A peyote cacuts by Paul Christoph Hennings, 1888.

The western world’s first encounter with mescaline came in the form of the peyote cactus, part of the astonishing complex of magical and medicinal plants to which the Spanish conquistadors were introduced on their arrival in Mexico. They had brought with them samples of spices such as cinnamon which they were surprised to discover that the local ‘Indians’ didn’t recognise. Instead, they were presented with the richest psychoactive flora on earth. The tabaco already brought back to Europe by Columbus’s crew was on sale in the markets as cigars, chewing preparations and snuff, together with an array of beautifully worked pipes, pouches and snuff tubes. Here, however, it was traded and consumed in conjunction with other plants that had even more powerful mind-altering effects. These included several species of hallucinogenic mushrooms; the seeds of the morning glory plant, containing alkaloids closely related to LSD; shrubs of the Datura and Brugmansia genera, cousins to the bewitching nightshade herbs of Europe; the toxic and deliriant red mescal bean; dream-giving varieties of mint and sage; and, most highly venerated of all, woven baskets filled with nubs of a small, wrinkled spineless cactus known in the Nahuatl tongue as peyotl.

The peyote is about as different from the San Pedro as a cactus can be. The latter’s tall columns dominate the slopes of its Andean heartlands, while the peyote is all but invisible in its natural habitat, the mountains and high desert scrub of northern Mexico, extending across the Rio Grande into pockets of modern-day Texas. Its creased, leathery, spineless heads barely protrude above the sand and gravel, usually covered in dust, looking more like stones or deer droppings than plants. It becomes easily visible only during its brief flowering season, when each head produces a fountain of lustrous satiny pink and white petals.

Peyote’s lifeless appearance is one of its many defences against predators, along with its thick, waxy skin, the bitter taste of its alkaloids and its well-hidden tap root. The heads, or buttons, are only the visible tip of a thick carrot-shaped body in which sparse desert moisture is held in a bitter, chemical-rich mucus. Compared to the irrepressible San Pedro its pace of growth is glacially slow. A button can remain visibly unchanged for years, often shrinking during the dry seasons, while slowly bulking out below ground. But when the head is damaged – trodden upon by a deer or cut with a knife – the enzyme channels that suppress budding are disrupted and new heads (or ‘pups’) rapidly form; long-established specimens can thus elaborate themselves into hydra-headed, coral-like colonies.

Like the San Pedro, there are several closely related species of peyote and their taxonomy has been no less contentious. Lophophora williamsii, the true peyote, was allocated to various different genera over many decades before the current classification was standardised. For a long time it was not differentiated from Lophophora diffusa, a similar-looking species that grows slightly further south, closer to Mexico City. L. diffusa contains some phenethylamine alkaloids but only trace amounts of mescaline itself; the early pharmacological investigators of peyote were confused for years by dried samples in which the two species were not distinguished. There is still no consensus about the number of species in the family, and in 2009 an entirely new one was discovered, Lophophora alberto-vojtechii, a miniature with buttons rarely reaching an inch in diameter and an alkaloid content yet to be officially established (though probably, like L. diffusa, richer in related compounds than in mescaline itself).1

Peyote has been collected and consumed for as long as San Pedro, perhaps longer. Dried buttons found alongside ancient rock art in the Shumla caves on the Texas side of the Rio Grande have been radiocarbon dated to around 4000 BCE, and shown still to contain mescaline at a concentration of around 2 per cent.² The first written evidence of its use by Spanish observers is found in The General History of the Things of New Spain, the twelve-volume compendium which the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún began to assemble after his arrival in Mexico in 1529, and which reached Florence around 1570 (it is commonly known today as the Florentine Codex). In it Sahagún mentions the peyote’s drab physical appearance only briefly before moving on to its more remarkable properties: ‘those who eat or drink it see visions either frightful or laughable . . . it stimulates them and gives them sufficient spirit to fight and have neither fear, thirst nor hunger, and they say it guards them from all danger’.3 The effects appeared to him similar to those produced by the mushrooms to which the Indians were also devoted.

