“Each year, more than two million visitors enjoy the attractions of the Western Hill Country, with Uvalde as its portal, and the lower Pecos River canyonlands, which stretch roughly along US 90 from Brackettville, through Del Rio, and on to the west. Amistad National Recreation Area, the Judge Roy Bean Visitors’ Center and Botanical Garden, Seminole Canyon State Park, and the Briscoe-Garner Museum in Uvalde, along with ghost towns, ancient rock art, sweeping vistas, and unique flora and fauna, are just a few of the features that make this distinctive section of the Lone Star State an enticing destination.
“Now, veteran writer, blogger, and educator Mary S. Black serves up the best of this region’s special adventures and secret treasures. From the Frio to Del Rio is chock-full of helpful maps, colorful photography, and tips on where to stay, what to do, and how to get there. In addition there are details for 10 scenic routes, 3 historic forts and 7 state parks and other recreation areas.”
Mary S. Black
C.M. MAYO: What inspired you to write this book?
MARY S. BLACK: I think what inspired me was the land itself, and the history. The Lower Pecos Canyonlands are not well known by most people, but the landscape is incredibly majestic and unexpected. You can be driving 70 miles per hour down the highway through the desert, when, wham, a huge canyon veers off to the left like a sudden tear in the earth.
These canyons were inhabited by human beings for thousands of years. They lived off the land and made paintings on the canyon walls that illustrate their gods and belief systems. Over 300 of these paintings still exist, and you can visit some of them. They are a treasure of human culture, and I hope more people will learn to value them as something important for us to save. The people who settled this area historically were a diverse bunch with a lot of gumption. Do people know that word anymore? I guess in modern language, we might say they had a lot of guts.
C.M. MAYO: In your view, what is the most underrated place in this region?
MARY S. BLACK: If I have to pick only one, I’ll say Las Moras Springs Pool at Ft. Clark in Brackettville. I’m always looking for great swimming holes. Las Moras Springs Pool is the third largest spring-fed swimming pool in Texas. Crystal clear water at a year-round temperature of about 70 degrees comes into the pool from a strongly flowing spring, yet very few people swim there because they don’t know how to get access.
The pool is located on Ft. Clark, and old U.S. Army fort originally built in 1849. You can get a day-pass for $5.00 at the guard house to enter the fort, enjoy the pool or play golf on either of two gold courses, and look at all the old stone buildings that remain from when the place was an active Army fort. There is also a really interesting museum there that is open on Saturdays.
C.M. MAYO: Which is your favorite place?
MARY S. BLACK: Hands down, the White Shaman Preserve. The best studied of all the ancient murals is located there. This is a polychrome painting about 25 feet long and 13 feet high done on a rock wall overlooking the Pecos River. This painting tells a story about creation and how the sun was born, according to Dr. Carolyn Boyd. You can visit the preserve on Saturdays at noon if you make a reservation online through the Witte Museum. Tours are two-three hours long, and require a fairly strenuous hike down a canyon to a rockshelter, then back up. But to be up there, to see the mural up close and in person, to look out over the river and imagine the people who made this painting, can change your whole perspective. It’s that powerful.
C.M. MAYO: Your favorite seasonal or annual event?
MARY S. BLACK: I have two: autumn color near Lost Maples State Natural Area near Vanderpool, and tubing in the cold Frio river in summer. Both are unique experiences in Texas and shouldn’t be missed. An isolated stand of bigtooth maple turns orange and red in Sabinal Canyon in late November. And swimming in the Frio at Garner State Park is like heaven on a hot day.
C.M. MAYO: What surprised you in researching this book?
MARY S. BLACK: How fascinating the area really is. The more I learned, the more I wanted to know. The region has seven state parks and natural areas, nine ghost towns, three historic Army forts, and many scenic drives. But the coolest part was reading about all the crazy things that have happened there, like train robberies and early airplane adventures. And Indian battles. When settlers from the US and Mexico started coming in after the Civil War, the native Apaches and Comanches were fighting for their lives. And of course the U.S. Army was trying to drive them out. It gets complicated, but there were many interesting people involved in all this, like the Black Seminole Indian Scouts at Ft. Clark, and others. One of the first settlers in the Nueces River valley was a woman named Jerusha Sanchez, who came in the 1860s. Later a widow named Elizabeth Hill and her three sons also pioneered in the area. Blacks, women, immigrants from Italy, Mexico, Germany, and other places, and Native Americans made the history what it is.
C.M. MAYO: You offer an excellent bibliography for further reading. If you could recommend only three of these books, which would they be?
MARY S. BLACK: Hmm, they are so different, let me see. First I think Carolyn Boyd’s new book, which is called simply The White Shaman Mural, just published by University of Texas Press in 2016. She details her 25 years of research on the painting in this book and explains how she cracked the code on what it means, an amazing accomplishment.
Then I nominate Judge Roy Bean Country by Jack Skiles, published in 1996, which is a compilation of local stories of life in the Lower Pecos. The Skiles family has been ranching in the area for over 75 years and can tell stories about mountain lions and smugglers that will make you faint.
Finally, one I found fascinating was The Newton Boys: Portrait of an Outlaw Gang by Willis and Joe Newton as told to Claude Stanush, published in 1994. It tells how they became train robbers and learned to blow bank safes with nitroglycerin, which they did in Texas and the Midwest all through the 1920s. By the time they were captured, they had stolen more money than all other outlaws at the time combined.
