Part 15
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.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] _Peyote as Used in Religious Worship_, 11, lent through the courtesy of Alfred Wilson (Cheyenne).
[2] Letter of Mack Haag (Cheyenne), Calumet, Oklahoma, to Dr. R. W. Miles, San Francisco, California, Sept. 16, 1925, and reply Oct. 2, 1925. What unfriendliness the writer met was largely the projection of individual suspiciousness, e.g., that of a Caddo who concocted a preposterous story out of his own imagination. When I returned to Anadarko in 1936 with a White companion who remained for several weeks, this man circulated the story that James Mooney’s son and the son of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs had arrived to make a thorough check-up on peyote, that to obtain an “absolute lowdown” we had a man stationed on every corner in the town to check up on every Indian who took a drink of beer in a saloon, picked up a woman, or was overheard swearing—in any of a dozen Indian languages!
[3] Parsons, _Taos Pueblo_, 66-68.
[4] Datura or Jimsonweed was also greatly feared; it killed or drove crazy anyone who touched it. Only shamans armed with the more powerful peyote dared uproot it. Bakánori was used by runners to rub on their legs or to carry in the girdle to counteract witchcraft in the ritual races; but if kept too long this plant also would drive a man crazy or kill him. See Bennett and Zingg, _The Tarahumara_, 136-38, 292, 338, 347; Lumholtz, _Unknown Mexico_, 1:359-60, 372-74; also Mooney, _Tarumari-Guayachic_.
[5] Opler, _The Use of Peyote_; _Lipan Apache Field Notes_; Hoebel, _Northern Cheyenne Field Notes_; Petrullo, _The Diabolic Root_, 71.
[6] Can this be a reflex of an older pattern? Spier (_The Sun Dance_, 473) lists as a part of the Sun Dance of the Arapaho, Kiowa and Southern Cheyenne a prepared drink and the induction of vomiting. Kozad (Kiowa) believed peyote had a good effect whether vomited or not—the virtue being in the quantity eaten. Cf. the emetic rites in connection with the “black drink.”
[7] Kroeber, _The Arapaho_, 406-407; Parsons, _Taos Pueblo_, 65.
[8] Radin, _A Sketch of the Peyote Cult_, 5-6, 19-20; _The Winnebago Tribe_, 395.
[9] E.g., Charles Lonewolf (Kiowa) in _Peyote as Used in Religious Worship_, 53; Hoebel, _Comanche Field Notes_. Again, all the prestige of the culture itself was behind Old Man White Horn’s pronouncement to the psychotic Oto, R. E., that peyote would protect him. This individual suffered apparently from an obsessional neurosis (stereotyped actions, collecting string, rolling and unrolling balls of it, persecutory fears, avoidance of people, fear of being pursued etc.). If his difficulties had originally arisen from real or supposed aggressions upon him of members of his group, the therapeutic value of the assertion that the fetish would protect him is obvious. For the belief that it would protect him was shared by all the others present, and he had the support of the enormous impetus a deep-seated culture-pattern possesses. The importance of the fetish plant as a psychic “authority” should likewise not be minimized.
[10] Opler, _The Influence of Aboriginal Pattern_, _passim_.
[11] For one matter, the shaman’s staff never left his hand to be passed around as in the Plains; and each individual had some prophylactic fetish in his hand which he never dared relinquish throughout the meeting. Note, too, the fetish peyote on the altar: on this the leader could detect evil thoughts and acts, such as the magic intrusive “shooting” of water-beetles and feathers by rival shamans into each other.
[12] Radin, _Crashing Thunder_, 180, see also 193-94, 198-99; _A Sketch of the Peyote Cult_, 8-9; Densmore, _Winnebago Songs of the Peyote Ceremony_.
[13] Skinner, _Societies of the Iowa_, 725; Radin, _Crashing Thunder_, 177; _A Sketch of the Peyote Cult_, 5-6, 19-20; _The Winnebago Tribe_, 395; Densmore, _The Peyote Cult_; _Winnebago Songs of the Peyote Ceremony_. Confession is present in Iowa, Oto, and Winnebago peyotism. But I have noted non-peyote instances of public confession among Aztecs, Aurohuaca, Carrier, Chichimeca, Crow, Dogrib, Eskimo, Guatemaltecans, Huichol, Ijca, Inca, Iroquois, Maya, Nicarao, Plains Cree, Plains Ojibwa, Salteaux, Shawnee, Slave, Tahltan, Western Apache, Yellowknife, and Yucatecans. Related practices are reported for the Arikara, Blackfoot, Southern Cheyenne, Oglala, and Sarsi.
[14] Radin, _Crashing Thunder_, 171, 186-87; Petrullo, _The Diabolic Root_, 111.
[15] Densmore, _Winnebago Songs of the Peyote Ceremony_.
[16] Michelson, _Sauk and Fox Myths_.
[17] A Wichita told an anecdote which he thought evidenced his own very good fortune. During a storm he was trying to get to a meeting at Red Rock in his old car, which failed him. A tragedy occurred in this meeting: Riley Fawfaw (Oto) was killed by lightning. A supporting wire had been put on the tipi and along this the lightning apparently traveled, for money in his pocket was melted, his neighbors made unconscious and others thrown about the tipi by the force of the bolt. Unfortunately it seemed inexpedient to inquire more deeply into detailed attitudes about this incident.
