Indians of North America -- Religion; Indians of North America -- Rites and ceremonies; Peyotism
So far as the brute effect of the drugs is concerned, the first stage
is one of physical and mental exhilaration. To this physiological fact
no doubt is due the Mexican use of peyote in foot-races, in war and for
allaying hunger and thirst when on fasting pilgrimages for the plant.
Expression of this exhilaration by dancing is common in Mexico, and is
found likewise among the Tonkawa, the Lipan and sporadically in the
Plains.[32]
Gross attitudinal behavior may be exhibited in extreme cases.
Lumholtz[33] says of the Huichol that
in a few cases a man may consume so much that he is attacked
with a fit of madness, rushing backward and forward, trying to
kill people, and tearing his clothes to pieces. People then
seize upon him, and tie him hand and foot, leaving him thus
until he regains his senses. Such occasions are thought to be
due to infringements of the law of abstinence imposed upon them
before and during the feast.
This semi-psychotic state is no doubt as much conditioned culturally as
the Malay “running amok”; in Mexico early Spanish writers repeatedly
describe native visions as sometimes horribly frightening as well as
sometimes laughable. Indeed, in Mexico, among the Mescalero, and the
early Plains users, aggressions welling up under peyote intoxication
commonly took the form of witchcraft fear and counter-witchcraft.
Typically in the Plains, however, the attitude repeatedly emphasized is
that of intertribal brotherhood and an individual feeling of friendliness
and well-being. Nevertheless some fifty native visions collected indicate
great variability in the psychic state. A Taos instance records euphoria
to the point of laughter,[34] but Crashing Thunder (Winnebago)[35]
experienced a state of deep depression and intense _fear_:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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