August 2019 finds me on vacation. Nonetheless, each Monday this month I will be offering posts from the archive (as usual, look for a workshop post on the second Monday, Q & A with a fellow writer on the fourth Monday).
On the Trail of the Rock Art of the Lower Pecos
Originally posted on Madam Mayo blog November 3, 2015
Remote as they are, the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of the US-Mexico border have a strangely magnetic pull. That may sound like a wild assertion, but the evidence comprises over 200 shamanistic rock art sites, many of them thousands of years old, and the fact that dozens of rock art enthusiasts, including myself, find themselves returning again and again.
It was on a meltingly hot August day in 2014 that I made my first foray into the canyonlands for the Rock Art Foundation’s visit to Meyers Spring. A speck of an oasis tucked into the vast desert just west of the Pecos, Meyers Spring’s limestone overhang is vibrant with petrographs, both ancient, but very faded, and of Plains Indians works including a brave on a galloping horse, an eagle, a sun, and what appears to be a missionary and his church.
I took home the realization that with Meyers Spring I had taken one nibble of the richest of banquets. In addition the rock art of the Plains Indians—Apaches and Comanches— of historic times, the Lower Pecos Canyonlands are filled with prehistoric art, principally Pecos River, Red Linear, and Red Monochrome. Of the three, Pecos River is comparable to the best known Paleolithic rock in the world, the caves of Lascaux in France.
I would have to return to the canyonlands— alas for my book’s time and travel budget! Not that the Rock Art Foundation charges more than a nominal sum for its tours. The individual tour to Meyers Spring, which lasted four hours, cost a mere 30 dollars. Everyone involved, including the guides, works for the foundation for free.
By December of 2014 I was back for another Rock Art Foundation tour, this one down into Eagle Nest Canyon in Langtry. Apart from rock shelters with their ancient and badly faded petrographs, cooking debris, tools, and even a mummy of a woman who—scientists have determined— died of chagas, Eagle Nest Canyon is the site of Bonfire Shelter, the earliest and the second biggest bison jump, after Canada’s Head Bashed-In, in North America. Some 10,000 years ago hunters drove hundreds of prehistoric bison—larger than today’s bison—over the cliff. And in 800 BC, hunters drove a herd of modern bison over the same cliff, so many animals that the decaying mass of unbutchered and partially butchered carcasses spontaneously combusted. In deeper layers dated to 14,000 years, archaeologists have found bones of camel, horse, and mammoth, among other megafauna of the Pleistocene.
DESCENT INTO EAGLE NEST CANYON, DECEMBER 2014
Then in the spring of this year I visited the Lewis Canyon site on the shore of the Pecos, with its mesmerizing petroglyphs of bear claws, atlatls, and stars, and, behind a morass of boulders, an agate mirror of a tinaja encircled by petrographs.
LEWIS CANYON PETROGLYPHS, MAY 2015
LEWIS CANYON TINAJA SITE WITH PETROGRAPHS, BY THE PECOS RIVER, MAY 2015
Not all but most of the Lower Pecos Canyonland rock art sites— and this includes Meyers Spring, Eagle Nest Canyon and Lewis Canyon— are on private property. Furthermore, visits to Meyers Spring, Lewis Canyon, and many other sites require a high clearance vehicle for a tire-whumping, paint-scraping, bone-jarring drive in. So I was beginning to appreciate the magnitude of the privilege it is to visit these sites. At Lewis Canyon, as I stood on the limestone shore of the sparkling Pecos in utter silence but for the crunch of the boots of my fellow tour members, I learned that less than 50 people a year venture to float down its length.
This October I once again traveled to the Lower Pecos, this time for the Rock Art Foundation’s annual three day Rock Art Rendezvous. Offered this year were the three sites I had already visited, plus a delectable menu that included White Shaman, Fate Bell, and—not for those prone to vertigo— Curly Tail Panther.
WHITE SHAMAN, OCTOBER 2015
Just off Highway 90 near its Pecos River crossing, the White Shaman Preserve serves as the headquarters for Rock Art Rendezvous. After a winding drive on dirt road, I parked near the shade structure. From there, the White Shaman rock art site was a brief but rugged hike down one side of cactus-studded canyon, then up the other. I was glad to have brought a hiking pole and leather gloves. No knee surgery on the horizon, either. When I arrived at White Shaman, named after the central luminous figure, the sun was low in the sky, bathing the shelter’s wall and its reddish drawings in gold and turning the Pecos, far below, where an occasional truck droned by, deep silver.
The next morning, at the Rock Art Foundation’s tour of the Shumla Archaeological and Research Center in nearby Comstock, I heard Dr. Carolyn Boyd’s stunning talk about her book, The White Shaman Mural: An Enduring Creation Narrative in the Rock Art of the Lower Pecos, which is forthcoming in 2016 from University of Texas Press. Dr. Boyd, whose work is based on 25 years of archaeological research in the Lower Pecos and a meticulous study of Mexican anthropology, argues that White Shaman, which is many thousands of years old, may represent the oldest known creation story in North America.