The perspective of the Nahua people (or Aztecs, as the Spanish called them) can be teased out a little further in the fragmentary written record of their songs and poems from the pre-conquest era. These include a handful of ‘flower-songs’, incantations received by their composers from the divine House of the Sun, that describe a paradisiacal garden in which ‘The Cocoa flower gently opens his aroma / The gentle Peyote falls like rain’.⁴ This paradise of the Nahua was conceived both as the source of their psychoactive flora and the place to which those who consumed those luxuries were transported. It was a bright world of radiant colour, the home of flowers, glittering gemstones, opalescent seashells, perfumes and incenses, and particularly the vibrant, iridescent feathers of birds such as the quetzal, the macaw and the hummingbird. It was the domain of the sun, in which nature was distilled into its quintessence. The Spanish missionaries seized on its similarities with the Christian heaven and drew on its imagery for their religious instruction: the songbook translated by Sahagún and published in 1583, entitled Psalmodia christiana, embedded songs of the Nahua flower-world among biblical texts and passages from the lives of the saints.⁵ But the bright world of the Nahua was not a transcendental realm or a future state. It was reality, the here and now, stepped up to a higher energetic level in which colour became dazzling light and time dissolved into an eternal present. Those transported to it were intoxicated, enraptured, bathed in fragrance and lifted up sunwards on shimmering wings.

Early Spanish accounts of peyote focused on the Nahua belief in its miraculous properties, which they interpreted in a variety of ways. The naturalist Francisco Hernández de Toledo, personal physician to the king of Spain, considered Mexico’s psychoactive plants in detail in his botanical survey of 1577, giving a supernaturally tinged account: ‘this root scarcely issues forth but conceals itself in the ground, as if it did not wish to harm those who discover it and eat it’. The Nahua attributed ‘wonderful properties’ to it, including the power to ‘foresee and predict things; such things, for example, as whether the weather will continue favourable; or to discern who has stolen from them some utensils or anything else’.6 Others interpreted the local beliefs in more sceptical and natural terms, notably the physician Juan de Cárdenas. In his 1591 treatise Problems and Miraculous Secrets of the Indians, Cárdenas asserted that the effects of the peyote were not supernatural or demonic but due to the pharmacology of the cactus, which disturbed ‘the interior sense of the cerebrum’ and generated visions of ‘monsters, bulls, tigers, lions and ghosts, that is, painful and horrible things’.⁷

The Indians’ relationship with their visionary plants presented the Spanish with profound problems of interpretation. The parallels with the Christian Eucharist were unmissable. They fasted before taking them, stood with their heads bowed as their priests dispensed them, and mumbled prayers as they chewed them. They perfumed their ceremonies with the fragrant tree resin copal just as the Spanish did with frankincense; they even referred to their psychedelic mushroom as teonanacatl, the ‘flesh of the gods’. Since their Christian mission was the justification of the conquest, it was crucial for the Spanish clergy to interpret these practices correctly. Some missionaries argued that God been using these plants to prepare the heathen to receive the Gospel. Others countered that the Devil was mocking them with a parodic inversion of the true Sacrament. The supposed miraculous powers of the peyote were dismissed by some as a primitive delusion, but taken by others as evidence that the Devil stalked the New World as cunningly as the old.

Sahagún’s monumental survey expresses the mix of wonder, fear and practicality that the first western observers brought to peyote. His project was essentially descriptive, modelled on the classics, particularly Pliny’s Natural History, spanning botany, zoology, geology, agriculture and medicine, and aiming at an objective presentation of the Mexican world for the Spanish reader. He interviewed hundreds of native subjects, often former members of the nobility, and trained scribes to record huge quantities of data in Nahuatl; the eventual codex was presented in parallel Nahuatl and Spanish text. He strove to present Indian beliefs and practices in their own terms, free from doctrinal interpretation, but he did so in the interests of domesticating Indian culture under Spanish rule and providing missionaries with the tools they needed to combat its beliefs. He drew some of his information from tribunals of the Inquisition and cited the example of Saint Augustine, who described pagan beliefs in Book VI of his City of God specifically in order to furnish the godly with weapons for spiritual conquest.

