect of entheogenic cacti, which they mistakenly interpret as a “cleansing”—in reality the body is rebelling against a large dose of toxic alkaloids and attempting to “cleanse” the system of the drug! The experienced user realizes that one to two hours will typically elapse before the inebriation commences, in some cases up to three or four hours. Therefore, generally at least three or four hours are allowed to elapse before attempting to augment the dose, in cases where the effects are marginal.

In connection with a botanical and chemical investigation of the peyote plant (Lophophora Williamsii (Lem.) Coult.), I have pursued ethnobotanical studies regarding its use among the Kiowa, Kickapoo, Shawnee, and Wichita of Oklahoma. During these studies, additional information was received from individuals of neighboring tribes. The investigation revealed that several erroneous ideas and misinterpretations regarding the use of peyote have become widespread.

I

For more than two centuries, the use of the peyote-cactus as a religious sacrament has been slowly diffusing northward among the southern Plains tribes of the United states.

For more than fifty years, there has been a growing interest in the peyote-cult among American anthropologists. An extensive literature [Consideration of general ethnological problems relating to peyote lies beyond the range of this paper, but it is pertinent to mention that information concerning the use of Lophophora Williamsii exists for the following tribes: Arapaho, Comanche, Cora, Delaware, Huichol, Ioway, Kickapoo, Kiowa, Menominee, Mescalero Apache, Omaha, Pawnee, Sac and Fox, Shawnee, Taos, Tarahumare, Tepehuane, Wichita, Winnebago. Peyote is known to be used in many other tribes, but detailed reports have not appeared.] has appeared concerning the ceremonial use of Lophophora Williamsii in the United States as well as in Mexico, where its use extends back probably for more than twenty centuries.

Until recently the anthropological information was in a more or less chaotic state. Shonle, Wagner, and others have dealt with the diffusion of peyote and conditions making possible its rapid spread. Although occasional references to the “appeal” of peyote are found, there does not seem to be any critical study of what may be termed the appeal-phase of the peyote problem. Petrullo, Wagner, and especially Radin have devoted more attention to the appeal of peyote than have other anthropologists, but a consideration of this neglected subject from an ethnobotanical point of view should prove of value.

It is not the purpose of this paper to present a complete ethnobotanical study of the peyote-cult, but rather to consider whether its widespread diffusion is due to the vision-producing properties attributed to the alkaloids of Lophophora Williamsii or to the supposed therapeutic properties of the plant. In a consideration of this kind, certain fundamental facts pertaining to the botanical, chemical, and pharmacological investigations relating to Lophophora Williamsii must be enumerated, for only on such a foundation can an accurate interpretation of peyote and some of its problems be made.

II

Lophophora Williamsii is a small, grey-green, spineless, napiform cactus possessing remarkable narcotic properties rarely exceeding fifteen centimeters in length and five or six in diameter at the top. The chlorophyll-bearing crown is less than one quarter the length of the plant. Peyote plants are normally unicephalous, but age and injury may cause them to become polycephalous, assuming bizarre shapes, often resembling a deerhoof imprint, a circumstance which may account for the close association of peyote with the deer in Mexican Indian mythology.

The crown is divided into from five to thirteen broad, rounded ribs, separated by straight or spiral furrows. Transverse grooves may divide the ribs into a number of low, polyhedral tubercles, each bearing an areola from which grows a tuft of matted hairs. These tufts of greyish-white, wooly hairs give a lanuginous appearance to the plant which is of importance in etymological considerations.

The flowers, varying from red to pink or white, are borne on the apical areolae at the top of the crown during June and July. When the crowns of peyote are cut off and dried, they form the so-called mescal buttons which are eaten in the ceremony.

Lophophora Williamsii is not a rare plant. It grows on both banks of the Rio Grande and in scattered places in Aguas Calientes, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Hidalgo, Jalisco, Nuevo Léon, Querétaro, San Luis Potosí, Tamaulipas, and Zacatecas. The Indians of Mexico and the southern plains make annual “pilgrimages” to gather it. Those tribes too distant to visit the peyote-fields procure their supplies by mail from merchants in lower Texas who deal exclusively in mescal buttons.

The narcotic properties of peyote have attracted wide attention. Peyote-intoxication is divisible into two general phases: a period of contentment and over-sensitivity, and a period of nervous calm and muscular sluggishness, often accompanied by hypocerebrality, colored visual hallucinations, and abnormal synæsthesiæ.

Alterations in tactile sensation, very slight muscular incoordination, disturbances in space and time perception, and auditory hallucinations may accompany severe peyote-intoxication.

The most striking characteristic, however, is the occasionally induced peyote vision which is often fantastically colored.

Peyote-intoxication is unique in that during it consciousness is not lost, control of the limbs and senses is maintained, there is no tendency to commit acts of violence, and seldom do uncomfortable effects accompany or follow it. These characteristics are reported in the literature, and I have observed them in the field.

Many investigators agree that peyote is not a habit-forming narcotic. Its use is productive of little social and moral degradation or physical harm, notwithstanding statements to the contrary. The assertions so often made concerning its aphrodisiac properties have been disproved. Furthermore, there is experimental evidence which suggests that it is definitely anaphrodisiacal.

The narcotic and medicinal properties of peyote are traceable to active principles contained in the tissues of the plant. From four to eight alkaloids may be present in varying amounts and proportions: mescaline, anhalonine, anhalonidine, pellotine, lophophorine, anhalamine, anhalinine, and anhalidine.

Several of the alkaloids of Lophophora Williamsii have found minor uses in modern medicine.

In the ceremony, peyote is eaten dry, but occasionally fresh plants are consumed.

The dried mescal buttons keep indefinitely and are stored in bags for use. They possess a very bitter taste, but in spite of this, they are chewed and swallowed in great number by peyotists. The smallest consumption by a single person is about four buttons at each meeting. It is impossible to estimate the largest, but I have seen an Indian eat more than thirty at one ceremony. Other investigators report doses as large as ninety buttons. An estimate of the average consumption, however, would probably be about twelve buttons by each person at a single meeting.

Occasionally, mescal buttons are steeped in water, and the resulting “peyote tea” is drunk. This tea is widely used both in the ceremony and in daily life when peyote is administered medicinally. In Mexico, fresh peyote is ground on a metate, and the resulting thick brown liquid is drunk.

Mexican Indians sometimes add peyote, thus prepared, to alcoholic fruit juices to produce a delirious intoxication.

This use of Lophophora Williamsii, however, should not lead to its confusion with mescal, the alcoholic Agave-brandy prepared from Agave spp.

III

The visual hallucinations often induced by peyote have been considered of fundamental importance as an “appeal” in the diffusion of the peyote cult among the Plains Indian tribes.

It has been pointed out that formerly many aspects of Plains Indian life centered around the pursuit of visions. The vision-quest “as an affair of maturity” has become widely recognized as an outstanding characteristic of Plains culture as a whole.