FATE BELL, OCTOBER 2015
From the White Shaman Preserve, Fate Bell is a few minutes down highway 90 in Seminole Canyon State Park. More than any other site, this shelter in the cake-like layers of the limestone walls of a canyon, reminded me of the cave art I had seen in Baja California’s Sierra de San Francisco. Inhabited on and off for some 9,000 years, Fate Bell is the largest site in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands. It has various styles of petrograph, including a spectacular group of anthropomorphs with what appear to be antlers and wings.
CURLY TAIL PANTHER, OCTOBER 2015
Curly Tail Panther is a scoop of a cave about the size of a walk-in closet, but as if for Superman to whoosh in, set dizzyingly high on a cliff-side overlooking the Devils River. The back wall has an array of petrographs: red mountain lion, anthropomorphic figures, and geometric designs. The only access to Curly Tail Panther is by way of a narrow ledge. Drop your hiking pole or your sunglasses from here, and you won’t see them again. You might lose a character, too—in the opening of Mary Black’s novel, Peyote Fire, a shaman stumbles to his death from this very ledge. The Rock Art Foundation’s website made it clear, Curly Tail Panther is not for anyone who has a fear of heights. But who doesn’t? My strategy was to take a deep breath and, like the running shoes ad says, Just do it.
“Each year, more than two million visitors enjoy the attractions of the Western Hill Country, with Uvalde as its portal, and the lower Pecos River canyonlands, which stretch roughly along US 90 from Brackettville, through Del Rio, and on to the west. Amistad National Recreation Area, the Judge Roy Bean Visitors’ Center and Botanical Garden, Seminole Canyon State Park, and the Briscoe-Garner Museum in Uvalde, along with ghost towns, ancient rock art, sweeping vistas, and unique flora and fauna, are just a few of the features that make this distinctive section of the Lone Star State an enticing destination.
“Now, veteran writer, blogger, and educator Mary S. Black serves up the best of this region’s special adventures and secret treasures. From the Frio to Del Rio is chock-full of helpful maps, colorful photography, and tips on where to stay, what to do, and how to get there. In addition there are details for 10 scenic routes, 3 historic forts and 7 state parks and other recreation areas.”
MARY S. BLACK: I think what inspired me was the land itself, and the history. The Lower Pecos Canyonlands are not well known by most people, but the landscape is incredibly majestic and unexpected. You can be driving 70 miles per hour down the highway through the desert, when, wham, a huge canyon veers off to the left like a sudden tear in the earth.
These canyons were inhabited by human beings for thousands of years. They lived off the land and made paintings on the canyon walls that illustrate their gods and belief systems. Over 300 of these paintings still exist, and you can visit some of them. They are a treasure of human culture, and I hope more people will learn to value them as something important for us to save. The people who settled this area historically were a diverse bunch with a lot of gumption. Do people know that word anymore? I guess in modern language, we might say they had a lot of guts.
C.M. MAYO: In your view, what is the most underrated place in this region?
Las Moras Springs
MARY S. BLACK: If I have to pick only
one, I’ll say Las Moras Springs Pool at Ft. Clark in
Brackettville. I’m always looking for great swimming holes.
Las Moras Springs Pool is the third largest spring-fed swimming pool in Texas.
Crystal clear water at a year-round temperature of about 70 degrees comes into
the pool from a strongly flowing spring, yet very few people swim there because
they don’t know how to get access.
The pool is located on Ft. Clark, and old U.S. Army
fort originally built in 1849. You can get a day-pass for $5.00 at the guard
house to enter the fort, enjoy the pool or play golf on either of two gold
courses, and look at all the old stone buildings that remain from when the
place was an active Army fort. There is also a really interesting museum there
that is open on Saturdays.
C.M. MAYO: Which is your favorite place?
MARY S. BLACK: Hands down, the White
Shaman Preserve. The best studied of all the ancient murals is located there.
This is a polychrome painting about 25 feet long and 13 feet high done on
a rock wall overlooking the Pecos River. This painting tells a story about
creation and how the sun was born, according to Dr. Carolyn Boyd. You can visit
the preserve on Saturdays at noon if you make a
reservation online through the Witte Museum. Tours are
two-three hours long, and require a fairly strenuous hike down a canyon to a
rockshelter, then back up. But to be up there, to see the mural up close
and in person, to look out over the river and imagine the people who made this
painting, can change your whole perspective. It’s that powerful.
C.M. MAYO: Your favorite seasonal or annual event?
MARY S. BLACK: I have two: autumn color
near Lost Maples State Natural Area near Vanderpool, and tubing in the cold
Frio river in summer. Both are unique experiences in Texas and shouldn’t be
missed. An isolated stand of bigtooth maple turns orange and red in Sabinal
Canyon in late November. And swimming in the Frio at Garner State Park is
like heaven on a hot day.
C.M. MAYO: What surprised you in researching this book?
MARY S. BLACK: How fascinating the area
really is. The more I learned, the more I wanted to know. The region
has seven state parks and natural areas, nine ghost towns, three historic Army
forts, and many scenic drives. But the coolest part was reading about all the
crazy things that have happened there, like train robberies and early airplane
adventures. And Indian battles. When settlers from the US and Mexico
started coming in after the Civil War, the native Apaches and Comanches were
fighting for their lives. And of course the U.S. Army was trying to drive them
out. It gets complicated, but there were many interesting people involved in
all this, like the Black Seminole Indian Scouts at Ft. Clark, and others. One
of the first settlers in the Nueces River valley was a woman named Jerusha
Sanchez, who came in the 1860s. Later a widow named Elizabeth Hill and her
three sons also pioneered in the area. Blacks, women, immigrants from Italy,
Mexico, Germany, and other places, and Native Americans made the history what
it is.
