The Peyote Ritual by Monroe Tsa Toke, 1957.

Thus far peyote, and now mescaline, had proved to be of surpassing interest to western science but no obvious practical use. The panacea of the Indians was listed in the Parke, Davis catalogue and recommended by a handful of pharmacists as a stimulant tonic, but it had yet to find a defining medical application. Prentiss and Morgan had made broad suggestions that it might have value in nervous and mental conditions, but even robustly healthy-minded subjects were exhausted by its duration, unpleasant physical symptoms and relentless barrage of mental stimuli. Arthur Heffter concluded his 1898 paper by asking whether any of the peyote aklaloids might have therapeutic value and suggesting ‘the answer is probably no’. He was equally doubtful about Havelock Ellis’s prediction that it might become a popular recreation, on the grounds that ‘the side-effects are so pronounced that they considerably spoil the appreciation of the beautiful visual images’.1

The following year saw the first thorough physiological trial of mescaline by Walter Dixon, one of Britain’s first pharmacological specialists at a time when there was still no university chair in the subject (he would later become professor of materia medica at King’s College London, and end his career as the first reader in pharmacology at Cambridge University). Dixon was simultaneously studying the effects of cannabis, which he concluded was a ‘useful and refreshing stimulant and food accessory’.² He had paid close attention to the reports by Mitchell, Ellis and Heffter and enlisted Edmund White, pharmacist at St Thomas’ Hospital, to follow Heffter’s extraction method. White presented him with mescaline, anhalonidine, anhalonine and lophophorine ‘in a beautifully crystalline condition’.³

Dixon proceeded through a systematic series of experiments on dogs, cats, rabbits and ‘as far as practicable on the human subject’, himself.⁴ In animals the peyote alkaloids stimulated salivation, occasionally produced vomiting, lowered blood pressure and heartbeat, and quickened respiration at high doses. ‘Occasionally, after an intoxicating dose’, he discerned in cats ‘most of the physical elements of “terror” . . . the ears are drawn back, the hair over the body, especially the tail, becomes erected, there is twitching of the superficial muscles, the respiration being shallow and hurried, and the heart weak and irregular’.5 In humans he found, in accordance with William James’s theories, that ‘as in cannabis indica, time is over-estimated, possibly as a result of the rapid flow of ideas and the inability to fix the attention’. On two occasions, after a high dose, he remarked on the ‘indescribable feeling of dual existence’ that had been mentioned by Prentiss and Morgan’s second subject: after sitting with eyes closed, absorbed in the coloured visions, he opened them to find ‘a different self, as on waking from a dream’.⁶ The inner world and the outer were each so enthralling that one forgot the other existed; opening and closing the eyes was like jumping between two parallel streams of time.

As well as overlaps with cannabis, Dixon noted passing similarities with strychnine, nicotine, digitalis and cocaine, but in each case the contrasts were equally marked and he concluded that ‘“mescal” acts differently from any known substance’. He sensed some therapeutic promise, especially at low doses, which elicited a gentle exhilaration and sense of well-being. It might have potential as a general tonic, or turn out to be ‘of special use in melancholia’.⁷ But even the most exacting physiological investigation with the purest chemical extracts advanced the medical practicalities no further than Prentiss and Morgan had. Mescaline undoubtedly had potential as a mild stimulant and mood elevator, but these qualities appeared inseparable from a spectrum of undesirable effects that stretched from queasiness to anxiety and physical collapse.

As the new century turned, however, peyote attracted the interest of another class of western investigators. For many the modern world had become, in the terms conceived at that time by the sociologist Max Weber, an era of disenchantment: an iron cage constructed by the demands of capital, industry and bureaucracy in which humanity and its inner life had no place. Modernity was haunted by the loss of the sacred; religion, the music to which every previous human society had danced, had been silenced by the tyranny of reason and its restless extension of human power and control. By the same token it became an era of resistance to the forces of modernity and their abolition of mystery: the disenchanted embarked on utopian projects, experimenting with new forms of thought and ways of living to rekindle the power of the sacred.

Over the twentieth century the spiritual dimensions of peyote and mescaline would repeatedly re-enchant western culture, at various times and places eclipsing their roles in science, medicine and therapy. This process began in its opening decades, though only among a small number of scattered individuals. The social and political movements of the Progressive Era, as it became known, conceived drugs in general and alcohol in particular as sources or consequences of dehumanisation, and campaigned vigorously for their prohibition. Most westerners who were aware of peyote regarded it as a degenerate and dissolute Indian habit, no different from the strong spirits that were ravaging the shattered tribes, a disease from which they needed to be cured before they could attain the benefits of civilisation. Yet there were a few, most but not all with some connection to Indian culture, who attempted in different ways to harness the spiritual power implicit in peyote. At the same time the peyote religion of the Plains tribes, beset by persecution and prohibition, found a new form that forced the modern world to accommodate it.

In August 1910 the London Daily Sketch reported on a ceremony to invoke Saturn conducted in an apartment at 124 Victoria Street, the home of the notorious occultist Aleister Crowley. Tickets had been sold, and visitors arrived to find the rooms in semi-darkness with thick curtains drawn. The ceremony began with the ‘Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram and the Consecration of the Temple with Fire’, after which Crowley’s disciple, the poet Victor Neuberg, passed around a ‘cup of Libation’, a golden bowl that Crowley later described as a cocktail of fruit juice, alcohol, ‘alkaloids of opium’ and ‘the elixir brought by me to Europe’: an extract of peyote or, in Crowley’s preferred terminology, ‘anhalonium’.8 The draught was reported to have an unpleasant taste, like rotting apples, a description suggestive of the sour and bitter undertones of a cactus brew. The ceremony began; Neuberg danced, Crowley’s ‘Scarlet Woman’ Leila Waddell played the violin, and Crowley recited his poetry interspersed with selections from Swinburne. The cup was passed around again, and guests took second and third libations – enough, it seems, for some to notice a psychoactive effect. The poet and novelist Ethel Archer recalled later that she and her husband felt ‘pepped up and lively’ after drinking, a feeling that persisted for a week.⁹ The Sketch reporter, Raymond Radcliffe, was entranced: ‘We were thrilled to our bones . . . if there is any higher form of artistic expression than great verse and great music, I have yet to learn it.’¹⁰

