Psychedelia, page 48
The peyote ritual is an all-night ceremony held inside a special tipi raised by the tribe's women, which is oriented with its opening facing directly towards the East and the rising sun. Inside the tipi a rich assortment of ritual paraphernalia is arranged along an West-East axis across the floor, with a fire in the middle. At the far side of the fire is an altar arrangement containing objects used by the leader, or Road Chief; a drum, a staff, the bag full of peyote buttons, incense, sage, a gourd, a cloth. In front of the altar is a mound of sand forming a large moon crescent, behind which 'Father Peyote' rests upon an eagle feather. Father Peyote is a talismanic cactus button representing the sacred powers of all peyote, and it may originally have been selected because of its unusual size or shape. Seated in a circle around the fire is a group of a few dozen participants, including novices to be initiated, persons bringing an illness or problem to be dealt with, and three or four officiants. Ideally, no one will leave the tipi or otherwise break the circle until sunrise.
The Road Chief signals the beginning of the ritual by moving Father Peyote from its place by the altar to rest upon a bed of sage by the crescent mound. A symbolic path drawn in the sand along the crescent symbolizes man's life, with Father Peyote now placed at its mid-point, representing the gaining of knowledge as one matures. The participants are instructed to fix their eyes upon Father Peyote, while the Road Chief prays to the peyote not to harm the group, which comes with good intentions and seeks curing and wisdom. Tobacco is smoked and incense passed around in a ritualized manner. The Road Chief then brings forth the bag of peyote and eats the first few buttons. The bag is passed around among the participants, who make individual choices on how much to take. Weston La Barre, from whose The Peyote Cult the current description is taken, gives a range of between four and thirty buttons consumed by each member in the group. During the night, any participant may call out for more peyote from the bag. The dried buttons are bitter and harsh to swallow, and there is substantial spitting and coughing as the participants set out on their mescaline journey.
As the drug slowly begins to take effect, drumming and singing of 'The Opening Song' is commenced by the hierophants, after which the drum and ceremonial staff are passed along in a prescribed manner; each person holding the drum will accompany the singing or chanting of the person immediately to his right. As the participants take turns engaging themselves in the music, there are no directives upon what or how to sing, but any form of spontaneous expression is encouraged. After an hour or two, the tipi is immersed with the psychedelic effects of mescaline, and outbursts of weeping and laughter mix with the free-form singing and drumming. At midnight the leaders signal a shift in the ritual, as 'The Midnight Song' is sung, more incense is burned and water is passed around to counter the dehydration caused by the peyote. The brief pause in the ceremony allows participants to stretch their legs and exchange thoughts, before entering the difficult phase that lies beyond midnight. An experienced Comanche describes the situation around 2 o'clock in the morning:
If there is suffering, this is the time. That is 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.
(from C W Simmons' 'Peyote Road', a manuscript quoted by La Barre)
Based on the pattern of a classic psychedelic journey, this marks the time when personal soul- searching may give way to spiritual and metaphysical experiences, for those readied through inner cleansing and sufficient peyote doses.
The communal trip continues until dawn, or the first sight of the Morning Star, when the first 'Morning Song' is sung by the Road Chief. A female officiant, sometimes referred to as Mother Peyote, brings water into the tipi, which is shared in the same prescribed manner as before, while more Morning Songs are heard. At this point the mescaline will still be in effect, not least among those who have continued to eat buttons through the night, and as daylight nears, the participants may engage in advise-seeking from elders or, in cases of illness, shamanic doctoring. Gradually the mood is loosened, while a large breakfast is prepared by women outside the tipi. The formal ritual ends with the 'Quitting Song' and a handing over of the paraphernalia by the participants to the leaders, after which the Road Chief removes Father Peyote from the symbolic road along the crescent mound. Breakfast is eaten inside the tipi in an informal manner while visions and experiences during the night's psychedelic journey are compared, and those still under the influence of mescaline admire the sunrise coming towards them from the East.
