Peyote: Envoy of the Great Spirit

“The white man goes into his church house and talks about Jesus, but the Indian goes into his tipi and talks to Jesus”—Quanah Parker, 19^th century Comanche Chief and peyote road man (La Barre, 166). 

The history of Native American religions has witnessed four pan-Indian faiths: the omnipresence of Christianity (from the 16^th century onward) the Code of Handsome Lake (from the late 18^th century onward), the Ghost Dance (which rose and fell in the late 19^th century), and the Peyote Way (practiced without interruption for at least ten-thousand years). Among these four religions the most widespread by far is Christianity, a faith and worldview imported by a foreign race of conquerors that invaded Indian homelands from a distant continent. Nevertheless, the second-most widespread and by far the most ancient pan-Indian faith is the native religion of the divine cactus, peyote. This paper provides a brief overview of the long history of the peyote cult in North America.

Anthropologist Weston LaBarre[1] believes that peyote and other mind-altering plants have been used in the New World since the Mesolithic age (c. 9000 bce). During this span of more than one-hundred centuries, a worldview developed among all aboriginal Americans that, while distinctive in its many variations, can be generalized as follows:

• The world is populated with spirits, some good and some evil.
• Communication with a supreme being occurs through spirit-powers which are embodied in plant, animal or natural forces. (The sun, moon, rain, wind, lightning, mountains, rivers, fire, tobacco, and bison are examples of spirit-powers on earth.)
• Human beings are lost without the help of the spirit guides.
• Spirit-powers are approached through ceremonies that bring visions.
• Those who are granted visions gain power to heal and prophesize and to communicate with unseen spirits.
• Such persons bridge the gap between the visible and invisible worlds, and their “medicine” (spiritual power) can be used for good or ill.
• Because visions are needed to gain spiritual power, psycho-active plants are highly valued as religious sacraments—a means of attaining visions.

In this universal native worldview, the shamans (persons capable of spiritual vision) were regarded as special intermediaries essential to the health and survival of the tribe. Understandably, the first Americans were motivated to seek plants that offered them direct access to the spirit-world. La Barre suggests that this explains how the New World peoples discovered significantly more psycho-active plants in their environment than did their Old World counterparts:

Botanists expert in New World hallucinogens have repeatedly wondered how it could be that, given the wide range of plant genera in the Old World and New Worlds, and given the fact that hallucinogens occur as alkaloids, glycosides, resins, essential oils and others in seeds, sap, stem, leaves, bark and other parts of plants—and also given the fact that in land area the Old World is larger than the New, and that inquisitive man has existed for a much longer period in Old World that in the New—nevertheless the American Indians knew some forty local species of hallucinogens, whereas all the inhabitants of the rest of the world had scarcely half a dozen (La Barre, xiv, xv).

To further explain the aboriginal Americans’ superior knowledge of psycho-active plants, La Barre points out that Amerindians and Europeans have opposing epistemologies that have led them toward vastly different goals. American natives traditionally sought subjective visionary experience; whereas Europeans, from the pre-Socratic philosophers onward, pursued objectively verifiable experience, and wanted to purge religious experience of all idiosyncratic elements (Ibid., xv).

Whatever the circumstances, Americans since prehistory have known about peyote, a small, spineless cactus (Lophophora williamsii) that grows in the Rio Grande Valley of southern Texas and northern Mexico. Its name derives from peyotl, a Nahuatl word for “caterpillar” (describing the plant’s tufts of white hair). According to Omer Stewart, an authority on peyote religion, this insignificant-looking plant is more meaningful to many Indians of North America than maize, a dietary staple, because “it goes beyond the material things of daily human existence and into the realm of the spirit-forces” (Stewart, 174).

The first European record of peyote was provided by a Franciscan missionary to Mexico in the 1500s who observed peyote use among the Chichemec (Marriott, 213). The priest wrote that the Indians believed the plant’s power could safeguard them from witchcraft and enemies in battle, and enable them to find lost objects and to heal various illnesses. In 1620 an edict of the Office of the Inquisition banned all peyote use, associating it with heresy from the true Catholic faith. The decree warned that violators would suffer the same punishment as all unholy heretics: execution. The existence of this prohibition makes it clear that many of the Indians who had converted to Catholicism were still practicing some of their ancient native ways. Over the next two and a half centuries, 90 cases of using peyote were prosecuted in 45 towns within the Spanish colony (Marriott, 213).

Despite these eradication efforts by the Catholic Church, peyote use continued to flourish and spread farther north. The tribes of northern Mexico (in particular, the Huichol) were the source of the northward diffusion of peyote religion into the Southwestern Plains. Time has blurred the paths of distribution, and there were no written records kept of the origin and expansion of the cult. However, the fundamentals of the modern peyote religion (minus its new Christian additions) can be traced to the complex of the Mexican cult.

According to most scholars, the earliest known peyotists of the present-day United States were probably the Carrizo, beginning in the 1600s. The cult then diffused from the Carizzo to the Lipan Apache, then to the Mescalero Apache and Tonnkawa who carried it to the Kiowa, Kiowa-Apache, Commanche and Caddo. During the desperate times of Native Americans in the late 1800s, the cult leapt in all directions from this Southwestern hub throughout the Indian Territory of Oklahoma and beyond (Anderson, 25).

