Peyote Ceremony

The peyote ceremony is an all-night ritual centered on the sacramental ingestion of the peyote cactus, Lophophora williamsii, which contains the psychoactive alkaloid mescaline, practiced originally by Indigenous peoples of northern Mexico including the Huichol and Tarahumara and, from the nineteenth century onward, adopted and adapted by many Native American peoples of the United States and Canada as the central rite of the pan-tribal Native American Church. A typical ceremony runs from evening to sunrise around a crescent-shaped earthen altar, led by a roadman who guides participants through prescribed songs, prayers, ingestion of peyote, and periods of quiet reflection intended to promote healing, moral guidance, and communion with the divine, and the ceremony is understood by practitioners as a deeply spiritual, disciplined religious practice rather than recreational drug use. The Native American Church's peyote ceremony has a distinctive legal history in the United States, where its sacramental use of peyote is protected under specific federal and state religious-freedom exemptions after decades of legal conflict, making it one of the most closely studied cases in the anthropology and law of Indigenous religious practice and psychoactive sacrament use.