Note 44 — APPENDIX 6: PHYSIOLOGY OF PEYOTE

The issue of the native religious use of the drug is indeed a complex one. But whatever else may be said, it is only fair to the Indians to state that the bitterest and most unmeasured condemnations of the drug have issued from quarters which are scarcely disinterested. Whatever the merits of the case, those persons are concerned with the deculturation of the Indian, and see in the peyote religion a formidable obstacle to their progress in inducting the native into modern life. The doubtless good intentions of such persons have on occasion, however, led them into errors of judgment when, for instance, they would argue that peyotism is merely out-and-out drug addiction in religious guise (e.g. Daiker, Hughes, Newberne and Burke, Seymour, Watermulder, and the writers in the Indian Rights Association and Literary Digest articles;) Lindquist, for example, feels free to commit numerous errors of fact yet still pontificate on the “false gods” of “the cult of Death” which is “nothing but an evil” (The Red Man, 72, 73, 75). For, given the Plains religious and ideological background, the peyote cult is entirely plausible as a religion, and the issue is properly one of religious freedom.

The intellectual “authority” in west European culture is, of course, the empirical and pragmatic (or putatively), while that of the Indian in this religion, as elsewhere, can correctly be termed mystical, if we understand by this a super-normal knowledge-technique transcending ordinary epistemological considerations. For there can be no shadow of a doubt concerning the deep and humble sincerity of the worship and belief—and sincerity perhaps, even in the absence of other ingredients, is the chief component of a living religion. And if the chief function of a religion is the liquidation of the anxieties and the solution of the fears and troubles of its adherents, then surely the peyote religion eminently qualifies as such.

The issue then balances somewhat delicately on the point of “authority,” which is really at bottom a matter of comparative ethnography. If, as we believe, the scientific is truly the most mature knowledge-technique man has yet perfected, then facile and off-hand condemnation of peyotism on its basis is even less possible. Aside from the probable ultimate disappearance of the Native American Church, a generous and libertarian philosophy would condemn present attacks on it as often misguided and even oftener uninformed. The chief human difficulty in the world today is the adjustment of one culture to another, of one absolutistic ideology and Weltanschauung to another. But the scientific spirit itself would protest against the dictatorship of any one ideology, of whatever sort; there is too much chance that any self-contained scheme be dangerously wrong, when unchecked by modifying differing beliefs. Science, indeed, has been lifted above the level of folklore precisely because the spectacle of variously conditioned culture-historical outlooks has necessitated self-criticism and an objective comparative survey of beliefs. A fetishistic attitude toward science and its tentative pronouncements, therefore, is itself folkloristic in tone. This however, is not to suggest any distrust in the ability of the scientific method to obtain such sound results as have been so far achieved; but it is intended to point out the real limitations in our information.

Although the best modern scientific knowledge would indicate that the alkaloids in peyote do not perform the manifold therapeutic miracles which natives ascribe to it, one might still well wonder whether harsh sumptuary laws would not work more positive hardship and harm than the drug itself. If not the injustice then certainly the inexpedience of such exercise of civil authority has been amply demonstrated in the Eighteenth Amendment and its sorry consequences. We may not presume therefore to judge what should be the administrative fate of the peyote cult. The emotional and ideological side of the religion is not open to judgement; and on the properly scientific and physiological side of the question the simple fact is that we actually don’t know enough about it.