Part 4

De la Serna[13] said that ololiuhqui and peyote were carried by persons “forsaken of God” as charms against all injuries, and Arlegui deplored the custom of parents to “hang little bags on their children, and inside of them in place of the four Evangels that they place around the necks of children in Spain, [to] place peyot or some other herb.” Arias described a surreptitious worship of the fetish: the natives hung the herb in the choirs “as a special creation of the malignant spirit which they designate with the name of Naycuric,” and they communicated with the numen by drinking an infusion of peyote instead of wine.[14]

Peyote is also a powerful protection against witchcraft in ritual foot-races. Rivals are liable to throw bones and herbs on the track and cause the Tarahumari runner to be bewitched and lose the race, which is run at night. For this contingency, however, “hikuli and the dried head of an eagle or a crow may be worn under the girdle as a protection.”[15] Peyote is a great protection too when traveling, both in war and on peyote-pilgrimages.[16]

The Comanche commonly wore peyotes in buckskin bags attached to beaded bandoliers, recalling the mescal bean bandolier which the Kiowa and others commonly wore in battle. Indeed, peyote was even a part of the Θawikila and Kispoko war bundles of the Shawnee, long before they knew the generalized peyote ritual—a custom similar to the Iowa use of mescal beans in their war bundles.[17]

But in Mexico and the Southwest war and witching are closely connected ideologically. As a matter of fact, peyote itself as well as the peyote shaman’s rasp, is employed in Tarahumari witchcraft.[18] Among the Mescalero Apache,[19] however, witching _within_ the tribe by rival peyote shamans was an ever-present anxiety, their feuds being conceived in terms of battles and war, with the “shooting” of arrows and struggles to see who had the more powerful and compelling songs. The Mescalero peyote leader was merely a shaman _primus inter pares_, whose major function was to prevent witching in meetings. The purpose of the Tonkawa peyote songs, it is said, was to ward off the enemies’ witching. Witching with peyote is less in evidence in the Plains, save among the Kiowa, Comanche, and Cheyenne who early received it, but as late as the time when the Caddo-Delaware messiah John Wilson took peyote and the Ghost Dance to the Quapaw there was witching by “shooting” objects. The Northern Cheyenne feared the “trickiness” of peyote itself; and the Lipan fireman was chosen for his braveness because “he has to go out at night to get wood and it is a frightening job sometimes, especially when one is under the influence of peyote; peyote is sure a joker!”

Besides this fetishistic use in war, peyote was also used somewhat more “technologically” to cure wounds. Alegre writes that the Sonoran

manner of curing the wounds is with peyote, that they call peyori after it has been made into a powder, with which they fill the cut, cleaning it and renewing it three times every two days, or with a species of balm composed of [maguey].

Prieto says that, in Tamaulipecan war, among the provisions carried by the women in the rear were

gourds full of peyote and water ... and in addition to all these provisions they carry some plants, which, chosen and prepared beforehand serve to stop hemorrhages from the wounds, and to aid in their curing.

The Opata used pejori for arrow-wounds, cleaning them out with cotton squills on sticks dipped in the powder; the Lipan put peyote on wounds of all kinds.[20]

The other therapeutic uses of peyote are various. At Taos it was used for snake-bite. The Caxcanes of Teo-caltiche employed peyote for cramps and fainting spells, the Chichimeca for relieving painful joints. The Tarahumari apply peyote externally for bruises, snake-bites and rheumatism. The Huichol use few remedies except hikuli, unlike the Tepecano who use many, but it is good for anything from a minor ache to a major wound. Medicinal uses are also recorded for the Tepecano, Yaqui, Opata, Pima, Papago, Cora and Lipan.[21]

In the Plains a Wichita case of blindness of fifteen years’ standing was cured by the sole application of peyote-infusion.[22] Radin cites a similar Winnebago case. The Kiowa use peyote as a panacea: uses are recorded for tooth-ache, hemorrhages, headache, consumption, fever, breast pains, skin disease, hiccough, rheumatism, childbirth, diabetes, colds and pulmonary diseases in general. Mooney records the further use as a “tonic aperitif.” The Shawnee chew peyote into poultices for sores and snake-bites and eat it for colds, pneumonia, rheumatism, aches and pains.[23]

The remaining non-ritual uses of peyote are quite varied. The Acaxee employed it in some manner in their ball games, probably eating it in small doses, according to Beals. In Tlaxcala peyote was used by “the auxiliary forces of the conquistadores, in order not to feel fatigue on their marches”—a widespread use in Mexico; in the Plains the typical origin legend tells of peyote aiding a seriously wounded warrior or a woman and child left behind by their companions without food or drink. The legend is not unlike the common Plains stories of receiving power from animals in a stress-situation; Old Man Horse (Kiowa) said “peyote is the only plant from which one can get power,” obviously thinking in terms of the old vision quest. Peyote in fact gave power to perform shamanistic tricks in the old days.[24]