C.M. MAYO: You offer an excellent bibliography for further reading. If you could recommend only three of these books, which would they be?
MARY S. BLACK: Hmm, they are so
different, let me see. First I think Carolyn Boyd’s new book, which is
called simply The White Shaman
Mural, just published by University of Texas Press in 2016.
She details her 25 years of research on the painting in this book and explains
how she cracked the code on what it means, an amazing accomplishment.
Then I nominate Judge Roy Bean
Country by Jack Skiles, published in 1996, which is a
compilation of local stories of life in the Lower Pecos. The Skiles family has
been ranching in the area for over 75 years and can tell stories about mountain
lions and smugglers that will make you faint.
Finally, one I found fascinating was The Newton Boys: Portrait of an Outlaw Gang by Willis and Joe Newton as told to Claude Stanush, published in 1994. It tells how they became train robbers and learned to blow bank safes with nitroglycerin, which they did in Texas and the Midwest all through the 1920s. By the time they were captured, they had stolen more money than all other outlaws at the time combined.
P.S. As artist-in-residence I will be giving a free travel and nature writing workshop at the Guadalupe Mountains National Park over this Memorial Day weekend, details to be announced shortly on my events page.
SOME NOTES & ETC ON PEYOTE FROM THE RESEARCH FOR MY BOOK IN-PROGRESS ON FAR WEST TEXAS >> Read about my book in-progress >> Listen in to the 20 “Marfa Mondays” podcasts (mainly interviews) posted to date >> View my maps of Far West Texas
Lophohora williamsii, or peyote
Far West Texas, an area approximately the size of West Virginia, includes a goodly patch of the territory that stretches deep into Mexico where peyote, or lophophora williamsii grows… oh so very… very… very… v-e-r-y… slowly. A runty, dull-gray spineless cactus with wispy white hairs, when found, peyote– an Anglicization of the original Nahautl name, peyotl— is usually growing in clusters. What certain indigenous peoples have done for an eon is slice off the tops– the “buttons”– and eat them. Calories and dietary fiber are not the point; apparently the taste is puckerlips nasty. But adepts claim that this humble-looking plant is no less than “the divine cactus,” and eaten as a sacrament, as “holy medicine,” it can bring one’s mind into a mystical realm where psychedelic visions can help one see across time and space and heal one’s thoughts about oneself and the cosmos. As one participant in a peyote ritual reported, echoing so many others, he found “profound gratitude for his life” as it was.
PEYOTE AND THE HUICHOLS The Huichols, who live in Mexico’s Sierra Madre, are the indigenous group best known for their peyote ritual.
PEYOTE IN FRAY BERNARDINO SAHAGUN’S GENERAL HISTORY OF THE THINGS OF NEW SPAIN The first known written mention of peyote is in Franciscan missionary Bernardino de Sahagún’s Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España, or General History of the Things of New Spain. The original 16th century manuscript, which contains 2,468 colorful illustrations and text in both Spanish and Nahuatl (the language spoken by the Aztecs phonetically transcribed using Latin), is also known as the Florentine Codex because it is in the Medicea Laurencziana Library in Florence, Italy.
>> To view the digitized manuscript which contains many intriguing and colorful illustrations, but, alas, not one of peyote, click here.
Pages from the Florentine Codex. This does not show peyote, alas.
“On him who eats it or drinks it, it takes effect like mushrooms. Also he sees many things which frighten one, or make one laugh. It affects him perhaps one day, perhaps two days, but likewise it abates. However, it harms one, troubles one, makes one besotted, takes effect on one.”
(By the way, you may have noticed that I never link to wikipedia, aka The Maoist Muddle, unless there is absolutely, but absolutely, nothing else and a link really would be better than none. FYI: When I checked wikipedia for this post on the Florentine Codex, the images shown were from the wrong book.)
PEYOTE ALSO MENTIONED IN DR. FERNANDO HERNANDEZ’S DE LA HISTORIA PLANTARUM NOVAE HISPANAE In 1570 King Felipe II sent medical doctor Fernándo Hernández (1514-1587) to New Spain to survey and report on the natural resources of the colony, including plants that might be put to medical uses. In his seven years in the Valley of Mexico (Mexico City and environs), Dr. Fernández documented a multitude of plants and a long-standing and elaborate tradition of Aztec herbal medicine. Dr. Fernández’s report on 3,000 plants, in various editions and languages, did not appear in print until some decades after his death.
“Hernández died before he could publish his Natural History, and the materials were placed in the Escorial, where they were extensively consulted, copied, abstracted, and translated by generations of scientists, medical specialists, and natural philosophers before they were destroyed by fire in 1671. Hernández’s work was still regarded as authoritative on a number of New World botanical topics as late as the nineteenth century, and his writings remain in use in popular form in Mexico today.”
