BADiN] THE PEYOTE CULT 421 



life as the Shawnee prophet proposed to do, he substituted an ahen 

 religion. It was because he was introducing an alien religion, not 

 because he was introducing a new religion, that he was so intensely 

 hated by the conservative members of the tribe. 



When this hostility was at its height a new convert, Albert Hensley, 

 revolutionized the entire cult by introducing the reading of the Bible, 

 postulating the dogma that the peyote opened the Bible to the under- 

 standing of the people, and also adding a number of Christian prac- 

 tices. He, like Kave, had been in Oklahoma. He brought back 

 with him many peyote songs, generally in other languages, dealing 

 ■with Christian ideas, upon which subsequently Winnebago songs 

 were modeled. He also introduced either baptism itself or an inter- 

 pretation of baptism, and induced Rave to attempt a union with the 

 Christian Church. He seems to have been the only prominent man 

 connected with the peyote who was subject to epileptic fits. He had 

 the most glorious visions of heaven and hell while in his trance, and 

 these he expounded afterwards in terms of Revelation and the 

 mystical portions of the New Testament. Hensley 's additions repre- 

 sent a second stratum of borrowed elements, all of which are in the 

 nature of accretions as far as the peyote itself is concerned. The 

 Bible is explained in terms of the peyote. Neither Hensley nor his 

 followers ever interpreted the peyote in terms of the Bible, although 

 other elements of the old Winnebago culture were so interpreted. 

 These elements, however, represented features that even in the old 

 Winnebago cults exhibited a great variability in interpretation. 



Rave's attitude toward the innovations of Hensley seems to have 

 been that of a benevolent acquiescence. He himself could neither 

 read nor write. Yet he immediately accepted the Bible and added 

 it to his other regalia. As such it always seems to have remained. 

 To Rave, after all, the peyote was the principal element, and if Hen- 

 sley chose to insist that the Bible was only intelligible to those who 

 partook of the peyote why that naturally fell within its magical 

 powers. From the entire omission in Rave's account of the Peyote 

 cult of the more important things that Hensley introduced and 

 from the fact that whenever Hensley's influence was not dominant 

 there seems to have been little Bible reading, it seems justifiable to 

 say that Rave's attitude toward these innovations was merely 

 passive. 



There never was any rivalry between Rave and Hensley. The 

 latter was, however, a much younger man, quick-tempered, con- 

 ceited, dogmatic, and withal having a strong mixture of Puritan 

 Protestant ideas. A conflict developed after a while and in a very 

 interesting manner. Rave had allowed a man with an extremely 

 bad reputation, who had been admitted as a member of the Peyote 

 cult, to occupy one of the four positions. Hensley violently pro- 



