Peyote, and Two Very Different Traditions

Two religious traditions in this grouping involve peyote and they are not the same thing. The Wixarika of the Sierra Madre Occidental undertake an annual pilgrimage east to Wirikuta in the state of San Luis Potosi, where the cactus grows, and the journey, the hunt for it and the ceremonies attached are part of a tradition with its own elders, its own ritual specialists and its own conditions.

The Raramuri further north have their own practice. Separately, from the late nineteenth century, peyote ceremonies spread among peoples of the southern plains and beyond and were formalised in the Native American Church, which is a distinct institution with its own history and its own legal standing in the United States, protected by federal statute for enrolled members of federally recognised tribes.

Some of its members are Uto-Aztecan speakers and most are not. The atlas keeps the two apart because collapsing them is common and wrong, and it describes both without instructing in either. Wirikuta is under pressure from mining concessions, and the Wixarika have pursued that in Mexican courts, which is a current matter rather than an ethnographic one. Hopi practice belongs in neither category and is subject to explicit restrictions set by the Hopi Tribe and by individual villages on recording, photographing and describing ceremony. Those restrictions are recorded in this atlas as a rights gate and are honoured in what it publishes.