Missionaries accounted for much of Sahagún’s early readership, and they paid close attention to his descriptions of how Indian idolatry was practised and the rituals, objects and plants that accompanied it. Confession manuals were structured around his work, guiding penitents to a full accounting of the deities they worshipped and the festivals they held in their honour. Sahagún’s intention was not to damn his Indian subjects but to exculpate them. By describing their beliefs dispassionately, and separating evidence from judgement, he presented them as innocents who had been duped by the forces of evil. The act of confession, by instilling a sense of personal identity and responsibility, allowed them to rescue their consciences and their souls from the practices that had previously enslaved them. The evil of their beliefs was projected onto the practices and the plants intrinsic to them. One early seventeenth-century catechism, the Camino del Cielo (Road to Heaven), included in its questions: ‘Hast thou eaten the flesh of man? Hast thou eaten the peyotl? Do you suck the blood of others? Do you adorn with flowers places where idols are kept?’8

Under peyote’s influence the Devil was summoned, and it was he who worked its magic and whispered knowledge of the future. The communion with the cactus had to be extirpated because, as one priest put it, ‘the devil neither sleeps nor has forgotten the cult that these Indian natives offered him in the past, and that he is awaiting a suitable conjuncture to return to his lost lordship’.9

Alongside missionaries, however, Sahagún’s readership included many who were fascinated by the New World’s intoxicants. Their classical inheritance fed an appetite for marvels, myths and monsters, and for possession of new dominions of knowledge. In particular, some of these miraculous plants had great potential for trade and profit. Nahua knowledge of plant pharmacy was in many respects more advanced than that of the Spanish, who from Cortéz onwards had chosen to adopt local remedies in preference to their own. Even the strangest of their medicines might be worth its weight in gold. By the time Sahagún’s work was published in Europe, the physician Nicolás Monardes was growing tobacco in his gardens in Seville and it had begun to command a high price as a panacea against infections and fevers. By 1590 the Spanish were cultivating chocolate, first encountered among the luxuries of Moctezuma’s court, using Nahua techniques and exporting it to Europe as a precious substance said to enrich the blood. In both cases the cultural barriers to adopting a savage practice were overcome by developing new preparations more acceptable to the European palate and claiming medical benefits unique to the constitution of Christians.

Tobacco and chocolate were, in the paradoxical term, ‘sober intoxicants’ that found a niche in the trading spheres and social spaces of the European world. But more powerful psychoactives such as peyote were harder to assimilate. They were regarded as agents of borrachera, ‘drunkenness’, a descent into animal nature to which Indians were regarded as particularly prone.¹⁰ Alcoholic intoxication among Indians was governed by very different rules from the Spanish. It was highly visible but, less obviously, also more compartmentalised. Spanish customs permitted solitary, regular and moderate drinking, all of which were foreign to Indian culture. Peyote ceremonies often incorporated alcohol and climaxed in drinking to the point of unconsciousness. In consequence the Spanish saw Indian sacred rituals as no more than drunken orgies in which the worst aspects of their savagery – idolatry, human sacrifice, cannibalism – were given free rein. They observed psychedelics through the lens of alcohol, while the Indians treated alcohol like a psychedelic.

The Spanish encounters with the intoxicants of the New World, framed as they were in religious language, are often treated as a superstitious prelude to the modern prohibition of peyote and other drugs that began in earnest in the nineteenth-century United States. Yet a continuous line can be drawn from these first contacts to the contemporary ‘War on Drugs’, which still retains the vestiges of its origin in religious and racial taboo. The use of peyote became a marker that separated the civilised from the savage, and with the advent of racial science a symptom of hereditary degeneration and inferiority. In response, the cactus became ever more tightly bound into Indian identity and sacred practices. By the time anti-peyote campaigns emerged in the United States in the late nineteenth century, government policy was largely conducted in the modern language of public health and social progress, but it was still shaped by missionaries for whom the suppression of peyote had long been a crucial aspect of the war for souls. The language that resulted was a hybrid that blurred the medical, the religious and the moral: peyote was a plague, a heathen cult and a menace to civilisation.11 Texts from this era’s anti-drug crusades were incorporated into the international treaties of the twentieth century and still underpin them today. The 1961 United Nations Single Convention on Drugs, the foundation of the global drug control system, is unique among UN documents in its use of the word ‘evil’ to describe the dangers that drugs pose, a term not deployed in its official definitions of child abuse, terrorism or genocide.¹²

