After the sixties the whole issue of peyote became one of those no-win political contests between individual freedom on the one hand and democracy on the other. Clearly LSD was injuring some innocent people with hallucinations that led to their death, and clearly the majority of Americans wanted drugs such as LSD made illegal. But the majority of Americans were not Indians and certainly they were not members of the Native American Church. There was a persecution of a religious minority going on here, something that’s not supposed to happen in America.
The majority opposition to peyote reflected a cultural bias, the belief, unsupported by scientific or historical evidence, that hallucinatory experience is automatically bad. Since hallucinations are a form of insanity, the term hallucinogen is clearly pejorative. Like early descriptions of Buddhism as a heathen religion and Islam as barbaric, it begs some metaphysical questions. The Indians who use it as part of their ceremony might with equal accuracy call it a de-hallucinogen, since it’s their claim that it removes the hallucinations of contemporary life and reveals the reality buried beneath them.
There is actually some scientific support for this Indian point of view. Experiments have shown that spiders fed LSD do not wander around doing purposeless things as one might expect a hallucination would cause them to do, but instead spin an abnormally perfect, symmetrical web. That would support the de-hallucinogen thesis. But politics seldom depends on facts for its decisions.
Behind the index card for the PEYOTE slips was another card called RESERVATION. There were more than a hundred RESERVATION slips describing that ceremony Dusenberry and Phædrus attended — way too many. Most would have to be junked. He’d made them because at one time it looked as though the whole book would center around this long night’s meeting of the Native American Church. The ceremony would be a kind of spine to hold it all together. From it he would branch out and show in tangent after tangent the analysis of complex realities and transcendental questions that first emerged in his mind there.
The place can be seen from U.S. 212, about two-hundred yards from the highway, but all you see from the road is tar-papered shacks and grungy dogs and maybe a poorly dressed Indian walking on an earth footpath past some junked cars. As if to make a point of the shabbiness, a clean white steeple of a missionary church stands in the middle of all this.
Away from the steeple, off by itself (and probably gone by now) was a large teepee that looked like it might have been put up as a tourist attraction except that there was no way you could drive to it from the road and there were no billboards or signs around advertising anything for sale.
The physical distance to that teepee from the highway was about two-hundred yards, but culturally the distance bridged with Dusenberry that night was more like thousands of years. Phædrus couldn’t have gone that distance without the peyote. He would have just sat there observing all this objectively like a well-trained anthropology student. But the peyote prevented that. He didn’t observe, he participated, exactly as Dusenberry had intended he should do.
From twilight, when the peyote buttons were passed around, until midnight he sat staring across the flames of the ceremonial fire. The ring of Indian faces around the edge of the teepee had seemed ominous at first in the alternating light and shadow from the fire. The faces seemed misshapen, with sinister expressions like the story-book Indians of old; then that illusion passed and they seemed merely inscrutable.
After that there was a scaling down of thoughts that occurs whenever you adjust to a new physical situation. What am I doing here? he wondered. I wonder how things are doing now back home?… How am I going to get those English papers corrected by Monday?… and so on. But the thoughts gradually became less and less demanding and he settled down more and more into where he was and what he was watching.
Sometime after midnight, after he had listened to the singing and beating on the drum for hours and hours, something began to change. The exotic aspects began to fade. Instead of being an onlooker, feeling greater and greater distance from all this, his perceptions began to go in the opposite direction. He began to feel a warmth toward the songs. He murmured to John Wooden Leg, the Indian sitting next to him, John, that’s a great song! and he meant it. John looked at him with surprise.
Some huge unexpected change was taking place in his attitude toward this music and toward the people who were singing it. Something in the way they spoke and handled things and related to each other struck a resonance too, way deep inside him, at levels that had seldom resonated favorably to anything.
He couldn’t figure out what it was. Was the peyote just making him sentimental? He didn’t think so. It ran deeper than sentimentality. Sentimentality is a narrowing of experience to the emotionally familiar. But this was something new opening up. There was a contradiction here. It was something new opening up that gave the sentimental feeling someone might get from his childhood home when he sees a tree he once climbed or a swing he used to play on. A feeling of coming home. Coming home to some place he had never been before.
Why should he feel at home? This was the last place on earth where he should feel that.
He really didn’t. Only a part of him felt at home. The other part still felt estranged and analytic and watchful. It seemed as though he was splitting into two people, one of whom wanted to stay there forever, and the other wanted to leave immediately. The latter one he understood, but who was this first person? This first person was a mystery.
This first person seemed like it must be some secret side of his personality, a dark side, that seldom spoke and didn’t show itself to other people. He guessed he knew about it. He just didn’t like to think about it. It was the side with the sullen, scowling, outlook; a side that didn’t like authority, had never amounted to anything, and never would, and knew that, and was sad about it, but couldn’t help it. It could never be happy anywhere but always wanted to move on.
This wild side was saying for the first time, stop wandering, and these are your real people, and that was what he began to see there, listening to the songs and drums and staring into the fire. Something about these people seemed to say to this bad side of himself, We know exactly how you feel. We feel this way ourselves.
The other side, the good analytic side, just watched, and before long it slowly began to spin an enormous symmetrical intellectual web, larger and more perfect than any it had ever spun before.
The nucleus of this intellectual web was the observation that when the Indians entered the teepee, or went out, or added logs, or passed the ceremonial peyote, or pipe, or food, they just did these things. They didn’t go about doing them. They just did them. There was no waste motion. When they moved a branch into the fire to build it up they just moved it. There was no sense of ceremony. They were engaged in a ceremony but the way they did it there wasn’t any ceremony.