The Tarahumari, among other things, left a hikuli plant with the corpse, the motive for which is unstated.[25] A Wichita, captured in war and imprisoned, was aided in escaping unseen from the enemy camp by his fetish-plant; the lobbying power of peyote in influencing Federal bonus legislation has already been mentioned. Indeed, peyote has had a record of unbroken success in preventing Federal anti-peyote legislation.[26]

RITUAL USES OF PEYOTE

Despite the unsatisfactory state of the literature, it is clear that the ceremonial use of peyote in Mexico differs widely from that in the Plains. First we shall characterize the Mexican type by summarizing the Huichol and Tarahumari rites, and later adding comparative Mexican data.

HUICHOL

Though the most important of their fiestas, Huichol peyotism is a seasonal matter, the hikuli seldom being eaten outside the ceremonial period in January. In October a preliminary trip lasting fifteen days each way is made to Real Catorce (San Luis Potosí) to obtain the plants. The eight or twelve pilgrims bathe and sleep in the temple with their wives the night before leaving, not washing again until the feast some four months later. After receiving new names for the trip, the next morning they pray around a fire, wearing squirrel tails tied to their hats, and sacrifice five tortillas[27] to the fire. Then, after sprinkling their heads with a deer-tail dipped in water steeped with certain herbs, all weep as each man puts his right hand on his wife’s left shoulder and bids her farewell.[28]

Their route is full of religious associations, since formerly the gods went out to seek peyote and now are met with in the shape of mountains, stones and springs; their dreams en route are also important in deciding religious arrangements for the coming year (who is to sacrifice cattle for rain, who is to be fire-maker, etc.). The pilgrims carry sacred hour-glass shaped gourds and the leader also carries the yákwai, a ball of native-grown tobacco called macuchi, which is solemnly distributed after they pass Puerta de Cerda. In the afternoon they place ceremonial arrows toward the four corners of the world, and sit around a fire until midnight. Tobacco belongs to the personified fire; after much praying the leader touches the tobacco-ball with his plumes and wraps small portions in corn husks[29] “so that they look like diminutive tamales,” and each man puts one in a special tobacco-gourd tied to his quiver. This act symbolizes the birth of tobacco and henceforth they must preserve ritual order on the march, and only cease to be the “prisoner” of Grandfather Fire when the sacred bundles are given back to him, i.e., burned.

On the fourth afternoon the women at home gather to confess their sins to Grandfather Fire; they knot palm-leaves lest they forget the name of even a single lover and the men consequently find no hikuli. After this public confession each woman throws her leaf into the fire and becomes ritually clean. The men make a similar confession “to the five winds” a little beyond Zacatecas and burn their tallies in the fire. The hikuli-seekers are henceforth gods and the leaders fast (save for eating stray plants) until they reach the peyote country.[30]

Arrived, they line up, each man with an arrow on his bow-string which he points successively to the six regions of the world without letting it fly. As they march toward the mesa-“altar” where the leader has seen hikuli as a “deer,” each man shoots two arrows each over five hikuli plants, crossing over their tops that they may be taken “alive.” They make a ceremonial circuit of the mesa, but the “deer” assumes the form of a whirlwind and disappears, leaving two hikuli in his tracks; there they sacrifice votive bowls, arrows, paper flowers, beads, etc., and pray. After this they return to get their five hikuli, and eat and gather others. The whole ceremony is of hunting deer, and after five days they reverse the logs of their fireplace and return home with gourds of holy water, wood for the shaman’s rasp, sotol for the “godseats,” yellow paint material and the hikuli they have gathered. Their tobacco-gourds and faces are painted yellow, the color of the God of Fire. The face-painting represents the faces or masks of the gods, and expresses prayers for rain, luck in deer-hunting and good crops, symbolized as corn field, cloud, ear of corn, “rain-serpent,” squash-vine and -flower designs.[31]

Approaching home, they must hunt deer until they have enough for the feast, before being freed from the ritual restrictions of continence, fasting, and non-use of salt, meanwhile being sustained by slices of green hikuli eaten from time to time. The deer meat is cooked and then cut into small cubes which are strung (precisely as peyote is) on cords.[32] The deer-killing is to obtain rain for the next growing season.[33] The hunting period over, men and women bathe for the first time since the beginning of the hikuli-pilgrimage.