Ethel Archer was a friend of Victor Neuberg who later joined Crowley’s magical order the AEAA and wrote poetry for its journal the Equinox, which was published by her husband, Eugene Weiland. Her novel The Hierophant (1932) contains a retrospective account of the evening that, though fictionalised, gives a vivid sense of the impression it made on her. The protagonist Iris and her husband receive a narcotic-scented invitation to a ceremony being held by Vladimir Svaroff – an amalgam of Crowley and George Gurdjieff – who with his ‘latest drug, a sedative tonic from Mexico . . . had hopes of penetrating the future and overcoming time and space’.¹¹ On arrival she is offered a ‘dark brownish liquid’ in a glass phial; ‘the odour of the stuff was certainly not inviting, it suggested bad apples and laudanum’.¹² Iris and her husband pass into a dimly lit room furnished with cushions, ‘heavy with the haze of smoke and filled with the murmur of many voices’.¹³ She feels a powerful throbbing energy inside her; meanwhile her husband has a vision of time ‘unwinding backwards’ through the Bronze and Stone Ages, with ‘dancing figures brandishing stone-knives, flints, clubs, antlers of animals’.14 Another guest, a ‘tall youth’, confides, ‘It’s a pretty stiff dose for a kick-off. I’ve been several times – it’s quite good fun.’¹⁵ Svaroff begins to ‘intone in some strange tongue’, and Iris is suddenly ‘seized with a deadly nausea’. She is discreetly dosed with a white powder ‘and the next thing she remembered was lying back in a chair in the inner room and Svaroff pouring her out some tea’.¹⁶

Sifting fact from fiction in Aleister Crowley’s use of peyote is a delicate business. His habitual self-aggrandisement and mystification is compounded by a reticence about the precise details of his magickal practices that he maintained in correspondence even with his closest associates.¹⁷ He never referred to the peyote experiments of Havelock Ellis, Arthur Symons and W.B. Yeats, of which he must have been aware; he and Yeats were both members of the small and close-knit fraternity of the Golden Dawn, but disliked one another cordially and Crowley was hardly likely to acknowledge Yeats’s precedence. The corroborating evidence from others is equally unreliable. Crowley was using his anhalonium as part of an arsenal of mind-altering drugs that by the 1920s included hashish, morphine, ether, chloroform, cocaine and heroin, most of which were at this time only vaguely understood even among his immediate circle. Those who experienced the hallucinogenic effects of his potions at first hand were often unclear whether they had been given peyote, or hashish, or opium, or some combination of Crowley’s devising. He was certainly not the first European to take peyote, nor to make a liquid decoction of its buttons, though his claim that his anhalonium elixir was ‘brought by me to Europe’ may be accurate in the narrow sense that his extracts were prepared to his own recipe. It is, however, probably true to say that he was the first westerner to take peyote methodically over a period of years, and the first to adopt it as a ritual sacrament.

Crowley’s interest in peyote had little to do with its native use in the Americas, though he may have heard of it, and possibly encountered it, during his visit to Mexico in 1900. He approached it rather as a latter-day alchemist. He was initiated into drugs around 1898 in the company of Allan Bennett, a fellow member of the Order of the Golden Dawn who was also an analytical chemist. They sought the Elixir of Life, as Crowley wrote, ‘by fruitless attempts to poison ourselves with every drug in (and out of) the Pharmacopœia’.18 The first reference to anhalonium in his diaries, dated 12 March 1907, describes a commerically supplied tincture, presumably that of Parke, Davis. He had earlier that day visited Messrs Lowe & Co., the pharmacy in Bond Street run by his friend Edward Whineray, who specialised in supplying obscure drugs to the bohemian set. Whineray had a keen interest in the occult: he wrote an article on hashish for Crowley’s journal, the Equinox, and placed advertisements for his ‘oils, perfumes, unguents, essences, incenses, and other chemical products’ in several of its issues.¹⁹ Crowley experimented carefully with the drops, working his way up from one to ten, the maximum dose specified on the label, from which he still felt little effect.

He persisted, a process probably reflected to some extent in his short story ‘The Drug’, published in the January 1909 issue of the Idler, in which the narrator calls on a friend who is synthesising a mysterious potion he calls ‘the drug that giveth strange visions’, which plunges him into a phantasmagoric episode of temporary insanity. In his personal copy of his own 1922 Diary of a Drug Fiend, Crowley wrote in the margins of the passage on peyote ‘I made many experiments on people with this drug in 1910, and in subsequent years.’²⁰ This supports the contention that the anhalonium extract was an element in the sour-tasting cup of libation at the Saturn ceremony that year. In 1913 Crowley dosed Katherine Mansfield with either peyote or hashish, upon which, according to a friend, ‘up, up rose the spirit into a pink and paradisiacal contentment, whence she viewed space with a rosy rapture’.²¹ Mansfield herself found Crowley ‘a very pretentious and dirty fellow’.²²

In 1915 Crowley visited America, where one of his first stops was Detroit. ‘Parke Davis were charming,’ he recalled in his memoirs, ‘and showed me over their wonderful chemical works.’ Like Lewin a generation before, he was astounded by the ‘countless and ingenious devices’; in particular ‘a great mass of pills in a highly polished and rapidly revolving receiver was infinitely fascinating to watch’. Crowley charmed the pharmacists in turn, telling them about his anhalonium researches and they ‘made me some special preparations on the lines indicated by my experience which proved greatly superior’ to their standard line, and with which they supplied him from this point onwards.23 The new elixir made its public debut at a party in New York, where he offered it to the writer Theodore Dreiser, who asked casually before drinking whether there was a doctor in the neighbourhood; Crowley replied that there was ‘a first-class undertaker on the corner of 33rd Street and Sixth Avenue’. ‘I don’t like that kind of joke, Crowley,’ Dreiser replied, before sampling the elixir and proceeding to describe his visions in extenso to the assembled company.²⁴