            This blossoming of peyotism in the late 19^th century was promoted by terrible events in Indian history. The aboriginal way of life (especially for the nomadic plains tribes) had collapsed. Traditional social organization was destroyed or disrupted; languages and religious ways were forbidden; physical suffering was epidemic because of poverty, malnutrition, disease and alcoholism. Indian leaders who appealed to the Indian sense of pride and nostalgia and that resisted total assimilation into the white Christian culture found that it was not difficult to create religious movements that attracted many followers. New ways, such as the Peyote Road, offered Indians a sense of identity under disastrous circumstances, and the visions that peyote stimulates gave dramatic form to their hopes.

            Simultaneous with the early years of the dissemination of the peyote cult, the Ghost Dance religion arose and swept up disciples among tribes throughout the plains and beyond. However, its emphasis on the elimination of the white invaders and the return of bison herds and dead ancestors ended in mass disillusionment. Following the massacre at Wounded Knee, the expanding peyote cult was present to take the place of the failed Ghost Dance. Just as importantly, the cactus was able to deliver exactly what its prophets had promised: journeys to the spirit world and spectacular visions. According to Vincenzo Petrullo, an anthropologist who studied peyotism among the Delaware tribe:

                        Peyotism contains no prophetic formula for the imminent elimination of the Whites and the return to the pre-Columbian conditions; it teaches acceptance of the new world, and makes possible an attitude of resignation in the face of the probable disappearance of the Indian groups as distinct peoples, culturally and racially, by insisting on the necessity of emancipation from mundane aspirations. The greater goal that the Indian should attempt to attain is a loftier spiritual realm which is beyond the reach of the

                        Whites to destroy (quoted in Stewart, 32).

            Five elements of the peyote religion made it particularly appealing at this juncture in Native American history:

1)      It included traditional native religious personas and symbols.

2)      It encouraged a pan-Indian outlook.

3)      It included salvation in its teachings, as well as an ethical code.

4)      It adopted aspects of the Christian faith to create a pan-Indian theology.

5)      Peyote was powerful “medicine” and produced visions (thus fostering and continuing the Plains tribe’s vision quest).

The “divine cactus” seemed to guarantee an excursion to the realm of the spirit-powers. Peyote provided Crashing Thunder, a Winnebago peyote missionary, with his first real visions and thus solved for him a lifelong problem:

He had lied about having gotten power from a vision experience in connection with the older native religion: So important for personal prestige was this experience that he was betrayed into fabrication about it. But he never lied to himself. All his life he was aware of the deception, and being a man of marked fundamental honesty, he keenly felt the fraud. Finally at the age of forty-five he did achieve through peyote the experience which he had missed as a youth. His conversion to the peyote religion was consequently must profound: “It is the only holy thing that I have become aware of in all my life,” he said simply, after this experience (La Barre, 100).

John Rave, another Winnebago peyote missionary, became a prophet after his own conversion experience:

           

In the middle of the night I saw God. To God living up above, our Father, I prayed. “Have mercy on me! Let me know this religion!” I had been frightened during the night but now I was happy. I seemed to see everything clearly. “O medicine, Grandfather, most assuredly you are holy! All that is connected with you; that I would like to know and that I would like to understand. Help me! I give myself up to you entirely!” Throughout all the years that I had lived on earth, I now realized that I had never known anything holy. Now for the first time, I knew it. Would that some of the Winnebagos also know it! (Anderson, 37)

It is an irony of history that the white policy of the systematic cultural assimilation of Indians by sending them to white schools and taking away their native languages, dress, beliefs and customs, actually prepared the way for the flourishing of peyotism. The whites had created ideal conditions for the rebirth of an aboriginal cult that had been practiced since prehistory. Some of those historical factors include:

• Inter-tribal warfare had been almost entirely curtailed.
• Tribal reservations in Indian Territory (Oklahoma) were crowded together.
• Older religious traditions had weakened, but without changing the basic native worldview.

• Missionary boarding schools multiplied friendly contacts between members of different tribes.
• Learning English as a common language greatly facilitated communication.
• Friendships developed as students encouraged much visiting among reservations after graduation (Stewart, 33).

Thus, to many Indians the peyote cult and other reconciliatory religions (such as Shakerism of the Pacific Northwest and the “Great Message” of the Iroquois) became a much-needed link with the traditional past that was being destroyed by the white hegemony. Within only a few decades this new faith had been eagerly accepted by members of every Oklahoma tribe (Stewart, 32). By the late 1970s peyotism was practiced by Indians throughout the United States and Canada, and had become “the most widespread and popular intertribal religious movement of the American Indian” (Stewart, 36).

Most tribes that practice peyotism have at least one story about the magical plant’s origin. Often a spiritual power named Peyote helps a young woman or man in a time of drastic need. Most stories emphasize the hero’s closeness to death, and then his miraculous recovery through eating peyote; in some tales the person even dies and is transported to the spiritual realm where the Peyote teachings are conveyed, and is then returned to earth in order to teach the Peyote Way to the tribe. The general theme is that from the earth grows a spirit-helper in the form of a plant with supernatural powers of healing and teaching. “Other aspects of the accounts—loneliness, hunger, thirst, despair—can be seen as symbolic of the fate that the Indian feels has befallen him at the hands of the white man. But with the intervention of Peyote there is hope and the promise of a better future” (Anderson, 20-1).