Since visions are occasionally induced during peyote intoxication, it has been thought that the fantastic peyote vision was so appealing that the Plains Indians adopted the peyote cult as an easy way of obtaining visual hallucinations. Shonle, for example, writes: “All over the Plains where the dried peyote is used, the Indians delight in the peyote visions and respond to their thrill, even when the dreams are terrifying in character.

From the belief that the vision configuration is the integrating principle in the Plains peyote ceremony a natural inference has been that the rapidity with which peyote has spread was due to the ease with which it could become naturalized to the established pattern. According to this, peyote offered a method of obtaining visions without the self-torture and privation resorted to by some of the Plains tribes in the vision quest.

In my opinion, the principal appeal of peyote has been and continues to be centered around the therapeutic and stimulating properties of the plant and not around its vision producing properties. In other words, the peyote vision has been incidental while the medicinal reputation of peyote has been fundamental in the establishment, spread, and, to some extent, in the maintenance of the peyote cult in the United States.

IV

The medico-religious peyote cult was already established in Mexico when the Spaniards arrived. The earliest record of the use of Lophophora Williamsii is that of Sahagun who wrote that the Chichimeca ate the root, peiotl, which induced amusing or terrifying visions and stimulated them in battle. He failed to note whether or not these Indians used the plant therapeutically. Cardenas also wrote of the terrifying visions which followed indulgence.

Hernandez describing the plant as Peyotl zacatecensis, emphasized the fact that it was used in prophesying and in the treatment of pains. He did not mention peyote visions.

Likewise, Ortego, who described the Cora ceremony, made no mention of visions. Furthermore, Arlegui did not report visual hallucinations, but stated emphatically that peynote was administered as a panacea and as an aid in prophesying.

Thus, from a survey of early Mexican accounts of the use of peyote, the importance of the plant as a medicine seems to overtop the importance of peyote visions.

Correlated with virtues which are valuable to aboriginal therapy, there are properties making peyote a remarkable stimulant and tonic. Indeed, so close to each other are some of the uses of the plant for stimulation and for curing disease that it is often difficult to distinguish between the two. Since these uses both pertain to the retention or the restoration of a feeling of well-being, it is obvious that they must be closely associated.
Sahagun, Ortego, and others have described peyote as a favorite stimulant in warfare.

Sahagun reported that it strengthened and encouraged the warriors. De la Motta stated that the Spanish were severely handicapped in their conquest of the Nayarit kingdom by the resistance of the natives of Sierra de Alica, whose great opposition was attributed to their constant ingestion of peyote. Galvez noted the use of the plant during Tamaulipas dances, and Perez reported similar uses by the Lagunero and Acaxee tribes.

Peyote is widely used as a stimulant in Mexico at the present time. Lumholtz, for example, found the Tarahumare using the plant for stimulation. He tested it to his own satisfaction, comparing its physiological action with that of Erythroxylon Coca Lam. Diguet corroborates this, saying: “In using the drug moderately, the partaker is endowed with energy which permits him to overcome great fatigue and to endure hunger and thirst for five days.”

That the therapeutic appeal of Lophophora Williamsii is still strong in Mexico is shown by recent writers. Lumholtz wrote that the Tarahumare, Huichol, and Tepehuane apply peyote externally for rheumatism, wounds, burns, snakebites, and skin diseases. Furthermore, he stated that “it is an absolute cure against the painful stings of scorpions, and, as such, deserves to be widely known.”

Bennett and Zingg have found that the Tarahumare apply crushed peyote externally as an ointment. In this tribe “hicouri (peyote) dances are more frequent during times of sickness.”

Peyote has been widely used in Mexico as a cure for arrow wounds; the dried, powdered root being packed into the wound until healing occurs.
In Mexico, as in the United States, the therapeutic use of Lophophora Williamsii grades into the superstitious and pseudotherapeutic. To its use is attributed health and longevity; rubbed on the knees, it is believed to give strength in walking; in curing disease, it is said to fortify the body against future ills and to purify the soul. Unlike many herbs, peyote is not offered to the dead, but is eaten at death feasts to fortify the living.

Among the Zacateco, peyote is revered above all other plant remedies.

The Tarahumare believe that the illness resulting from touching or breaking of Datura meteloides Dunal can be cured only with peyote.

Lophophora Williamsii continues to be valued by Mexican Indians as a powerful medicine, but its therapeutic use is not confined to the Indian population. Peyote is offered for sale in drug markets in many parts of Mexico and has been listed officially in the Farmacopia Mexicana. Indeed, the medicinal use of peyote has become so well known that Mexicans have incorporated the word peyote into the verb empeyotizarse, the usual term employed among rural Mexicans to signify self-medication (with aspirin) for indisposition following alcoholic intoxication.

The emphasis on the curing powers of peyote is as great among the northern Indians who use it as it is among the Indians of Mexico. The Kiowa and Comanche, for example, the earliest recipients of peyote on the plains, rely on the cactus as a panacea. Among the Oklahoma tribes with which I worked, I found that there is hardly a disease which is not believed to be curable with peyote. Some of the ills listed as responding to peyote were tuberculosis, pneumonia, scarlet fever, intestinal ills, diabetes, rheumatic pains, colds, grippe, fevers, and venereal diseases. Among the Kiowa, partly masticated mescal buttons are packed around an aching tooth. The Delaware also practice this type of dental therapy.

A Shawnee informed me that peyote tea was a good antiseptic wash for open wounds and a soothing liniment if applied warm to an aching limb. It is used “as white man uses aspirin.” Mooney observed: “I have also seen an Indian eat one between meals as a sort of appetizer.”

Several mescal buttons are given three times during childbirth among the Kiowa, Kickapoo, Shawnee, and probably other Plains tribes. The frequent use of peyote as a medicine has led to the statement that the plant is employed as a habit-narcotic, but field investigators deny that this is so.

V

The sustaining properties of Lophophora Williamsii, together with its supposed medicinal virtues, are fundamental to practically every peyote origin myth. The peyote vision seldom enters into circumstances enumerated by the Indians as having led to the discovery of the properties of the “sacred cactus.” Usually the myth relates the remarkable sustaining powers of peyote when eaten by a lost starving Indian. Similarly, a Mexican myth tells of the power of peyote to save a whole people engaged in desperate battle under adverse conditions. The essential point is that the stimulating, or sometimes the curative, properties of peyote provide the central theme of most myths, making it clear that this appeal is fundamental.

