In a volume devoted to the study of shamanism and
hallucinogenic drugs it is important to include data concerning a group whose
experiences with the hallucinogenic peyote cactus (Lophophora williamsii) in
shamanistic rituals resulted in serious conflict and, ultimately, proscription
of the ceremonial use of the drug. 1 Inthis contribution we present information
concerning the Apaches of the Mescalero Indian Reservation, some of whom used
peyote in shamanistic contexts between about 1870 until some time after 1910. We
then examine some of the reasons why its use was abandoned and why their
accredited shamanistic practices subsequently have excluded the use of
hallucinogens.2
The Apaches presently living on the
reservation include members of three tribes, in order of descending numbers,
Mescaleros, Chiricahuas, and Lipans (R. M. Boyer, 1962, Appendix A). The
reservation was established in 1873 for the Mescaleros. The Chiricahuas were
taken as prisoners of war in 1886 after the capitulation of Geronomo and his
followers. When they were freed in 1913, the majority chose to move to the
reservation and to become part of the Mescalero tribe. The Lipans were destroyed
as functioning groups during the latter half of the nineteenth century, when
their few known remaining members joined the Mescaleros.
Nineteenth-century authors stated that the Mescaleros used peyote in religious
rites in 1867 (Methvin, 1899:36-37), the Chiricahuas in 1875 (Tones, 1899:95)1·
and the Lipans in 1885 (Havard, 1885:521; 1886:38). Nevertheless, it is not
generally known that these Apaches ate peyote. They were excluded from Shonle's
(1925) map of the distribution of the use of peyote in the United States and
they were listed as non-users in a booklet compiled under the aegis of the
Bureau of Indian Affairs (Newberne, 1925.)
During his field
work in the 1930's, Opler (1936); learned that the Mescaleros had practiced
rather elaborate ceremonies centering on the utilization of peyote for some
forty years and that the Lipans had used it in shamanistic contexts (Opler,
1938, 1940, 1945)·
According to the aged informant Antonio
Apache, the Lipans obtained peyote from the Carrizo Indians (Opler, 1938); and
the Mescaleros are said to have learned peyote rites from the Lipans not long
before 1870 (LaBarre, 1938) or from the Tonkawas, Lipans, Yaquis, or other
non-Apachean groups of northern Mexico (Opler, 1936:148). But for some slight
degree of experimentation by today's young people with marijuana and perhaps
LSD, the reservation Apaches are not known to have used any other hallucinogenic
drugs with the exception of alcohol. Modern informants affirm that peyote has
been and may now be used for social purposes, but that formerly it was ingested
only during Mescalero and Lipan shamanistic ceremonies. We have been unable to
confirm its use during the years 1958-71. No one now has knowledge of peyote use
by the Chiricahuas of the reservation.
To understand why the
shamanistic use of peyote was abandoned requires an insight into Apache
religious concepts and a cognizance of personality structure among these people.
Initially we shall summarize the religious tenets.
Aboriginal
religio-medical philosophies, the criteria for according the status of shaman to
individuals, and shamanistic procedures have been similar if not identical among
the three tribes in recorded times (Boyer, 1964)· They conceive the world to be
permeated by supernatural power which has no intrinsic attribute of good or
evil; its virtue resides in its potency. Power approaches people through the
agency of a plant, animal, or natural phenomenon by means of a dream or other
hallucinatory experience; its acceptance is frequently accompanied by an ordeal.
Ritual instruction may be received directly from the power or from other
shamans. Any person is a possible power recipient. Thus, Opler (1936:146)
described the Mescaleros as "a tribe of shamans, active or potentially active."
An individual might own any number of powers. If he is thought
to use power for purposes which are not oriented toward the common good, he is
accorded the status of witch. Yet those who are thought to use their powers for
the benefit of the group, the shamans, are implicitly witches since a shaman who
saves a life must then either sacrifice his own or that of a loved person.
Obviously, jealousies, enmities, and suspicion abound. Each shaman has private
instructions concerning the use of power, and his rites are individually owned.
Consistent with native concepts of leadership and authority (Basehart, 1959,
1960, 1970), there has never been a chief shaman.