Crowley’s magickal diaries of 1915–16 make regular mention of the Parke, Davis extract, usually abbreviated to Anh. Lew. or simply A. L. In 1919 the Equinox advertised that the following issue would include ‘Liber CMXXXIV [934]. The Cactus. An elaborate study of the psychological effects produced by Anhalonium Lewinii (Mescal Buttons), compiled from the actual records of some hundreds of experiments; with an explanatory essay’.²⁵ But the promised secrets of anhalonium never appeared. By 1921, during his residence at Cefalù in Sicily, Crowley’s magickal drug experiments were in full flood: he was using the Parke, Davis extract along with opium, ether, cocaine, laudanum, heroin and hashish in nightly trials during which he forced himself to ‘fathom the Abysses of Horror, to confront the most ghastly possibilities of Hell’. The process, he explained, was similar to psychoanalysis: ‘it releases the subject from fear of reality and the phantasms and neuroses thereby caused, by externalising and thus disarming the spectres that lie in ambush for the Soul of Man’.²⁶ By 1922 in Paris the regime was devolving into a twin dependence on cocaine and heroin; the latter would be his companion until the end.

In 1915 the new prophet-president of the Church of Latter-Day Saints, Frederick Madison Smith, spoke to his followers for the first time about the peyote ceremonies of the Plains Indian tribes. Over the next few years it became a regular theme in his calls to renew the Mormon faith. Smith described in glowing terms ‘the peculiar and esctatic state’ generated by the ceremonies with their ‘beautiful visions’, and ‘the wonderful and beneficial therapeutic effects’ that followed.27 In 1919 he published an article in the Saints Herald entitled ‘A Trip among the Indians of Oklahoma’ in which he stated explicitly that, despite the church’s strict prohibition on alcohol, he regarded peyote as a potent stimulus to the elusive state of genuine religious ecstasy, and that he himself had taken it in all-night rituals with Indian tribes including the Omaha and the Cheyenne.

Frederick Smith was the grandson of Joseph Smith, the church’s founder, and had become the third prophet-president on his father’s death in 1914. He was a man of the new century, eager to breathe fresh inspiration into the Mormon community and integrate the church more fully into the modern world. He applied its ethics to progressive social issues, expanding local sanitariums and building residential complexes for the elderly. He decided to educate himself in psychology and studied for a doctorate under one of the founders of the discipline, G. Stanley Hall, a professor at Johns Hopkins University. He became interested in the field of ‘mind expansion’, the search for techniques to maximise mental resources, efficiency and stamina. The world, he believed, had entered an era of efficiency in industry, agriculture and social organisation, but it was a ‘soulless efficiency’ that treated humanity simply as machines and failed to engage the spirit.²⁸ Hall suggested that Smith should focus his doctoral thesis on the ecstatic practices of primitive people, which might offer useful perspectives on the range and limits of man’s psychic potential. Since the church was already involved in missionary work among the Indian tribes of the Southwest, Smith decided to concentrate in particular on their use of peyote in religious ceremonies.

At an early stage in his studies Smith came under the spell of Stanley Hall’s colleague William James, in particular his essay ‘The Energies of Men’, originally delivered as a lecture to the American Philosophical Association at Columbia University in 1906. In it, James considered the phenomenon of ‘second wind’, in which perseverance at a task past the usual limits of exhaustion seems to tap an unsuspected reserve of energy. James had long been considering what the physiological basis for this might be, and why it should be that ‘men the world over possess amounts of resource which only very exceptional individuals push to their extremes of use’.29 He proposed that ‘we live subject to arrest by degrees of fatigue which we have come only from habit to obey’.³⁰ The key to unlocking this hidden potential was to slip the chains of habit with unusual stimuli, unusual degrees of excitement, unusual ideas and unusual efforts.

Smith’s doctoral thesis, published in book form as The Higher Powers of Man, extended James’s ideas into a survey of the ecstatic rites employed by primitive religions around the world and throughout history. Ecstasy was typically pathologised within psychology as a form of neurosis or mental weakness and yet, from the Dionysian cults of ancient Greece to the yogis of Hinduism, it had played a central role in most societies and generated ‘the “more than highest” conditions of pleasure, inspiration and the boldest flights of thought’.³¹ ‘Many are the agents of ecstasy’, Smith discovered, and chemical inebriation, along with hypnotism, trance, rhythm and dancing, was a common tool in traditions across the globe. He was careful to bracket alcohol as a special case: although it had the capacity to incite ecstasy, it ‘is essentially an exaltation of feeling followed by a depression’,³² reclaiming with interest the energy it temporarily loans and leading to dependency and dissolution.

The peyote of the Indians was quite different in this respect. Smith cited most of the published sources to date – Mooney, Lumholtz, Lewin, Ewell, Prentiss and Morgan, and Mitchell – but based his extensive account on the testimony of two Cheyenne in Oklahoma, Philip Cook and Chief Three Fingers, who introduced him to their ceremony. Smith was struck by ‘the universal extent of this movement among the Indians and the tenacity with which they held to it in the face of the combined opposition of the various church representatives and the government agents’.33 This seemed to him strong evidence for the social value of the ecstasy it generated. He learned that the Oklahoma Indians avoided the ban on trafficking the cactus across state lines by ‘the very simple expedient of sending a man with several trunks to El Paso, and from there he goes to where it can be gathered’.³⁴ He was particularly struck by the centrality of a ‘Creator or Great Spirit’³⁵ that, in contrast to most primitive religions, seemed so easily compatible with Jesus Christ, the perfect exemplar of the divinity to which man’s second wind might ultimately lift him. Jesus’s forty days in the wilderness, Smith believed, were the moment when He ‘entered the ecstatic state’ and ‘from these ecstatic moments sprung the nascent consciousness of his great powers’.³⁶

Smith’s researches seem to have won broad acceptance from his Mormon congregation, among whom the mission to the Indian tribes was regarded as highly important. Any thought of introducing peyote into its liturgy was, however, derailed by a crisis of authority that enveloped the church in the 1920s. Smith’s reforming programme was opposed by the more traditionally minded members of its General Conference, and he responded by pushing through a decree of Supreme Directional Control that made his presidential decisions binding on the church at large. The decree resulted in schisms and breakaway Latter-Day Saints churches, and was effectively reversed in the 1930s.

