Note 14 — BOTANICAL AND PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF PEYOTE

Handbook of the American Indians. 1:604b. Spier informs me this is also Navaho and perhaps Pueblo as well. As indicated elsewhere, peyote, teo-nanacatl and associated plants have repeatedly been thought to be aphrodisiacs. The supposed sex of the plants may have some reference to this belief; cf. the Huichol belief that “Maize is a little girl whom one sometimes can hear weeping in the fields; she is afraid of the wild beasts, the coyote and others that eat corn” (Lumholtz, Unknown Mexico, 2:279). Different colors of corn belong to different deities also; it is interesting to note that the Huichol attribute different colors symbolically to peyote which have no effective reality (Rouhier, op. cit., 133). In 1935, in a non-peyote context, Apekaum told me that cotton plants in a field we were passing were male and female; some trees were male, too, and others female, he thought. No botanical realities were involved in any of these cases. The Jivaro also attribute sex to plants (Karsten, Civilization, 301, 304-06, 314-15, 323) as do the Aymará and others.