Opler's
informants stated, and today's Apaches agree, that ritual peyote use was
acquired from personal contact with power that approached people while it was
invested in peyote flowers or "buttons." Various Mescalero shamans acquired
peyote power and became leaders of a peyote camp in which curing and other
ceremonies were conducted. During such rites, various shamans and other
participants used and were affected by peyote, experiencing the usual perceptual
and logical distortions, hallucinations, and physical effects. Whether the
Lipans had a formal peyote camp is not known.
There is a
fundamental incongruity between the principles involved in ordinary Mescalero
shamanistic ceremonies and the rules that applied to peyote rites. In ordinary
shamanistic practices, a single shaman is tire principal figure and the
experiences of attendants at ceremonies are subordinate. Religious ecstasy,
visions, and communications with supernaturals are the shaman's prerogatives and
validate his power and efficacy. The use of peyote by other people at ceremonies
made its psychological and physiological effects common, and the uniqueness of
the shaman's experiences disappeared. The peyote meetings became places in which
shamanistic rivalries and witchcraft flourished. Disruption resulted, rather
than cohesiveness through shared experience.
The peyote
ceremonies were not accompanied by the acceptance of Christian beliefs and
practices, and the Mescaleros never became involved in the Peyote Religion (see
Slotkin, 1956). Instead, the use of peyote was intended to affirm the vitality
of traditional religious practices at a time when the impact of reservation
confinement contributed to an increased awareness of social and cultural
deprivation. Yet antagonisms became so open and bloody that eventually the
peyote gatherings were abandoned. The hostilities which became overt during the
meetings were ascribed to the peyote. Since its use involved witchcraft
practices, its ingestion was equated with the potential for witchcraft.
It will be recalled that, in the native conceptualization,
power has no intrinsic attribute of good or evil, and can be used for moral or
immoral purposes at the will of its human owner. To our knowledge, peyote power
is unique among the Mescaleros in that it is uniformly considered to be bad.
Some Mescaleros believe that one other power, the owl, is intrinsically evil.
Thus, the hoot of an owl is considered to presage death. However, some Apaches
regard the owl as the bearer of the power of a human witch, others believe
ghosts to inhabit owls, and yet others deem owls to be witches whose actions are
motivated by their own evil will or power.
During 1959-60
there were thirteen accredited Mescalero, Chiricahua, and Lipan shamans on the
reservation. Perhaps fifteen Mescaleros, here termed pseudoshamans, claimed to
own supernatural power but were considered generally to be imposters.
One of the shamans, Ancient One, was the sole living person known to have
participated in the peyote camp. Of the shamans, only he and Black Eyes (Boyer,
1961; Klopfer and Boyer, 1961), both Mescaleros, were at times judged to be
witches. It was said that they and two of the pseudoshamans still used peyote in
the illicit practices of witchcraft and love magic ceremonies, rites which are
potentially dangerous to those who perform them. The shamans, considered to be
legitimate possessors of peyote power, were not punished by that power for their
actions. However, the peyote had "turned back" on the pseudoshamans. As a
consequence, one of them lost one of his legs in an accident and the other was
castigated indirectly when one of his close relatives was killed and another
lost a limb.
Let us turn now to a brief and partial
recapitulation of facets of current socialization practices. R. M. Boyer (1962)
found that child-rearing techniques tend to be uniform in emotional content, and
usually in actual practice, provided the mother has been brought up on the
reservation. Further, during the prelatency period of a child's growth,
socialization practices strongly resemble aboriginal tactics.
Typically, there is gross inconsistency in the maternal care of children.
Frequently, the baby of the family is afforded tender and loving care but
periodically the mother will impulsively abandon the infant to the supervision
of others, sometimes to children of only four or five years of age, for hours or
days while she engages in narcissistic pursuits, commonly involving drinking.
Ordinarily, a husband does not object to such treatment of small children
because his attention and regard are no more constant. Under such conditions,
the development of a sense of basic trust (Erikson, 1950) is Stultified; one
result is the marked ambivalence and suspiciousness which form aspects of Apache
personality.
With the birth of a baby, usually when the
previous child is 18 to 24 months old, the older child is abruptly, and often
brutally, displaced. The resultant sibling rivalry is intense but strongly
disapproved. Nevertheless, its repression is insecure and its effects become
blatantly manifest when teenagers and adults are under the influence of alcohol.
We refer here to only two of the severe psychological traumata encountered by
growing children.
