Pyote 3
Pyote 3
Pyote 3
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outstretched right hand a four-ribbed San Pedro cactus.
Chavin textiles recently discovered in coastal southern Peru
show the cactus associated with a hummingbird and a feline
animal - which in much of South America is the animalfamiliar into which the medicine man is thought to be able to
metamorphose. Ceramic representations, often associated
with deer, are datable circa 1000-700 B.C. Five other Chavin
vessels, dating from circa 700-500 B.C., show the cactus
with jaguars. Another, of similar date, I suggest may depict
the use of San Pedro infusion as an enema.
Other finds showing the San Pedro cactus are of later
date: Nazca urns of about 100 B.C.-700 A.D.; Salinar
ceramics (circa 400-200 B.C.); Moche (circa 100 B.C.-700
A.D.)- in the last style often showing a shawl-clad, owl-faced
female shamaness. Chimu vessels dating 700-1745 A.D. still
depict the San Pedro cactus, the use of which persisted in the
colonial period, despite efforts to suppress it. Our earliest
written documents on San Pedro are 17th century. In 1631
Father Oliva described tile ritual usc of huachuma or San
Pedro, as in 1653 did Father Cobo both expressing Church
hostility to traditional folk healing which has, however,
continued into modern times. The folk-medical use of this
mescaline-containing cactus therefore spans some 33
centuries of continuous employment (Sharon 1978; Schultes
1977b; La Barre 1974; Furst 1972; de Rios 1969, 1968).
By contrast, in North America the use of another
mescaline-containing cactus, Lophophora williamsii or
peyote, can at present be Cl4-dated only to 810-1070 A.D. In
1941 Walter Taylor (1966) excavated a peyote-button
necklace in a Mayan mortuary-complex cave site (CM-79).
One of the oldest materials ever submitted to alkaloid
analysis,
through
thin-layer
chromatography,
gas
chromatography and mass spectrometry, this specimen from
west-central Coahuila somewhat surprisingly still contained
identifiable mescaline, anhalonine, lophophorine, pellotine
and anhalonidine. In suitably dry sites, alkaloids persist for
remarkably long periods: Ilex guayusa leaves from a
medicine man's tomb in Bolivia, Cl4-dated to 375 A.D., still
contained caffeine and traces of nicotine were identified from
a tobacco sample in the same tomb (Bruhn et al. 1978).
The peyote cactus is a small, spineless, carrot-shaped,
mostly subterranean gray-green cactus; only the small
pincushion-like top of which protrudes above the ground.
The radial (sometimes spiral, sometimes sinuous), rounded
superficial ribs contain small tufts like grayish artist
paintbrushes in rows from which the name Lopbophora,
"crest-bearing," is taken. Cut off transversely at about ground
level and dried, "peyote buttons" are obtained, hard-corky
Journal of Psychedelic Drugs
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I now believe with Omer Stewart (1974, 1972) that the key
tribes for later diffusion, the Kiowa and the Comanche,
certainly had peyote by 1870 and perhaps before. In the
20th century peyotism has spread over the Plains northward
to Saskatchewan and Manitoba in Canada and westward to
Nevada-central California tribes besides taking in many of
the Algonkian-speaking residual-reservation tribes from the
Midwest and Eastern woodlands. Over 250,000 Indians, in
as many as two or three dozen tribes, now practice the
peyote ritual of the so-called "Native American Church."
Anthropologists, notably Stewart and Aberle, have
consistently and successfully defended the aboriginal use of
peyote, which current laws now specifically exempt from
regulation.
The principal significance in eating the peyote cactus is
that the mescaline contained in it induces spectacular visual
hallucinations in color, which are regarded (after the
aboriginal pattern of the vision quest) as direct contacts
with the supernatural, the manitou of the Algonkians, the
wakan of the Siouans, the orenda of the lroquoians and so
forth. Typical visions might be of a dog with a clam-shell
head, which it opens and closes ridiculously as it tries to
support itself on duck-headed feet, and the visionary may
be hard-put to suppress unseemly laughter. Both Indian and
White users have reported frightening and rather paranoid
experiences while under the influence of peyote. Sometimes
the visions may be abstract, as of fields of sparkling manycolored jewels, or of vast cosmic curtains undulating like an
aurora borealis. In one meeting, the drum handle (made of
excess lacing wound into a kind of handle) looked to me
like a Gila monster, though I was intellectually aware it was
not and was not frightened, Hallucinations in other sensory
modalities (auditory, olfactory and the like) are not
uncommon, including synesthetic hallucinations (as when
one Indian heard the sun coming up with a roar) and even
kinesthetic sensations (as when another participant felt he
was lifted up into the air by the sound of the drumming).
Anciently Indians went out alone on the vision quest for
supernatural "medicine" power; with peyote people can
have an assembled vision quest largely guaranteed
pharmacologically.
In the standard Kiowa-Comanche peyote ritual of
the Plains, the Indians, often from several tribes, gather
about dusk in a circle within a large tipi (sometimes
there is a second, concentric circle of women behind the
men) around a central fire. The fire, built of sticks like
interlaced fingers, with the opening eastward toward the
tipi door, burns within the horns of a crescent-shaped
earth altar, with a "peyote road" groove symbolizing the
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dismissed. An earlier belief in two botanical species of
Lophophora was destroyed taxonomically by the
observation of the two supposed species growing from the
same root. It is therefore most interesting that Edward F.
Anderson (1970, 1959) has now established to the
satisfaction of botanists that there are two species of peyote,
Lophophora williamsii and L. diffusa- the latter of more
restricted provenience within the area of the former and
perhaps phylogenetically ancestral to it.
Dr. John Raleigh Briggs of Dallas, Texas first brought
peyote to the attention of doctors in 1887. In Bartlett's
Dictionary of Americanisms (Third edition, 1860), there is
reference under "Whiskey Root" to what was probably
peyote, and some soldiers in Civil War times evidently
knew the plant. The celebrated traveler, Sir Richard Burton,
compared peyote to fly agaric (Araanita muscaria), which
is "surely the first such comparison" (Bruhn & Holmstedt
1974). Mrs. Anna B. Nickels of Laredo, Texas was the next
supplier after Briggs to the pharmaceutical firm of ParkeDavis. An earlier puzzle arising from Heffter's negative
results can probably best be explained by his having been
furnished with plants obtained in Querataro, that is, with
Lophophora diffusa, 90 percent of the alkaloids of which
are pellotine with almost no mescaline (Bruhn & lIolmstedt
1974). Another medically interesting point is that Furst and
Coe (1977) believe the Maya and Huichol Indians both
used peyote in an enema infusion. This would parallel a
possible similar usage of Trichocereus pachanoi in Peru, as
I have conjectured earlier.
Ever since the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus,
western science has accepted as veritable evidence only
intersubjectively-accessible information. But, just as
plainly, shamanistic and other religious revelation has relied
heavily upon the overwhelming individual vision as the
touchstone for supernatural truth-and I have suggested in an
earlier presentation that hallucinogens may have been one
source of such supernatural revelations. Schultes (1977a)
now lists "some hundred species" of hallucinogens used by
New World aboriginals. The fact is puzzling when
compared with the small number known in the Old World which has a far larger geographic area than the New World,
and surely as varied ecological and climatic regions.
Moreover, the Old World was far longer inhabited by
humans or humanlike forebears who might have discovered
hallucinogens in their food quest. I have suggested an
anthropological answer to this legitimate botanical
question: that hunting peoples in the New World have
longer preserved the old shamanic vision quest, which Boas
long ago considered the foundation of American Indian
religions in both North and South America (La Barre 1970).
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REFERENCES