Peyote was not easily suppressed. Abandoning their vision-giving plants proved one of the most stubborn doctrinal obstacles to the Indians’ conversion. As the sixteenth-century Jesuit missionary José de Acosta observed, ‘the people venerate these plants so much that they do all in their power so that their use does not come to the attention of the ecclesiastical authorities’.13 Just as the mescaline-containing cactus traditionally known in the Andes as huachuma was renamed San Pedro, peyote worship persisted under the aegis of Jesus and Mary, the saints and the angels, which gave it cover as well as imbuing it with Christian magic. In some localities a liquid decoction of the cactus was surreptitiously used to baptise infants. The danger that it posed to Indian backsliders extended to the Spanish and mestizo populations, who took to using it in witchcraft, love magic and pacts with the Devil.¹⁴ In 1620 the Mexican Inquisition issued an edict to prohibit it, on the grounds that ‘the use of the herb or root called peyote’ was ‘an act of superstition condemned as opposed to the purity and integrity of our Holy Catholic Faith’. Its intoxicating properties were designated as supernatural: in them could be ‘plainly perceived the suggestion and intervention of the Devil, the real author of this vice’.¹⁵

Between 1620 and 1779 the Inquisition heard seventy-four cases against what they referred to as raíz diabólica, the ‘devilish root’. In some cases the context of its use was described in detail, and a picture emerges of two distinct forms of peyote ritual. More common was that described by Sahagún and the early chroniclers of the Nahua: a consultation or healing between a curandero or shaman and their patient, in which the clairvoyant power of the peyote trance was used to reveal the location of a missing object, the cause of an illness, the source of a bewitching, prognostication of weather or the outcome of battles. But, particularly in the north, in the cactus’s ancestral homeland among the semi-nomadic Chichimeca peoples, missionaries also witnessed group ceremonies in which an entire village or community would sing and dance all night under its influence. In 1649 a Coahuiltecan community in the desert around the Rio Grande were said to have assembled en masse – at least a hundred men and women – singing so harmoniously that ‘it seems a single voice’. They drank peyote ‘ground up and dissolved in water’, along with wine, and scratched their bodies ‘with some beaks of a fish called aguja’ until blood flowed, which they smeared all over themselves. Dawn revealed them lying exhausted ‘on the ground like dead persons’, where they remained until they were ‘over their drunkenness’.16

The fullest description of a ceremony of this kind was received by the Inquisition in 1760 from a Franciscan mission in the remote ranges of the Sierra de Tamaulipas along the Atlantic coast, an unruly border zone where Spanish writ had never run more than intermittently. A tribe in the area were in the habit of spending two or three days gathering peyote in advance of a seasonal festival to which neighbouring communities were invited. The ‘feast’ was held at night, around a ‘great bonfire’; the ‘poetic enthusiasm of the guests’ was ignited by ‘the first fumes of peyote’ that was served by the young girls and old men on a table improvised from a tree trunk. A deer or coyote skin drum struck up, and the party danced in a circle around the fire, ‘alternately raising one foot and then the other’ and breaking out in ‘discordant howls’. These feasts always ended ‘with the complete drunkenness of the guests, who, exhausted moreover by the dance, fell asleep around the almost burnt-out fire’.¹⁷ To the hostile eyes of priests and missionaries these ‘feasts’ were no more than drunken orgies. More sympathetic witnesses would reveal them as ritual practices of astonishing complexity, woven deep into the fabric of the participants’ lives.

In the northern borders of Mexico, where its use dated back millennia, peyote traditions clung on. The Spanish had never fully established themselves beyond the main roads and mining towns, and their scattered and poorly supported missions left much of the Sierra Madre’s remote canyon country undisturbed. After the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, the horse was adopted by Indian tribes from the north and the mountains came within range of Apache warbands who ambushed travellers, raided forts and made isolated settlements unsustainable.

In 1890 the Norwegian traveller and ethnographer Carl Lumholtz mounted an expedition through an eerie landscape of abandoned mines, crumbling churches and empty pine forests to the ravines and ridges of the northern Sierra Madre where a white man had never yet set foot. He was looking for the surviving descendants of the Indians who had built the mysterious ruined pueblos and temples in the deserts of New Mexico; he found a people called the Tarahumara who had retreated into the most inaccessible canyons to evade the Spanish and who held ceremonies under the influence of small cacti they called hikuli. ‘The eating of them causes great ecstasy,’ Lumholtz recorded. ‘They are therefore treated as demi-gods, who have to be treated with great reverence, and to whom sacrifices have to be offered.’18

