the trickiness of peyote is emphasized by the Cheyenne. They
constantly reiterate that a man must keep hold of himself and
also that he must live straight or peyote will shame him.
A Delaware rationalized the unpredictable effect of peyote somewhat
differently:[5]
I had the feeling once that it was going to make me foolish,
but that happens to everybody, and is a test of one’s faith in
peyote.
Vomiting of peyote is a punishment for one’s sins, but it cleanses the
body of its impurities in the process and purifies the blood. Part of the
symbolism in the bead-work on an Arapaho fetish-pouch is the “vomitings”
deposited in a ring around the inside of the tipi.[6]
It would be naïve to suppose that peyote tastes any less unpleasant to
natives than it does to Whites. But we should remember that peyote is
eaten by Indians influenced by strong motives and deep belief, and the
consequent physiological state is easily and adequately rationalized. It
is not surprising that a man addicted to alcohol and shamed by it before
both Indians and Whites believes that “whiskey and peyote fight in a man,
and usually peyote wins and brings it out.” No doubt such a cure _ad
nauseam_ is as good as any, and more effective than some. The depressing
effect of peyote is also well recognized and measures are taken to
overcome it. The Arapaho have feathers at four corners of the tipi to
brush persons who tire during the meeting, and the “smoke” at Taos is
made to overcome the depression of the early stages of eating, as sage is
similarly used in the Plains.[7]
But suffering is counted even a positive virtue among people who had the
“vision quest” in the old days. A crippled Indian at Miami told me that
“to get power from peyote a man must suffer to it.” The four rounds of
the drum without water among the Caddo suggests an intention of making
the meeting an ordeal, and Mrs. Voegelin’s Shawnee informant emphasized
that the Spybuck moon modelled on the Caddo was “hard.” Most informants
would consider the Osage, who have “beds” in their meeting-houses
sometimes, not merely ostentatious but also “soft”; one old man said that
sage under the blankets of the seat as a cushion indicated a decadent
generation, for did not they sit on the bare ground in the old days? A
Kickapoo informant said Quanah Parker used to warn them that the taste of
peyote wasn’t good, though “it would keep you on the right path.” About
2:10 in the morning a Comanche informant of Simmons said:
If there is suffering, this is the time. That’s 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 the Crucifixion. Everyone here is
suffering now.
The Winnebago[8] elaborated into a dogma the physiological effect of
peyote in producing occasional vomiting:
If a person who is truly repentant eats peyote for the first
time, he does not suffer at all from its effects. But if an
individual is bull-headed, does not believe in its virtue, he
is likely to suffer a great deal.... If a person eats peyote
and does not repent openly, he has a guilty conscience, which
leaves him as soon as the public repentance has been made....
If a peyote-user relapses into his old way of living, then the
peyote causes him great suffering.... The disagreeable effects
of the peyote varied directly with a man’s disbelief in it.
This explanation [Rave] persistently drummed into the ears of
beginners, who otherwise become terrified and give up too soon.
We have already noted the Huichol-Tarahumari belief that peyote sees and
punishes evil deeds. Similarly, when as an old man Kutubi (Comanche)
became sick he gave his father peyote to Mumsika, reasoning that he had
“probably eaten something peyote didn’t allow”; this is probably the
same father peyote which years before had predicted a bad fate for a war
party. The leader had wept and strenuously upbraided peyote for this and
may later have felt some guilt for his presumptuousness. In any case he
held peyote responsible both times for his bad fortune.
But if peyote is blamed for bad fortune, it is also accredited with
the liquidation of manifold anxieties. Fear of death is perhaps the
most conspicuous anxiety in Plains culture. It is not surprising,
therefore, that doctoring plays a major part in the cult. But the power
and authority of peyote are relied upon in other ways too. In a number
of tribes peyote or peyote tea is used whenever the individual finds
himself confronted with any important personal problem. To be sure, it
is the individual’s _total wishes_ which ultimately find expression in
the course of action followed, but the consultation with peyote composes
conflicts and gives an authority to the decision which the “unaided”
individual might not have been able to summon.[9]
The protective function of the father peyote is most highly
patterned, perhaps, among the Mescalero Apache.[10] In this culture
the aggressions arising from the particular socio-economic system of
marriage find expression in intense witchcraft activity. But for the
typical aggressions which a culture engenders, a culture often has a
patterned solution to offer. For though the means used were magical, the
aggressions and counter-aggressions were _real_ in the psychological
sense, and peyote had a real function in witch-prophylaxis. Shamanistic
rivalry was most virulent and witchcraft-anxiety was correspondingly
as intense as the projected hatreds. One never knew what dangerous and
powerful supernatural possessions a hated rival possessed, hence a
number of protective devices were developed in Mescalero peyotism.[11]
Yet characteristically in this uncomfortable culture, the power of peyote
was itself dangerous, and elaborate care had to be exercised in removing
the fuzz from the top of the buttons before eating. Should it touch the
eyes, it would cause blindness!