An historical survey of the peyote cult in America indicates that, with few exceptions, the first peyote leader of a tribe was converted as the result of a cure and not through a quest for visions. Once converted, he usually tried to impress his friends with the remarkable virtues of the new plant. From a position of indifference or actual hostility, many of the first advocates of the peyote cult became ardent supporters of the religion centering around it. These advocates, likewise, encountered strong opposition from the older and more conservative elements in the tribe. With such powerful forces to fight, peyote leaders would naturally make use of the most influential recommendations that peyote possessed. In the healing power of Lophophora Williamsii, the peyotists found an appeal which completely swept aside conservative opposition and paved the way for rapid acceptance of the plant and its cult. Radin has emphasized this as follows:

Of the records of early peyote leaders, only one (John Wilson) indicates that the vision was considered as an appeal, and, in Wilson's case, the curative properties of peyote were stressed as much, if not more, than the vision. Elk Hair, who simultaneously with John Wilson introduced peyote to the Delaware, consistently refused to eat peyote, although he was critically ill. Finally, however, he submitted to the pleas of friends to have a peyote ceremony for his recovery. The “cure” was successful, and Elk Hair became an ardent peyotist.

Wilson introduced a slightly different type of ceremony to the Delaware. He was not converted through a cure, but became acquainted with peyote through a deliberate effort to learn its virtues. He went into seclusion and spent several weeks in a continuous peyote intoxication, during which time he was “continually translated in spirit to the sky-realm where he was conducted by peyote.”

The Wilson ceremony is dominant among the Delaware today, and Petrullo feels that the reason for the failure of Elk Hair's ceremony was due to the fact that “he preached the old religion, and offered only another medico-religious cult,” whereas Wilson “brought to his people a new religion, a hope of building anew, a definite severance with the past.” This may be true to a slight extent, but it is clear that Delaware peyotism, like that of other American Indian tribes, is essentially a medico-religious cult. Petrullo calls attention to this fact himself when he says:

This statement suggests that the element of curing and health is fundamental to Delaware peyotism. Wilson himself considered peyote a great medicine, although his own conversion was not through a cure.

Rave preached about the healing properties of peyote while introducing it among the Winnebago. Like other early peyotists, he had experienced visions, but did not consider them fundamental. Radin emphatically stated:

This appeal of Lophophora Williamsii as a medicine may be duplicated in almost every tribe regarding whose peyote ceremony sufficient is known. Among the Kickapoo, Kiowa, Shawnee, and Wichita, I heard constant references to the fact that early peyote leaders in the tribes had experienced the curative powers of the plant and had taught of its medicinal virtues.

It is true that the therapeutic appeal is as vital and as influential today as it was fifty years ago. Many of the young peyote devotees whom I interviewed are sincere in their belief in the supremacy of peyote as a medicine. Their faith in the plant extends far beyond its value as a physical medicament, and the enthusiasm with which they described cure after cure indicated clearly that conditions have changed little in this respect from the early days of the cult. Many who stray away from the peyote religion return to its folds in times of sickness and remain faithful when health is restored. La Barre reports the case of a boy who, having left the peyote cult in his youth, returned to it during sickness twenty years later. This is probably not uncommon and it serves to illustrate once again the importance of the belief in peyote as a guardian and restorer of health.

VII

The importance of the curing ritual in the peyote ceremony has been completely overlooked by those who have written on the subject. Although a patient is not necessary to a peyote meeting, very often a sick person is treated during the course of a ceremony. This is common to both Mexican and American peyote ceremonies. Prayers for health and longevity are offered in the meetings, but definite ritualistic courses of treatment are resorted to whenever the seriousness of an illness warrants such action.

In Mexico, the Tarahumare carry out a pseudotherapeutic rite at the break of dawn. No peyote additional to that consumed during the night is administered to the patient, however. In the Mexican rite, every worshipper takes part in the ritual and is believed to derive some health-giving power from the treatment, whereas in the American peyote curing ritual, the patient alone is treated.

Among the American peyotists, the curing rite is more therapeutic than is that of the Tarahumare, because additional doses of peyote are given to the suffering patient. Here peyote is used as an actual medicine, usually administered in the form of a tea. Literature on the curing rite is almost entirely lacking. Apparently, the form of the ritual is not yet stereotyped, but varies according to the preferences of the leader. The Kiowa leader who conducted the curing rite which I witnessed treated a young man suffering from tuberculosis. Leaving his place shortly after the ritual of the Midnight Water, the leader walked to the patient, lying at the side of the tipi. The fire-man handed the leader a cup of water, and the leader offered several prayers in which the words Jesus Christ were frequently used. He handed the patient fourteen mescal buttons which he himself had partly masticated before the treatment. While the patient was swallowing them, the leader waved the cup of water in cedar incense produced by throwing dried juniper needles (Juniperus virginiana L.) into the altar fire. He also wafted this incense to the patient's bared chest with an eagle feather fan. Following this, he chewed several more buttons, expectorated them into his cupped hands, and annointed the patient's head with the saliva while praying. Then he picked up a glowing ember from the altar fire and, placing it almost in his mouth, blew its heat over the patient's chest. The ritual ended with a long prayer. This cannot be taken as typical of all peyote curing rites, but similar rites are practiced in most American peyote circles. This phase of the ceremony illustrates one of the practical manifestations of the belief that peyote is a supremely potent medicine.

VIII

Peyote has not remained within the confines of the Plains culture area. Indeed, from the first days of its rapid spread, peyote has diffused to tribes of several culture areas. At the present time, the peyote ceremony, as pointed out by Wagner is practiced in four distinct culture areas—Plains, North Mexican, Eastern Woodland, Southwestern—and in one intermediate culture area by the Mescalero Apache.
In the spread of Lophophora Williamsii beyond the tribes of the plains, the vision appeal could not have exercised the same influence which it is assumed to have played in the Plains tribes, for, although visions are important in many Indian cultures, only in the Plains area was the vision quest fundamental enough to have suggested the linkage of this phase of the culture with the spread of peyote. The diffusion of peyote to so many other culture areas indicates that an “underlying belief in the supernatural origin of visions” cannot, as Shonle postulates, define the area of the probable spread of peyote. If, however, the spread of the peyote cult be viewed as resting fundamentally on the medicinal appeal of the plant, no “area of its probable spread” can be suggested.

IX

An indication that the medicinal appeal of peyote is of fundamental importance is found when the native names of Lophophora Williamsii are examined. All of the tribes of the United States which use peyote and some of the Mexican tribes understand and employ the term peyote. Some have naturalized the word into their own language. Both in the field and in the literature, I have found that the native, pre-peyote word for “medicine” has often been applied to the cactus, sometimes retaining its original connotation, sometimes losing it. The Delaware biisung, the Taos walena, the Comanche puakit, and the Omaha makan, are reported in the literature as terms formerly meaning “medicine,” but now signifying “peyote.”

Likewise, I have found that to designate “peyote,” the Kickapoo use naw-tai-no-nee and the Shawnee o-jay-bee-kee, both of which terms formerly meant “medicine.” Thus, it seems that there is a wide-spread understanding of Lophophora Williamsii as a great medicine. In this connection, it is interesting to note that an Aztec word for peyote—ichpatl—means, according to an analysis by Reko, “wooly medicine” or “fleecy drug.

