Second, because I wish to present the rituals in some detail, I have chosen accounts
that are representative and thorough. Together, the accounts range across three
continents and three very different societies, and they are representative of the wide
range of cultural approaches to the sacred generally and to entheogens in particular.
Also, to simplify the analysis I have chosen accounts where the entheogen is ingested
by the same route—orally—rather than as an ointment, enema, snuff, smoke,
vapour or injection. I have selected just three examples of rituals, which I believe are
exemplars of community-oriented entheogenic ritual as a class.
Peyote and Huichol communityThe Wixárika or Huichol are an indigenous Mexican people, who live in several
independent, self-governing districts or comunidades indígenas with economies based
on sedentary slash-and-burn agriculture supplemented by gathering and hunting
(Schaefer and Furst 1996). The animistic or panentheistic Huichol religious
worldview maintains that all things in the environment are sensate and animate.
The Huichol pantheon bustles with beings generically referred to by the obscure
term ‘Kakauyaríte’—conceptualized as personae or faculties of nature, and addressed
in kinship terms—who are revered and invoked for aid (ibid.).
In Huichol religion ecstatic states are greatly valued; consequently, peyote is
greatly esteemed. The Huichol ingest the visionary hikuri or peyote cactus
(Lophophora williamsii) as a religious sacrament and as a ‘unifying force in ideology
and society’ (Schaefer 1996:140–1). Peyote contains upwards of 57 alkaloids,
alkaloidal amines and amino acids (Anderson 1996). The most psychoactive of these
substances is the alkaloid mescaline (ibid.), one of the classic psychedelics (Peyton
and Shulgin 1994). The Huichol employ hikuri in a wide range of religious and
ethnomedicinal contexts. Two of the major public rituals involving the ingestion of
peyote are the peyote pilgrimage and the Hikuri Neixa, or ‘Peyote dance’. Here I
will focus primarily on the rituals associated with the pilgrimage. Every year a group
of Huichol undertakes the lengthy pilgrimage to Wirikúta, a high desert where peyote
grows abundantly (Lamaistre 1996). The Huichol peyote pilgrimage is interpreted
by the pilgrims or hikuritámete as a spiritual return to the mythic fons et origo
(Myerhoff 1974). In the preparatory phases of the pilgrimage, participants—
beautifully clothed in the highly ornate and colourful traditional dress so pleasing to
their deities (Valadez and Valadez 1992) —express their solidarity and openness to
one another through the public confession of sexual misconduct, after which
the shaman ties knots in a special string, with each knot representing a pilgrim
and the uniting of the souls of all participants. They are thus ...symbolically
tied together for the entire pilgrimage, as well as afterwards, up to and
including the completion of Hikuri Neixa, months later, when in one of the
concluding rituals the knots are untied.
(Schaefer 1996:163)124 DES TRAMACCHI