In the Plains the fear is often expressed, not without justification,
that the white man is ever about to take away the peyote religion
from the Indian, as he has taken almost everything else material and
immaterial. But the frequency of this asserveration, sometimes in
contexts which the writer thought were unrealistic, indicates that
Indians view peyote in a sense as a protector from the Whites. Peyote
is rather confidently thought to be able to take care of itself—which
accounts for the comparative ease with which a white man can obtain
entrance to a meeting, where he will be exposed to “proof” of peyote’s
power. We need not emphasize this function of peyote beyond its true
proportions, but it may be recalled that peyote enabled a native to
escape from a white man’s jail; that it aided peyote pilgrims to bring
plants undeterred through the white man’s customs; that it is the
sovereign remedy for the evil of the white man’s whiskey; that peyote
has so far protected itself against the white man’s attempted sumptuary
legislation; that it miraculously escaped detection and confiscation in
a white man’s war, through which it protected its bearer; and, not least
in psychological importance, that peyote characteristically succeeds
(because it is of God, not man) in cures which the white doctor has long
since given up as hopeless.
This function of peyote as protector is rooted in earlier history:
it sees from afar the approach of the enemy, predicts the results of
battle and protects one in battle from the hazards of war. Peyote would
have prevented a gun accident, and an accident with a mechanical saw,
in instances collected, if the persons involved had only been able to
understand its warning. And in another case, when a serious automobile
accident had already happened, peyote quelled the anxiety of worrying
relatives in assuring an ultimate cure. Again, Mary Buffalo, White Wolfs
mother and Belo Kozad’s wife had all lost many children, until they took
their sons into peyote meetings and prayed to the power that they be
spared; in each case the son grew to manhood. Peyote is the comforter in
the event of death also; a funeral meeting is often held as the last rite
of respect to the deceased, and some groups hold anniversary meetings for
four years after the death.
But peyote punishes as well. An inconstant result of its physiological
action is the production at times of an intense fear-state. Rave, for
example, (Winnebago)[12] in a period of mental stress experienced his
fear:
Suddenly I saw a big snake. I was very much frightened.
Then another one came crawling over me. “My God! Where are
these snakes coming from?” There at my back there seemed to
be something also. So I looked around and saw a snake about
ready to swallow me entirely. It had arms and legs and a long
tail. The end of its tail was like a spear. “Oh God! I am
surely going to die now,” I thought. Then I turned in another
direction and I saw a man with horns and long claws and with a
spear in his hand. He jumped for me and I threw myself on the
ground. He missed me. Then I looked back. This time he started
back but it seemed to me that he was directing his spear at
me. Again I threw myself on the ground and he missed me. There
seemed to be no escape for me.
A similar experience of Crashing Thunder (Winnebago) is noted elsewhere;
and in a story told of Bear Track (Cheyenne) and his Osage wife on their
visit to the Holy Land, the parents seem to have communicated some of
their anxiety and fear surrounding mysterious experiences there to their
small daughter, who awoke screaming one night at a presence she saw in
the room.
The peyote meeting of many groups has incorporated in it a powerful
mechanism for the liquidation of individual anxieties in the practice
of public confession of sins. It is difficult to over-estimate the
importance of this feature.[13] On the exhortation of the leader, many
members rise and accuse themselves publicly of misdemeanors or offenses,
asking pardon of persons who might have been injured by them. How large
a part peyote has in the production of such states is an open question
(for the pattern of public confession is widespread aboriginally in the
New World); but that confession to the father-peyote and his authority,
and repentance before the group is of profound significance cannot be
doubted. More than ritual tears stream down the confessant’s cheeks as he
acknowledges his faults and asks aid to keep his promise to mend his ways.