Hikuli, or peyote, permeated Tarahumara life. They were chewed as a medicine against snakebite and fever, and when carried in a man’s belt they gave him energy for running and watched over him to ensure he was not poisoned or ambushed. The more Christianised members of the tribe made the sign of the cross when they encountered one, and Lumholtz was told to lift his hat in their presence. People sang to them in the desert as they passed them, and collected them reverently for their feasts. At these the cacti were welcomed with music, the sacrifice of a sheep or goat, dancing and maize beer: ‘peyote wants to drink beer, and if the people would not give it, it would go back to its own country’.¹⁹ A fire was lit, and a shaman took his seat to the west of it; assistants carried censers filled with copal incense. The shaman sang, describing how peyote ‘walks with his rattle and his staff of authority; he comes to cure and to guard the people and to grant a “beautiful” intoxication’.²⁰ A brewed peyote liquor circulated and the dance continued till daybreak, when the shaman turned to the rising sun and made passes towards it with his notched stick. ‘By this act, three times performed, he waves peyote home.’²¹

Lumholtz was inspired to try peyote for himself, though ‘only a small cupful’. It gave him an immediate rush, ‘similar to coffee but much more powerful’ followed by ‘a depression and a chill such as I have never experienced before’, which even a night huddled next to the fire failed to dispel.22 He took some away with him, adding it to the baggage on his mule train, which included canvas tents, folding camp furniture, scientific instruments and boxes of dynamite for unblocking mountain passes. A shaman named Rubio, ‘the great hikuli expert’ of the tribe, fed his samples with copal smoke to keep them safe from ‘sorcerers, robbers or Apaches’ on their travels.²³ Lumholtz headed south, where after several hundred miles – and many adventures – he arrived among the windswept cliffs and canyons of another people famous for their peyote rites, the Huichol.

Wandering the Huichol country, Lumholtz met small groups of peyote hunters, easily recognised by the happy smiles on their faces and the peculiar gleam in their eyes. ‘They are always merry, and they sing much.’²⁴ He tried the cactus again during a strenuous hike to some sacred caves in the distant cliffs, and was surprised to discover that in these circumstances it was no longer a depressant but ‘refreshing, quenching thirst and allaying hunger . . . I felt stimulated, as if I had had some strong drink’.²⁵ A great peyote feast was being prepared, and Lumholtz waited impatiently as trees were hung with ‘large bundles of deer meat threaded on strings, as well as large coils of fresh hikuli’.²⁶ The ceremony was to take place at a temple, or tuki, one of a network that extended across Huichol country, positioned in cardinal directions to face the sun at solstices and equinoxes and keep the ritual universe in balance. But it turned out that renovations had to be completed at another tuki in a neighbouring village before the feast could begin, and after weeks of delay the ceremony was eventually held in a fierce dust storm that turned the proceedings into blind chaos. Lumholtz lost his guide, on top of which a group of Mexican traders arrived with strong liquor and ‘of course all present got drunk, and it was impossible to do anything with them’.²⁷

A full picture of the Huichol’s peyote rites was only obtained in 1966, when two anthropologists joined for the first time the annual pilgrimage that members of the tribe make to their aboriginal lands to collect it – or, in their terms, to hunt it – for their temple ceremonies. Barbara Myerhoff, together with her UCLA colleague Peter Furst, had studied for some time with an apprentice mara’akame or shaman named Ramón Maria Silva, with whom they negotiated the unprecedented problems raised by bringing a non-participant on their journey. During this process Myerhoff discovered that despite its ‘rude technology and simple social organisation . . . in aesthetics, mythology, oral tradition, symbolism, and cosmology, Huichol culture is highly developed, rich, and especially beautiful’.28 The world of the Huichol was one where sacredness was not something ‘set apart’ from daily routine but a ‘natural condition’ that imbued every aspect of it. Unlike other semi-settled Mexican tribal groups which moved between their own culture and that of the wider world, all Huichol participated fully in this symbolic existence, at the core of which was the elemental trinity of deer, maize and peyote. As Ramón expressed it to her: ‘These things are one. They are a unity. They are our life. They are ourselves.’²⁹