Smith, however, continued to work with Indian peyotists and lobbied in Washington, DC, against federal attempts to outlaw their ceremonies.³⁷ He also promoted peyote in non-Indian circles. His wife Ruth had joined him in peyote meetings in 1918 and when his daughter Alice went to Harvard University the following year Smith introduced the cactus to her classmates. After dinner one evening he described its effects to her friend Virgil Thomson, a prodigiously talented musician and composer whom Smith helped with a loan for his college fees. Thomson asked to try peyote, and Smith agreed on condition that he wrote a report of his experience that he could add to his files. Thomson described a series of rapturous visions ‘each as complete in color and texture as a stage set . . . each one, moreover, had a meaning, could have been published with a title’. In sum they ‘constituted a view of life not only picturesque and vast but all mine and all true’.38

Thomson subsequently introduced various members of his Harvard scene to peyote, including the socialist and poet Sherry Mangan, who started buying dried buttons by mail order from New Mexico. Their informal researches devolved into what would later in the century be termed ‘recreational use’. Mangan and Thomson were members of a heavy-drinking coterie that convened in the Harvard dormitory buildings and they introduced peyote to these sessions, grinding the dried buttons up in water. Students stricken by nausea stuck their heads out of windows to relieve it and on one occasion the toilet seat in Mangan’s rooms was mysteriously burned.³⁹ The group experiments soon ran their course. Thomson took peyote several more times in private but although his ‘adventures were always surprising and sumptuous . . . in none did the heavens so definitely open as they had for me that first time alone in my room’.⁴⁰

In New York in the spring of 1914, a year before Aleister Crowley’s anhalonium party was held there, the heiress Mabel Dodge hosted a peyote meeting – part salon, part ceremony – in her exquisite home at 23 Fifth Avenue. It remains the best-remembered western encounter with peyote from this period, thanks to the full and candid description she included in her memoirs. The episode is by turns bizarre, whimsical and harrowing, and rendered unintentionally comic by her naïve and breathless prose, but this mystically inclined socialite’s report provides much that is passed over by the male medico-scientific gaze. Rather than descriptions of her visions, Dodge gives us an intensely emotional account of a social gathering dissoving into chaos and the personal fallout that resulted. It seemed at the time to most observers, including Dodge herself, a foolish and regrettable incident, yet it turned out to have momentous consequences, setting off a chain of events that would transform not only her and her circle but federal Indian policy.

Born Mabel Ganson in 1879, the daughter of a wealthy banker from Buffalo, she had grown up among the upstate New York elite before marrying Edwin Dodge, a prominent architect, and spending eight years in Europe, where she became a patron of the arts and attended Gertrude Stein’s salons. She separated from her husband and in 1912 returned to New York, where she took up residence in a brownstone on the east side of Greenwich Village that she decorated sumptuously in white, with a polar-bearskin rug in front of a marble fireplace overhung with a white porcelain chandelier, lit through clouded and coloured glass panels in the doors and windows. It became a bohemian salon par excellence, with Dodge in her own words ‘a species of head-hunter’, gathering up ‘socialists, trade unionists, anarchists, suffragists, poets, lawyers, murderers, old friends, psychoanalysists, artists, clubwomen . . .’41 She identified strongly as a New Woman and a spiritual feminist, and devoured Havelock Ellis’s writings on the psychology of sex. She began a passionate affair with John Reed, poet and radical journalist (and yet to witness the Russian revolution), who captured the tenor of their life in his poem ‘The Day in Bohemia’: ‘Blazing our nights with arguments uproarious / What care we for a dull old world censorious / When each is sure he’ll fashion something glorious?’⁴²

It was into this world that Dodge’s friend, the poet and anarchist Hutchins Hapgood, introduced his cousin Raymond Harrington, an ethnographer who had been following in James Mooney’s footsteps by studying the peyote religion among the Kiowa in Oklahoma. Harrington enthused about peyote, explaining (in Dodge’s words) that ‘it was not a drug at all, but a marvellous vehicle of the Indian life enabling one to be deeply and wholly and concisely what one inherently was’. It emerged that he had brought some buttons with him and offered to host a ceremony: ‘We were all thrilled.’43

The participants were a more or less random selection from Dodge’s coterie: her effervescent young cousin Genevieve, who had just returned from China ‘full of a mystical elation’; the political activist Max Eastman and his wife; the early Cubist painter Andrew Dasburg; and a ‘grand anarchist’ named Terry, who had long ago ‘passed up the capitalistic system and swore that he would never take a job or do a day’s work under it, and he had carried out his vow’. Harrington set a serious tone, carefully constructing a facsimile of the Kiowa tipi space with eagle feathers, a green branch for an arrow, a peyote path made of a folded white sheet and a light bulb with Dodge’s red Chinese shawl over it to take the place of the fire. On his instructions they fasted for supper and dressed their best. (‘Like Church, I thought to myself.’)⁴⁴

Harrington chewed a button and began to sing; he sounded to Dodge like a howling dog. The rest of the company took their buttons, including Dodge (‘But it was bitter! Oh, how it was bitter!’). When they were passed around again, she secreted hers behind her back. The impulse to giggle became irresistible. At the same time, her friends all seemed to be subtly transmuting, one into a Persian miniature, another into a Lutheran monk. The singing went on, ‘monotonous and outlandish, and gradually my laughter wore itself out and I grew weary and longed to leave’.⁴⁵ She caught the eyes of several of the others and they quietly withdrew, leaving Harrington with Genevieve and Terry, who both appeared entranced by the ceremony.