2
As a modern psychedelic ritual with a certain Western influence, Peyote Night warrants attention. It is neither a classic shamanic healing session, nor a strictly codified religious-liturgical ceremony, and least of all a recreational pursuit. Elements from these diverse applications can still be found within the communal peyote rite, unified into coherence by the effects of a powerful hallucinogenic drug. The Native American peyote ritual provides practical evidence for a claim made by thinkers as different as Aldous Huxley and Terence McKenna: the psychedelic experience is so rich that it can serve several ritual purposes under the same communal banner. Depending on the three factors of dosage, set and setting, one participant may come out of Peyote Night with a life-altering experience, while his companion by the fire mainly enjoyed the perceptual sensations and sanctified mood. The mescaline brings joy and melancholy, it facilitates soul-searching and subsequent shamanic healing of participants in need, but at higher doses it opens the visionary realm of the Church's religious beliefs. During the eight or ten hours the trip lasts, there will be moments of deep bonding along with moments of euphoric relaxation, as the social tension dissolves by the communal drug experience and drumming and singing.
Despite its origins in the archaic shamanic legacy shared by all Amerindian peoples, the peyote ritual of the Native American Church contains only a moderate element of shamanism. The role of the Road Chief is not that of the shaman, he is a master of ceremony rather than a lightning rod for local energies. Healing and doctoring are recognized elements of the peyote ritual, but in a spontaneous way that differs from the programmed and centralized position the healing holds in classic shamanism. In its blend of individual contemplation and communal activity, such as singing and drumming, the American peyote ritual resembles the modern-day ayahuasca churches of Brazil, whose gatherings feature energizing group expressions as well as time and space for private meditation and counseling. Effective ritual programs like these, which maintain structure while allowing for profound individual development, do not materialize out of thin air; on the contrary, the founding histories of these entheogen-based churches often relate how sacramental procedures and tenets were given in revelation, usually under the influence of the psychedelic drug on which the spiritual group is built. Evolving directly from the otherworldly experience which it aims to promote and support, it is not surprising that these instructions are found to be productive. The wide gap between canonical belief, shared ritual, and private experience that many perceive in the major world religions is here quite narrow; on a good night there will be no gap at all, but a perfectly closed circle from the private to the communal, and from the mundane to the celestial.
Consequently, the 'church' designation of these peyote and ayahuasca organizations should not obscure the fact that their most fundamental attribute is precisely what sets them apart from the 'churches' of major religion. Beyond the ceremonies and paraphernalia, the gift these spiritual- psychedelic communities offer the participant is the direct experience of a higher world. Within major religion, that type of experience has usually been withdrawn from the congregation to form the leading attribute of a priestly class. This dividing line is crucial for both psychedelicists and those who seek unmediated spiritual experiences in general. The Eastern Vedic religions offer support for immediate personal revelation at their more advanced levels of study, but the Abrahamite religions of the Middle East do not recognize direct experience of the divine among laymen. Even with the syncretic Christian remnants in modern Pan-American entheogen churches , they remain fundamentally apart from all traditional religions of the West.
What they may remind one of, however, is the Great Mysteries of Eleusis. Beyond the obvious difference of scale, the similarities between the Greco-Romans' great psychedelic cult ritual and the recurring rituals among American peyote and ayahuasca churches are several. This fact was remarked upon by Albert Hofmann in a 1992 lecture:
At Eleusis, where the preparation and attendant ceremonies were optimal, just as they are among the Indians, where their use is in the hands of and controlled by shamans, this type of drug found propitious application. Eleusis and the Indians in this respect could serve as models for our society.
(Albert Hofmann, 'The Message Of The Eleusinian Mysteries')
At the heart stands, once more, the private revelation of the divine for each individual participant as a common objective for the ceremonies. Another shared aspect are the contrasting elements of spontaneous song, dance and prayer on the one hand, and the public display of ritual objects and formal declamations on the other. As evident from testimonies from both Eleusis and the entheogen churches of the New World, there is also a common element of social bonding as the hallucinogenic journey unfolds, with an exchange of impressions and feelings in the midst of adventure. These non- formalized aspects may be as crucial as the shared basic spiritual principles for the success of the psychedelic ritual to persist over time.
