From these data, then, it may be well seen that peyotism functions in all ways as a living religion: peyote christens the new-born and protects their early years, teaches the young, marries young men and women, rewards and punishes the behavior of adult years, and buries the dead—offering throughout consolation for troubles, chastening for bad deeds or thoughts, and serving as the focus for tribal and intertribal life. Peyotism is without question the living religion of the majority of Plains Indians today. Perhaps the statement of a Delaware may make this clear:[18] The old Delaware religion is too heavy for us who are becoming few and weak. It is too difficult; Peyote is easy in comparison. Therefore we who are weak take up this new Indian religion. This is the very objection raised by the old men, taking it up. But Peyote knows that the Indian’s burden of becoming educated and at the same time keeping up the old religion is too heavy, for he said that to the old woman who was the first to discover our new religion. Peyote is to be the Indians’ new religion. It is to be for all the Indian people and only for them. The intent of the present section was to give the reader some sense of the emotional immediacy of peyotism to the present-day Plains Indian. Such a study might properly be termed “functional,” and in biological analogy corresponds to the physiology or dynamic aspect of the anatomy or descriptive morphology attempted in our preceding discussion of cultural traits and patterns. But we must at once abandon our analogy, lest like some others we extrapolate illegitimately terms which have meaning in one universe of discourse into another where they serve only to produce confusion. In biology and medicine, anatomy may perhaps be understood wholly divorced from palaeontological and physical-anthropological (i.e., historical) considerations, but this is peculiarly not the case with any attempt to discuss a culture-pattern functionally or psychologically. Here the immediacy and the momentum of past history, that is the functioning of culture-patterns in terms of individuals, is precisely the point at issue. And here the aggregation of traits into a complex is less the result of organismic-biological factors than of “historical accident” (e.g., the use of parched corn in the Plains ritual breakfast—its function in the religious pattern of an agricultural economy having long since been in abeyance). The traits of a complex do not gain their relatedness or their adhesiveness from any biological-organismic “function”; culture-traits are not chromosome-linked genes, and change of one trait of a pattern need not organically change the rest. Indeed, if we can speak of “the peyote cult” at all, it is only after demonstrating its historical continuity as such.