Dodge retired to bed, where she felt fury building inside her at the way she had lost control of the evening: ‘To think that it was going on there in my house and I could not stop it if I wanted to!’ As she prayed for the ritual to end, she heard loud footsteps from the other end of the house: Dasburg, bursting back into the ceremony. She opened her bedroom door and found Genevieve outside it, pale and wide eyed, gasping ‘Oh Mabel! It is terrible!’ In the living room, Dasburg was trampling the altar and scattering the peyote, Harrington shouting ‘Stop, man! That is terribly dangerous!’ and Dasburg violently insisting ‘I had to break it up!’46 Terry sat motionless in the centre of the scene, contemplating the end of his cigarette.

They realised abruptly that Genevieve had vanished. Harrington gathered up the peyote buttons, in case the police were called. (‘Police! Heavens, I was scared!’) Genevieve was eventually found outside a window, gibbering and insisting she had to go and find her father. They called a discreet ‘East Side Jewish doctor who is a friend of all of us’, who examined the peyote with curiosity. He hadn’t heard of it, but wondered if it was the same thing as ‘mescal’: if so, he pronounced, ‘a highly strung girl like this might easily be injured by it’. Harrington broke into Terry’s reverie, and the anarchist ‘smiled the most illuminated smile I have ever seen. His eyes were blue like gentians. “Harry,” he said, “I have seen the Universe, and Man! It is wonderful!”’⁴⁷ He left without a word, and Dodge never spoke to him again (though she did glimpse him one more time, at one of Eugene O’Neill’s parties in Provincetown).

Genevieve was now mute, blank and sobbing on the chaise longue. They called for a nurse and an urgent discussion began about how the story could be kept out of the papers, and whether they should call the police. They decided instead to summon John Collier, a crusading lawyer who was widely admired in bohemian circles for his work in support of New York’s immigrant communities. Collier’s response was anything but reassuring: ‘Undoubtedly you could all be indicted under the illicit drug act.’ It dawned on Dodge that the evening might be represented as ‘a “Dope Party”. Horrors! I had heard of such gatherings and they were the antithesis of all I wished to stand for. The level of my life, at least in my own eyes, was infinitely raised above such sordid sensationalism.’⁴⁸

Mabel Dodge never saw her cousin Genevieve again, though she did receive incomprehensible letters from her ‘composed of symbols and hieroglyphs’ and was not surprised to learn that she had become persona non grata with that branch of the family.49 The episode precipitated a rocky period in her own life, and her mental health became fragile. In August 1914 John Reed left for Europe as a war correspondent and she retreated into herself, searching for a ‘mind cure’ that could offer equilibrium in the face of civilisation, the ‘great machine’ that seemed intent on its own destruction.⁵⁰ She tried Freudian talking cures and New Thought, a popular movement that drew on the Hindu philosophy of Vedanta together with Zen and Sufi traditions of healing by integrating the individual with the ‘Divine Mind’.⁵¹

In August 1917 she married the sculptor Maurice Sterne, who had left Gertrude Stein’s circle in Paris to search for a ‘Garden of Eden’. After a few months he departed New York to continue his search in the deserts and mountains of the American Southwest. Dodge visited a medium who predicted she would soon be surrounded by Indians, and she had a psychic vision of Sterne at the same moment that he arrived in Santa Fe. She joined him there for Christmas, trading the dour New York winter for the snow-capped desert mesa, a decision that transformed her life. Soulless, mechanised modernity melted away in a landscape that seemed to be made of light. When she visited the ancient adobe pueblo at Santo Domingo (now Kewa) and witnessed the centuries-old Christmas dance in its plaza, she was transported entirely. ‘For the first time in my life,’ she wrote, ‘I heard the voice of the One coming from the Many.’⁵²

In 1918 Sterne left to continue his travels and Dodge moved further up into the mountains to Taos, where the Pueblo Indian community had subsisted on the sagebrush plateau for at least a thousand years, its adobe dwellings stacked like living cells beneath the cloud-wreathed sacred mountain. The town beside it was centred on a seventeenth-century Spanish plaza, expanded by pioneer trappers and traders such as Kit Carson and more recently colonised by artists drawn to the play of light across the mountains and the exquisite, timeless aesthetic of the pueblo’s architecture and cultural life. Over the next forty years Dodge would collect around her a commune of artists and Indian activists – in her words, a ‘fabulous honeycomb, irresistible and nourishing’53 – that drew the likes of Georgia O’Keeffe, Ansel Adams, D.H. Lawrence, Carl Jung and Aldous Huxley. In partnership with the Pueblo community leader Tony Luhan, who after Dodge’s divorce from Maurice Sterne became her next and final husband, she bought a traditional adobe farmhouse set under a huge cottonwood tree in 12 acres of sagebrush desert adjoining the pueblo’s ancestral land. Adding a series of adobe extensions that fused Tony’s traditional building techniques with her modern arts-and-crafts aesthetic, they elaborated it into the first example of the style that would become known as Pueblo Revival.

In time, many from Dodge’s Greenwich Village set followed her, including some of those who had participated in the peyote episode. Andrew Dasburg relocated to Taos, discovering a productive fusion of his emerging Cubist style with that of the pueblo’s architecture and remaining there until his death in 1979. By far the most consequential arrival, however, was that of the community lawyer John Collier, who by 1920 found himself under government surveillance in New York during the Red Scare that followed the Russian Revolution and accepted Dodge’s invitation to join her. She found him a house in the artists’ colony next to D.H. Lawrence, and he transferred his activist energies from the immigrant communities of New York to the native population of the Southwest. He would later be appointed commissioner of Indian Affairs for the federal government by Franklin Roosevelt, from which position he launched the ‘Indian New Deal’ that turned federal policy away from assimilation and towards the preservation of Indian culture and religion.