            Albert Hensley, a Winnebago of Wisconsin, recounted a typical peyote origin legend that contains obvious Christian elements. In the story a Mescalero Apache hunter gets lost and goes without food or drink for several days. Finally, he lays down under a shade tree to die and he stretches his arms out to both sides of his supine body. His hands touch a plant on each side. He brings it the plants to his mouth and eats the juicy flesh.

Then as he lay on the ground a holy spirit entered him and taking the sprit of the Indian carried it away to the regions above. There he saw a man who spoke to him. “I have caused you to go through all this suffering, for had I not done it, you would never have heard of the proper religion. It was for that reason that I placed holiness in what you have eaten. My Father gave it to me and I was permitted to place it on the earth… At present this religion exists in the south but now I wish to have it extended to the north. You Indians are now fighting one another, and it is for the purpose of stopping this, that you might shake hands and partake of food together, that I am giving you this peyote. Now you should love one another. Earth-maker is my father. Long ago I sent this gospel across the ocean but you did not know of it. Now I am going to teach you to understand it” (Anderson, 22).

            A similar peyote origin tale was told by Howard Rain of the Menomini tribe in Michigan. The tale begins identically, with a lost hunter lying down to die with his arms outspread and discovering peyote plants, which he eats and is transported beyond the earth. Then he sees someone approaching on a cloud.

                        That’s a man coming this way, with a buckskin suit on; he got long hair. He come right straight for him; it’s Jesus himself. So he told this boy, “Well, one time you was crying, and your prayers were answered that time. So I come here. I’m not supposed to come; I said I wasn’t going to come before two thousand years. But I come for you, to come tell you why you are lost. You ain’t lost. Oh, it’s just a little ways, here. But we’re going to bring you something, so you can take care of your people. That’s what you’re crying for; you don’t know how—how you’re going to take care of your people. So we’re going to give you the power to do it. But we go up here first.” So they went up a hill there. There’s a tipi there already. So Christ, before he went in it, offered a prayer. So they went in there. Then he showed the ritual ways; the medicine, how to use, it, he gave him the songs, them songs we’re using—but that’s why, see, we don’t understand them words… “Now you can go back. Take this medicine along, over there. Keep your peoples. Whoever takes this medicine, he will do it in my name” (Anderson, 23).

James Mooney, a former newspaper reporter in Indiana, conducted the first studies of the peyote religion as an ethnologist for the Bureau of American Ethnology of the Smithsonian Institution. In 1890, at age 30, Mooney traveled to Oklahoma to study the new religious movement of the Ghost Dance. He soon discovered that some participants of the Ghost Dance were leaders of another pan-Indian religious movement, the peyote religion. While busy writing a large monograph on the Ghost Dance, Mooney managed to participate in several all-night peyote meetings. Over the next few years, he wrote a number of articles describing the rituals and theology of the peyote cult. Mooney wrote of “a ceremony essentially Indian, but not of any particular tribe; a ceremony having overtones of Christianity, but so different from all Christian sects that it would provoke them all to do their best to eradicate it” (Stewart, 34).

Although the details of peyote ceremonies vary among the many different tribes that practice a form of the cult, the essential ingredients are similar. There are two primary peyote ceremonies: The Half-Moon Way and the Big Moon Way. The Half-Moon Way (also known as the Little Moon Way, Tipi Way, Comanche Way and Quanah Parker Way) uses a crescent-shaped earthen altar and shallow fire pit in the center of a tipi. It incorporates more Native American traditions, with references to the Four Directions, Mother Earth, Peyote Woman and Chief Peyote as a messenger of the Great Spirit (or as an embodiment of the Sun God [2]). In contrast, the Big Moon Way (also known as the Wilson Moon and Moonhead Way) uses a larger, horseshoe-shaped altar and its rituals include mounding the ashes into the shape of a heart and a cross. Disciples of the Big Moon Way built permanent churches with concrete altars and fire pits, and in some locales, cemeteries for peyotists. It involves stronger biblical and Christian elements, including baptism. The Big Moon Way also bans tobacco use, whereas smoking tobacco (wrapped in corn silk) is an important ceremonial element of the Half-Moon Way.

            Both of these major forms (and a number of less-practiced variants) meld Indian culture with Catholicism, but to different degrees.[3] All peyote ways emphasize the role of peyote as messenger between this world and the spiritual dimension. Peyote is also respected as a healer. All the peyote ways forbid the use of liquor, and they all preach that peyote can cure alcoholism (Marriott, 214).

The all-night peyote ceremonies, called “meetings” are usually held on Saturdays. There are no preliminary purification rituals such as fasting or a sweat lodge, but the participants may spend time painting and decorating themselves with feathers and their best clothes. The meetings include four leaders: the road man (the principal leader), the chief drummer, the fire-tender, and the cedar-man (who consecrates people and objects with cedar-dust incense tossed into the fire). Ritual objects include a staff, a rattle, eagle-bone whistle, drum, drumsticks, a fire-stick, an eagle or pheasant feather fan, and a water bucket. A huge button of peyote, the Peyote Chief (or Father Peyote)[4] is placed atop an altar, sometimes on a small, beaded throne. Dried peyote “buttons” (the lobed tops of the cactus) and peyote tea are available for consumption during the ceremony.

