San Pedro Cactus

The San Pedro ceremony of the north Peruvian coast is a healing rite rather than a visionary retreat, and its structure is unusually consistent from one practitioner to the next.

The cactus is cut into slices, boiled for hours into a thick bitter decoction, and drunk around midnight. The centre of the ceremony is the mesa, a cloth laid on the ground and arranged with objects: staffs, swords, shells, stones, images of saints, bottles, archaeological pieces picked up from old sites. The mesa is divided into fields, commonly a left side associated with disorder and illness and a right with order and healing, with a mediating centre, and the curandero works across it through the night, rattling, whistling, invoking both Christian saints and the mountains and lagoons of the region.

The patient is there to be diagnosed. Much of the work is identifying the cause of an affliction, frequently understood as dano, harm sent by another person, and then removing it. Tobacco is taken through the nose, plants are rubbed and blown, and a cleansing with a guinea pig or an egg may be used to read the body.

The plant is not the ceremony. It is what allows the curandero to see, and the patient may take less of it than the practitioner does. This is a working craft with clients, fees and reputations, not a retreat, and it has functioned continuously alongside Catholicism for centuries.

San Pedro has the strongest archaeological case of any sacred plant in South America, which is rare, because ritual plant use is exactly the kind of practice that normally leaves nothing behind.

At Chavin de Huantar in the Peruvian highlands, a ceremonial centre in use from roughly the first millennium BC, a stone relief shows a fanged anthropomorphic figure holding a columnar cactus, and the cactus is rendered with enough anatomical accuracy that the identification is not seriously contested. Cactus imagery recurs in Cupisnique and later Moche and Nazca material, and dried cactus has been recovered from dry coastal sites. The site itself is built with galleries, drains and acoustic features that a number of archaeologists read as designed to disorient, which fits.

The name is the interesting distortion. San Pedro, Saint Peter, is a colonial-era Christian overlay: the saint holds the keys to heaven, and the cactus is said to open the gate. It is a piece of syncretic wit, and it did its job, letting a suppressed practice continue under a name no priest could object to. The older Quechua name wachuma has been returning to use, and the choice between the two names is now itself a statement about whose tradition it is.

A caution: several Trichocereus species are involved and the taxonomy has been repeatedly revised, so older sources and modern ones do not always mean the same plant.