Peyote often figures in matters of personal adjustment. The story of John
Rave is too well known to require more than mention here. The somewhat
similar history of Jonathan Koshiway (Oto) is likewise interesting in
showing how a compromise was struck between the older pagan culture and
Christianity, to whose influence this individual had been exposed. The
personal solution in Koshiway’s case seems to have been a perfectly
satisfactory one: in the Church of the First-born he doctored and
“hollered” like the source of his power in good old Indian fashion, and
on the other hand baptized, conducted funerals and married couples just
as in white churches. The statements of Crashing Thunder’s father[14]
indicate a somewhat less happy and inclusive solution, which involved the
sacrifice of the old customs:
The peyote people are rather foolish for they cry when they
feel happy about anything. They throw away all the medicines
that they possess and whose virtues they know. They give up
all the blessings they received while fasting, give up all the
spirits who blessed them. They stop giving feasts and making
offering of tobacco. They burn up all their holy things,
destroy the war-bundles. They stop smoking and chewing tobacco.
They are bad people. They burn up their medicine pouches, give
up the Medicine Dance and even cut up their otter-skin bags.
Crashing Thunder, as we have seen, was himself persuaded by peyote
cultists that it was disgraceful to have his hair long, and he gave his
shorn hair with his medicine bundles to his brother-in-law, as both wept
and as he received the thanks of his relatives. Clothing and headdress
are also symbols of conflict between the old and the new for Taos and
Osage.
A dramatic solution of a life-long problem was offered Crashing
Thunder in peyotism. He had lied about having gotten power from a
vision-experience in connection with the the older native religion: so
important for personal prestige was this experience that he was betrayed
into fabrication to obtain it. But he never lied to himself. All his life
he was aware of the deception, and being a man of marked fundamental
honesty, he keenly felt the fraud. Finally at the age of forty-five
he did achieve through peyote the experience which he had missed in
his youth. His conversion to the peyote religion was consequently most
profound: “It is the only holy thing that I have become aware of in all
my life,” he said simply, after this experience.
Jack Thomas (Delaware) solved a problem of major importance to himself
through peyote. He had been appointed a Government policeman, and found
considerable conflict between his duty and his sympathies. Finally he
became gravely ill, and a meeting was put on by his brother and another
relative to pray for his recovery. In this meeting the answer came to him:
The others in the tipi did not like me. Peyote told me this. I
had been a man-catcher. That was the reason. The two persons
that loved me prayed for me and I got well. I did not go back
to my job of man-catcher. Peyote showed me that it is wrong.
The mechanisms for social control afforded by the public and communal
nature of the cult (as opposed to the individualism of the older
religions in the Plains) are on the whole very effective. The speeches
of the leaders and old men give ample opportunity for the expression of
opinions concerning the conduct of younger members in peyote meetings and
out. We have already noted the case in which a Kiowa marriage was saved
from destruction by timely advice and reprimand addressed to the husband
in a peyote meeting. The prayers, too, which almost any individual may
make by calling for a smoke, are further vehicles for quite various
psychological transactions.
Peyote leadership carries with it much prestige, and the great
road-chiefs like Quanah Parker, Belo Kozad, Old Man Horse, White Horn,
John Rave and Jonathan Koshiway are spoken of with considerable respect.
In the case of John Wilson peyote was further made the vehicle of
economic success. But the negative instances are just as interesting. We
have already mentioned A. S., a Seminole who lived and married among the
Caddo. He built a moon of the general John Wilson-Enoch Hoag type, which
differed from these in only minor details. His bid for personal prestige,
however, received so little support on the part of his group that he
removed the inner symbolic part of his altar to the woods nearby, and
left only the crescent and apron of a “small moon.”
