Peyote

Jackson's Tarot Cards.

[laughs] Or Jackson's Peyote, uh, Peyote Takes.

We'll just have you do a bunch of peyote before the show on Friday, and then you just kind of pick the winners.

I mean, I wouldn't like to do that, but it'd be a hell of a radio show, so I'll do it.

You know, I didn't mind LSD, but Mushrooms really knocked me around.

I mean, I had a couple of amazing experiences with Peyote.

real peyote, powdered peyote.

But not so much mushrooms.

Drugs.

We have episode title Peyote from Sacrament to Schedule 1.

And I purposely use Schedule 1 part of the title because I wholeheartedly disagree with the fact that it should be a Schedule 1 drug.

110%.

I agree.

A tiny spineless cactus has been used as medicine, sacrament, and a pathway to altered consciousness for thousands of years.

Peyote.

Indigenous communities have cultivated deep spiritual and medicinal traditions around this plant, and then Western medicine got curious.

Physical purging, vomiting, shaking, crying is considered a normal and often horrible welcomed part of the process, understood as literal and energetic release happening together.

Peyote, Lophophora williamsii, is a small spineless cactus native to the Chihuahuan Desert of northern Mexico and southern Texas, containing the psychoactive alkaloid mescaline.

Among the Huichol people specifically, ceremony centers on Tatarari, the sacred fire, around which participants gather to consume peyote buttons, while a marakame, a trained shaman singer, chants through the entire night, understood as opening nierikas, interdimensional portals connecting participants to ancestral and spirit presences.

This differs in real structure from ceremony within the Native American church itself, which developed its own distinct format, typically held inside a teepee through the night, led by a designated roadman guiding the ceremony's course, with a fireman tending a central sacred fire and a cedar woman or water woman bringing water at dawn to close the ceremony.

Drumming and prayer songs carry participants through until sunrise.

I find it interesting that this ceremony also includes water as we've explored water in the beginning of season two and the thresholds that people understand are being crossed in many cultures using water.

Peyote's legal history in the United States is worth knowing directly.

since it's genuinely unique among every substance in this episode.

Poppy seeds, you can eat it every day.

Yeah, but I'm saying, oh, I'm thinking of Paiote.

Stop it, never mind.

What, peyote? Yeah, peyote.