I have yet to get my hands on a copy of The Mexican Treasury, but as quoted in Stewart’s Peyote Religion, in turn quoting a translation from a 1916 article by William E. Safford in Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution, of peyote Dr. Fernández writes:
“Wonderful properties are attributed to this root… It causes those devouring it to be able to foresee and predict things; such, for instance, as whether the weather will remain favorable; or to discern who has stolen from them some utensils or anything else; and other things of like nature which the Chichimecs really believe them have found out. On which account this root scarcely issues forth but conceals itself in the ground, as if it did not wish to harm those who discover and eat it.”
FIRST IMAGE OF PEYOTE IN DR. HERNANDEZ’S MAGNUM OPUS, POSSIBLY… OR IN CURTIS’ BOTANICAL MAGAZINE — OR, POSSIBLY, IN THE VOYNICH MANUSCRIPT?
According to Stewart in Peyote Religion, the earliest known botanical illustration of peyote is from 1847, in Curtis’ Botanical Magazine. Hat tip to peyote and cactus blogger Lophophora, here is that very illustration, a lovely one, from the Botanicus Digital Library, Missouri Botanical Garden.
>> See the utterly fascinating 2013 paper by John D. Comegys, “The Voynich Manuscript: Aztec Herbal from New Spain.” Comegys
also notes some possible influence from the work of Dr. Hernández.
Comegy’s paper is fascinating read, and I highly recommended it for
anyone interested in rare book history, botany and/or Mexico.
From the Voynich Manuscript. Peyote? Possibly…
PEYOTE IN THE LOWER PECOS CANYONLANDS
The archaeological
record shows that peyote has been used many groups and many thousands
of years into the past in what is today northern Mexico and remote areas
along the Rio Grande on both sides of the US-Mexico border in Texas.
>>
For a novelist’s take on ancient peyote ritual in what is now the Lower
Pecos Canyonlands of Texas, see Mary S. Black’s Peyote Fire.
>>And
for more about the Lower Pecos Canyonlands and the magnificent rock art
there, see my guest-blog post for Mary S. Black here.
PEYOTE IN THE INQUISITION It is often said that the Mexican Inquisition focused on heretics, in particular conversos secretly practicing Judaism, but not indigenous. But the Inquisition did prosecute some indigenous and their use of peyote was often the issue.
Quoted in Stewart’s Peyote Religion (p. 20), in New Spain, in 16th and 17th century Catholic priests asked their parishioners:
Hast thou eaten the flesh of man? Hast thou eaten the peyote? Do you suck the blood of others? Do you adorn with flowers places where idols are kept?
(For
those not familiar with Mexican history, the first and third questions
might seem extreme. All I can say is, read the history.)
And, according to Stewart, in 1620 “the Inquisition was brought to bear against peyote.”
From American Anthropologist 44, 1942:
Irving A. Leonard, “Peyote and the Mexican Inquisition, 1620”
A quote from Leonard’s translation of a Spanish document:
“We, the Inquisitors against heretical perversity and apostasy in the City of Mexico, states and provinces of New Spain, New Galicia, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Yucatan, Verapaz, Honduras, Philippine Islands, and their districts and jurisdictions, by virtue of apostolic authority, etc. Inasmuch as the use of the herb or root called Peyote has been introduced into these Provinces for the purpose of detecting thefts, of divining other happenings, and of foretelling future events, it is an act of superstition condemned as opposed to the purity and integrity of our Holy Catholic Faith.
“This is certain because neither the said herb or any other can possess the virtue or inherent quality of producing the effects claimed, nor can any cause the mental images, fantasies and hallucinations on which the above stated divinations are based. In these latter are plainly perceived the suggestion and intervention of the Devil, the real author of this vice, who first avails himself of the natural credulity of the Indians and their tendency to idolatry, and later strikes down many other persons too little disposed to fear God and of very little faith.
“Because of these efforts the said abuse has increased in strength and is indulged in with the frequency observed. As our duty imposes upon us the obligation to put a stop to this vice and to repair the harm and grave offense to God our Lord resulting from this practice, we, after consultation and conference with learned and right-minded persons, have decreed the issuing of the present edict to each of you, one and all, by which we admonish you and summon you to obedience by virtue of your holy submission [to the Church] and under penalty of anathema…and other pecuniary and corporal penalties within our discretion. We order that henceforth no person of whatever rank or social condition can or may make use of the said herb, Peyote, nor of any other kind under any name or appearance for the same or similar purposes, nor shall he make the Indians or any other person take them, with the further warning that disobedience to these decrees shall cause us, in addition to the penalties and condemnation above stated, to take action against such disobedient and recalcitrant persons as we would against those suspected of heresy to our Holy Catholic Faith.”
In Peyote Religion, Stewart also includes a map (p.23) of the Inquisition hearings that specifically involved peyote, which were concentrated in Mexico City and surroundings, as well as scattered around what is now the main trunk of the Mexican republic (excluding the Baja California and Yucatan peninsulas). There were two cases in Manila (Philippines) in 1617 and 1639, as well as a case in 1632 as far north as Santa Fe. The case in Santa Fe involved someone who took peyote in order to divine who had stolen some of his clothing.
(For those wondering, why Manila? The answer is the China trade, wherein Spanish merchants brought the Manila Galleon or Nao de China, across the ocean to Acapulco on the Pacific Coast, and from there, by burro train and tameme, brought the goods inland to Mexico City, parts elsewhere, and via Veracruz on the Gulf, across the Caribbean and Atlantic to Spain.)
