Note 53 — BOTANICAL AND PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF PEYOTE

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.