A typical ceremonial sequence includes a counter-clockwise entrance into the tipi or church (with each worshipper consecrated by cedar smoke); seating on piles of fragrant sage; the consecration of ritual objects with cedar smoke; distributing tobacco for ritual smoking (in the Half-Moon version); passing around a plate of peyote and a pail of peyote tea; the road man’s singing of an opening song followed by a prayer; then passing around the sacred staff, fan, rattle and drum to each member, who each sings four songs before passing the items along counter-clockwise. The peyote songs, which are usually spontaneous (and often include what Pentecostals would call glossolalia) are sung until midnight.[5] Then the fire-tender goes outside and sounds the midnight water call four times in each direction on his eagle-bone whistle, before re-entering with a pail of water. After the water is consecrated by cedar smoke and the eagle-bone whistle is allowed to “drink” first, the water is passed around for each participant to slake his thirst. Some road men dip the eagle-feather fan into the water and fling droplets on the participants like a Catholic priest sprinkling holy water. Then there is a brief recess, and the ceremony resumes with a quiet time; the advent of powerful visions.

After the visionary period, singing starts up again along with the (optional) consumption of more peyote buttons[6], and sometimes a healing ceremony for those who are ill. At sunrise, a special Dawn Song is sung by the road man. Then a pre-designated woman (Water Woman, or Peyote Woman) brings in a second pail of water, and after it is circulated, women bring a ceremonial breakfast of corn, meat, fruit and water, each in its own container. The ceremony may conclude with members sharing their visions, or (in the Big Moon Way) with a Bible reading. The final song, the Quitting Song, is then sung.

Among the prophets of the modern peyote cult, Chief Quanah Parker of the Comanches was probably the single most important leader. He introduced peyote to members of his tribe on the Kiowa-Comanche reservation in Texas and protected its use from those who would ban it, all the while remaining a friend and collaborator with white Christian missionaries and businessmen (Stewart, 70). Parker contributed to the spread of peyotism in three important ways:

1.      Through his rank and wealth as chief of the Comanches, his personal history as a warrior and his considerable charisma, he was able to attract many to his beliefs.

2.      Through political diplomacy he was able to protect the use of peyote for the Indians when government and church agencies were trying to prohibit it.

3.      He was an apostle of the Half Moon peyote ceremony and he preserved this version of peyotism against the innovations of others (Stewart, 70).

Quanah Parker was the son of Cynthia Ann Parker, who had been captured by the Comanches in Texas when she was 12 years old. She became the wife of a Comanche chief and gave birth to Quanah in 1845 when she was 22. When Quanah was 15 his father was killed and his mother was coerced, after several attempts, to return to white civilization. At his mother’s insistence, Quanah remained with the Comanches to be raised as a young warrior. In 1867, refusing to abide by the Treaty of Medicine Lodge, he commanded military raids in Texas. After the battle of Dodd Walls in June, 1874, in which he led 700 warriors into a bloody slaughter, Parker surrendered and from then on cooperated with whites. He even promoted the idea of the social integration of Indians with whites, and he used his used his considerable political power to condemn the traditional medicine men who he felt had betrayed the warriors with lies about invincibility in combat.

            In his mid-twenties, while visiting his white uncle, John Parker, in Mexico, Quanah was gored by bull. Blood poisoning set in and the local Indians gave him woqui, a drink made from boiled peyote cactus. When Parker became well again, a Lipan Apache road man named Billy Chiwat conducted a peyote ceremony for the chief. Afterward, Parker began to proselytize as a road man for the Half-Moon Way[7] (Stewart, 76).

Quanah Parker is directly responsible for the spread of peyotism to the Delaware, Caddo, Potawatomi, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Ponca, Oto, Pawnee, Osage and other tribes. He has assumed the stature of legend among the peyotists, especially the Comanches (Stewart, 79). A white peyotist, C.C. Simmons, who was an employee of Parker, wrote an account of Parker as road man that appeared in a 1913 book, “The Peyote Road”:

           

At about three o’clock in the morning, the “silent hour” and the time of the greatest manifestation of power, Quanah, the leader, knelt before the altar and prayed earnestly. Then, taking the eagle feathers in both hands, he arose to his feet. I saw at once he was under great inspiration. His whole personality seemed to change. His eyes glowed with a strong light and his body swayed to and for, vibrating with some powerful emotion. He sang the beautiful song, “Ya-na-ah-away” [the eagle’s flight to the sun], in a most grand and inspiring manner. Then all sang together in harmony. They prayed to God and to Jesus, and sang of a “narrow way” (Stewart, 77).