Another case is that of H. B., a Kiowa. This group has been unimpressed
by any major changes in the rite, and success in leadership lies along
rather conventional lines since they regard themselves as the repositors
of the original native rite. H. B. aspired to be a peyote leader and to
increase his prestige through the cult. His wife’s brother was the leader
of the minutely variant “Kiowa Road,” his mother’s brother, further,
was one of the two original users of peyote among the Kiowa and his
step-father was an owner of one of the “Ten Medicine” bundles. All in all
his chances might have seemed good in the beginning. But a train of bad
luck befell him: his wife died, his step-son fell sick, and his mother’s
brother died, all within a year. His mother quarreled with the rather
well-to-do wife of her nephew, C. A., who among the middle-aged men is
perhaps the most promising and widely accepted peyote leader (though he
still modestly confines himself to the job of “fire chief”). Then, as C.
A. said—and he was not above sabotaging his rival H. B.’s chances—“he
couldn’t quite make the grade, because people wondered why all these
things had happened to him; some fellows are like that.”
There is much therefore that is psychologically precarious in peyotism.
Personal histories and happenings to the individual determine his
attitude toward the cult, and the attitude may change as new anxieties
arise and old ones are solved. A typical conversion perhaps is that of
John Bearskin (Winnebago), described by Densmore:[15]
The parents of John Bearskin belonged to the medicine lodge and
he belonged to that organization until 1912. The mother of John
Bearskin became sick in 1905 and told him that she was near to
death. He was so distressed that he went to town and became
drunk. The next morning they wakened him and said that his
mother was dead. His father died in 1909. At that time he had
a little girl two years old and his sister had a little girl
five years of age. Both children died a week after his father’s
death. Bearskin’s father left him a farm with house, stock and
implements. He disposed of these, spent part of the proceeds
and with the remainder bought a house in Winnebago [Nebraska]
but later sold that and spent the money. He was drifting from
place to place and working as he had opportunity when a cousin
wrote him about peyote, advising him to return and use it. He
went back and on January 19, 1912, he and his two daughters
joined the peyote organization, being baptized by John Rave.
His wife joined later, during an illness. Since that time he
has not wavered in his attachment to the peyote cult, neither
has he gambled nor used liquor nor tobacco.
But there are skeptics who do not join. Michelson[16] quotes a Sauk
informant, who first belonged and later quit the cult:
I do not believe in it because it gives you the same effect
as whisky when you are drunk four or five days; only peyote
will affect you when you eat it once. I have eaten so there is
nothing in it. I quit five years ago. And another reason why I
do not believe in it is because the man did not know who the
manitou was who did the talking [in the Peyote origin legend];
because the men pitied by manitous, among us Sauks, knew who
they were, such as Wolf, Wisake, Turtle, or such as that.
An Oto informant was skeptical at first about the power of peyote, and
experimented with it: for two days he drank tea to test its virtues,
and then went to a meeting. There he was converted or “saved” when he
realized that he was “pitiful like a stick.”
Delos Lonewolf (Kiowa) quit peyote and became a preacher again, though
he had been an important peyote leader and one-time president of the
Oklahoma Native American Church; he had had “family troubles” and
was apparently persuaded thereto by his wife. Cecil Horse and Albert
Cat (Kiowa) have also recently quit peyote. When Kiowa Jim lost his
son, he gave his staff, gourd and feathers to Baptiste Derond (Oto),
a brother-in-law of Jonathan Koshiway. Derond was later killed in an
automobile accident. His younger brother Frank now has the paraphernalia,
but according to Koshiway, “they are afraid of them, and want to return
them,” since they are associated with misfortune.[17]
Sometimes Christianity itself is invoked in defence of peyote. Old Man
Green (Oto) used arguments from the Bible to confound a Protestant
minister who had been unfriendly to the native religion. He quoted from
Genesis 1.12 an opinion from God Himself upon His completing the creation
of green herbs: “and God saw that it was good.” Said Green, “Peyote
was there then. If you condemn peyote, you condemn God’s work.” On the
whole, however, peyotism and Christianity are mutually exclusive in the
southern Plains at least, so far as membership in the one or the other
is concerned. This is partly due to the usual time peyote meetings are
held (i.e., Saturday night and Sunday forenoon), but partly also to the
intransigence and stubbornness to native overtures on the part of white
Protestant ministers.
Bert Crow-lance (Kiowa) is an interesting case of a man who has tried
both the old religion and peyote, and found both unsatisfactory. In
1935 he attempted the vision quest, fasting and praying on a hill west
of Anadarko. A hernia had partially incapacitated him for work, and he
was seeking means to support his large family. He went out to fast and
pray in the hope (so he told the writer) of finding gold and diamonds in
Oklahoma through a vision, and failing that, oil, which would make him
rich. But before he had completed the required four days, his deceased
mother appeared to him in a vision and told him that there were snakes
around which endangered him, and that he must return later with a pipe,
which he had forgotten. But the second attempt was no more successful
than the first.