For the hikuli feast the men deck their hats lavishly with brilliant macao and hawk feathers, and wear supernumerary girdle-pouches; the women wear strings of yellow and red plumes across the back. A temple fire, another at the east of the patio to “guard” the dancers, and a third at the north for visitors from the underworld are built in a special fashion: the shaman carefully brings an eighteen-inch billet of green wood, offers it to five directions and finally to the sixth by placing it on the ground, after which others place sticks pointing east and west on this molitáli or “pillow” of Grandfather Fire.[34]

Then the shaman and hikuli-seekers ceremonially circle the freshly white-plastered “god-house of the Sun,” enter, pray aloud and give a long account of their journey until late at night. The temple fire place (áro) is a circular clay basin in the center with a slightly raised rim; the poker is the “arrow” of the God of Fire. The niches at the west of the temple behind the shaman are filled with god-images; the others sit on either side of him in a semi-circle on sotol or century-plant stools. Their wives, flower-garlanded and painted, sit farther back in the temple, while the pilgrims smoke and sing all night about Greatgrandfather Deer-Tail, the Morning Star and all the other gods who, long ago, went out to seek hikuli. The next morning all wash their faces, heads and hands in water from the hikuli-country, and salute the rising sun with a bowl of burning incense, sprinkling water to the four corners of the world with a flower and praying for life and for luck in hunting deer.[35]

Meanwhile the patio has been prepared for dancing. Beside the fire are jars of holy water and tesvino, a stuffed fetish-skunk tied to a stick, and a stuffed grey squirrel decorated with dark green beetle wing-covers, small clay birds, feathers and a crucifix.[36] The shaman, sitting west of the main fire (behind the usual ceremonial arrows, plumes, tamales, and a pot of hikuli-liquor) sacrifices water to the six regions with a stick; then, with assistants on either side who take turns helping him, the shaman sings the mythological songs, unaccompanied by a drum, and the long dance begins.[37] Both sexes take part in the dance, “a quick, jumping walk with frequent jerky turns of the body,” in a circle counter-clockwise around the shaman and the fire—though the circle tends to an ellipse as they approach the fetish-animals at the northwest.[38]

At sunrise of the third and last day comes the corn-roasting ceremony which gives its name to the entire festival, Rarikira (from raki, “toasted corn”).[39] The shaman fastens a plume with a ribbon in the hair of the woman who is to do the toasting and gives her a coarse straw whisk to stir the corn on her comal, supported on three stones over the fire. The hikuli-seekers appear with large varicolored ears of corn in their pouches, and after ceremonial circuits they shell it, sacrificing five grains to the fire. The woman then prepares the esquite, and all eat this, together with deer meat and broth, thus ending the festivities.[40]

The Huichol ritual paraphernalia is heavily symbolized. With his eagle and hawk plumes the singing shaman can see and hear everything anywhere, cure the sick, transform the dead, and even call down the sun; they symbolize the antlers of deer, and deer-antlers in turn symbolize peyote and the “chair” of Grandfather Fire. Peyote itself symbolizes both corn and deer, while the flames of the greatest shaman of all, Grandfather Fire, are his plumes (the brilliantly-colored macao is his particular bird). Deer-antlers, furthermore, for the Huichol symbolize arrows,[41] arrows being the symbol _par excellence_ of prayer. Again, arrows symbolize a bird flying with outstretched neck, the feathered portion representing the heart. The peyote plant, finally, is considered the drinking-bowl of the god of fire and wind.[42]

This intricate symbolic complex (corn = peyote = drinking-bowl of Grandfather Fire = god of wind = whirlwind = deer = deer-tracks = peyote = deer-antlers = shaman’s plumes = deer antlers = chair of Grandfather Fire = flames of fire = brilliant bird [macao] plumes = flying bird = arrow = prayer for rain, corn and deer-hunting, etc.) is deeply rooted in Huichol religion, and each one of the symbolic equations has a ritual reflex.[43]

TARAHUMARI

Tarahumari peyotism is on the decline in Samachique, Quírara and Guadalupe, though still remaining around Narárachic; in Guadalupe the bakánawa cactus is valued instead. From two or three to a dozen men make the month-long trip to the region around the mouth of the Rio Conchos at any time of the year, though usually not in the rainy season. They first purify themselves with copal incense; on the way anything may be eaten, but in the hikuli country they eat only piñole, and speech is forbidden. Arrived, they erect a cross near the first plants found, in order to find an abundance of others, and carefully cut off the tops with wooden sticks to leave the roots uninjured. They sing and eat green peyote while gathering it and in the evening they dance the dutubúri around the cross and a fire. The harvesting lasts several days, some taking turns dancing while the others sleep. Each variety of hikuli is put in a separate bag, for they would fight if mixed.[44]