            The second most important leader in the modern peyote religion was a Caddo medicine man named John Wilson. He was half-Delaware, one-fourth Caddo, and one-fourth French, but he considered himself Caddo and spoke only that language. In 1880, at 40 years old, Wilson became a peyote road man with a new ceremony that attracted a large following. He was an active leader for half a dozen years in the Ghost Dance religion, but when that cult died, he returned again to full-time peyotism.[8] He claimed to have learned his unique ceremony, the Big Moon (or “Wilson Moon”), by divine revelation from the Father Peyote himself. This revelation came to him during a two-week period in which he ate peyote day and night. He was shown, under peyote’s guidance, the empty tomb of Christ and the path that Christ took that led from the grave to the Moon (or Elder Brother, in his Caddo tradition). Peyote told John Wilson to walk this path for the rest of his days. If he would do so humbly, open to the teachings of peyote, then he would, “just before his death, reach to the door of the moon one step beyond which, at the moment of his death, would bring him onto the actual presence of Christ and Peyote” (Stewart, 89).

            The Big Moon ceremony of John Wilson (who was also named “Moonhead”) differed from the Half-Moon ceremony of Quanah Parker in its greater focus on Jesus, the crucifix and the Bible (Stewart 91). Wilson formulated a set of moral demands that included abstaining from alcohol and tobacco, sexual restraint, fidelity within monogamous marriage, and prohibitions against lying, revenge and fighting, and witchcraft. These ethical teachings have become widely distributed and known as the “Peyote Road” (Stewart, 37). In the Big Moon ceremony, an earthen mound representing the sun is heaped opposite the door. From the doorway through the sun a line is drawn to the center of the horseshoe-shaped altar where the Chief Peyote rests, occasionally topped by a crucifix. This line represents the “Peyote Road.” From about 1900, the Big Moon ceremony has been practiced among the Chippewa, Menominee, Sioux, Shoshone, Ute, Gosiute and Navaho (Stewart, 91-3).[9]

Peyote was expected to purge one’s sins, and John Wilson taught that the greater the sin, the more peyote must be ingested. Vomiting was regarded as both a punishment for sins and a purification of evil influences.[10] Wilson insisted that the degree of nausea suffered and the consequent vomiting was commensurate with the amount of sinfulness that must be eradicated. He also taught that eating peyote buttons and drinking peyote tea was analogous to the ritual use of bread and wine in the Sacrament of Holy Communion (Stewart, 37).

The modern peyote ceremonies have not changed much since those that Mooney attended in the 1890s except that, in most cases, women are no longer prohibited from participating in the rituals. Indeed, Omer Stewart points out that the breakfast of meat and parched corn is related to the eating of venison and parched maize in the peyote rites of northern Mexico. There are other features of the old Mexican peyote complex that persist in the modern American peyote religion that suggest a continuity of ideas and practices: the gourd rattle, the ritual number four, the dedication to the four directions, the cleansing in fire, the smoke and incense, cigarette smoking, bird symbolism, and the all-night ceremony. “But most significant is the ancient, persistent belief in the supernatural power of the peyote plant common to both rituals. Peyote is a sacred medicine; peyote protects; peyote allows one to see the future, or to find lost objects; peyote gives power to the user that may manifest in various ways; and peyote teaches” (Stewart, 41).

Peyote may be used by Christians or incorporated with Christian ideas, and Christian authority is expressed within many peyote songs.[11] The Iowa peyotists, for example, chant the following lines in high-pitched Indian vocalizations that makes the English nearly unrecognizable: “Jesus’ way is the only way. Savior Jesus is the only Savior. Oh, Lord! Lord! Lord! It is not everyone who says who shall be saved. I know Jesus now. You must be born again” (La Barre, 82). An opening song of the Pawnee declares, “God’s son says, ‘Get up and follow Me.’ Jesus said, ‘You shall enter into the Kingdom of God’” A morning song says, “Jesus said, ‘Whoever asks Me for water, I will give him the water of life. If I give him the water of life he will never thirst again.’” Another morning song says, “The sun is coming up now. God made that light for us. We are living now. God made us. To God is the glory” (La Barre, 83). One closing song of the Winnebago is, “This is the road that Jesus showed us to walk on.” The disciples of Winnebago road man John Rave end their all-night worship with the Lord’s Prayer and this song; “There are many wings [repeated five times]. It is God’s will that there should be many wings.”

Peyote is actually revered by many peyotists as the Indian’s Christ, which did not come to the whites, but only to the Native Americans. John Wilson explained that, “Jesus, like Peyote, is a spirit-force, so white man and Indians worship the same God but just have different spirit-forces” (Stewart, 52).

Christian influence pervades even the rituals for collecting peyote cacti, which is regarded as a kind of pilgrimage. When the Tarahumara search for the plant they make the sign of the cross and greet the cactus as if it were a chief. Then they erect a cross and place near it the first plants that they find, which will then tell them where more cacti are growing.

An interesting feature of every variant of the peyote cult is the personification of the peyote plant as a living spirit-entity. Tarahumara Indians say that peyote sings to them in the desert country in which it grows. “It says, ‘I want to go to your country that you may sing your songs to me,’” said one informant. The cacti sing in the bag while being carried home. “One man, who wanted to use his bag as a pillow, could not sleep, he said, because the plants made so much noise” (Stewart, 32). A Lipan Apache told the ethnographer Weston La Barre:

“Peyote is pretty hard to find…a person who is not used to it doesn’t recognize it though he is in the middle of a whole clump of peyote. Once he sees one, another appears and so on until they all come out just like stars. If you are having a hard time finding them, you do this: when you find one by itself you eat it. When it takes effect, you will hear a noise like the wind from a certain direction. From the place where the noise comes you will get many peyote plants” (La Barre, 57).