Myerhoff’s narrative of the ritual journey, The Peyote Hunt (1974), is vividly complemented by the documentary film To Find Our Life, shot by Peter Furst on a second pilgrimage in 1968. Ramón and his Huichol band of pilgrims process through the bleak, parched desert margins in wide-brimmed straw hats glinting with embroidered tassels, red and white tunics and ponchos flapping in the biting wind; their belts and pouches are decorated with votive images of saints and woven yarn emblems; they are hung with garlands and carry guitars, fiddles and single-stringed bows. The journey from their village to the peyote hunting grounds at Wirikuta, in the high mesa above the former colonial mining town of Real de Catorce, is around twenty days’ walk, though it is mostly now travelled in trucks and buses. As the pilgrims progress toward their sacred destination, every landmark is a sign imbued with memories and symbolic meanings. Ramón establishes an improvised language of nonsensical reversals, by which the familiar is rendered strange: he becomes the pope, their destination is Los Angeles, their van is a donkey. He later explains that ‘everything should be upside down and backward’, as they cross over into the world of the peyote.30

When they arrive in Wirikuta, they speak not of collecting cacti but hunting deer. The first peyote is spotted among thorny brush and agaves, its head almost invisible in the dust of the gravel plain. It is described as the deer’s footprint. Before disturbing it, the pilgrims surround it and transfix it with four feathered arrows at each of its cardinal points. When they begin harvesting, they cut the cactus tops delicately while speaking to them, addressing them as ‘our elder brothers’ and informing them ‘we shall eat your body’.³¹ Myerhoff theorises that the deer–maize–peyote complex speaks of a transition, still in progress, from a hunter–gatherer culture to one of sedentary farming. The deer is the food of the former, the maize of the latter, with peyote the mercurial agent that transcends time and permits a deeper vision in which past and present are brought together.

After the hunt, darkness falls and the pilgrims gather round a campfire in the open desert. Ramón feeds them peyote which they receive as a sacrament, hands folded and heads bowed. Fiddle and guitar music strikes up as they stare at the fire, ‘waiting to see the beautiful flower in the centre’.³² Their visions unfold in silence. For the pilgrims, Ramón told Myerhoff, the visions are primarily ‘for beauty’: they see ‘little animals, beautiful colours, and occasionally some of the creatures told of in the myths’.³³ For the mara’akame they have more profound meanings, but these are not to be spoken of. For shaman and pilgrim alike, they are private gifts; to share and compare them would diminish their power to nourish ‘that part of a man’s life which is private, beautiful and unique’.³⁴

In Myerhoff’s assessment, ‘peyote occupies no utilitarian place on any level of Huichol life. Even the visions obtained by it are not used for religious illumination, or didactic purposes.’ The peyote hunt is a return to paradise, through which the pilgrims become their own ancestors and their own gods. They have stepped outside time, into a world before creation and individual consciousness, where the past and the future are the same. In the mundane world of modern Mexico they ‘are aware that they are destitute while outsiders prosper’,35 but their annual return to Wirikuta creates for them an alternate reality. In the peyote hunt they inhabit an eternal present in which all things are in harmony.

The work of Myerhoff and Furst was instrumental in bringing the Huichol, and particularly their use of peyote, to a global audience. They have become an archetype of traditional psychedelic shamanism and, though peyote is only one element in their highly elaborated cosmology and ritual, it now dominates western perceptions of them. Some scholars regard them as surviving exemplars of an archaic peyote culture that spanned northern and central Mexico centuries before the Spanish conquest: Peter Furst, along with Weston La Barre, the twentieth century’s leading authority on peyote religion in the USA, argued that the Huichol peyote rituals are ‘probably the closest extant to the pre-Columbian Mexican rite’ and ‘may well be virtually unchanged since Cortéz’.³⁶ Others have proposed a direct connection via the Huichol’s ancient community temples, known as tuki, which they regard as the last surviving remnant of ‘a vast network of regional trade and ceremony’ that from at least 200 CE spanned much of pre-Hispanic Mexico, setting seasonal cycles for deer hunting and maize growing and governing the trade in sacred items such as peyote, conch shells and feathers.³⁷

Barbara Myerhoff, however, was less convinced. In the early Spanish accounts the Chichimeca peoples of Mexico’s northern deserts were culturally distinct from the urbanised Nahua further south, and in her view Huichol traditions ‘appear unrelated to Aztec [Nahua] peyotism . . . nor do the other Mexican Indian groups have comparable symbolic associations between deer, maize and peyote. Further, they have no ritual which corresponds to the Huichol peyote hunt.’38 The theories are not entirely exclusive: the world of the Huichol may be a uniquely rich source of pan-Indian motifs without referring to any other culture beyond itself. The hazards of interpreting it as a relic from prehistory are illustrated by the Tarahumara, whose use of peyote has evolved strikingly even since Lumholtz’s day. John Kennedy, an anthropologist who lived among them in the 1970s, described the central role in their culture of tesgüino, their maize beer, which is deeply entwined with sociality, cooperative labour and reciprocal obligations. Hikuli (peyote), which used to be part of this complex, is now used only by shamans and is predominantly associated with sorcery. It has the malign reputation of ‘a spiritual substance having an independent soul’ that spies on its subjects and foments feuds and grievances.³⁹

