Religion: The Button Eaters

Visions and other mystical experiences are part of the regular spiritual diet of the 50,000-odd members of the Native American Church, thanks to what they consider a special gift from God: peyote (pronounced pay-oh-tee), a small cactus growing in the valley of the Rio Grande. The Indians of the Native American Church, 46 tribes in the West and Canada, cut off and dry the cactus tops, then eat the “buttons” in nightlong ceremonies to the accompaniment of sacred fire and chanting. A derivative called mescaline, subject of experiment by psychiatric researchers and mystical dabblers, including Aldous (The Doors of Perception) Huxley, produces in devotees a vivid immediacy of experience that the Indians consider far superior to the liturgy the paleface missionaries have to offer.

The missionaries did not take kindly to peyote Christianity; after World War I, in cooperation with the Federal Bureau of Indian Affairs, they managed to put through several state laws banning the drug. But lately, the tide of opinion has been turning. Last week New Mexico’s House of Representatives voted 53 to 11 to approve a senate bill legalizing “the sale, possession and use of peyote in religious services.”

Particularly pleased by the news was a vigorous, 50-year-old Crow Indian named Frank Takes Gun, who has been taking his gun on the warpath against the peyote ban ever since he was elected international president of the Native American Church four years ago. He has been aided in his campaign by the testimony of anthropologists, including the late Franz Boas, that the peyote ritual was truly religious, and by the failure of various federal attempts to classify peyote as a narcotic. (Though it may produce a hangover, it is not habit-forming and no more skull-popping than firewater.)

Frank Takes Gun still has some vociferous opposition to contend with. Says State Senator Vincent M. Vesley of New Mexico’s Grant County: “We are leaving the door open to some religious groups coming in here and possibly saying that marijuana should be used as part of its religious practice.” New Mexico’s Temperance League plans to organize a campaign urging the Governor to veto the pro-peyote bill. “We don’t think it’s a good thing for the state,” said the league’s executive secretary, the Rev. Durward R. Trolinger last week. “Peyote has a narcotic effect; it causes hallucinations. It should not be legalized, even if only for religious purposes. If it’s bad at home, it’s bad in church.”