Collier, like Dodge, felt passionately that modern industrial society was destructive to the human spirit. He was at once a radical and a deeply conservative thinker who rejected the individualist goals of social Darwinism and laissez-faire economics in favour of social and spiritual collectives. Taos pueblo became for him a living example of the alternative to twentieth-century materialism, wealthy instead in beauty, comradeship and godliness. He believed this had been the natural state of man in prehistory and developed a vision of Indian culture as a font of ancient wisdom, humanity’s last chance of redemption from a brutal modernity that was consuming itself in war. In 1921 he coined the term ‘Red Atlantis’ to capture the sense, developed over long evening discussions at Dodge’s house with her bohemian and Theosophical neighbours, that the Pueblo culture at Taos was the surviving remnant of a lost high civilisation, ‘the quest through art expression of an esctasy communally realised’.54

This vision of Red Atlantis was, however, strictly drug-free. Unlike the counterculture of the 1960s, for which peyote was a major attractor towards native American cultures, Dodge and the Taos art colony maintained a horror of it. Prohibition was one of the few causes that united social progressives with the reactionary elements of religion and politics. Missionaries to the Indian reservations and pueblos equated peyote with the foreign ‘dope’ habits of ethnic minorities: Chinese, blacks and Mexicans. The prohibitions on Indian peyote use that had begun in 1886 on the Kiowa–Comanche reservation in Oklahoma and escalated to statute law in 1899 were advanced by prohibitionist politicians on the national stage who attempted to add peyote to the laws prohibiting intoxicating liquors on reservations.⁵⁵ When the Harrison Narcotics Act was passed in 1914, prohibiting the unlicensed sale of opium and cocaine, the Bureau of Indian Affairs classified peyote as a narcotic in an attempt to bring it under the same federal controls. Sensational press coverage established the term ‘peyote cult’, along with ‘peyote séance’ and ‘peyote debauch’. In 1923 the New York Times ran the headline ‘Peyote Used as Drug in Indians’ Cult of Death’ above an article arguing that its worship originated in the Aztec cult of human sacrifice.⁵⁶

For the white admirers of Indian culture, the use of peyote was – like that of alcohol – a tragic response to the miseries of captivity and a degeneration of its once proud traditions. This was also the view of many Pueblo Indians in Taos, where peyote meetings were a recent arrival and a source of communal tension.57 They had been introduced from Oklahoma by nomadic peoples such as the Comanche, into whose culture they fitted much more easily. Comanches had long been in the habit of forming impromptu groupings for camps and warbands, and it was relatively straightforward for one family or faction to adopt the peyote religion without creating friction in the wider tribe. Pueblo cultures such as Taos, by contrast, were sedentary, with a structure of recognised roles and hierarchies centred round the kiva, a sacred space for ceremonies in which the entire community was expected to participate.

As the anthropologist and folklorist Elsie Clews Parsons observed when studying Taos pueblo in the 1930s, religious innovations were ‘fundamentally contrary’ to the ‘general temper of Pueblo ceremonialism’. In Taos, peyote acted as a wedge between traditionalists and innovators. It appealed to the progressive tendency as it ‘emphasizes individual emotional experience against communal, ritualistic performance’; as a result it ‘became associated with a group of Americanized individuals inclined to rebellion against the hierarchy’. Its leaders, often the better educated and travelled members of the community, were on occasion expelled from the kiva hierarchy, which made them ‘bitter, hostile and more ardent in supporting the foreign cult’.⁵⁸

The conflict played out in miniature in Dodge’s blossoming relationship with Tony Luhan. The two of them became, in her eyes, a dyad in which his deep-rooted wisdom and her transcendental modernism fused to become a beacon for humanity. She did not immediately appreciate that Luhan was among the pueblo’s leading peyote devotees. One day, while they were working on the house, Tony looked at the purple ribbon Dodge was wearing and purred, ‘Ni-i-i-ce colour!’ She recognised that ‘he saw more in it than I did’, and ‘a queer magic that opened windows in my imagination soon filled the room and I drifted upon it’.59 But it was not until some months later that the question became explicit, when Tony produced some peyote buttons and showed them to her. ‘You know Him?’ he asked.

‘“Do you Indians out here eat peyote?” I asked tremulously.’ Tony replied that they did, but ‘This peyote . . . he not ours. The Plains Indians gave him to us. Maybe he belong to all Indians a long time ago but not now . . . this is Montezuma’s medicine.’⁶⁰ Dodge was profoundly shaken. She recognised that this was ‘a terribly important issue between us, perhaps actually the most important adjustment we had to make’.⁶¹ She told Tony about ‘that evening at 23 Fifth Avenue’ and he seemed unsurprised that events had spun out of control: ‘You got to do it right, or peyote get mad.’ Dodge was still troubled: ‘It seems to me you go away from yourself when you eat peyote; you lose yourself.’ ‘And seem to me I find myself more and more,’ Tony replied.⁶²

Some time later Dodge fell ill and Tony told her that there was a traditional medicine for her sickness: peyote. With trepidation, she accepted a dose. ‘The medicine ran through me, penetratingly,’ she wrote, and ‘the whole universe fell into place . . . all the heavenly bodies were contented with the order of the plan, and system within system interlocked in grace . . . I was not separated and isolated any more.’⁶³ It was more than relief of her symptoms: it was medicine that went to the root of her sickness, in spirit as much as in body, and rebalanced her whole being.

Yet she was still unwilling to accept peyote into her life as a spiritual practice, or to permit it in Tony’s. ‘Anything that tampers with consciousness always frightens me – consciousness is all we have . . . I am afraid the peyote will make it unreal, make you seem unreal if you are using it. If I come together with you, won’t you give up the peyote?’ she asked, ‘terribly in earnest’.⁶⁴ Tony conceded, and it became the bride price of their dyad. But their house still bears its traces. The adobe chimney surround sculpted by Tony in one of the grand downstairs rooms is known to this day as the ‘peyote fireplace’, and a peyote bird, a symbol associated with the Plains Indian ceremony, can be discerned among the frescoes in his bedroom.

At the point when Dodge moved to Taos, peyote was facing its most serious legal challenge to date: the prospect of a federal ban. Over several days in February and March 1918 the US House of Representatives heard evidence in a committee convened by Carl Hayden, the representative from Arizona, to consider a prohibition on ‘anhalonium or peyote’65 by attaching it to an existing bill criminalising the trafficking of liquor on Indian reservations, settlements, school lands and pueblos.

