Note 11 — APPENDIX 6: PHYSIOLOGY OF PEYOTE

The writer testifies to the accuracy of Dixon’s somewhat amazing statement. So marked have been the physical effects of the first stage of intoxication, that when these pass off to give rise to the feeling of physiological normality (introspectively), one almost has a distrust of the existence of these spectacular mental displays particularly if the observer is of a markedly non-“psychic” or skeptical cast of mind. The visions arise in the midst of a psychological state I can only describe as one of perfectly plausible “epistemological orientation,” sometimes acutely felt in alcoholic intoxication. The feeling of dissociation with this unfamiliar and spectacular side of one’s peyote-intoxication experience has suggested to some observers incipient schizoid psychoses. Small wonder natives often exhibit curiously ambivalent attitudes toward their visions, and sometimes explicitly reject and disclaim them as “bad,” the result of trickery by the peyote power (“he’s testing me”) or by some human witch present. Hoebel in conversation has insisted on the Northern Cheyenne attitude of suspicion of peyote’s “trickiness.” But I wholly disagree with Havelock Ellis and others who have argued for the “ineffability” of visions, and even less do I see in peyote-intoxication any approach to the mystical state of the epistemological convincingness of the visions. It is this concomitant state of seeming objectiveness and reality-orientation which accounts for the marked feeling of duality. On this point, cf. Drs. Monakow and Morgue: “[Peyote produces] a particular state of dreaming, without losing, relatively, the idea of orientation, accompanied by pseudo-hallucinatory phenomena.”