Mexico City’s Palacio de la Inquisition is now the Museo de la Escuela de Medicina (part of Mexico’s National University). You can visit that museum, see the original building, and also an exhibition on cells used by the Inquisition.
The Inquisition on Youtube — who needs The Texas Chainsaw Massacre when you can surf around for all that infinitely more creative and toe-curlingly wicked gross-out stuff about Inquisition torture now on the Internet? For those with blood pressure issues, may I suggest Monty Python instead:
Mexico’s Archivo General de la Nación also has a large collection on the Inquisition. Alas, at the time of this writing the website was down.
PEYOTE IN THE NATIVE AMERICAN CHURCH North of the US-Mexico border– into Texas and beyond– peyote is used as a sacrament in the ritual of the Native American Church (NAC). Is this legal? Yes, for members of the NAC, and only after a century of bitter struggle, with the 1994 amendment to the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, which protects the use of peyote in religious ceremonies. (Not that you, dear presumably non-Native American reader, can commence cultivating, selling, and scarfing down peyote as you please. For details, check out the current DEA status.)
Omer C. Stewart’s Peyote Religion: A History and Edward F. Anderson’s Peyote: The Divine Cactusboth provide a a history of the founding of the “peyote church” on Plains Indian and other Indian reservations in the United States.
THE PEYOTE RITUAL ARRIVES FROM MEXICO IN TEXAS AND OKLAHOMA
Chevato was a Lipan Apache born in northern Mexico who, long story short, became a member of the Mescalero Apaches roaming both Mexico and Texas, and later, of the Comanches on that tribe’s reservation in Oklahoma, thanks to his friendship with chief Quanah Parker.
His 2007 biography by his grandson, William Chebahtah, and Nancy McGown Minor, Chevato: The Story of the Apache Warrior Who Captured Hermann Lehman is both a major contribution to Comanche, Lipan Apache and Mescalero Apache history, and a gem-packed fascinating read– a must for any collection on the history of Northern Mexico and the Southwest.
Apropos of peyote, Minor writes (p.73) that the Lipans stayed near Zaragosa (in Coahuila, northern Mexico) because of its proximity to a hill where peyote grew in abundance. “The Western Lipans had been using peyote in their ceremonies since at least the 1780s, and as the Lipans were dispered out of Coahuila and into New Mexico, they brought with them their special peyote rituals.”
Apart from doing all the Wild West things Apache warriors did in those days, Chevato was a shaman and a “peyote singer,” singing special songs during the all-night ritual. Chevato’s great-grandfather was the first Lipan to make use of peyote in Mexico. Minor:
“Although the Mescaleros had used peyote in their religious ceremonies… it was the Lipan Apaches who created the form of ceremony practised by the Mescaleros by 1870 and the Comanches after 1875.”
Why 1875? The year prior to that the Quahada and other bands of Comanches had been defeated in a contest over “Anglos” taking the buffalo hunting grounds at The Second Battle of Adobe Walls, which was in the Texas Panhandle, prime buffalo hunting country. This defeat was the end of the end for the Comanches, and I believe that Quanah Parker’s adoption of the peyote ritual needs to be seen in this context.
So who was Quanah Parker? One
cannot write about Far West Texas without writing about Comanches, and
one cannot write about Comanches without writing about Quanah Parker,
and one cannot write about Quanah Parker without writing about the
Native American Church and peyote. So you can be sure, in my book I will
be writing about them.
It seems that everyone in Texas and Oklahoma already knows about Quanah Parker, the son of Comanche Chief Peta Nocona and Cynthia Ann Parker, who had been kidnapped as a child from her family’s farm in Texas and raised as a Comanche.
(The John Wayne / Natalie Wood movie The Searchers is loosely based on the novel that was, in turn, loosely based on the story of Cynthia Ann Parker.)
Although
it has little to say about peyote, one of the best books on the
Comanches and Quanah Parker and an all-star crunchy fun read is S.C.
Gywnne’s Empire of the Summer Moon. Humongously recommended.
Quanah Parker in the first two-reel western ever filmed (in 1907): “The Bank Robbery”
(zip about peyote as far as I can tell)
Screenshot of Quanah Parker from “The Bank Robbery,” 1908
UPDATE September 2, 2016 Thanks to Gene Fowler, none other, who very kindly sent me the link, I have added to that blog post this link (embed rather) to “Amada of the Gardens” a fascinating documentary on peyotera Amada Cardenas (1904-2005).
ON THE SPREAD OF PEYOTE RELIGION From the article “The Native American Church” in the Encyclopedia of the Great Plains, hosted by the Center for Great Plains Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
“While the exact origins of the Native American Church and its incorporation of peyote as a sacrament of communion are shrouded in oral history, Native believers generally agree that it began in the Southwest and worked its way up from Mexico. Among the Plains Indians, the Omahas, Poncas, Winnebagos, and Sioux readily accepted the belief system of the Native American Church.”
>>“With the Peyoteros” by Karen Olsson for The Texas Observer, March 2, 2001. Strong demand, plus fences and ranches plowed over for deer hunting, make finding peyote in the wild increasingly challenging.