X

A thorough consideration of the literature combined with field observations indicates that the importance of peyote visions has been exaggerated out of its proper proportion. The fact that, when visual hallucinations do accompany peyote intoxication, they are of a fantastic nature has led to a great amount of emphasis being placed on their psychological interpretation and anthropological significance. Accounts of peyote visions among Indians, however, are very rare; only a few having been reported in the literature. The rarity in the literature of these visions is in complete harmony with certain observations made in the field. Of the many Indians of all ages with whom I talked, only a few had ever experienced visions during peyote ceremonies. Everywhere among the Oklahoman tribes with which I worked I found the same disinterest in the peyote vision. There was no indication of the pursuit of visions during peyote ceremonies. One Indian informed me that visions were exceedingly rare and were a reward to old peyotists for faithfulness to the moral teachings of the religion. Still others insisted that it was “wrong” to use peyote and the peyote ceremony as a means of obtaining visions. Petrullo found the same feeling among the Delaware, and part of Wilson's teachings were:

Richard Schultes’ paper on “The Appeal of Peyote,” in the recent Anthropologist, is ably argued, but contains some misconceptions, I think, which should be pointed out. Mr Schultes' general thesis is that “the peyote vision has been incidental while the medicinal reputation of peyote has been fundamental in the establishment, spread, and, to some extent, in the maintenance of the peyote cult in the United States.”

In section IV, paragraph 4, he argues that even in Mexico the medicinal virtues of the plant over-topped the importance of the visions. This may be so, yet the preceding paragraphs of evidence he cites for this do not appear to me to support the thesis, for it was the visions which accounted for the use of peyote in prophecy etc. (compare the “death vine,” datura, cohoba snuff, yahé etc. in native America). Indeed, even in Mexico some of the authorities Schultes cites mention the vision. Further, Lumholtz' term “curing” in Mexican peyotism is used in a special sense: it is a prophylactic “baptism-”ceremony, rather than a therapeutic medicinal cure, a ritual to protect a group, not to cure an individual invalid. Furthermore, the use of peyote in battle is surely as much for its supernatural vision-produced “power” as for its “stimulating” properties.

Again, Mr. Schultes argues that the healing power of peyote was the most important element in enabling peyotists to sweep aside conservative tribal opposition, and cites Radin to this end; but Radin mentions in the quotation “the glorious visions” of peyote-intoxication also. I think, indeed, a mere new plant medicine, without the authority of the visions peyote produces, could not have made its way against such resistance (the Kiowa, I believe, are typical for the Plains in saying, “We don't get medicine power from any plants except peyote.”) A new plant remedy, of which the Plains Indians already had many, did not crush this opposition; the supernatural authority of the visions produced by peyote appealing to an older vision-valuing culture did. In the Plains, as is well established, the epistemological authority for behavior is the supernatural vision-experience, quite as the experimental laboratory method is for our scientific culture. It is, I repeat, this element, at least in the Plains, which overcame individual tribal resistance, and which indeed convinced them it had medicinal curing-power! Schultes' own quotation of Petrullo notes that the devotees “hope to win the attention of the spiritforces and their intercession for the sick person.” Via the vision!

As for the argument that the new plant medicine succeeded chiefly on the basis of its medicinal virtues, Schultes quotes John Wilson to the effect that “as the peyote worshipper progressed in knowledge, he could ignore the effects of the native pharmacopeia and effect his cures upon himself and others by the sole use of peyote.” Why could one plant cause the casting-out of use of all other plants, if not because of its additional vision-power? And whence the “knowledge” if not through the vision-experience?

As a matter of fact, however, I believe the difference between Mr Schultes and myself derives from the ambiguity of meaning of the familiar term “medicine power” in Plains ethnography. To be sure in peyotism supernatural power vouchsafed in the vision-experience often is power to cure illness; yet the term “medicine power” encountered in the literature should by no means be read always as “power to cure illness.” It is far more generalized, as I think I have shown in “The Peyote Cult,” to mean on occasion power over the enemy in war, witchcraft prophylaxis, power to prophesy, to be clairvoyant, to find lost articles, etc. I think Mr Schultes is mistaken to equate “medicine-power” with medicinal-power, so far as peyote is concerned. And I think he is surely mistaken in believing that in Oklahoma there is a “disinterest in the peyote vision” or that there is “no indication of the pursuit of visions during peyote ceremonies”. I collected 75 or so visions in the field and mentioned in the literature; Sunday forenoons after meetings, indeed, are usually spent in telling about ones peyote-visions!

Mr Schultes states that “The importance of the curing ritual in the peyote ceremony has been completely overlooked by those who have written on the subject.” This statement has the appearance of being gravely unfair to the extensive discussion of curing and doctoring by peyote which I undertook to make in “The Peyote Cult.” The facts are otherwise. The manuscript for Mr Schultes' article was prepared at a time when “The Peyote Cult” was unavailable to him, being then in press; this appeared before the publication of Mr Schultes' article, but subsequent to his absence on a field trip to Oaxaca, Mexico.

Incidentally Mr Schultes' authoritative work on the botany of peyote has been capped on this field trip by his discovery in Oaxaca of the mushroom “teonanacatl,” which Safford erroneously identified with peyote. My own critique of Safford was based entirely on textual criticism, which could only have become conclusive through Mr Schultes' authoritative botanical evidence.

High in the Sierra Madre Occidental mountains of Mexico, northwest of Guadalajara, the Huichol Indians live in small villages called ranchos scattered throughout this remote, rugged terrain. They integrate peyote use into their lives, culture, and religion today as they have done for at least a thousand years and most likely for thousands of years.

A complex pantheon of gods and goddesses is discussed around a campfire as wood collected during the past week evenly burns. The details and descriptions of this other world are so intricate and exact that they rival theological discussions of the worlds greatest religions. This religion of the Huichols has been passed from generation to generation by word of mouth for probably the same length of time as these great religions. The core of Huichol religion was even brought from east to west during the great migrations 10 to 30 thousand years ago. Today's teller has their own version of the original text. These versions are discussed with the familiarity of craftsmen with their trade. Each version is defended by the teller, sometimes argued by the audience, and maybe even changed slightly by the next telling, but there always remains the ancient themes and storylines.

Kauyumarie and Tatewari come to life in the smoke where the sky is their church. Most people have heads full of thoughts; I try to empty my mind said a shaman, Don Jose. I am like an antenna that receives messages from the gods. He relays these mesages to his people as shamans of his tribe have done from the beginning. The healthy children play in the brook with clean, clear, fresh water and a hallo of butterflies as Don Jose talks about his plans for the day. At 96 years old he planned to clear an area for another hut. Machete under his arm, he set out to organize the project.

Small seminomadic microbands remind us of our own proto-evolutionary state. The ranchos are based on nuclear families. The larger ones may have a population of 50 to 100 residents with their own shaman. The smaller ranchos could consist of a husband, his two wives, their children and a mother-in-law. They may all go or just send a representative to attend the many scheduled fiestas at larger ranchos or meeting places.

