Peyote

Peyote supports two well documented religious traditions that are not versions of each other, and conflating them is the most common error made about it.

The Huichol, or Wixarika, of the Sierra Madre Occidental undertake an annual pilgrimage of several hundred kilometres to Wirikuta, the high desert where the cactus grows and where they hold the world to have been created. The journey is a return to a place of origin, the pilgrims take on the identity of the ancestor deities for its duration, and the peyote is hunted rather than gathered, addressed and shot with an arrow as a deer. The association of deer, maize and peyote as a single complex runs through Huichol art and ritual and has no counterpart further north.

The Native American Church is a different thing: a Plains ceremony that spread rapidly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries among peoples who had not previously used peyote, incorporating as a church and taking on Christian elements to varying degrees. The all night meeting is held in a tipi around a crescent altar and a fire, with a water drum, a gourd rattle and a staff passing around the circle, and it is directed by a roadman. Its purposes are healing, sobriety and community.

Both are living. Neither is the origin of the other. The Huichol tradition is the older and the more localised; the Plains ceremony is the more widespread and the more institutionally organised.

Sources Flesh of the Gods: The Ritual Use of HallucinogensPeter T. Furst (editor) with Peyote Religion: A HistoryOmer C. Stewart

Peyote is the only entheogen in this atlas with a specific statutory protection in United States federal law. The American Indian Religious Freedom Act Amendments of 1994 provide that the use, possession and transportation of peyote by an Indian for bona fide traditional ceremonial purposes in connection with the practice of a traditional Indian religion is lawful and shall not be prohibited. That protection was won, not granted: it followed decades of state prosecutions and a Supreme Court decision in 1990 that had gone the other way.

The wording matters and is frequently misreported. The exemption is tied to membership and to traditional ceremonial use, and it does not make peyote generally lawful.

The pressing problem now is not legal but biological. Lophophora williamsii grows extremely slowly, takes many years to reach a harvestable size, and is confined to a narrow range in south Texas and northern Mexico. Habitat loss, root ploughing for agriculture, and harvesting that cuts too deep or takes immature plants have all reduced wild populations, and demand from outside the protected traditions has grown sharply. The peyote gardens that supply the Native American Church are finite, and the people with the strongest claim to the plant are the ones most exposed to its decline. Conservation and religious access are, unusually, the same argument here rather than opposing ones.

Sources American Indian Religious Freedom Act Amendments of 1994 (Pub. L. 103-344)United States Congress with The Encyclopedia of Psychoactive Plants: Ethnopharmacology and Its ApplicationsChristian Ratsch