“Indians from Mexico would come across hunting medicine plants and, above all, the cactus peyote. Six or seven of these men would walk up to the house wanting something to eat or water. The Indians were great beggars and always wanted you to give them anything that they could carry off. Sometimes they’d show me the different medicine plants they’d gathered and what each plant was for in curing. I learned lots from them and also from the old men and women that were my neighbors living in Mexico that came to see me at different times. One bunch of Indians came to see me from Oklahoma. They were looking for the cactus peyote. And as we talked, one said, ‘If you have faith, an ordinary rock could cure you.'”
PEYOTE TESTIMONY: YOUTUBERIE AND MORE
“Sacred Peyote”: a short documentary film about peyote and the Native American Church.
GERMAN-MEXICAN AMIGO GIVES TESTIMONY
My friend Hans Lens’ memoir. More about this anon.
GRINGOS GIVE TESTIMONYTara from “40BelowFruity” on her experience ingesting peyote
“Not
as easy experience… I was feeling a lot of nausea… deep-seated,
buried issues… I was resisting it… I started to become
overwhelmed… peyote brought [memories] to the surface…I felt like I
had been completely ripped apart and put together again… like a new
person, reborn… It has the power to heal people.”
“The Mind Divided” shares his reflections on his peyote experience and what he believes was the beautiful lesson: “Lighten up… embrace and enjoy life.”
Blogger Sara Brooke shares her experience with peyote in this post. A quote:
“It is conscious medicine, a consciousness that is far more intelligent than our own. It needs to be treated with respect and care and it honestly is something that isn’t for everyone. Psychologically, mentally, emotionally, physically and spiritually you have to be ready for it. It gives you an opportunity to face ALL parts of yourself, especially the shadow aspects. It is one of the most confronting, yet profound and worthwhile experiences I have ever had. I am eternally changed.”
(WHAT ABOUT CARLOS CASTANEDA? He did write about peyote in his several best-sellers. Alas, dude, not on my wavelength.)
AN ESOTERIC HYPOTHESIS
ABOUT PEYOTE WHICH I DO NOT INTEND TO TEST
My drug is coffee! My own
ventures into the esoteric have not been psychedelic but literary–
primarily by way of the Himalayas of reading I did for my most recent
book, Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution: Francisco I. Madero and His Secret Book, Spiritist Manual. Indeed
I read so much esoterica that my sense of cognitive dissonance went
from geyser to sputter, then a little puddle, then, well… that dried
up. So now, no problemo, I could read about oh, say, aliens tokin’ peyote. That doesn’t mean I am saying anything about aliens tokin’ peyote. I am unaware of any such report.
Scion of a wealthy family in Coahuila, Francisco I. Madero was
the leader of Mexico’s 1910 Revolution and President of Mexico from
1911-1913. I am often asked what he knew about indigenous shamanistic
traditions. I
did not find any evidence that Madero had any interest in or experience
with peyote nor, indeed, with indigenous healing traditions other than
an association, late in his short life, with his Masonic brother and
fellow Spiritist and doctor, the Mexican-German spy Dr Arnoldo Krumm-Heller, aka “Maestro Huiracocha,” author of a number of works, including El zodiaco de los incas en comparación con los aztecas, 1910.
Madero’s personal library
contained mainly French and Ango-American (some in the original, some
in Spanish translation) literature on Spiritualism, Spiritism,
Theosophy, hypnotherapy, French occultism, the Bhagavad-Gita, adventures
into Tibet, and the like. His work that I translated, Manual espiritaof 1911, references many of these works.
Educated
in France, where he discovered Spiritism and other esoteric ideas then
in vogue, Madero would have been familiar with the Hindu concept, as
conveyed to the West through the writings of various Theosophists, of
the human body as having interpenetrating “energy bodies” and specific
energy vortices known as “chakras.” Under this paradigm, my hypothesis–
and take this with a truckload of salt, I am not sure I have a clue
what I am talking about– is that ingesting peyote removes certain
neuro-filters in the pineal gland and actives a chakra so that one can clearly perceive blockages and other auric debris, and one’s own emotional body. Which chakra might that be? Heart– I guess. Just a guess.
Continuing
to follow my understanding of what could have been Madero’s
hypothetical paradigm for understanding peyote, there may also be one or
more conscious and intelligent astral entities / spirit guides
associated with the plant. This concept is eloquently articulated in
Eliot Cowan’s Plant Spirit Medicine.
Most
modern doctors and scientists would focus on peyote’s botanical,
chemical, medicinal pharmacological aspects, and specifically, their
measurable effect on the brain and body. Several chapters are devoted to
these topics in Anderson’s Peyote: The Divine Cactus.
Remote as they are, the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of the US-Mexico border have a strangely magnetic pull. That may sound like a wild assertion, but the evidence comprises over 200 shamanistic rock art sites, many of them thousands of years old, and the fact that dozens of rock art enthusiasts, including myself, find themselves returning again and again.
It was on a meltingly hot August day in 2014 that I made my first foray into the canyonlands for the Rock Art Foundation’s visit to Meyers Spring. A speck of an oasis tucked into the vast desert just west of the Pecos, Meyers Spring’s limestone overhang is vibrant with petrographs, both ancient, but very faded, and of Plains Indians works including a brave on a galloping horse, an eagle, a sun, and what appears to be a missionary and his church.