In the larger ranchos there are large extended families and interpersonal relationships that can make soap operas look tame. If there is a big difference of opinion within the group, as there often is, a split can occur producing two small ranchos. As the dwellings they build last only five to ten years and firewood becomes increasingly scarce, a regular move can be in order. Like an amoeba, these organic units split to form two similar but not exact biological units.

Sometimes a shaman takes along some followers chasing after a vision he saw in the flames at the temple the night of the fiesta. Sometimes a hunter takes his family and friends to where the deer are not so far away. Evolution takes its course and some new and old ranches succeed and some fail. The most conservative way is not always right and sometime the young ranchos are resilient with new found strength.

Peyote is not used by all the Huichols but is familiar to them all. Sometimes babies are introduced to it through their mothers milk. As the principal agent for a tribe described as healers, peyote is considered a panacea and a health aid as well as a hallucinogen. It is sometimes given as a pain reliever or as a stimulant to make work easier among other uses. It is also a catalyst to meditation and for religious ceremonies and fiestas it is a purgative and empathetic agent. It replaces alcohol at some of the fiestas where an all nighter on peyote can be quite different from one on alcohol.

"Americans are looking for a Saturday night high" a Huichol told me. Peyote is not like that. Four is the ticket I was told by an old man as many of his friends agreed. Peyote is a cactus about the size of a medium to small potato and grows in central Mexico in the desert at a place the Huichol call Wirikuta and it tastes terrible. To eat a spoonful of something that tastes terrible is difficult, to eat four potato sized peyote that taste terrible one has to be determined. That is a reason why some Huichols don t like it. But others have an affinity for it, they even say it is good, but you never know what a Huichol says means because they have a good sense of humor and sometime speak in opposites: good is bad, cool is hot, etc. Like groups within our culture that use opposites to confuse outsiders; if someone is good they are. Did I mention that peyote causes nausea? It is definitely not material for a Saturday night high.

Some Huichols fast for days and then eat only peyote. At Wirikuta peyoteros walk in the desert sun by day and dance by the fire at night while they talk to the gods and collect peyote to take home to the rancho. The family of the peyoteros wait for their return from the long journey to Wirikuta and keep the home fires constantly burning as a symbol of their vigil. These peyoteros are Huichols who travel the 300 miles from their homes in the Sierra to the distant desert to collect the peyote for the ranchos use during the years fiestas and religious ceremonies. They have the time, the desire and the money to allow them to take a one to two week trip and they have usually been asked by someone with a car or truck to make the journey. Some Wirikuta trips are made by those who want to be cured of an illness or to help cure others of their illness or by older Huichols who want to see the sacred land one time before they die.

The old shaman bends over and removes a rock from a footpath in the Sierras. His grandchildren walk that path now, the same one he walked as a child: the path to San Andres. Now San Andres has an airport where DC 3 cargo planes land with corn, alcohol, limes, Cokes, teachers, doctors, and more. But these conditions are becoming commonplace among the Huichols. Each nearby city extends its tendrils high into the Sierra. The battery powered cassette players and radios of 10 years ago are now amplified by major electric sources from the city and roads that bring ease of access.

National Geographic Magazine did a nice article in June of 1977 on the Huichols and predicted that they soon would be absorbed by assimilation as most other distinct Indian groups have been. In my 20 years of visiting the Huichols I have found them to remain remarkably intact, but they are definitely threatened. Their identity and cultural survival may in a large part depend on interest and support from the outside. The Mexican government and the local government in the state of Nayarit have recognized the Huichols value as a colorful element of their national cultural diversity. Many tourists seek out Huichol handicrafts and are fascinated by the Huichol story. By buying their handicrafts and art work and by learning more about them we can help them. We may even be able to turn the paradise lost scenario around into paradise found. We can learn about ourselves, before cities and macrobands: no electricity, fire for heat, animals that are brothers and the sky for a church.

Is peyote soma? Like many other psychoactive agents used by native peoples throughout the world since before written history, there are many qualities about it that would qualify. Like these other agents, there is so much we do not know. Hopefully through the work of MAPS and other organizations we can find if there are properties that can aid our culture to better health and psychic well being. It is ironic that the older element of our society that could most benefit from new sources of pain relievers and energizers is the most resistant to research in the areas where these answers are most likely to be found.

My thoughts about Peyote are closely interwoven with the religious context of the Native American Church, the Peyote religion of the American Indian. In my experiences with this sacred plant, Indian Peyotists have been my companions. I am grateful to them for their patience and understanding, and their willingness to adopt me into their church. Peyote is considered a holy medicine among members of the church; and it is used with the utmost respect. The teachings of Peyote go beyond the confines of the tipi; my experiences sitting by the sacred fireplace have helped guide my daily life. Peyote ceremonies have also allowed me the opportunity of being closely associated with the Sioux, who are quite remote psychically and geographically from the mainstream of American life—far more remote than many of us realize.

Most Sioux Peyotists are full-bloods and traditionalists; their great-grandfathers were buffalo hunters and warriors. They live in the spacious beauty of a pine and prairie landscape, but by our economic standards they are distressingly poor. As late as the early 1970s many Indians in the Pine Ridge country were still using kerosene lamps. They have retained their native language, Lakota, and their knowledge of English is limited. Lakota is spoken throughout the Peyote ceremony. At ceremonies someone has often interpreted in English for me, but through the years I have come to understand much of what is said; and much requires no words.

I attended my first Peyote ceremony in 1964. That eventful night in a tipi at Wounded Knee was the first of many meetings and the beginning of my acculturation to the Indian way of life. Although I was thirty-one in 1964, I was a child in the Peyote religion. The Sioux have patiently watched me grow up in the Peyote way, and in their eyes I am now a teenager of sixteen. They liken their religion to a school; one peyotist has said: "You learn in here just like at school; it is graded and becomes easier the farther along you go." In reference to my learning, the same man said: "It is good that you are starting now; you can always learn more from Peyote, but you will never learn it all."

Peyotists at Pine Ridge constitute less than 2 percent of the population (about 15,000 in 1980). The church membership is growing from within because of an increase of children in Peyote families, but the number of new members from outside these families is negligible. The Peyote religion at Pine Ridge is like a large family: almost everyone knows everyone else. Other reservations have a much higher percentage of Peyotists: among the Navajo of the Southwest, about 50 percent. Despite the Sioux Peyotists' small numbers, they are famous among Peyotists of other tribes, especially for their songs. Since the Peyote religion is pan-Indian, members often attend meetings with other tribes. At one meeting I attended, seven tribes were represented. Thus for an Indian visiting the reservation of a tribe not his own, the Native American Church is a home away from home.

Although the Peyote religion is definitely Indian, it includes some vital Christian elements. Christianity has influenced the pre-Columbian Peyote religion since the early sixteenth century, when Spanish friars came to the New World. Peyotists know and accept the Ten Commandments and the teachings of Jesus; at Peyote meetings participants often recite the Lord's Prayer, sometimes in English. Considerable time during ceremonies is devoted to prayers. Indians are an intensely religious people; their prayers to God and Jesus come to them easily and naturally. My prayers are still a little awkward, although as a member of the Native American Church I have had ample practice.