[18] Petrullo, _The Diabolic Root_, 76.
HISTORICAL INTERPRETATIONS
THE PRE-PEYOTE MESCAL BEAN CULT
As we have noted in the section on the botany of peyote, the use of the term “mescal” is surrounded with considerable confusion, and is persistently used in the older literature to designate _Lophophora williamsii_ or peyote. The true mescal is the _Agave_ spp. whose cabbage-like center is baked by the tribes of the Southwest and northern Mexico as a food; “mescal” also refers to the brandy distilled from mescal beer or pulque. No doubt it is due to their intoxicating properties that two other distinct plants, _Sophora secundiflora_ and _Lophophora williamsii_, have been called, respectively, “mescal bean” and “mescal button.” A further confusion of these last has been contributed to by the fact that both have been involved in Plains cult uses.
_Sophophora secundiflora_ is an evergreen shrub bearing two or three tough-shelled red seeds in a bean-like pod. Known in Mexico as “toleselo” and elsewhere as mescal-bean, coral-bean,[1] frijolito, frijolillo and mountain laurel,[2] it contains the extremely toxic narcotic alkaloid sophorine or cytisine,[3] the physiological action of which accounts for its ceremonial use by natives. This is a powerful poison causing nausea, convulsions and finally death by asphyxiation; it is said[4] to resemble nicotine closely in physiological action. A more complete botanical and physiological account appears in an appendix, and we are here concerned only with its ethnographic aspects.
Havard says that the Indians near San Antonio
formerly used the seed as an intoxicant, half of a seed producing a delirious exhilaration followed by a deep sleep lasting two or three days.
Opler tells a Chiricahua Apache coyote story in which the trickster pounded up a number of the beans and gave them to the people to eat:
So while the people were out of their minds, Coyote cut out their hair in patches the way Indians cut their hair. So there they were, crazy.
Lumholtz says that the Tarahumari added the root (?) of the frijolillo to their maguey wine “as a ferment,” and Bennett and Zingg report an archaeological occurrence at a Rio Fuerte site in Chihuahua on a Basket-Maker horizon:
Containers found here and in another site held nothing but a few seeds of the poisonous wild “bean,” which may have ceremonial significance.
This inference is not implausible when we recall the Mexican mode of keeping peyote.[5]
The use of peyote in racing and in ball games is noted for the Tarahumari and Tamaulipecan groups, and in this connection it is interesting to learn that the Wichita used to eat mescal beans before they ran a race. A Cheyenne informant said that his tribe used the “red-berry” as an eye-wash long before they knew of peyote, though he never heard of their eating it; “it’s poison,” he said. The Comanche used to get mescal beans from near Fort Stanton, apparently for ornamental purposes only.[6] Like most of the Plains tribes, the Kickapoo used mescal beans chiefly as beads, but in common with the Cheyenne they used them medicinally: for earache they boiled, mashed and strained the beans through a cloth.
The Kiowa use the ḱɔnḱoλ or mescal beans typically, as beads in peyote meetings, much as they formerly wore bandoliers of them on the war-path. One Kiowa is said to have chewed the inside of a mescal bean before breaking a bad wild horse bareback. A Kiowa peyote chief had several of the beans on his moccasin heel-fringe, to protect from the dangers of inadvertently stepping on menstrual blood, and another Kiowa “peyote boy” had a mescal bean attached to the thong of his gourd rattle. Mescal beans are clearly thought to possess great medicine-power.
The Iowa had leggings which Skinner thought might have been of a modified Kiowa-Comanche type, with a perforated scarlet mescal bean (Iowa, maka shutze, “red medicine”) knotted on each thong of the fringe. The Omaha used as beads and good luck charms bright red beans which Gilmore thought were _Erythrina_, and which they called makaⁿ zhide or “red medicine” likewise. In adopting the use of chinaberries (_Melia azerdache_ L.) as beads, they likened them to mescal beans and called them, curiously, makaⁿ-zhide sabe, “black red-medicine.”[7] Pawnee informants said that long ago they used bat or mescal beans for medicine “to strengthen the body,” but now use them only for decoration. The Oto used to eat “liar(?) berries” or mescal beans in one of their lodges; they had the interesting superstition that they breed (recalling the sex attributed to peyote):
Tie two or three in a bundle, leave it a year or so, and when you open it again you’ll have a dozen.
The inference that the Pawnee and Oto used the mescal bean ritually is borne out by the Iowa, who had a full-fledged ceremony called the “Red Bean Dance:”[8]
This is an ancient rite (maⁿkácutzi waci) far antedating the modern peyote eating practice but on the same principle. The society was founded by a faster who dreamed that he received it from the deer, for red beans (mescal) are sometimes found in deer’s stomachs.[9] There are four assistant leaders, besides the leader, and it is their duty to strike the drum and sing during ceremonies.
In this society members were obliged to purchase admission from some one of the four assistant leaders. This was done in the regular ceremonial way. A candidate brought gifts and heaped them on the ground before the assistant leader and begged for the songs, etc., which he taught them and was then a leader. There was no initiation ceremony. During performances the members painted themselves white and wore a bunch of split owl-feathers on their heads. Small gourd rattles were used and the members while singing held a bow and arrow in the right hand which they waved back and forth in front of the body while they manipulated the rattle with the left.