For a federal government committed to assimilating Indians into the mainstream of American society, the growth of the peyote religion since James Mooney’s first reports of it in the early 1890s was alarming. Then it had been largely confined to the peoples with direct contact to Mexico and the Kiowa–Comanche–Apache reservations of southwest Oklahoma. By the end of the century it had spread across the state to tribes such as the Cheyenne, Oto, Osage and Winnebago and into the pueblos of the Southwest; over the following decade it was adopted from Kansas to Utah to Missouri, by members of the Arapaho, Ponca, Shawnee and Kickapoo and the Northern Plains Sioux groups.⁶⁶ Federal officials took firm measures to stamp it out. In 1909 the Bureau of Indian Affairs sent an officer, the ardent prohibitionist William ‘Pussyfoot’ Johnson, to Laredo, where he extracted a promise from the local peyoteros to curtail their trading, and burned 176,400 confiscated buttons. Walter Runke, superintendent of the Yankton Sioux agency in South Dakota, was typical in his response to its arrival in 1911: ‘It will be much easier at this time to prevent the introduction [of peyote] than it will be later to stamp out its use. I have taken drastic measures with the ring-leaders of our new so-called Mescal Society and have them now lodged in the Agency jails.’⁶⁷

The list of charges laid against peyote in the committee hearings was extensive. Missionaries and agency administrators had supported the formation of native Christian groups such as the Indian Rights Association and the Society of American Indians, who testified that addiction to peyote was spreading among the tribes with demoralising effect. Their reports, with titles such as ‘The Ravages of Peyote’68 and ‘Mescal, a Menace to the Indians’,⁶⁹ asked the government to step in to ‘protect helpless, downtrodden people from the ruthless hand of the oppressor’.⁷⁰ Gertrude Bonnin, the secretary of the Society of American Indians, claimed to have witnessed a death by peyote overdose within ‘a few minutes’ of the victim swallowing it.⁷¹ Dr Harvey Wiley, now retired from the Department of Agriculture, testified that the ‘toxic principle’ of peyote, like that of alcohol, produced rapid tolerance and dependence in its regular users.⁷² He also maintained this principle was contained in its resins, like cannabis, a theory that had been debunked twenty years previously. He related his version of the now deceased Erving Ewell’s experiment in 1895 which had, Wiley recalled, left him babbling about visions of ‘angels in streets of gold’ and making other ‘wholly incoherent remarks’ that ‘showed an absence of events of a logical character’.⁷³

The chief witness against peyote’s prohibition was James Mooney, the acknowledged expert on the subject who had by now been called to its defence many times, notably in 1915 when he had testified in Washington to the Board of Indian Commissioners. Peyote, Mooney argued, was not a cause of degeneracy but a mark of progress. ‘The Indians now are largely civilised,’ he maintained; ‘they are becoming citizens, they are educated’. It was this younger generation who had ‘taken up the peyote cult and organised it as a regular religion’.⁷⁴ He described the ceremony in detail; questioned as to whether it was a true Christian religion, he replied, ‘It is not a Christian religion, but it is a very close approximation . . . by a process of evolution the Indian has interwoven with this peyote religion the salient things of Christianity.’ One will, for example, ‘catch the name of Jesus constantly through the prayers’.

To attach peyote to a bill prohibiting alcohol, Mooney continued, was a gross misunderstanding. ‘The peyote does not like whisky,’ he explained, and ‘no real peyote user touches whisky or continues to drink whisky after he has taken up the peyote religion.’75 It had been the Indians’ most potent weapon against the scourge of alcohol, a contrast made more pointedly by Francis La Flesche, an Omaha Indian employed by the Bureau of Indian Ethnology, who testified that the peyotists were ‘decent, sober and kindly people’ who had ‘saved my people from the degradation that was produced by the fiery drinks white people manufacture’.⁷⁶

Mooney turned the argument, as he usually did, to its medical virtues: a catalogue of scientific reports, he reminded the committee, ‘warrant the general conclusion that it is a valuable medicine, for which we are indebted to the Indians, and that it is our business to utilize it’.⁷⁷ In response to Silas Weir Mitchell’s warning of its ‘perilous reign’, which Wiley had highlighted, he presented a letter he had received from Mitchell in 1903 expressing his ‘amazement’ at the ‘cruelty and injustice’ of the attempts to prohibit peyote to the Oklahoma Indians. He quoted from a pamphlet in which Mitchell had written: ‘I took the substance of nine buttons, and had an afternoon and evening in fairyland . . . I wish you would tell me where I can find the law forbidding its use in the United States under penalties. It is really rather a harmless drug compared with most of the others which men use.’⁷⁸

As the hearings went on, the rift that peyote exposed between the ethnographers and the Bureau of Indian Affairs became ugly. General R.H. Pratt, former superintendent of the Indian school at Carlisle, Pennsylvania and an old friend of Wiley, declared himself ‘absolutely against peyote’ and the ‘nightly orgies that have been described so graphically by the Bureau of Ethnology itself’.⁷⁹ The country was misinformed by the ‘large and expensive books that come from the Bureau of Ethnology’, in which the descriptions of peyote meetings were slanted by the ideology of authors who ‘always lead the Indian’s mind back into the past’.⁸⁰ He alleged that Mooney had once, during a Sun Dance ceremony, tried to find an Indian ‘who would submit to having his back slit, the skin lifted and thongs put in his back and . . . dragged around while this gentleman dashed around making photographs of it for this govenment publication’. ‘I denounce that as an absolute falsehood,’ Mooney responded, and questioned in turn the standing of the Indian Christian bodies presented by the committee. ‘An Indian delegate from a sectarian body or alleged uplift organisation is not a delegate for his tribe.’81 If the Representatives wished to learn about peyote, they should ask the tribal leaders themselves. He had brought several of them to Washington with him, and ‘you can look at them and see whether they are physically or mentally degenerate’.⁸²

After the hearings concluded, the bill was passed by the House but rejected narrowly by the Senate, thanks to pressure from the senator from Oklahoma, who had been energetically lobbied by his Indian constituents. Mooney returned to continue his fieldwork in Oklahoma, where he was invited by the tall and imposing Comanche peyotist Post Oak Jim to a meeting to celebrate the legislative victory.⁸³ He circulated among the tribes, attending peyote meetings and dances with the Kiowa, the Arapaho and the Caddo, where the idea was mooted that the peyote religion needed to constitute itself officially in some form. As long as it was defined by others as a ‘cult’, it would lack legal rights and protections, and the ratchet of prohibition would continue to tighten around it.