When the peyote seekers return home, the people welcome the gathered cacti with music. “The night is passed with dancing… The pile of fresh plants, perhaps two bushels or more, is placed under the cross, and sprinkled with maize beer, for peyote wants to drink beer, and if the people should not give it, it would go back to its own country. Food is also offered to the plants and even money is placed before them, perhaps three silver dollars, which the owner, after the feast, takes back again” (Stewart, 32).

            Birds play an important symbolic role in peyote religion and “peyote birds” can be found in sacred decorations from drumsticks to beaded peyote bags to water pails. The bird represents a messenger between Father Peyote in the spirit world and the people of earth. The Huichol of northern Mexico regard the macaw as their holy peyote bird. The Kiowa use the image of a waterfowl, like a crane, and silver jewelry of this bird has been traded all over the Plains for decades. If a Kiowa sees an eagle in a peyote vision, he holds his eagle feathers in his left hand from then on. The Comanche peyote bird is called the “sun-eagle” (literally, “yellow eagle”), which is said to travel just below the rising sun. The peyote bird of the Shawnee is the martin. When the fire-tender whistles on an eagle bone, it is said to mimic the cry of a thirsty eagle. After the fire-tender reenters the tipi with the water bucket, the first to “drink” is the eagle whistle itself, dipped into the water in the pattern of the sacred cross, representing the four directions (and possibly the cross of Jesus). “The peyote spirit is like a little hummingbird,” said Jonathan Koshiway, an Oto peyote road man. “When you are quiet and nothing is disturbing it, it will come to a flower and get the sweet flavor. Bit if it is disturbed, it goes quick” (La Barre, 71).

The physiological effects of peyote were studied extensively in the 1970s. The alkaloid, mescaline, is by far the most potent psycho-active ingredient of the peyote cactus. Several authors mentioned that mescaline-hydrocloride (the “street” form of the drug) brings on a psychedelic experience that is virtually indistinguishable from the effects of organic peyote.[12]

Peyote cactus is extremely bitter to the taste. Within an hour after ingestion, it produces a strong physical exhilaration and stimulation of the central nervous system. Other common effects include nausea, profound depression[13] and wakefulness, and visions saturated with color that last for several hours. There are no uncomfortable aftereffects[14] and peyote is not physically habit-forming.   

            Peyote intoxication causes synaesthesia, or the blending of the senses (for example “hearing” and “tasting” colors). A popular peyote song called Heyowiniho came to John Wilson during a synaesthetic auditory hallucination in which he heard the sound of the rising sun. Many peyote songs are composed of nonsensical syllables, yet are memorized and taught later by participants (La Barre, 20).

            The physiological effects of peyote dictate the course of the night-long ceremony. The initial period of exhilaration is used for offering songs and prayers.[15] The secondary stage of depression may bring on paranoid states and panic about witchcraft, but also the sacrificial suffering at the heart of the vision quest. The third stage of visionary experience can lead to profound euphoria, “catching songs,” and revelations of bead designs and so forth.

A Lipan informant told La Barre:

If a fellow is not scared, is not afraid of it, he will surely have a good time. A fellow who is afraid of it just gets dizzy and frightened… What he sees is not true, but is just playing a joke on him. When a fellow is honest and good-natured, it is easy for him. But when a fellow is rough and ill-tempered he will have a hard time learning from peyote. It will scare him and make it hard for him… The chief peyote is pretty tough. It watches what is going on. It keeps everything straight. It is a plant, but it can see and understand better than a man. If someone has wrong thoughts, he had better look out or he will go crazy. When they first start eating peyote they put their thoughts on something good, something they want, for they say that whatever you are thinking about when you start is what you will see all during the night in your vision… Sometimes a man sees a vision and it scares him and he goes out running. But he is all right the next day… In the morning, just after the meeting is over, you can tell others what you saw (La Barre, 95).

            The psycho-somatic depressive effect of peyote is well known among the Indians and they will use sage or cedar incense to “smoke” a person who becomes “tired” during the early stages of the experience. However, rather than regarding this depressive stage as a terrible effect of the plant, it is seen in a positive light as the necessary suffering that always accompanies a true vision quest. In other words, this stage of depression fits well with the notion of “lamenting for a vision” that formed part of the religious ideology of the Plains tribes. Indeed, some Caddo peyotists endure four rounds of singing without taking water, in order to intensify their ordeal, and proudly emphasize that their way is “hard.” Most of La Barre’s informants considered the Osage peyotists, who use “beds” made of sage in their meetings, to be decadent and soft.

The stage of anguish during the peyote experience may even be understood in Christian terms. During one meeting, at about 2 a.m., a Comanche peyotist said, “If there is suffering, this is the time. That’s the reason I took a good rest, so I could stand it. Many a time I have fallen over at this time. It’s getting on to what they call the dark hour, the hour of crucifixion. Everyone here is suffering now” (La Barre, 96).