In the aboriginal situation, other
socialization practices were reasonably effective in directing hostilities
engendered by such child-rearing practices, for example, those mentioned above
toward outsiders, witches, ghosts and other culturally defined objects. During
the long period when these Apaches were nomadic hunters, gatherers, and raiders,
such externalization of aggression served to strengthen group solidarity. With
changing life conditions, in the presence of feeble repression of interfamilial
and intragroup resentments, individuals' hatreds are generally discharged in
manners which result in anomie and various forms of self-destruction (Boyer and
Boyer, 1972)·
L. B. Boyer's essential research method
consisted of conducting psychoanalytically oriented investigative interviews
(Boyer, 1964a). He had from 1 to 145 interviews each with 60 different persons
of both sexes, ranging in age from 4 to 65 years. He found a personality
configuration which was typical for these Apaches.
They are
impulse-ridden, fear loss of control, especially of feebly repressed hostile
urges, and are suggestible and phobic. They tend to avoid introspection and seek
outer controls and explanations for their behavior and thoughts. They are
suspicious and dependent and their libidinal attachments are unstable. The men,
who are caught between passive and aggressive urges, have insecure sexual
identities. The typical Apache personality configuration corresponds with the
Western psychiatric diagnosis of character disorder with hysterical and
impulsive attributes.
L. B. Boyer was generally considered to
be a shaman and, accordingly, was in an unusually good position to learn about
shamans and their activities. He found them to have personality configurations
that concur with those which are typical for the Apaches, differing only to the
degree to which they successfully employ imposture and in their having greater
creative potential (Boyer, 1962).3 They are not autocultural deviants who have
resolved serious psychopathological conditions through assuming shamanistic
roles (Ackerknecht, 1943; Devereux, 1956; Silverman, 1967)· The personality
structure of the impostor as delineated by psychoanalysts (Greenacre, 1958) is
clinically similar to that of the usual Apache shaman.
A
capacity to regress in the service of the ego (Kris, 1952) and an ego-controlled
availability of primary process thinking (Freud, 191·5) are related to
creativity and showmanship. These characteristics appear to be necessary for the
successful practice of shamanism and for convincing impostureship. It is
noteworthy that the pseudoshamans who were interviewed were found clinically to
lack creative potentials and the capacity to use regression in the service of
the ego.
Because it was impossible to conduct psychiatric
interviews in depth with all of the shamans and pseudoshamans, the Rorschach
test was employed as a research adjunct. Protocols were obtained from all
Apaches of fifty years of age and older (referred to here as the old-age group),
12 of the 13 shamans and 7 pseudoshamans (Boyer, Klopfer, Brawer, and Kawai,
1964). The protocols of the shamans and pseudoshamans were compared with those
of the old-age group and with each other. As expected, the protocols of the
old-age group showed hysterical signs. The shamans demonstrated more hysterical
signs and, additionally, a way of handling data with keener awareness of
peculiarities and more selective theoretical interest; they had creative
characteristics and a high degree of reality testing potential in addition to a
capacity to regress in the service of the ego. Viewed heteroculturally, or
within Devereux's framework of the ideal psychological normal, they more nearly
approached normality than did their culture mates." The personality of the
pseudoshamans was strikingly different. They were not hysterical, had variable
degrees of reality testing potential, and impoverished personalities. Klopfer
concluded from indirect data that the shamans were able to use imposture
convincingly whereas pseudoshamans could not.
COMMENT
Historical and modern data provide some partial
and tentative answers to the intriguing question of why the Mescaleros abandoned
the use of peyote in shamanistic rituals and today forbid its use.
Apache child-rearing practices engender much hostility. Aggression was
and is addressed institutionally toward outsiders, witches, ghosts, and cultural
bogies in an attempt to produce individual repression of hostile impulses
originally directed toward familial and societal members. The effort was more
effective aboriginally but has never been strikingly successful. In the past, as
today, when individuals were under the influence of hallucinogens, including
alcohol, their unstable repression of hateful impulses toward parent and sibling
surrogates became blatantly overt and threatened tribal unity.
The use of peyote in the camps introduced a foreign element into Apache
shamanistic procedures, the simultaneous assumption of authority by more than
one practitioner. Each of them vied for supremacy of power and status. The
physiopsychological effects of the hallucinogen reduced the efficacy of their
repression of the hostilities which had resulted from their socialization
experiences.
