Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [49]
Once in the tipi, I found that skipping the altered state was, from a culinary point of view, less of a sacrifice than I had imagined.When the peyote man first came around with his coffee can full of dark brown sludge and spooned the peyote paste into my mouth—using the same teaspoon for everyone, I noticed—I nearly choked on the acrid taste and lima-bean-like texture. Just as I was recovering from the paste, another man thrust a silver bowl in front of me. I reached into what felt like a mass of writhing worms and plucked out a peyote button, the cactus herb itself. I held the soggy yellow button reverently in my hand until he had moved on, and then quietly dropped it on the dirt behind me. I looked up to find a third man kneeling before me with a jug of green liquid—peyote tea—which he pressed to my lips before I could brace myself.
The trinity of peyote would return every two hours or so, but after the second circuit I politely declined, leaving myself in a wired but not altered state. At just after midnight, the drumming ceased, catapulting us into silence, save for the hiss of the fire. Eventually the Navajo woman in the place of honor cleared her throat, and we all turned to gaze at her.
“I want to thank you for praying with me,” Mary Ann began in a reedy voice. “I know that the peyote and your prayers will heal me. Now I want to tell you something I have never told anyone.” She paused, looking around the circle. “I need to confess to the fire.”
Jesus as Chemical Compound
I had met Mary Ann the morning before. She showed up just as a group of us—about a dozen Navajos, a Harvard professor, his wife, and I—were heading off to set up the tipi for Mary Ann’s healing ceremony the next night. She had come to work out the last-minute details.
My instant impression was that this was a woman in long-term pain: She was sixty-four, and her golden face bore deep lines around her nose and mouth, which was set in grim resignation. She jackknifed slightly at the waist, bent in discomfort.When I introduced myself as a journalist who would be attending her ceremony, she poured out her story of shingles and unreceptive doctors and unrelenting pain.
“I’ve been suffering, suffering for five months now,” she said, her voice wavering. “I can’t get out of bed. My husband has to do everything for me.” Her husband, frail and ancient, nodded soberly.“Tonight I’m going to ask the peyote to help me. I’m putting faith in the medicine to heal me.”
I murmured sympathetically. I thought it unlikely that mescaline would do the trick.
Her wording captured the difference between Native Americans and a white girl like me. I thought of peyote as a chemical compound that alters consciousness; they thought of it as a divine gift throbbing with supernatural power. In my conversations with Mary Ann and others, I noticed that Navajos referred to peyote as a being, a personality. One called it the flesh of God, another called it a spirit. A third said it was holy medicine intended by the Creator only for native people.
Peyote, Andy Harvey explained, is “a sacrament.”
With laugh lines around his eyes and mouth, Andy’s face welcomed all strangers. His lustrous black hair took a decade off his forty-nine years. His stocky body suggested that he had not seen much physical labor since he began working for the economic development office of the Navajo Nation.
Peyote is like the Eucharist for a Catholic, he said. It is God, and it opens the way to God.
“We take it, we pray with it, and we ask the Creator to help us in the experiences that we would have as we ingest that peyote. So in a sense we ask the peyote to help us to come to realize certain