Indians of North America -- Religion; Indians of North America -- Rites and ceremonies; Peyotism
[52] Rouhier (_Monographie_, 320) however suggests that the illusions
of phonation (the distance, strangeness and hollowness of the voice)
may not be entirely sensory, i.e. auditory, but may also be a matter of
voice-production; he cites Ellis, Putt, and Eshner.
[53] Note the ritual necessity that a woman bring the morning water into
a meeting formerly restricted to men, and the mythological significance
of the “Peyote Woman.” Opler (_The Influence of Aboriginal Pattern_)
says that Mescalero saw women in visions and wanted them, believing that
if one began with visions of women they would stay with him. Crashing
Thunder (Radin, 177) confessed that at one time he attended meetings
chiefly to find “a woman whom I cared to marry permanently. Before long,”
he says, “that was the only thing that I would think of when I attended
the meetings.” We have on the other hand, however, the healthy skepticism
of an Oto who said, “You can see dead people in meetings, but peyote
won’t get you a woman you desire though. She makes up her mind.” But may
not other explanations than the physiologically-aphrodisiac be involved?
Might there not be an association with promiscuity of the ritual mingling
of the sexes (for in the older Sun Dance just this was implied when the
main lodge-pole was brought in) in a region where sexual segregation
ritually was usual? Compare the injunction of one Ghost Dance prophet to
the people not to think of women, but to join hands with them on either
side and dance the Ghost Dance. Would he have made the explicit statement
if it had not been implicitly considered reasonable to expect natural
sexual arousement or preoccupation in a rite in which men and women are
not separated? Indeed, there is evidence among the Shawnee at least that
sexual opportunities afforded through the Ghost Dance were not left
unexploited.
THE ETHNOLOGY OF PEYOTISM
NON-RITUAL USES OF PEYOTE
An Oto in all seriousness informed the writer that “peyote doesn’t work
outside meetings, because I have tried it”—a belief understandable in
a group whose sole acquaintance with the plant is through a recent
ritual.[1] Nevertheless, owing to its marked physiological properties
peyote is widely used both in Mexico and the Plains non-ritually, a fact
which forms an interesting ethnological background to the rite proper.
One of the most important and striking of these uses is in prophecy and
divination. We find the Spanish missionaries in Mexico early protesting
against this abomination. The confessional of Padre Nicolás de León[2]
contains the following questions for the priest to ask the penitent:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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