Crow-lance had gone to a number of peyote meetings. In one of them he
prayed that his sick daughter be made well. She later died. Crow-lance in
disgust threw his peyote feathers into the Washita River. A friend who
heard of this was horrified:
Only when a Kiowa _dies_ do you throw things in the river. Your
children and grandchildren are living. That’s a mistake, and he
must right it now. We’re getting after him now—he threw away
all his good feathers!
The articles were recovered in part, and selections of gourds and
feathers were made by other peyote-users. Another anecdote we have
already recounted of a father peyote which was almost returned to the
place where it had been gathered. Again, Timbo (Comanche) formerly had
many cattle and horses. He has lost all of them now, and this he blames
on the displeasure of peyote. In short, all manner of happenings are
attributed to the approval or ill favor of peyote, and rare is the event
which may not be rationalized on this basis.
From these data, then, it may be well seen that peyotism functions
in all ways as a living religion: peyote christens the new-born and
protects their early years, teaches the young, marries young men and
women, rewards and punishes the behavior of adult years, and buries the
dead—offering throughout consolation for troubles, chastening for bad
deeds or thoughts, and serving as the focus for tribal and intertribal
life. Peyotism is without question the living religion of the majority of
Plains Indians today. Perhaps the statement of a Delaware may make this
clear:[18]
The old Delaware religion is too heavy for us who are
becoming few and weak. It is too difficult; Peyote is easy
in comparison. Therefore we who are weak take up this new
Indian religion. This is the very objection raised by the old
men, taking it up. But Peyote knows that the Indian’s burden
of becoming educated and at the same time keeping up the old
religion is too heavy, for he said that to the old woman who
was the first to discover our new religion. Peyote is to be the
Indians’ new religion. It is to be for all the Indian people
and only for them.
The intent of the present section was to give the reader some sense of
the emotional immediacy of peyotism to the present-day Plains Indian.
Such a study might properly be termed “functional,” and in biological
analogy corresponds to the physiology or dynamic aspect of the anatomy or
descriptive morphology attempted in our preceding discussion of cultural
traits and patterns. But we must at once abandon our analogy, lest like
some others we extrapolate illegitimately terms which have meaning in
one universe of discourse into another where they serve only to produce
confusion. In biology and medicine, anatomy may perhaps be understood
wholly divorced from palaeontological and physical-anthropological (i.e.,
historical) considerations, but this is peculiarly not the case with any
attempt to discuss a culture-pattern functionally or psychologically.
Here the immediacy and the momentum of past history, that is the
functioning of culture-patterns in terms of individuals, is precisely the
point at issue. And here the aggregation of traits into a complex is less
the result of organismic-biological factors than of “historical accident”
(e.g., the use of parched corn in the Plains ritual breakfast—its
function in the religious pattern of an agricultural economy having
long since been in abeyance). The traits of a complex do not gain
their relatedness or their adhesiveness from any biological-organismic
“function”; culture-traits are not chromosome-linked genes, and change of
one trait of a pattern need not organically change the rest. Indeed, if
we can speak of “the peyote cult” at all, it is only after demonstrating
its historical continuity as such.
For Bert Crow-lance and Homer Buffalo, we maintain, judged from the
vantage-point of any other culture than their own, would remain enigmas
or examples of inexplicably bizarre behavior if we did not fall back on
history—on the decadent pattern of the vision-quest, and on patterns
now almost vanished of prestige and power-seeking, etc. But the problem
of the ethnologist as we see it is not the reporting of the outlandish
and the picturesque; it is the discovery of plausible motivations in
terms of native meanings, the discovery of the essentially humane in its
to us often disguised manifestations. In practice, then, _we can never
know enough history_ either biographical or cultural, in explaining a
present culture as it functions in individuals acting in such and such
a (historically-conditioned) way. We feel the more free, therefore, to
trace in the next section the history of a pre-peyote Plains narcotic
used ritually, inasmuch as it affords an insight into the historical
problem.