            Praying in peyote meetings also appears to have much of the psychological tone of the old vision quest. The prayers are spontaneous and sometimes last up to an hour. “The speaker’s voice becomes louder as he proceeds, earnest and quavering as he sways with the fullness of his emotion and stretches out his hands toward the peyote and the fire. Sometimes his speech is wholly interrupted by uninhibited broken sobbing as he cries out for the pity of the supernaturals” (La Barre, 81). If the worshippers do not cry naturally, they will try to manage a few tears for the sake of ceremony.

In some peyote groups a method for the catharsis of personal woes is the practice of the public confessions of sins.[16] Following the call of the road man, members stand and confess their wrongdoings to Father Peyote and those present and ask forgiveness of Great Spirit and the persons they may have harmed (La Barre, 99).

Practitioners of the peyote way have faced waves of opposition from both white authorities and Indians. At the end of the 19^th century, Christian missionaries and local, state, and federal authorities (particularly the Indian agents) began to suppress peyote use in Indian Territory. “The Courts of Indian Offenses, founded in 1883, outlawed ‘old heathenish dances,’ plural marriages, healing practices of medicine men and women, property destruction associated with death and burial customs, and the use of intoxicants, including mescal beans and peyote (Marriott, 216). Adherents of the peyote religion in Oklahoma established the Native American Church in 1918 in order to protect their practice of peyote consumption as a religious sacrament under the First Amendment rights of religious freedom. Churches in other states soon followed. However, raids, arrests, confiscation of property, fines and jail terms continued for practitioners of peyote religion under an 1897 federal statute against providing intoxicants to Indians—which had already been determined in court not to apply to peyote (Marriott, 216).

            The peyotists met the prohibitionist movement with their own campaign of propaganda. Their most important claim, backed by much anecdotal evidence, is that peyote aided in the cure of alcoholism.[17] As one Indian informant put it, “Whiskey and peyote fight in a man, and usually peyote wins and brings it [the alcoholism] out” (La Barre, 96). Nevertheless, the antagonism from the dominant white culture had a strong negative impact. “There is a consequent lack of psychological security in their belief and practice of peyotism” (La Barre, 93). Antagonism from older members of the tribes was common. Among the Taos tribe, the elders claimed during a drought that the peyotists had “stopped the rain”—while the peyotists, in turn, blamed the drought on the hostility they encountered from the followers of the older native cults.

            La Barre points out that, “In the Plains the fear is often expressed, not without justification, that the white man is ever about to take away the peyote religion from the Indian, as he has taken almost everything else material and immaterial” (La Barre, 98). At the same time, peyote is often seen as a protector from the white race, and is thought to be able to take care of itself, “which accounts for the comparative ease with which a white man can obtain entrance to a meeting, where he will be exposed to ‘proof’ of peyote’s power” (La Barre 98). Stories circulate in which peyote helped an Indian escape from a white man’s jail, protected a soldier in a white man’s war, and that it often succeeds in cures in cases that white doctors have abandoned as hopeless.

In 1944, various peyote groups established the Native American Church of the United States, and in 1955, the Native American Church of North America[18], incorporated in 17 states. Its current membership is estimated at 250,000 to 400,000 (White, xv). The American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978 provided exclusive legal protection for peyote use by members of the Native American Church—who are at least 25 percent Indian. This statute excludes non-Indians (as well as many legally-recognized Indi­ans) from participation in the peyote sacrament. Immanuel Trujillo, a Native American Church road man with a French mother and San Carlos Apache father, tried unsuccessfully to challenge this racial exclusion. His children were only one-quarter Indian, and he worried that his grandchil­dren could be barred from partaking of the peyote sacrament. Trujillo founded an “all race group” within the Native American Church, but the federal government declared the group illegal and revoked its charter.

The modern peyote way functions in every aspect as a complete religion. Under the witness of Father Peyote, road men lead their congregations, christen newborns, teach a set of ethics, perform marriages and preside at funerals. Peyote and the visions it confers serves as a focus for tribal and intertribal spiritual life. “Peyote is without question the living religion of the Plains Indians today” (La Barre, 103).

The old Delaware religion is too heavy for us who are becoming few and weak. It is too difficult. Peyote is easy in comparison. Therefore, we who are weak take up this new Indian religion. This is the very objection raised by the old men… But Peyote knows that the Indian’s burden of becoming educated and at the same time keeping up the old religions is too heavy, for he said that to the old woman who discovered our new religion: “Peyote is to be the Indians’ new religion. It is to be for all Indian people and only for them.” (Trujillo, quoted in La Barre, 103).

Peyotism succeeded where the Ghost Dance had failed. The Ghost Dance contained militant elements that, combined with promises of magical immunity, had led to violence and finally, the massacre at Wounded Knee. By contrast, the Peyote Religion promoted non-violence, healing, introspection and spiritual consolation or escape. Yet peyotism was uniquely Indian and enabled the possibility of maintaining a native identity while still meeting and integrating the new conditions of the white cultural hegemony.

Nevertheless, it should be emphasized that despite its syncretism with Christianity, peyotism is essentially an aboriginal American religion, and it functions within a fundamentally native worldview about spirit-powers, visions, witches, shamans and magical modes of healing. As Quanah Parker commented, “The white man goes into his church house and talks about Jesus, but the Indian goes into his tipi and talks to Jesus.”

Works Cited

Anderson, Edward. Peyote: The Divine Cactus. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press,

1996.