The plants are left on a blanket in the mountains near home, and the blood of a slaughtered sheep or goat is sprinkled on them to “feed” them, with a special song. After drying they are placed in covered ollas away from the house. The hikuli-seekers are met on their return with singing, and a fiesta is held with the sacrificial sheep or goat. The dutubúri and the hikuli-dance are then danced all night around a large open-air fire, much green peyote and tesvino being consumed. This ceremony is to “cure” the pilgrims: the shaman’s necklace of _Coix lachryma-Jobi_ seeds is dipped into a bowl of agua-miel, sotoli, or mescal, each one receiving a spoonful, while the shaman sings of hikuli standing on a Job’s Tears seed as big as a mountain.[45]

Tarahumari hikuli-feasts are held at other times also. The women grind the plants with water on a metate into a thickish brown liquid. The dancing-patio is carefully swept with a straw broom and several crosses are planted, and near one of these the peyote is piled with jars of “tea” and tesvino, baskets of unsalted tamales and bowls of meat and “medicine.” A large fire is built with logs in an east-west position and hikuli and yumari are danced all night.[46]

Near the shaman and his assistants who sit west of the fire is a leaf-covered hole into which they carefully spit; the olla-cuspidor of the men to one side and the women to the other is passed around and emptied here also. With a drinking-gourd rim the shaman makes a circle on the ground and in it the right-angled cross of the world-symbol. Then he inverts a gourd over a hikuli placed on the cross, as a resonator for his rasp; hikuli enjoys this music and manifests his strength by the noise produced.[47] The shaman’s headdress is of bird-plumes, which prevent the wind from entering and causing illness; through them the birds impart to him all their wisdom. The assistants, of both sexes, carry incense bowls of copal, kneeling and crossing themselves at the cross, and then pass out the peyote.[48]

At times the shaman dances, at times his assistants, and women may dance either separately or simultaneously with the other men participants. The bare-footed men are wrapped to the chin in white blankets; the women wear clean skirts and tunics. The clockwise dancing (with a turn of the body at the shaman’s place) consists in a “peculiar quick, jumping march, with short steps, the dancers moving forward one after another, on their toes, and making sharp, jerky movements, without, however, turning around.” The men have deer-hoof sonajas, and the rasping and singing are continuous save when the shaman politely excuses himself to the fetish hikuli; others must also ask permission to leave the patio. In the intermittent dancing they beat their mouths with the palm imitating hikuli’s talk, or cry “Hikuli vava! (Hikuli over yonder!)” in shrill falsetto.[49]

At dawn the dancing stops at three raps on the shaman’s rasp. All rise and gather at the east cross. Then the shaman, followed by a boy with a gourd of palo hediondo medicine (ohnoa roots steeped in water), “cures” each one with his rasp wetted in the medicine, as they cry, “Thank you!” The shaman makes three long raspings with his stick on the man’s head; its dust is so potent in curing that it is carefully gathered from around the resonator and preserved in buckskin bags. A spoonful of other medicines is sometimes swallowed as the shaman blows and makes passes; sometimes tesvino exclusively is used. Blankets are also smoked with copal now. Then, facing the rising sun, the shaman makes three raspings at arms’ length, waving home hikuli who had come from the east early in the morning, riding on green doves, to prevent sorcery in the meeting; now he turns into a ball and returns, accompanied by the owl. Doctoring of the sick as well as “curing” may now occur. Then all wash carefully, and after the shaman sacrifices tortillas and tesvino as they stand in a line facing east, they all participate in a feast.[50]

COMPARISON OF MEXICAN PEYOTE RITUALS

Huichol peyotism is more intricate and important than Tarahumari, though it is seasonal only and the latter venerated several varieties of cactus. The state of the literature advises caution, but a far better case could be made for the Huichol as a center of diffusion: the neighboring Cora, for example, had a vigorous peyote rite, while the Tubar, who share tesvino and the yohe dance with the Tarahumari and otherwise resemble them culturally, lack it.[51] Beals, however, points out that since the Cora-Huichol do not live within the region of growth of peyote, they must have borrowed it; our sole knowledge of Huichol peyotism is modern, unfortunately, but the Cora rite is known from 1754. On the whole, the gaps in our knowledge are too great to discuss possible centers of diffusion of Mexican peyotism; they may, indeed, lie in the little known area to the northeast.[52]

A relatively full account of the Tamaulipecan rite is extant:[53]