While the parallels to Eleusis shouldn't be overstated, it's worth noting that the differences that can be observed mainly have to with the sheer size of the events; while the limited peyote and ayahuasca gatherings retain elements of shamanic healing-comforting, the thousand-headed crowd at the Great Temple made such individual counseling impossible. Similarly, the massive scope of Eleusis meant that there was no room for individuals to perform, lead prayer or confess publicly before the congregation. However, if one considers an earlier, pre-classical Mystery ritual at Eleusis, with a much smaller attendance each year, it is also possible to imagine elements of individual healing and performance. While speculative, this would present an ancient psychedelic ritual with a striking resemblance to the peyote and ayahuasca churches of today; a resemblance strengthened by the marked difference all three instances display towards the organized religions of the West.
3
Thanks to the pioneering efforts of ethnographers like James Mooney and Weston La Barre, it is possible to trace the dispersion of Native American peyote use from its ancient origins among desert tribes in Northern Mexico to a majestic fanning out across the American plains that reached as far north as Manitoba. While early European conquestors strived to eradicate the 'pagan' peyote use among various Mexican peoples, the cactus cult survived and thrived via migrations westward and to the North, and it's a pleasant irony that these aggressive Christian invaders unknowingly arranged for later Christian invaders further north to wrestle with the native use of a drug that was previously unknown there.
Beginning in the mid-1800s, several North American tribes made chance encounters with peyote use from Rio Grande Valley sources, and often sent out representatives to learn more and acquire button material. During its most rapid northward spread, the arrival and integration of peyote into local rituals around the USA can be followed from tribe to tribe, decade by decade. An Apache sub-tribe appropriately named the Mescalero represent an interesting transitional state of peyote usage, between the pure shamanic-tribal model of the Mexi-Indians and the societal (La Barre's term) ritual model that came to dominate among the Plains tribes. Around 1870 the Mescalero had begun to use imported peyote in a format where each participant was in a sense his own shaman, while the true shaman of the tribe maintained a supervising or leading position. Christian elements were entirely absent from the Mescalero rite, which in modern terms resembles the way psychedelic drugs are used among closely knit communities of 'acidheads', serious in intent but lacking a ritualized program.
The subsequent dispersion of The Peyote Cult in all directions, the occasional inter-tribal disagreements on liturgy and spiritual content, and the competition offered by other tribal customs such as the Ghost Dance, are all well covered in the literature. La Barre experienced his first Peyote Night as early as 1936, when he as a graduate student from Yale attended a Kiowa meeting in Oklahoma. Along with him was his Harvard colleague Richard Evans Schultes, and the two young Ivy Leaguers would go on to make formidable contributions not just to peyote research, but to the ethnobotanical field in general over the next 40 years. Remaining with the Kiowa for several weeks, La Barre had some profound mescaline experiences which colored his subsequent commitment to the Native American peyote tradition, in a way parallel to how Gordon Wasson was be-mushroomed on a somewhat similar sojourn to the Mexican cloud forest a few decades later. Schultes confessed to only seeing vague colored hallucinations from the mescaline, a shortcoming which did not prevent him from making numerous statements about the effects of the drug:
Lophophora Williamsii represents a veritable factory of alkaloids. More than thirty alkaloids and their amine derivatives have been isolated from the plant' The phenylethylamine mescaline is the vision-inducing alkaloid, and experimental psychology has found mescaline to be of extreme interest as a tool. Other alkaloids are undoubtedly responsible for the tactile, luditory, and occasionally other hallucinations of the peyote intoxication.