Hirschfelder, Arlene. “Peyote Religion,” in The Encyclopedia of Native American

Religions. Facts on File, New York, 1992.

La Barre, Weston. The Peyote Cult (fifth edition, enlarged). Norman, Oklahoma:

            University of Oklahoma Press, 1989.

Marriott, Alice and Carol Rachlin. Peyote. New York: Thomas Crowell, 1971.

Mooney, James. “The Mescal Plant and Ceremony.” Bureau of American Ethnology,

Annual Report 17 (1896), in Omer Stewart’s Peyote Religion.

Stewart, Omer. Peyote Religion: A History. Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma

Press, 1990.

Other Works

Ballantine, Betty and Ian Ballantine, ed. Native Americans: An Illustrated History.

Atlanta: Turner Publishing, Inc., 1993.

Slotkin, James. The Peyote Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956.

Swan, Daniel. Peyote Religious Art: Symbols of Faith and Belief. Jackson: University

            Press of Mississippi, 1999.

Thomas, Davis and Karin Ronnefeldt, ed. People of the First Man: Life Among the Plains

Indians in Their Final Days of Glory. New York: Promontory Press, 1982.

Wallace, Anthony. The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca. New York: Knopf, 1969.

White, Phillip. Peyotism and the Native American Church: An Annotated Bibliography.

London: Greenwood Press, 2000.

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[1] The Peyote Cult, La Barre’s ethnographic study of the peyote religion, was first published in 1938. In the introduction he says that the book was consciously modeled on Leslie Spier’s classic study of the Plains Indian Sun Dance. “The present study has been so far accepted as authoritative by Indians themselves that when new tribes acquire the peyote cult, I am told, they consult the book you hold in your hand for the proper ritual details. I am not entirely comfortable with this situation. It means that, perhaps unfortunately, the peyote rite has not changed in the last thirty years almost not at all—added to which an awesome responsibility for theological accuracy rests on the shoulders of a youthful graduate student who never in his most grandiose moments had calculated being the author in a religion of the book” (La Barre, xi).

[2] The Kiowa regard the peyote button, with its bright, circular disk and radiating lobes as the Sun God’s representative.

[3] A third form of worship, introduced by an Oto road man, John Koshiway, incorporates elements from Mormonism.

[4] Some Shawnee call the peyote chief the “interpreter” (between humans and the divine) or the Holy Ghost. Some Indians have worn their peyote fetishes as protective amulets during the world wars, and several of the large specimen Peyote Chiefs have are treated with the reverence of heirlooms, or even as if they were living holy persons (La Barre, 73).

[5] As James Mooney documented during a typical Half-Moon ceremony in 1891, “These songs have a peculiar lullaby effect, which intensifies the dreamy condition produced by the drug, at times rising into a note of wild triumph and then again sinking into wailing sadness” (Mooney, quoted in Stewart, 37).

[6] “Each worshipper then asks for as many peyote buttons as he wants to eat, and the songs resume around the tipi increasing in weird power as the effect of the drug deepens” (Mooney, quoted in Stewart, 39).

[7] A person learned to be a roadman by being taught by another roadman; the only requirements were to feel a calling to become a roadman and to be asked by someone to lead a meeting.

[8] Interestingly, Quanah Parker rejected the Ghost Dance, asserting that peyote was sufficient to the needs of his people (Mooney, 1896, quoted in Stewart, 34).

[9] By 1910, virtually every Oklahoma tribe was practicing some form of peyotism. These tribes included the Quapaw, Kansa, Kickapoo, Seneca, Ponca, Tonkawa, Oto, Pawnee, Sac, Fox, Shawnee and Iowa Indians. Peyotism also spread to the Northeast, where it was taken up among the Winnebago (Stewart, 127).

[10] Holes are sometimes dug inside the tipi as repositories for those who must vomit. The beadwork on a Arapaho peyote-fetish pouch represents these holes dug in a ring around the inside of the tipi.

[11] An internet search found a website, “Songs of the Native American Church,” where one can purchase no fewer than 47 different CDs of peyote songs!

[12] The factors that most strongly shape the experience, as both Omer Stewart and Weston La Barre pointed out, is the internal and external environment in which the drug is taken (for example, at a frat party or within a religious ceremony?) This parallels the counsel of psychedelic guru Timothy Leary about the supreme importance of “set” (mind) and “setting” (milieu) in the outcome of any psychedelic experience.

[14] James Mooney observed Quanah Parker engaging quite intelligibly in business transactions with white cattlemen one morning after eating at least thirty peyote buttons.

[15] Or in other contexts, allaying thirst and hunger on long hunts, or boosting courage and strength in war, racing and dancing.

[16] This is reminiscent of some Pentecostal Christian congregations.

[17] I was unable to find scientific research concerning peyote in the treatment of alcoholism. On the other hand, research with LSD (another alkaloid with psychedelic properties) specifically for the treatment of alcoholism has yielded positive outcomes, according to Stanislov Grof, M.D. (Grof, Stanislov. Realms of the Human Unconscious: Observations from LSD Research, New York: Dutton, 1976.)

[18] To incorporate the Canadian peyotists: Blood, Cree, Ojibway and Assiniboine.