The drug-induced regression resulted in their
releasing aggression in its earlier, childish form, directly toward parent and
sibling surrogates. Bloodshed and feuds occurred; the Apache wisely banned the
peyote camps.
It would appear that the ascription of the
quality of evil to peyote (power), an act which involved basic deviation from
the conceptualization of power without intrinsic properties of good or evil, was
intended to deny the presence of intragroup hostility.
The use
of peyote was proscribed for shamans; thenceforth it was employed by possessors
of supernatural power solely in witchcraft rituals, as was owl power, and love
magic practices.
It can be no coincidence that only peyote and
owl power have been considered to be evil in themselves. In each instance,
murderous wishes are projected onto the power in question.
The
Mescaleros, Chiricahuas, and Lipans fear the use of peyote for two stated
reasons: (1) it has an evil power which will drive them to do evil and (2) it
causes hallucinations, that is, reduces their capacity to perceive and judge
external reality accurately.
There is fear of the visual
aberrations and of the strange qualities of movement encountered. In the first
case, intrapersonal asocial tendencies are projected onto the peyote. Sexual
transgressions arouse little overt anxiety among these Apaches except when
inter-generational incest has occurred, but they fear their poorly controlled
aggressive impulses. The second case is similar. The Apaches may displace their
fear of loss of control over destructive urges onto fear of loss of control of
perceptual accuracy.
A number of questions remain, of which we
shall deal briefly with three.
First, why did two shamans
continue to use peyote in illicit practices! Both were considered to be very
powerful and were feared by most Apaches. Black Eyes, intoxicated, frequently
bragged that he was a witch and once flaunted peyote buttons before the
psychoanalytic author. Ancient One had no need to flaunt his witchcraft
potential. He was said to have killed many individuals, both tribal enemies and
Apaches, sometimes by means which appeared to have required the intervention of
the supernatural. His own children were so awed by his presumed powers that they
even hesitated to whisper their conviction that he was a witch. Perhaps these
two men deemed themselves to be so strong that they were above social sanctions
and continued to use peyote both to demonstrate their contempt for their fellow
Mescaleros and for material purposes. It is probable that they could demand
greater recompense and command greater respect from performing rituals which
were conceptualized as illegitimate in Apache practice and belief.
Second, why did two pseudoshamans use peyote in their rituals? They had
impoverished personalities, and were generally scorned both as shamans and
witches and employed solely by the most suggestible. We postulate that they used
peyote in an attempt to raise their esteem in their eyes and those of others,
hoping that they would truly become powerful if they could exploit the effects
of the hallucinogens. Each of them confided to L. B. Boyer while intoxicated
that they doubted their own claims of power possession and consciously sought to
deceive others.
Third, the use of alcohol among these Apaches
is commonplace. While it is officially and to some extent socially disapproved,
it is accepted as "one way of life," a way accepted even prior to white
domination. Under its influence, hallucinosis is frequent, and exceedingly
violent actions often occur. Further, in the drunken state, perception is
blurred and distorted, paralleling one aspect of the experiences induced by the
ingestion of peyote. Why, then, was the use of alcohol socially permissible,
while peyote was proscribed? A significant reason would appear to be the
incorporation of peyote into the shamanistic ritual complex from the time of its
introduction to the Apaches; the consumption of alcohol, to our knowledge, has
never been culturally acceptable in ceremonial contexts. Where the group
situation at peyote meetings fostered conflict centering on the varying powers
controlled by and controlling particular individuals, aggression released during
drinking parties was channeled outside the personally mediated world of the
supernatural.
It will be most interesting to observe future
Apache involvement with hallucinogens, inasmuch as their use has become
commonplace among adolescents and young adults throughout the United States.
Will the ban against the use of peyote extend to other hallucinatory agents with
which Apaches may become familiar in their increasing intercourse with the world
beyond the reservation? Or, might acquaintance with some hallucinogens pave the
way for the re-definition of peyote, especially in view of the diminished
commitment of the majority of present-day Apaches to the system of supernatural
beliefs associated with shamanism?
Research designed to answer
these and related questions should yield significant data for cross-cultural
comparison of processes of sociocultural change.
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