We have previously noted the use in Mexico of teo-nanacatl, _Cacalia_
spp. and _Cannabis_ spp. for their supposed aphrodisiac virtues.
Peyote too has become involved in this use, but it has been as warmly
defended as attacked, some indeed maintaining that it is a specific
anaphrodisiac. It can hardly be both. The present writer, as a matter
of fact, considers this less a problem of physiology than one of
ethnology, psychology or even psychiatry, and is persuaded that in the
pharmacological-physiological sense there exist neither aphrodisiacs nor
their opposite, anaphrodisiacs.
The matter is not to be settled off-handedly by resort to experiments
on white subjects; it is a more intricate question of culture and
personality. If white subjects argue heatedly for peyote’s aphrodisiac
and anaphrodisiac virtues, this proves nothing physiological. It merely
indicates the long notorious fact that given the somewhat anti-sexual
tradition of west European culture, the typical anxiety of its
culture-bearers is sexual. This is scarcely the case with the Plains
Indians I have observed. As expressed in ritual, symbolism and prayer,
the typical anxiety of these natives is that about life itself—and the
culture-historical background out of which this has grown will be readily
recalled by students of Plains ethnography (constant warfare, prestige
symbolisms, the coming of the Whites with new diseases, superior weapons,
etc.).
We shall merely cite here, therefore, instances showing up the order of
“proof” so far adduced to support these contrary stands about peyote.
Lumholtz leads the anaphrodisiac school:
Another marked effect of the plant is to take away temporarily
all sexual desire. This fact, no doubt, is the reason why the
Indians, by a curious aboriginal mode of reasoning, impose
abstinence from sexual intercourse as a necessary part of the
hikuli cult.[20]
Wertham and Bleuler also write of subjects that[21] “efforts to conjure
up an erotic scene were unsuccessful.” Fernberger,[22] however, exhibits
a still more naïve sense of evidence:
[An ethnographer] reports that in the Peyote Cults investigated
there is no actual, implied or even symbolic eroticism[23]
which marks these ceremonies off from practically every other
known American Indian ceremony of any tribe or group [!]. In
order to test the validity of some of these reports, nine
mature members of the faculty ... submitted together to extreme
peyote intoxication.[24] [The experiment was performed in a
group _because_ it] gave the opportunity for suggestion of
one observer upon another [and permitted a ceremony complete
with rattles and drum. Consequently[25]] one unexpected and
unforeseen result of this investigation is the evident strongly
anti-aphrodisiac[26] effect of the drug. This would again
explain, for social psychology and for anthropology, the
purely and totally unerotic character[27] of the ceremonies of
the Peyote Cults so unusual to American Indian ceremonies.[28]
It seems alike profitless to enter into a discussion of those who argue
the aphrodisiac properties of peyote.[29] These have often enough
been missionaries and administrators whose use of the argument in
bitter attacks on the Native American Church shows them to be scarcely
disinterested. Certainly from the evidence so far at hand we can only
heartily endorse the opinion of Klüver[30] that “the drug apparently does
not influence the sexual sphere in any specific way.”