THE PEYOTE CULT

THE PEYOTE CULT

 

By Weston La Barre

 

The Peyote Cult by Weston La Barre (1915-1996) is the classic work on peyotism, originating in Weston La Barre’s studies of the use of peyote in the rituals of fifteen Native American tribes in the 1930s. It has been revised many times. This is the latest edition (the fifth, enlarged edition), now back in print. 

For decades, readers on peyotism have enjoyed Weston La Barre's fascinating original study, which began when the author at age twenty-four, studied the rites of Native American tribes using Lophophora williamsii, the small, spineless, carrot-shaped peyote cactus growing in the Rio Grande Valley and Southward. 

The Peyote Cult includes discussions of contemporary drug culture and experiments with altered states of consciousness and psychedelic drugs, including Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert and Carlos Casteneda. La Barre looks at the legal aspects of drug use, ritual drug use (including in the Native American Church), and the increasing spread of peyotism from the South-West to other Native American tribes. La Barre also explores related issues, such as anthropology, economics, chemistry, botany, pharmacology, and archeology. 

 

The Peyote Cult is still quite generally considered to be the one outstanding work on peyote... La Barre follows the search for the ‘mystic experience’ through use of chemical substances - a new fashion albeit as old as history - in an unusually objective manner.

 

Richard Evans Schultes, Psychedelic Review

 

The Peyote Cult includes extensive bibliographic and reference material, including lengthy and in-depth bibliographical essays and notes on audio and media material as well as journals and books. 

Illustrated with photographs and diagrams., and an index. 

 

WESTON LA BARRE 

 

Weston La Barre is best known for his work in anthropology and ethnography, in which he drew on the theories of psychoanalysis and psychiatry. Born in Uniontown, PA, La Barre studied at Princeton and Yale, and later taught at Rutgers, Wisconsin and Duke universities. La Barre conducted field work across North and South America, and later through India, China, Africa and Europe. He studied the Plains Indians and their peyote cult with Richard Evans Schultes (which resulted in the 1938 book The Peyote Cult). La Barre's masterwork is The Ghost Dance: The Origin of Religion (1970), which draws together his explorations of shamanism, world religion, Native American culture, altered states of consciousness and the use of drugs in belief systems. His other books include The Human Animal (1954), They Shall Take Up Serpents (1962), Culture In Context (1990), and Muelos (1985). 

 

 

BOOKS BY WESTON LA BARRE

 

The Peyote Cult ••• The Aymara Indians of the Lake Titicaca Plateau ••• The Human Animal ••• Materia Medica of the Aymara ••• They Shall Take up Serpents: Psychology of the Southern Snakehandling Cult ••• Shadow of Childhood: Neoteny and the Biology of Religion ••• The Ghost Dance: The Origins of Religion ••• Culture in Context, Selected Writings of Weston La Barre ••• Muelos: A Stone Age Superstition About Sexuality