I took home the realization that with Meyers Spring I had taken one nibble of the richest of banquets. In addition the rock art of the Plains Indians—Apaches and Comanches— of historic times, the Lower Pecos Canyonlands are filled with prehistoric art, principally Pecos River, Red Linear, and Red Monochrome. Of the three, Pecos River is comparable to the best known Paleolithic rock in the world, the caves of Lascaux in France.
I would have to return to the canyonlands— alas for my book’s time and travel budget! Not that the Rock Art Foundation charges more than a nominal sum for its tours. The individual tour to Meyers Spring, which lasted four hours, cost a mere 30 dollars. Everyone involved, including the guides, works for the foundation for free.
By December of 2014 I was back for another Rock Art Foundation tour, this one down into Eagle Nest Canyon in Langtry. Apart from rock shelters with their ancient and badly faded petrographs, cooking debris, tools, and even a mummy of a woman who—scientists have determined— died of chagas, Eagle Nest Canyon is the site of Bonfire Shelter, the earliest and the second biggest bison jump, after Canada’s Head Bashed-In, in North America. Some 10,000 years ago hunters drove hundreds of prehistoric bison—larger than today’s bison—over the cliff. And in 800 BC, hunters drove a herd of modern bison over the same cliff, so many animals that the decaying mass of unbutchered and partially butchered carcasses spontaneously combusted. In deeper layers dated to 14,000 years, archaeologists have found bones of camel, horse, and mammoth, among other megafauna of the Pleistocene.
DESCENT INTO EAGLE NEST CANYON, DECEMBER 2014
Then in the spring of this year I visited the Lewis Canyon site on the shore of the Pecos, with its mesmerizing petroglyphs of bear claws, atlatls, and stars, and, behind a morass of boulders, an agate mirror of a tinaja encircled by petrographs.
LEWIS CANYON PETROGLYPHS, MAY 2015
LEWIS CANYON TINAJA SITE WITH PETROGRAPHS, BY THE PECOS RIVER, MAY 2015
Not all but most of the Lower Pecos Canyonland rock art sites— and this includes Meyers Spring, Eagle Nest Canyon and Lewis Canyon— are on private property. Furthermore, visits to Meyers Spring, Lewis Canyon, and many other sites require a high clearance vehicle for a tire-whumping, paint-scraping, bone-jarring drive in. So I was beginning to appreciate the magnitude of the privilege it is to visit these sites. At Lewis Canyon, as I stood on the limestone shore of the sparkling Pecos in utter silence but for the crunch of the boots of my fellow tour members, I learned that less than 50 people a year venture to float down its length.
This October I once again traveled to the Lower Pecos, this time for the Rock Art Foundation’s annual three day Rock Art Rendezvous. Offered this year were the three sites I had already visited, plus a delectable menu that included White Shaman, Fate Bell, and—not for those prone to vertigo— Curly Tail Panther.
WHITE SHAMAN, OCTOBER 2015
Just off Highway 90 near its Pecos River crossing, the White Shaman Preserve serves as the headquarters for Rock Art Rendezvous. After a winding drive on dirt road, I parked near the shade structure. From there, the White Shaman rock art site was a brief but rugged hike down one side of cactus-studded canyon, then up the other. I was glad to have brought a hiking pole and leather gloves. No knee surgery on the horizon, either. When I arrived at White Shaman, named after the central luminous figure, the sun was low in the sky, bathing the shelter’s wall and its reddish drawings in gold and turning the Pecos, far below, where an occasional truck droned by, deep silver.
The next morning, at the Rock Art Foundation’s tour of the Shumla Archaeological and Research Center in nearby Comstock, I heard Dr. Carolyn Boyd’s stunning talk about her book, The White Shaman Mural: An Enduring Creation Narrative in the Rock Art of the Lower Pecos, which is forthcoming in 2016 from University of Texas Press. Dr. Boyd, whose work is based on 25 years of archaeological research in the Lower Pecos and a meticulous study of Mexican anthropology, argues that White Shaman, which is many thousands of years old, may represent the oldest known creation story in North America.
FATE BELL, OCTOBER 2015
From the White Shaman Preserve, Fate Bell is a few minutes down highway 90 in Seminole Canyon State Park. More than any other site, this shelter in the cake-like layers of the limestone walls of a canyon, reminded me of the cave art I had seen in Baja California’s Sierra de San Francisco. Inhabited on and off for some 9,000 years, Fate Bell is the largest site in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands. It has various styles of petrograph, including a spectacular group of anthropomorphs with what appear to be antlers and wings.
CURLY TAIL PANTHER, OCTOBER 2015
Curly Tail Panther is a scoop of a cave about the size of a walk-in closet, but as if for Superman to whoosh in, set dizzyingly high on a cliff-side overlooking the Devils River. The back wall has an array of petrographs: red mountain lion, anthropomorphic figures, and geometric designs. The only access to Curly Tail Panther is by way of a narrow ledge. Drop your hiking pole or your sunglasses from here, and you won’t see them again. You might lose a character, too—in the opening of Mary Black’s novel, Peyote Fire, a shaman stumbles to his death from this very ledge. The Rock Art Foundation’s website made it clear, Curly Tail Panther is not for anyone who has a fear of heights. But who doesn’t? My strategy was to take a deep breath and, like the running shoes ad says, Just do it.
