served to alert the scientific and learned world to a new 
order of vegetable product, and opened the sluice-gates 
to an astonishing flow of discussion and experimentation. 
Though a booster dose was hardly needed, Aldous Hux- 
ley gave the theme a new dimension when he published 
his The Doors of Perception in 1954 and Heaven and 
Hell in 1955. 
The bibliography on peyot/ is enormous: one North 
American anthropologist, Weston La Barre, has devoted 
an important part of his professional life to keeping up 
with it and chronicling current developments.” The ques- 
tion presents itself seriously whether the output of arti- 
cles can be laid solely to the scientific interest of a strange 
drug, or whether supplementing this there is a subjective 
effect that compels those who have eaten the plant to 
embark upon a mission to make known what they have 
experienced. 
Peyotl (which has commonly been eroded to ‘peyote’ ) 
isa Nahuatl word. Alonso de Molina in his Vocabulario 
(1571) gives its meaning as capullo de seda, or de gusano, 
‘silk cocoon or caterpillar’s cocoon,” which fits well the 
small woolly cactus that is its source. This is probably 
the explanation. Others’ cite a number of similar words 
in Nahuatl that invoke splendor or illumination. May 
these words not be secondary, having been born of the 
splendor of the visions that peyot/ gives! For reasons that 
seem to have sprung from popular confusion, the E:nglish- 
speaking population of the Southwest came to call the 
dried peyot! ‘mescal buttons.” Lewin, Mitchell, and 
Killis, by their use of the terms, fixed this grievous mis- 
nomer in the English language. Later, when the active 
agent came to be isolated, the chemists called the alka- 
loid ‘mescaline’, thus compounding the mistake. ‘Mes- 
eal’ comes from the Spanish of Mexico mezcal, derived 
in its turn from Nahuatl meveall, the name for the agave, 
[ 165 ] 
