Twenty Years of Peyote Studies

Abstract

PEYOTE (from the Aztec peyotl) is a small, spineless, carrot-shaped cactus, Lophophora williamsii Lemaire, which grows wild in the Rio Grande Valley and southward. It is mostly subterranean, a,nd only the grayishgreen pincushion-like top appears above ground, with spiral radial grooves dividing the puffy prominences which bear linearly-spaced tufts of fine gray-white flocculence, somewhat like artists' camels-hair paintbrushes. Cut off horizontally about ground level, and dried into a hard woody disc, this top becomes the so-called button-often called button, confusingly since it does not come from the non-cactus succulent, the mescal proper, from whose fermented sap, pulque, the brandy mescal is distilled; also, erroneously, called bean which is the Red Bean, Sophora secundiflora (ortega) Lag. ex DC; and, further, once quite mistakenly identified with the Aztec narcotic mushroom teonanacatl, a Basidiomycete, a true member of the Fungi. Nine psychotropic alkaloids, an unusual number even for a cactus, are contained in natural pan-peyotl; some of these are strychnine-like pharmacodynamically, others (notably mescaline) hallucinogenic. For this reason the psychotomimetic mescaline has been experimentally investigated in recent psychiatric research, along with its fellow-indoles such as lysergic acid; and for this reason, its hallucinogenic qualities, American Indians have used pan-peyotl in native doctoring, witchcraft, and religious rituals. As a religious cult, peyotism is pre-Columbian in Mexico. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, peyotism spread, via Texan tribes and Athapaskans of the Southwest, to the Indians of the United States, mostly following the subsidence of the Ghost Dance, for which it largely substituted, now as a peaceful intertribal nativistic religion, in places somewhat acculturated to Christianity. It is now the major religious cult of most Indians of the United States between the Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi (including the remnants of eastern Algonkin tribes and the Siouan Winnebago), and additionally in parts of southern Canada, the Great Basin, and eastcentral California. The appeal of peyote is based upon the visions it induces, viz. its medicine power, and its availability therefore in native doctoring is culturallv based upon the aboriginal vision quest and the religious and ideological premises of this quest. Peyote is generally agreed by experts to be non-habit-forming; it is non-soporific and not, therefore, technically a narcotic.