Next to the prayers, Peyote songs are the most important part of the ceremony. As each person receives the prayer staff and musical gourd (rattle), he holds the staff in his left hand and shakes the gourd with his right. The drummer and other participants often sing along. These chants, sung with compassion, create a marvelous world of sound and meaning for Peyotists like myself, engendering visions, hope, and peace. Some peyote songs are prayer chants which praise the name of Jesus. Peyote is often referred to as a sacrament; it is considered a mediator between God-Jesus and Man.

At Pine Ridge there are two contrasting ceremonial rituals and organizations of the Native American Church: the traditional Half-moon ritual and a more Christian version known as the Cross-fire. The Half-moon ritual is much older and commonly occurs inter-tribally in the United States; the Cross-fire occurs chiefly among the Sioux of South Dakota and the Winnebago of Nebraska and Wisconsin. The leaders (roadmen) of the Cross-fire group are bona fide ordained clergy who have been appointed by the High Priest of the organization in the State of South Dakota. As ordained clergy they are qualified to perform baptisms and marriages.

In the Half-moon ceremony each participant rolls a prayer cigarette, which is a surrogate for the peace pipe; sometimes the Bull Durham tobacco is rolled in a corn shuck. In the Cross- fire ritual prayer cigarettes are not used; the Bible, which is set next to the Peyote sacrament and holy altar, replaces the smoke. At certain times during the Cross-fire ceremony the roadman reads aloud from the Bible and interprets readings to the congregation.

Another difference between the two fireplaces is that, at Half-moon meetings, each participant is allowed to help himself to the sacrament (generally four spoons of Peyote) each time it is passed clockwise around the tipi; at Cross-fire meetings a man stands in front of the participants and hands each of them four spoons at least the first time the sacrament is sent around. The roadman decides how many times Peyote should be passed around, usually three or four. It is sometimes used in powdered form, but more often as a gravy; an infusion of Peyote tea is also passed. Although individual members usually attend meetings (ceremonies) with their own group, they also freely attend the other group's meetings. Each group has its own cemetery. I like both rituals, but I have been raised in the Half-moon and prefer it.

The Native American Church is decidedly nationalistic. Military veterans are granted special honor. Since I am a veteran, I have the privilege of folding the flag at ceremonies. The official colors of the church are red, white, and blue, colors which also appear in the beadwork of religious paraphernalia; veterans have beadwork designs of the national flag. At almost all locations where meetings take place there is a flagpole; the flag is raised on Veterans Day and Memorial Day and for the funeral or memorial of a member who was a veteran. The nationalism of the church is partly attributable to its pan-Indian organization; it also reflects the fact that the government recognizes the Peyote religion and allows the Indians to practice it freely. But the military character of the Native American Church may also be a continuation of the old warrior society, which retains high prestige among the Indians.

Women were formerly excluded from the ceremony, except for Peyote Woman, the roadman's wife. She came into the tipi in the morning, bringing morning food and water over which she prayed as a symbol of Mother Earth. It was not until the 1950s that women in general started attending Peyote ceremonies at Pine Ridge. One reason for their original exclusion was the Indian taboo against allowing women near any medicine during their menses. It is still considered dangerous to the health and life of anyone taking Indian medicine, such as Peyote, to be in proximity to a woman who is menstruating or has just given birth; thus, women during these times respectfully stay away from meetings. Recently, a woman who had just had a child ignored warnings and entered a Peyote meeting; all the men at the meeting became violently ill, and many of them vomited.

Aside from these two prohibitions, Sioux women today not only freely attend meetings, but sit next to their spouses and sometimes even sing Peyote songs. Indian women of other tribes also attend meetings, but they tend to sit together, and they do not sing. Sioux women are liberated women compared with their sisters of other tribes. Yet the Peyote ceremony still remains a man's world; the political organization and the ceremonial are run by men, and men predominate in numbers. Children accompany their parents to Peyote ceremonies; the family worship is healthy. Children begin to take medicine ritually when they become teenagers.

There is no single reason that a person is drawn to the Peyote religion. Some take refuge in the church as a last resort to cure a sickness after the white man's medicine fails. Some start attending meetings out of sheer curiosity, and some want to escape the monotony of reservation life. Many come because they have heard that the Native American Church is a place where one can talk to God and feel His presence. They have heard that Peyote can change minds, habits, and lives for the better, or that Peyote can bring happiness to man in this life. The actions, words, and morals of Peyotists themselves have been positive living examples to the Indian people. Another attraction is the close fellowship of Peyote meetings.

Members of the Native American Church do not proselytize, nor do they criticize other churches or beliefs; they prefer to live unnoticed. But some Indians object to Peyote, the ceremony, and the people connected with it. A few of these critics are traditionalists who follow the old peace pipe religion of their grandfathers and see the Peyote religion as a foreign intrusion from Mexico. The major diffusion center of the Peyote religion was Oklahoma, and tribes such as the Kiowa and Comanche were its major disseminators. It did not arrive at Pine Ridge until some time between 1904 and 1912.

Some Sioux Peyotists participate in ancestral rituals with the peace pipe, such as the vision quest and sun dance, but I know of no traditional medicine man who has become a Peyotist. Indian alcoholics are especially fearful and critical of Peyote. They sneeringly refer to Peyotists as "cactus eaters." One alcoholic told me, in a malignant tone of voice, that Peyote was "snake juice." One reason alcoholics tend to fear Peyote is their knowledge that Peyote conquers the alcohol in a person's body and pushes that poison out of his system; he would thus suffer physically and mentally through an all-night ceremony. But the alcoholic generally refuses to admit that his recovery to sobriety and awareness may be the beginning of a new life.

The Peyote road is the path chosen by members of the church. In the imagery of some Peyotists, two roads diverge at a junction. The profane road, paved and wide, with its worldly passions and temptations, is considered to be an unholy road which leads to trouble. The alternative is the Peyote road, a narrow unpaved path surrounded by a wilderness of pristine beauty. All Peyotists travel this way, but each must journey alone, for it is the road of one's own life and wisdom. In the Christian sense, it is the road to salvation. Ethically, it is a path of sobriety (a major step for most Indians), industry, care of the family, and brotherly love. Its symbol is a narrow groove on top of a crescent-shaped earthen altar that encircles the west end of the fireplace. Rather than a straight and narrow path, it is a curved path all the way, but the curve on the crescent altar is constant, never-varying, and so in a sense straight. The road has not been easy for me, nor was it meant to be. Peyotists say that up to the mid-mark of human life the Peyote road is uphill. This is indicated by the earthen altar, which slopes up to the center of the crescent, where the Peyote chief which is a specially shaped Peyote plant placed on the altar by the leader of the ceremony is set. To reach the downhill side of the Peyote chief one has to go through (accept) Peyote, for it is considered impossible to go around or over the sacred plant placed on top of the altar. The downhill road symbolizes the latter half of one's life, the easier half.

