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Confession and the Headless Man

“I need to confess to the fire,” Mary Ann said, studying the flames as if to confirm they were ready to listen.

“One night, about twenty years ago, I was driving through Utah with my kids,” she began.“It was the middle of the night, and we were coming over a hill. Suddenly, there was a man waving at me to stop, but we were going too fast. And then I saw a body lying in the road—he was already dead, but I ran over him, I couldn’t stop. I think I ran over his head.”

Startled and relieved that the endless drumming had ceased, I glanced around the circle to see if anyone had registered what may have been a confession to vehicular homicide. They merely smiled benignly, heads swaying happily like bobble-head dolls, and stared into the fire.

“I know I didn’t kill him, but he kept haunting me,” Mary Ann continued, a bit frantic now. “Once, a few years later, I was in my car, waiting outside a [peyote] ceremony. And a headless man jumped up outside my car window. I screamed. I was so scared. Sometimes I still see him.”

She began to cry. “I need him to forgive me. I know I’m in pain because he hasn’t forgiven me. I need peyote to heal me.”

Mary Ann fell silent, and Fred, the “roadman” orchestrating the ceremony, began to chant prayers in Diné. The peyote man grabbed his tin full of paste and scooped a spoonful into Mary Ann’s mouth, as a mother bird feeds worms to her chick ... one scoop, two, three, four, five scoops, then a peyote button, washing it down with several gulps of peyote tea.

Mary Ann leaned back, sated. The drummers resumed their chanting. Two hours passed.

Two-thirty a.m.: “I had a vision,” Mary Ann stated, “a vision of a bald eagle.”

The others nodded. The peyote men fetched their medicine, and the group consumed the mescaline again, all except me. Then I noticed Mika, John Halpern’s Japanese wife. She bowed forward as in a formal tea ceremony and, her face a mask of stoicism, rid herself of the sacred herb. No more peyote for Mika. Two more hours of drumming, and then, at four-thirty a.m., Mary Ann spoke again.

“The shingles are gone!” she cried triumphantly. “The peyote has healed me!”

Right, I thought, let’s revisit this issue in forty-eight hours.

The next three and a half hours crawled by in comically slow motion. The ache in my legs escalated minute by minute, although this did inspire prayer: Please, God, let this end. I found myself gazing at the smoke hole at the top of the tipi, willing with all my might for the inky black sky to turn blue. But I was also mesmerized by the prayers and chants, and for the briefest of moments I did not want the ceremony to end. At eight a.m., eleven hours after we had crawled into the tipi, the roadman and his wife passed around water, corn, meat, and fruit as a ritual closing. The ceremony ended with a final blessing for Mary Ann: six spoonfuls of peyote paste, a button, and tea. There goes that interview, I thought as I watched her final peyote hurrah.

After the ceremony, a gauzy-eyed Mary Ann told me she was “too peyoted up” to talk with me, as did most others I tried to interview. After a few hours of waiting around, I reluctantly started off for Albuquerque without hearing Mary Ann’s story.

Wending through the mountains of Navajo country, I reflected that the ceremony I had just witnessed was more parts Catholic Church than Berkeley party. The tipi fire, and the church candles. The sacrament as peyote, and as a wafer. Confession to the fire and the people, to Christ and the priest. The Diné chants, and the Gregorian. The offering of food, and the collection plate. And after the service, in each case, the breaking of bread.

Still, peyote’s chemical makeup made me question how mystical the experiences can be. Knowing God through psychedelics. Seeing God through hallucinations. Hearing God through the serotonin system. Is it real? For Navajos, yes. Is the Eucharist the body of Christ? For Catholic believers, yes. Do I communicate with God through prayer? Yes, I believe I do, and when I am praying deeply, my brain waves no