(R E Schultes, in Peter Furst's anthology Flesh Of The Gods, 1973)
There is actually no reason to believe that the other alkaloids in the peyote buttons provide anything except certain somatic effects, mostly unpleasant ones. Contrary to Schultes' claim, the mescaline is perfectly able to provide a full-scale psychedelic experience on its own, as was evident from Aldous Huxley's experiments already in the 1950s. Huxley later tried LSD a few times, and made no particular distinction between the two drugs in his psychedelic writings. Schultes' viewpoints are probably biased (as were some of his ayahuasca theories) by the fact that he failed to get the full effect of the mescaline, unlike La Barre, or Huxley, or numerous others. Insufficient dosage is usually the correct explanation when inaccurate or incomplete descriptions of drug effects are encountered, but in Schultes' particular case there may have been some type of endogenous resistance to hallucinogens; what is known in psychedelic jargon as being a 'hard-head'. If this was the case with Schultes it was an unfortunate coincidence. Another passage from the same, highly influential anthology makes the conundrum even clearer:
Peyote intoxication, among the most complex and variable effects of all hallucinogenic plants, is characterized by brilliantly colored visions in kaleidoscopic movement, often accompanied by auditory, gustatory, olfactory, and tactile hallucinations. Sensations of weightlessness, macroscopia, depersonalization, and alteration or loss of time perception are normally experienced.
(ibid)
This is of course a textbook description of all the major psychedelic drugs (ie: LSD, Psilocybin, mescaline, DMT) and nothing unique to peyote, a fact which Schultes seems oddly unaware of. Rather than demonstrating the special nature of peyote inebriation that he posits, his statement points to the opposite. The essay proceeds even further up the wrong road:
There are very real differences between peyote intoxication and mescaline intoxication' mescaline is ingested only experimentally and then produces the effects of but one of the alkaloids, without the physiological interaction of the others that are present in the crude plant material. As a consequence, descriptions of the visual hallucinations of mescaline found in such writings as those of Aldous Huxley should not be equated too closely with the visual effects experienced by Indian peyotists.
(ibid.)
This statement makes little sense, and to the knowledge of the present author it is simply untrue. The only significant difference between Aldous Huxley's trip and a typical Peyote Night trip in a tribal tipi is that of set and setting. The peyote button contains a number of other alkaloids, true, but none of these have found to be psycho-active to any meaningful degree. What they contribute to the peyote effects are not different types of hallucinations, as Schultes oddly suggests, but rather central nervous system action including a sense of physical fatigue, dizziness and sleepiness. La Barre, in an appendix to The Peyote Cult, details the modest effects of these secondary alkaloids, and states the case clearly: 'The color visions so conspicuous in peyote intoxication are chiefly produced by mescaline.' The only notable difference between a peyote trip and a mescaline trip is that the former brings a slightly elevated risk for vomiting along with a feeling of fatigue. It should be pointed out that even pure mescaline will trigger some stomach discomfort. La Barre offers several trip reports of his own and from the literature, all which confirm the impression gathered from Havelock Ellis' classic peyote trip back in the 1890s: mescaline is a major psychedelic with an effect very close to LSD, and it contributes all the vital hallucinogenic action in the peyote button.2
Due no doubt to its interesting socio-cultural history, peyote has acquired a status as a drug representing defiance and survival. As detailed in an earlier chapter, Western awareness of the hallucinogenic cactus goes back to the late 1800s, preceding our knowledge of LSD-25 and psilocybian mushrooms by half a century.3 After the successful chemical synthesis of mescaline by Ernst Späth in 1919, it was in this pure lab form that mescaline became the first psychedelic drug explored to any substantial degree by the modern West. Although not conclusively verified, it is generally assumed that Hermann Hesse was part of a mescaline artist colony during the 1920s, which left unmistakable traces in his Steppenwolf (1927) and Journey To The East (1932). A German- language author whose experiments with mescaline and other psychedelic drugs are well- established is Ernst J'nger, who openly acknowledged the advantages he saw in the hallucinogens throughout his long life. Many also believe that Salvador Dali used mescaline to unlock his extraordinary imagination around this time, although the great artist later claimed not needing drugs due to his natural state of being high. The drug appears to have been more commonly found on the Continent than in the Anglo-Saxon world, which would explain the curious fact that Aldous Huxley, despite a life-long interest in drug-induced higher states, did not have access to mescaline until Humphry Osmond supplied it in 1953.4