Those early years of my uphill journey were difficult because of my preoccupation with death. This morbid obsession began when I attended my third Peyote meeting. Several people present were ill, and I feared the spread of disease by the communal sharing of the spoon to eat Peyote and the cup to drink Peyote tea. Two voices within me began to talk about my death, one stressing its reality and the other constantly agreeing; the voice-exchange continued until my awareness of death became intense. I had been asleep to my death for thirty-one years; it now became an intimate reality. At a meeting that I attended, a wise elderly Peyotist said, "You can see yourself in this fireplace; you can see what kind of man you are. If you accept what you see, you will be all right and stay in this religion; if you don't accept what you see, you will never come back." More than one man attending a meeting has thought himself attending his own funeral; he believed that he saw his own body being brought into the tipi instead of the morning food—the church became for him a funeral parlor. After such an experience, he may or may not want to return to the Peyote religion. That night I arrived at the junction and chose the Peyote road, which included the risk of sickness and the anguish of mental torment. Yet, in the sense that "many are called, but few are chosen," Peyotists say that "Peyote chooses you, you don't choose it."

After that traumatic night I was aware of death every day for a period of about 3 years. It was not an absorbing fixation, but it was a daily reminder, my Dark Night of the Soul. I was often awakened to the image of a black whiplash across my back and the words resounding in my ears: "You are some day going to die." At a Peyote meeting, when I told the members of my concern about death, one of the leaders stood up and said that I was off to a good beginning in the Peyote way. During a meeting 3 years later I simply became aware that it was useless worrying about the inevitable. To be uneasy is the original derivation of the word disease; my anxiety and worry (uncertainty) about my certain death was a disease. Perhaps there is in each of us a level where the knowledge of our own death is so strange that it comes as a shock.

The ceremonies not only exposed me to the unknown, but allowed me an insight into Sioux psychology and culture, which is so different from ours in many ways. Thanks to Peyote I have become acquainted with the genius of the Sioux mind; it has been a powerful catalyst in overcoming ethnocentric barriers. Peyote magnified individual personalities and cultural differences in a complementary manner, and showed what we all had in common as human beings. During their meetings, which lasted from 12 to 15 hours, I respectfully followed the ceremonial rules of conduct—the Indian way. The ingestion of Peyote helped us to endure the all- night ceremony and the socializing during the following day. Alone and decidedly outnumbered, I absorbed their culture under the aegis and power of Peyote. Although each meeting was a culture-shock to my nervous system, my acculturation was gradual rather than abrupt; it was a slow blood-transfusion of cultural transformation.

After attending several Peyote ceremonies I started noticing a change in my mannerisms. Especially noticeable was a change in my body movements and gestures; my way of speaking and voice quality also altered. My sense of humor and values became more recognizable among the Sioux than among people of my own culture. Sometimes I found myself willingly imitating the Sioux men I most admired; at other times I passively observed those same strong personalities controlling my actions and mannerisms. More than once during a ceremony I suddenly felt as though I had left my body, passing into a person sitting across from me and looking through his eyes at me. I have often wondered whether that person simultaneously had the same experience, but Peyotists rarely comment on their visions and appear uninterested when I tell them of mine. They generally refrain from telling anyone what they have learned, especially their deepest mystical experiences; they say that Peyote teaches each person differently.

As the Peyote religion and the Sioux became more important in my life, I began feeling more distant from my own culture, which appeared increasingly shallow, meaningless, aggressively acquisitive, and boastfully noisy. I was more comfortable with the Indians, who are a quiet, refined, and soft-spoken people; their slower pace of life was more restful to my mind, and their subtle sense of humor, especially Peyote humor, was a joy. Indians love to joke even when the joke is on them, but there is no scorn in their joking. Peyote humor is partly a play on words, especially English words which are relatively new to the Indian; they enjoy the fact that many different English words have the same sound, and that different-sounding words have the same meaning.

At the close of a Peyote ceremony, an elderly Indian was explaining the difference between the southern and northern Arapahoe language. He used English words for his example: "Where the southern Arapahoe would say 'match,' the northern Arapahoe would say. . . ?" He couldn't think of the cognate word, so a member looked up and said "lighter." Such humor and laughter is encouraged after the ordeal of an all-night ceremony. Often their humorous stories have a sober message; an example is the tale of the "monkey in the fireplace," which warns against treating the ceremony as play. The story is as follows: "No monkey business allowed in this fireplace, but everything is in this fireplace, so the monkey must be in there too. This engineer on the railroad had a monkey who watched everything he did. The engineer stopped the train and went in the depot to get a cup of coffee. When he heard the toot-toot outside, he ran out and saw the monkey taking this train down the track. Hey, this monkey was really having fun. He was driving the train just like a man. He was really driving that train fast. He missed the curve and the train went off the track, but the monkey, he jumped out of the window and grabbed hold of a tree and was saved. He watched the train go into the ditch."

We both laughed; then he became serious and said: "But all the people and children on the train were killed. That's the way the monkey is: if the man don't watch close, he will miss the curve; the monkey, he's a monkey." Then this Indian Peyotist slowly pointed to the fireplace and said: "That monkey will kill you if you don't watch him; no monkey business allowed in this fireplace." Symbolically, this story indicates that if you are careless on the curve of the Peyote road, you will fall from the altar and burn up in the fireplace.

Through Peyote I have acquired many Indian friends and adopted relatives. In particular, I became quite close to my adopted brother, Silas, an Omaha-Ponca Indian who lived among the Sioux for many years. He was a leader of the Peyote ceremony, an official of the church, and a man of great charm and spiritual power. He was about 20 years older than I, a wiser brother. Together, we spent much time visiting and attending Peyote meetings. He had been raised in the Peyote tradition, and he taught me much about that tradition and about the good life. For instance, he taught me the need for humility before entering the tipi to pray. To attend a meeting with a know-it-all attitude, that of a "big shot," will usually cause suffering throughout the night. He said: "Over there are some tall weeds that are now bent by the cold. That's what Peyote can do to a man who thinks he knows everything. Peyote will bend him down and turn him inside out. " I have seen that happen since and I know that his analogy was accurate.

Because of his vast experience and clear, quick mind, he was always several steps ahead of me. I shall never forget that when I told him I thought Peyote was good, his answer was: "You say that Peyote is good; what's good about it?" No one has satisfactorily answered his question. Once when Silas had a ruptured hernia, a few Peyote boys helped him through to health. They prayed, drummed, and sang through the night, and they spoon-fed Silas about 150 Peyote. He was well by morning; the ambulance returned to the hospital without him.