Others had been considering this possibility, including the Oklahoma attorney Karl Cunningham. Growing up in the wide prairie lands of Cheyenne country to the north and west of Oklahoma City, as a young boy Cunningham had been struck with a life-threatening illness and in desperation his parents had begged the local Cheyenne people for their medicine. At first the medicine men refused, but the elders intervened and held a ceremony in which Cunningham was cured.84 When he entered the legal world he was shocked by the state prosecutions of peyote meetings, for which terms of imprisonment were being handed down, and wrote to the superintendent of the Cheyenne and Arapaho agency at Darlington to protest the harassment of private worship in which the Indians ‘did nothing which is disrespectful to the civilized Christian religion’.⁸⁵ He accompanied the Comanche peyotists Marcus Poco and James Waldo on a peyote-buying trip to Laredo for their legal protection, and became friendly with a young Cheyenne named Mack Haag, who had grown up speaking English with his German father and often acted as a spokesman for his people in dealings with the white community.

During his stay in Cheyenne country Mooney met frequently with Cunningham and Haag to discuss solutions to the legal problems of peyote worship, either at the shingle-roofed house Haag had recently built on his 160-acre land grant outside the small town of Calumet or at the nearby house of Bob Cook, a local farmer who was married to a Cheyenne woman. Cunningham stressed the need for an ‘umbrella of protection’ for their worship: an official structure of charter, membership and incorporation under the First Amendment of the US Consitution. By this time there were precedents for legally recognised Indian churches: a Native Christian Church had recently received its charter in Kansas and an Oto leader named Jonathan Koshiway was in the process of chartering a First Born Church of Christ for his people in Oklahoma.⁸⁶

From the meetings between Mooney, Cunningham and Haag emerged the name Native American Church, disarming in its simplicity and radical in its implications. It was the first time the term ‘Native American’ had been used by Indians to describe themselves. It had previously been claimed by Anglo-Saxon pioneer descendants to differentiate themselves from more recent immigrants such as Germans, Italians and Irish. During the 1850s there had been an anti-immigrant political society who called themselves the Native American Party; they were commonly referred to as the ‘Know-Nothings’. The new church’s name reclaimed the term from internecine disputes between European factions, asserted there was only one truly native population in America and linked it confidently to an Indian future. US citizenship for all Indians was still some years away, but ‘Native American’ yoked together their indigenous heritage and their presumptive constitutional rights in a formulation that anticipated the Indian New Deal that John Collier would enshrine in the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934. Conjoined with the simple ‘Church’, which asserted its doctrine as a form of Christianity, it claimed its natural rights under the joint protection of God and the Constitution.

In August 1918 in El Reno, the nearest town to the Darlington agency, representatives of the Cheyenne, Oto, Ponca, Comanche, Kiowa and Apache tribes signed the charter of incorporation of the Native American Church (NAC), ‘to foster and promote the religious belief of the several tribes of Indians in the State of Oklahoma, in the Christian religion’. For clarity and legal protection the text of the charter explicitly stated that worship would involve ‘the practice of the Peyote sacrament’.87 The NAC was officially incorporated, a status that automatically applied to all the states in which the possession of peyote was not a criminal offence (at this point Utah, Colorado and Nevada).

Of all the various attempts to place peyote at the centre of a twentieth-century religious practice, the NAC was the only one to thrive and endure. The charter of 1918 was by no means the end of its struggle for legitimacy, and in many respects only the beginning. The anti-peyotists redoubled their efforts and similar bills for peyote’s federal prohibition were introduced to the House every year and, though none of them won another hearing until 1937, they continued until 1963. Even after that, state prosecutions continued and convictions were upheld on appeal before higher courts reversed them on First Amendment grounds. The most serious threat came in the 1990s, when years of litigation following the case of Alfred Leo Smith, who had been fired from his job as a substance abuse counsellor for refusing to stop attending NAC meetings, culminated in a Supreme Court judgement in which the church’s First Amendment rights were rescinded, with Justice Antonin Scalia arguing that religious diversity had become a ‘luxury’ and there was no ‘compelling state interest’ to maintain it.88 A concerted campaign to reinstate the NAC’s rights led to the passing of a new law specifically to protect them, the American Indian Religious Freedom Act Amendments of 1994.

For Mooney the foundation of the Native American Church was the culmination of over twenty years of advocacy, but he paid a high personal price for his conspicuous role. While laying the groundwork for it with his travels around Oklahoma, he had written to the Smithsonian that ‘on each occasion and in every tribe the Indians have made me the special guest of honour and their priests have voluntarily admitted me or invited me to be present at their most sacred mysteries’. He felt that ‘I could live here from tribe to tribe for the rest of the year . . . we have won the Indian heart in all these tribes.’⁸⁹ In the reservation agencies, however, his presence was much less welcome. Without his knowledge, Cato Sells, the commissioner of Indian Affairs, wrote to the director of the Smithsonian requesting him to recall Mooney on the grounds that he was ‘interfering’ with the work of the Bureau.⁹⁰ Mooney was summoned back to Washington, and when he applied in 1920 to return to the Kiowa reservation, to finish his study of the peyote religion, he was refused.

Hoping to enlist the support of the Church of Latter-Day Saints, he wrote to Frederick Smith. ‘My most important investigation,’ he lamented, ‘which promises to be of most value to the medical and scientific world, a research which I initiated and to which I have given a large part of thirty years, is blocked and killed . . . I am debarred from the field at the instance of Cato Sells, for declaring the scientific truth and defending the freedom of religion of our citizen Indians as guaranteed under charter and incorporation of the State of Oklahoma.’⁹¹ The following year he suffered a fatal heart attack in Washington, his study of the peyote religion unwritten.