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Religion and Psychoactive Sacraments:
An Entheogen Chrestomathy
Thomas B. Roberts, Ph.D. and Paula Jo Hruby, Ed.D.
Author Index | Title Index
The Peyote Cult.
La Barre, Weston. (1969).
New York: Schocken Books.
ISBN: None
Description: Paperback,
enlarged edition, with a new preface by the author, xvii + 260
pages.
Contents: Preface to
the paperback edition, 3 chapters, index.
Note: This edition incorporates
The Peyote Cult originally published as Yale
University Publications in Anthropology No. 19 in 1938, " Twenty
Years of Peyote Studies" from Vol. 1, No. 1 of Current
Anthropology, and a new section "The Last
Five Years of Peyote Studies." See 1989 edition below.
Excerpt(s): This is the
classical study of the background of the Mexican and American
Indian ritual based on the plant that produces profound
but temporary sensory and psychic derangements. Acid-heads
and mind-blowing cultists will find much thought-food in this
careful anthropological work, and the author's new Preface, with
its penetrating appraisal of the use of artificial psychedelic
drugs as instruments of revolt.
Professor La Barre strongly supports what he considers
the legitimate use of natural peyote in the ritual of the Native
American Church: "Western man already complacently accepts
(since it is ours) the mass use of substances such as tobacco
and alcohol which, to physical health can be more dangerous,than
a weekly Indian use of a feebly psychotropic desert plant.
The study started when the author was twenty-four;
he participated in the rites of fifteen tribes using Lophora
williamsii ( Lemaire) a small, spineless,
carrot-shaped cactus growing in the Rio Grande Valley and southward.
The original study has been supplemented by two essays that bring
the account up to 1964, including a report of the Timothy Leary
"debacle" at Harvard in 1963. (back cover)
Compilation copyright © 1995 – 2001 CSP
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