Areal contrasts in minor points are no less striking. Dancing was conspicuous in Mexico, less important transitionally, and on the whole lacking in the Plains. Painting of a symbolic nature was ritually significant in Mexico; in the Plains individual styles were dictated by peyote visions. Peyotism in Mexico is a seasonal matter, but in the Plains the rite occurs the year around (in the south the trip for peyote may have been associated more with the ritual salt pilgrimage, in the north with the ritualized war journeys; parallels are also suggested in the Maricopa ritualized mountain-sheep hunting and Navaho deer hunting). In Mexico peyote was a tribal affair and women participated on equal terms with the men in dancing, etc. In Mescalero, women were excluded from meetings, as in the Plains also originally. The rite was held principally outdoors in Mexico, and in a tipi transitionally and in the Plains—a patio arrangement in Mexico, and an altar centering around the “moon” in the Plains. Ritual racing and ball games[124] are part of Mexican peyotism, but not elsewhere. Smoking is inconspicuous in Mexico, but in the Plains it has been important enough to involve church schisms.[125] Huichol peyote had no drum, though elsewhere in Mexico a wooden drum was used, while in the Plains the water-drum (intrusive from the Southwest) is universal. The rasp is Mexican, but the Plains rite has the gourd rattle and eagle wing-bone whistle in addition to the drum. The “staff” is a special problem in the Plains. The Huichol and Tarahumari have a squirrel fetish in addition to the fetish plant; the Plains have only the latter. Ceremonial drunkenness with tesvino, etc., is an integral part of Mexican “curing”; in the Plains peyote and alcohol are so far mutually exclusive that the familiar propaganda calls the first a specific against the second. The alleged aphrodisiac virtue of peyote is a Mexican belief; but curiously enough in Mexico, where many “peyotes” were said by natives to be aphrodisiac, Lumholtz pronounced _Lophophora williamsii_ definitely anaphrodisiac; while in the Plains, where the natives most strenuously deny this virtue for peyote, enemies of the cult most consistently claim that it produces aphrodisiac orgies.[126] In Mexico the shaman alone sings, though his assistants may “spell” him; in the Plains all male participants drum and rattle. In Mescalero, though the drum circles the tipi, the staff and gourd remain with the leader. Finally, Mexican and Mescalero peyotism are almost wholly free of Christian elements; so too were the early Plains rites diffusing from the Kiowa-Comanche, though in the John Wilson rite, the Oto Church of the First-born (and its successor, the Native American Church) and the Winnebago Rave-Hensley variant, Christian symbolism and interpretations are frequent.