Silas told me of his vision when he ate that large amount of Peyote: "Brother George, I had so much Peyote in me that when I raised up from the bed the Peyote would come up my throat to my mouth. While the boys were drumming and singing I suddenly got out of bed opened the door and went outside; a short distance from the house was a large hill. I walked to the hill and saw a shiny new ladder going all the way to the top. I climbed the ladder to the top of the hill. I looked around, everything up there was so beautiful. The air was clean and fresh; there were all kinds of pretty colored flowers. When I looked back to the ladder it was old and broken; many rungs were missing. Since I had no way of getting back down, I decided to enjoy where I was; later I looked back at the ladder and it was once again a shiny new ladder. I finally climbed down the ladder and walked back to the house. The people in the house looked very sad. I walked up to the bed and looked down at the man lying on the bed; he had his eyes closed and looked rested. I saw that the man on the bed was myself. I then lay down to rest. When I awoke my sickness was gone. The large hill was a hill of Peyote, all those Peyote represented my sins. The top of the hill was paradise." Although Silas often ate large amounts of Peyote, he told me that if a person is in the right spirit "just a taste of Peyote on the tip of your tongue is enough."

At meetings, Silas was a strict disciplinarian. At a house meeting in winter I fell unconscious from the lack of oxygen. The one-room log house was sealed airtight; it was crowded and stuffy. There was no air circulation; the fireman had brought in a large pan filled with live coals which further heated an already hot room. Silas was sitting next to me. When I fell unconscious, I dropped my pheasant-feathered fan on the floor. I was revived about 10 minutes later. The first thing Silas said to me was, "Pick up your fan!" A few minutes later I told Silas that I believed the reason for my passing out was that the live coals were eating up the oxygen. He agreed, but nothing was done about it. Under the influence of Peyote, the loss of consciousness was especially meaningful. I felt as though I had died; the darkness of unconsciousness came before I realized what was about to happen. I wondered whether death would be like that, quicker than conscious thought. A tall, quiet Arapahoe man revived me; I saw him clearly before I could hear any sound, and it was about a minute before I could hear. I went outside in the bitter cold to get some fresh air. The Arapahoe man walked up to me and said: "You are doing all right in this Peyote way, but don't be in a hurry; take your time." Several days later, a leader in the Peyote religion who had heard about my fainting said: "I heard that Peyote finally caught up with you."

I write of Silas in the past tense because he died in 1973. Visiting his blood relations, the Omahas of eastern Nebraska, is the closest I can come to being with him. In their eyes I am a welcomed relative who has come home. Whenever I attend a Peyote meeting, especially among his own people, he is close to me. Although all tribes have essentially the same Peyote ritual, there are variations which are highly important in the minds of the Indians. Each tribe has its language and culture; each has its own style; each has its own genius. At my first birthday meeting among the Omahas, I said that since I was familiar with the Sioux way, they could continue singing while I prayed with a prayer cigarette during the main smoke. The Omahas looked startled; the air seemed electrified by the cultural transgression. After a silence which seemed to last an eternity, Henry, the leader and my adopted nephew through Silas, said: "Uncle George, we will pick up these instruments (musical instruments) again when you are finished with your prayer; that's the way we do it here, so that's the way it is going to be, Uncle George."

Although I continued to live and work within my own culture, my heart, spirit, and mind resided with the Peyote religion and the Indians. Thus, I lived in two worlds—physically among my own people, emotionally among the Indians. Living within an hour's drive from the reservation allowed me easy access to the source of my emotional life. Because of the increasing ease and frequency with which I went back and forth, my image of the reservation's entrance and exit was that of a swinging door. As I felt an increasing need to be on the reservation, I began attending more meetings and visiting more often. All of us Peyotists needed emotional support as an integral part of group solidarity and the fellowship of a community of seekers. The social group using Peyote became as important to me as the plant and its powers. Whatever their age, Peyotists are endearingly called " Peyote boys." They are a brotherhood of seekers who are youthful in spirit and attitudes, in their curiosity and willingness to learn.

As my cultural metamorphosis became less detectable to myself, it became more obvious among friends and relatives of my own culture. Yet I could never become fully Indian. A Peyotist made this clear to me by saying: "This way helps us to become more Indian and it helps you to be more like George Morgan." At first Peyote enabled me to see the Indians as I wanted to see them: in an idealizing light. But eventually I learned from Peyote that their culture had its own snags and contradictions, and my view became more balanced. In time, Peyote aided me in understanding and respecting my own culture. For instance, Indians have a sharing culture; we do not. Peyote helped me to understand the advantages and pitfalls of sharing. Of course, any discerning mind might in time come to the same understandings; one does become wiser with age. With Peyote too it takes time to learn about life and cultural differences; wisdom cannot be hurried.

By reconciling the opposed cultural values in my mind, I diminished their hypnotic influence and escaped the clutching grip of ethnicity. An identity crisis ended: the tenuous swinging door vanished; I stepped out of both cultures and took a deep breath of fresh air in a cultural void. I could now enjoy both cultures, and I could move freely and safely through them. To arrive at this point along the Peyote road took me years of relentless effort.

The Peyote religion also advanced my formal education. One morning as I sat by the sacred fireplace I felt an urgent desire to journey to the land where Peyote grows and study the plant's environment and trade channels. That impulse was prompted by substantial price increases for the plant and occasional supply shortages which troubled the Indians. My university training in geography and plant ecology had prepared me to study the biogeography and economic history of Peyote. As there was a gap in the literature, I decided that this study would become my doctoral dissertation, and I felt that the knowledge gained from it would help Peyotists to secure a dependable supply in the future. I spent several months over a period of 2 years in the Texas brush country studying Peyote. I learned about the plant's life cycle, habitat, growth rates, and geographic range past and present. I also studied the history of Peyote trade between the Peyoteros (a group of Spanish-American Peyote traders) and the Indians.

I sincerely believe that Peyote guided me in this study, for I met no obstacles in seeking information about a delicate and somewhat secretive subject. I also believe that Peyote protected me from harm in the rattlesnake-infested thorn brushes. The details of my study are too complicated to relate here, but the thesis is of value in understanding the present problems of Peyote supply and how they arose. If Indians make the effort, as they surely will, there should be a dependable supply for their needs in the future. In a strange way I feel as if Peyote selected me to do that study, for other Peyotists with artistic talent have been inspired through Peyote to paint religious paintings connected with the ceremony; others have done beautiful beadwork.

I would not casually suggest to anyone that he attend a Peyote ceremony. It is difficult to sit through an all-night ceremony. And Peyote is not easy to swallow: it is extremely bitter, even to experienced Peyotists, and occasionally nauseating, especially for beginners. A person of sincere intent would be welcome: it is a church. He would find hospitality: Peyotists are courteous and respectful. But it is well to remember that Peyote is not a plaything; Peyotists say that "if you play around with Peyote, it will turn around and start playing with you." The Native American Church is not for the curiosity seeker: it is a serious religion.

The Peyote road has shown me many wonders, and I believe it is the same for other Peyotists. I shall continue to follow that adventurous path, that sublime way of life.