The other facet of Huichol culture that has risen to global prominence along with peyote is its art. It seems obvious from first glance that the two are intimately connected. The yarn paintings that are synonymous with Huichol art today – dazzling coloured fibres pressed onto boards spread with beeswax – are, to the western eye, quintessentially psychedelic. Animals, birds and plants, often outlined in vibrant red and gold, dance across fields of stars, jewels, feathers and geometrical shapes, often in radial symmetry around a central solar burst of retina-scorching yellows, pinks and purples. Among the most common motifs is the peyote: clusters of blue-green heads attached to tapered roots that arrange themselves into kaleidoscopic mandalas, edged in fluorescent threads that throb and pulse like op-art illusions. These are among the world’s most popular indigenous artworks, from small pieces sold by the hundreds to tourists in Puerto Vallarta and Acapulco to wall-sized galaxies of imagery that command many thousands of dollars in the galleries of the southwestern USA, Spain or Japan. Huichol artists are flown across the world to create murals, from San Diego airport to the Paris Métro. Art has become the mainstay of the Huichol’s economy, their passport to protection by the Mexican state and their lifeline to cultural survival and the preservation of their ancestral land.

It should not, however, be taken for granted that these images are straightforward visual transcriptions of their creators’ peyote experiences, the flowers that they see in the fire. Like the peyote rites of the Tarahumara, their style has altered markedly within the span of a lifetime. The work collected in the 1930s by Robert Zingg, the anthropologist who first introduced Huichol art to the west, was quite different. Most of his pieces, now held at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe, New Mexico, were votive objects – crosses, gourd bowls and painted sticks adorned with feathers – to be left on rock shelves at sacred spots in the desert. Today’s synthetically dyed threads were unknown: most were decorated with precise but simple patterns in a subdued range of earth-toned reds, greens and browns. Very few were yarn paintings, a medium that may have evolved as a portable version of the more valuable stone disks. The handful of examples that Zingg collected were used as altar mats rather than hung on walls. The psychedelic brilliance that resonates so clearly with mescaline’s visions has emerged only in recent decades, in symbiosis with the western commercial market.

After his stay among the Huichol in 1934–35, Robert Zingg concluded that Huichol art was an altogether different activity from that practised in the west. ‘Every adult is an artist,’ he wrote, just as ‘every man is a shaman of sorts.’ In modern societies, ‘civilised art is the most specialised and individualised aspect of the whole gamut’; the quest of the artist is to ‘torture his spirit into some new quirk or style’. The Huichol were not artists of this kind: they were far closer to ‘another theoretical pole in art, the primitive’. Civilised art is ‘not only specialised and individualised, but also secularised . . . Primitive art, as currently exhibited by the Huichols, reveals art brought under the principle of the sacred.’40 The core of Huichol experience is the deer–maize–peyote complex: like ‘transubstantiation in the Mass . . . this sort of mystic participation is the strongest sort of social device for moulding the individual into the likemindedness of the group pattern’. In medieval Europe it produced the Crusades; ‘among the Huichol it induces pilgrimages’.41

At the time of Zingg’s visit the idea of Huichol art created for sale, like the presence of foreign observers on the peyote hunt, was outside the bounds of possibility. Today there are workshops where yarn paintings are produced for the international art market and noted individual artists whose work commands the highest prices. Yet sacred art still exists. Votive works are constantly produced for ceremonies, on a scale that would be unsustainable were it not for the proceeds of commercial art that support it. As Barbara Myerhoff wrote, ‘The Huichol notion of the sacred is elusive and in many ways difficult for a westerner to grasp . . . it is a dynamic condition of balance in which opposites exist without neutralising each other.’⁴² Huichol art, both new and old, epitomises this state of creative contradiction: in ceaseless flux, yet always contained within an overarching geometry and harmony. Western descriptions of the mescaline experience often revolve around the same tension, and it seems fitting that peyote should preside over a visual aesthetic that expresses it so eloquently.