In the early days they just had a good time for one night.
It was not used as a curing ceremony then.... At first they
wanted to have good visions, that’s what they were after. But
then, recently, they began to use it as a medicine for sick
people.... If a sick person comes in the tipi, they see what
is the matter with him. Perhaps a witch has shot something
into him, a bone or something like that. It is seen. Then the
sick one rolls a cigarette and gives it to someone there who
he thinks can cure him. Perhaps some man says, “I think I can
take that out with the help of peyote and these other men.”
So he does his ceremonial work in there and extracts what is
bothering the patient.... He sucks it out usually with his own
lips, not with a tube. It is nasty work right there. It might
be dirty and full of pus. But the medicine man doesn’t think of
it in that way. To them it is just as if they were sucking nice
juice out of something. Yet it will look terrible to others....
All the bad things have to go into the fire and burn down to
ashes.... Sometimes they suck out things like insects which
have been shot into people and these things pop. Sometimes when
they throw the evil object in the fire it blazes up blue but
does not pop.
Northern Cheyenne and Shawnee patients sit in special places in the
peyote tipi, as in the sweat lodge, suggesting that older patterns of
doctoring are involved; as we have seen, the sweat lodge is an integral
part of the Osage peyote round-house plan. That associations of curing
by peyote and curing in the sweat lodge lie close to the surface finds
affirmation in an interesting Arapaho case:[124]
One of the recent modifications of the peyote ceremonial
was devised by a firm devotee, to cure a sick person. The
originator of this new form of the worship believes himself
to have been cured by the drug. In this ceremonial, which was
repeated four times, the tent seems to have represented a sweat
house, and a path led from the entrance to a fire outside, as
before a sweat lodge. The ritual, while remaining a peyote
ceremony, conformed more or less to the ordinary processes of
doctoring a sick person.
One could easily over-emphasize the novelty of such a procedure,
considering the widespread use of peyote in doctoring, yet even the
Caddo, who do not doctor with peyote, often have four meetings to pray
for the recovery of the sick person; certainly cures by peyote do not
rest entirely on the “technological” procedure of the patient’s eating
and drinking peyote, but others present “help” by eating in the name
of the sufferer and praying. This is not at all unlike the presence
of relatives and others in the sweat bath praying for the patient’s
recovery; the various uses of sage, the fire pits in some altars, and the
ritual necessity for a fire even on the hottest summer nights further
suggest sweat bath parallels.[125]
Peyote is a panacea in doctoring. A Cheyenne woman was cured of a cancer
of the liver which had been pronounced hopeless at a White hospital. Such
invidious distinctions between White and peyote doctoring are common; for
the former represents merely human skill, and is not the unmodified herb
the direct creation of God? Belo Kozad, himself a well-known Kiowa peyote
doctor, spoke as follows:
When my sick wife was in there I chewed peyote for her. Her
skin got like wood bark—the hair come out. The doctors couldn’t
make it. We give it up, can’t do anything. [It was] diabetes,
and we shoot him every time she eats. That spoils the people;
they lose the mind and the skin gets bad. That morphine for
Howard [Sankadote, who was ill the night of the meeting and
could not be present] make him talk funny. It just ruin the
people in the mind. _Come_ to peyote! God knows more than any
people!
Perhaps Belo had every “pragmatic” right to talk thus: had he not himself
cured a boy’s hemorrhage by eating one hundred green peyotes for him?
Peyote indeed is a famous cure for tuberculosis and respiratory diseases.
John Bearskin (Winnebago) knew of two cures by “Sister Etta” in meetings:
one a woman with goitre, the other a boy who had previously been
dumb.[126] Pneumonia also readily yields to peyote, producing beneficial
perspiration when thirty buttons are drunk over a period of hours in two
quarts of water. The writer has seen doctoring with peyote for a crushed
thigh, tuberculosis, and malnutrition (?) in a two-year-old child; this
last cried fretfully in the early part of the meeting, but was fed “tea”
until it was blue and quiet in strychnine tetanus by morning. The wife of
our Quapaw host had also been “operated on in church.”
A Sioux doctor, who had gotten his power from a vision in which peyote
turned into a man, doctored at Taos; but an acquaintance of Dr. Parsons
imputed his trachoma to witchcraft on the part of “foreigners” who came
to large meetings. He found that peyote water prevented the inflammation
of his eyes. Another boy’s leg was “all gone, rotten,” and the boy
himself emaciated. Peyote men prayed over him for a month, whereupon he
became well and fat, though his leg remained drawn up because he had
taken too much White man’s medicine. The wife of a peyote man, herself
cured of neck sores by the plant, asserted that witch sickness is lacking
nowadays in Taos because of the power of peyote in exorcizing witchcraft;
a peyote chief, however, holding a button in his hand, had had to remove
a porcupine quill which some witch had shot into her nose. At Taos even
anti-peyotists consider it good for cures, and Dr. Parsons, no doubt with
some reason, makes the query: “Will peyote find its character of witch
prophylaxis an introduction to the southern pueblos?”[127]
Peyote is equally successful in treating mental cases. An Oto informant
told of four successive meetings held for a man who had “gone crazy”
when his wife left him. Formerly under observation at Norman, he was
afraid people were coming for him during the meeting; he could hardly
talk, wanted to run out and people had to wrestle with him. Old Man White
Horn gave him a peyote and told him it would protect him; finally, in
the third successive meeting the man “came to” and asked what had been
happening. Another Oto patient chopped wood incessantly, rolled and
unrolled strings, etc., and used to have “meetings” by himself, drumming,
singing and eating peyote all alone. An Oto told me of a Taos boy who
had “gone crazy”; some said it was peyote that was doing this. But a
doctor from west of Albuquerque came and pulled a snake and a dead water
dog out of him; these had been his medicines, taught him by his father,
and it was decided that he had clearly broken some taboo surrounding his
father’s medicine.
“_Preaching._” An interesting feature of peyotism, probably deriving
from earlier patterns, is the moral lecture in the morning. In one Caddo
“moon” the leader “talks to the boys, teaches them, just like a preacher,
telling them to do the right thing through life, and the consequences
if they didn’t do the right things.” White Wolf (Comanche) says Quanah
Parker lectured younger people in the morning; so too did Kickapoo,
Carrizo, Shawnee and Wichita leaders.
After passing peyote, the Delaware leader “addresses the peyote and the
fire, prays, and often delivers a regular sermon or moral lecture.” In
the Iowa meeting:[128]
The peyote chief ... leads in the preaching and Bible
reading.... The leader (or, as the writer understands it)
perhaps some visiting preacher of the faith, gets up and
delivers a sermon, while the cedar chief casts some more
incense on the fire. [He commonly exhorts them to confession.]
The leader then calls on other preachers to talk, and then
asks the fire chief [to pass the peyote again].... Meanwhile
he continues to read the Bible and exhort all sinners to
repent. He points out that all the old ways have been given
up, and with them their “idols,” such as the great drum of the
religious dance.
John Wilson ordinarily began his meetings with a talk by himself; the
Oto are commonly addressed in meetings by their “tribal priest.” The
estrangement of the lively J. S. (Kiowa) and his young wife was composed
through moral homilies delivered by older relatives in a peyote meeting—a
typical occurrence.