An Oto in all seriousness informed the writer that “peyote doesn’t work
outside meetings, because I have tried it”—a belief understandable in
a group whose sole acquaintance with the plant is through a recent
ritual.[1] Nevertheless, owing to its marked physiological properties
peyote is widely used both in Mexico and the Plains non-ritually, a fact
which forms an interesting ethnological background to the rite proper.
One of the most important and striking of these uses is in prophecy and
divination. We find the Spanish missionaries in Mexico early protesting
against this abomination. The confessional of Padre Nicolás de León[2]
contains the following questions for the priest to ask the penitent:
Art thou a sooth-sayer? 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 the blood of others? Dost
thou wander about at night, calling upon demons to help thee?
Hast thou drunk peyotl, or given it to others to drink, in
order to discover secrets, or to discover where stolen or lost
articles were?
This last was no idle matter, as appears from other evidence;
Hernandez[3] says that
[the Peyotl Zacatensis] causes those [Chichimeca] devouring
it to be able to foresee and to predict things; such, for
instance, as whether on the following day the enemy will make
an attack upon them; or whether the weather will continue
favorable; or to discern who has stolen from them some utensil
or anything else; and other things of like nature which the
Chichimeca really believe they have found out.
Padre Arlegui,[4] after mentioning the therapeutic uses to which the
Zacatecans put peyote, complains that
this would not be so bad if they did not abuse its virtues,
for, in order to have a knowledge of the future and find out
how their battles will turn out, they drink it brewed in water,
and, as it is very strong, it intoxicates them with a paroxysm
of madness, and all the fantastic hallucinations that come
over them with this horrible drink they seize upon as omens of
the future, imagining that the root has revealed to them their
future.