The Peyote Cult

"This is the classical study of the background of the Mexican and American Indian ritual based on the plant that produces profound but temporary sensory and psychic derangements. Acid-heads and mind-blowing cultists will find much thought-food in this careful anthropological work, and in the author's new preface, with its penetrating appraisal of the use of artificial psychedelic drugs as instruments of revolt... The study started when the author was twenty-four; he participated in the rites of fifteen tribes using Lophophora williamsii (Lemaire), a small, spineless, carrot-shaped cactus growing in the Rio Grande Valley and southward. The original study has been supplemented by two essays that bring the account up to 1964, including a report of the Timothy Leary-Richard Alpert "débacle" at Harvard in 1963."--Google.

This book discusses the Peyote religion, a religion centered around the ritual consumption of the Peyote cactus. Its ecclesiastical organization, the North American Church, has stirred some attention among scholars, most of them anthropologists. The author describes what he calls all the "nativistic" religious movements which have emerged in the Peyote tradition in North America over the past 200 years.

This book deals with the history and nature of the peyote cult in the Navaho country, with long-continues resistance to the cult of teh majority of the tribe and the vast majority of the Tribal Council, and with the facotrs that promote indivisual acceptance of the cult and that account for variation in the level of acceptance of the cult in various communities.

Despite challenges by the federal government to restrict the use of peyote, the Native American Church, which uses the hallucinogenic cactus as a religious sacrament, has become the largest indigenous denomination among American Indians today. The Peyote Road examines the history of the NAC, including its legal struggles to defend the controversial use of peyote. Thomas C. Maroukis has conducted extensive interviews with NAC members and leaders to craft an authoritative account of the church’s history, diverse religious practices, and significant people. His book integrates a narrative history of the Peyote faith with analysis of its religious beliefs and practices—as well as its art and music—and an emphasis on the views of NAC members. Deftly blending oral histories and legal research, Maroukis traces the religion’s history from its Mesoamerican roots to the legal incorporation of the NAC; its expansion to the northern plains, Great Basin, and Southwest; and challenges to Peyotism by state and federal governments, including the Supreme Court decision in Oregon v. Smith. He also introduces readers to the inner workings of the NAC with descriptions of its organizational structure and the Cross Fire and Half Moon services. The Peyote Road updates Omer Stewart’s classic 1987 study of the Peyote religion by taking into consideration recent events and scholarship. In particular, Maroukis discusses not only the church’s current legal issues but also the diminishing Peyote supply and controversies surrounding the definition of membership. Today approximately 300,000 American Indians are members of the Native American Church. The Peyote Road marks a significant case study of First Amendment rights and deepens our understanding of the struggles of NAC members to practice their faith.

Describes the peyote plant, the birth of peyotism in western Oklahoma, its spread from Indian Territory to Mexico, the High Plains, and the Far West, its role among such tribes as the Comanche, Kiowa, Kiowa-Apache, Caddo, Wichita, Delaware, and Navajo Indians, its conflicts with the law, and the history of the Native American Church.

The hallucinogenic and medicinal effects of peyote have a storied history that begins well before Europeans arrived in the Americas. While some have attempted to explain the cultural and religious significance of this cactus and drug, Alexander S. Dawson offers a completely new way of understanding the place of peyote in history. In this provocative new book, Dawson argues that peyote has marked the boundary between the Indian and the West since the Spanish Inquisition outlawed it in 1620. For nearly four centuries ecclesiastical, legal, scientific, and scholarly authorities have tried (unsuccessfully) to police that boundary to ensure that, while indigenous subjects might consume peyote, others could not. Moving back and forth across the U.S.–Mexico border, The Peyote Effect explores how battles over who might enjoy a right to consume peyote have unfolded in both countries, and how these conflicts have produced the racially exclusionary systems that characterizes modern drug regimes. Through this approach we see a surprising history of the racial thinking that binds these two countries more closely than we might otherwise imagine.