MESCAL: A NEW ARTIFICIAL PARADISE.^ 



By Havelock Ellis. 



It has been known for some years that the Kiowa Indians of New 

 Mexico are accustomed to eat, in their religious ceremonies, a certain 

 cactus called Anhalonium Lewinii, or mescal button. Mescal— •which 

 must not be confounded with the intoxicating drink of the same name 

 made from an agave — is found in the Mexican Valley of the Eio Grande, 

 the ancestral home of the Kiowa Indians, as well as in Texas, and is a 

 brown and brittle substance, nauseous and bitter to the taste, composed 

 mainly of the blunt dried leaves of the plant. Yet, as we shall see, it 

 has every claim to rank with haschisch and the other famous drugs 

 which have procured for men the joys of an artificial paradise. Upon 

 the Kiowa Indians, who first discovered its rare and jiotent virtues, it 

 has had so strong a fascination that the missionaries among these 

 Indians, finding here a rival to Christianity not yielding to moral 

 suasion, have appealed to the secular arm, and the buying and selling 

 of the drug has been prohibited by Government under severe penalties. 

 Yet the use of mescal prevails among the Kiowas to this day. 



It has indeed spread, and the mescal rite may be said to be to-day 

 the chief religion of all the tribes of the southern plains of the United 

 States. The rite usually takes place on Saturday night; the men then 

 sit in a circle within the tent round a large camp fire, which is kept 

 burning brightly all the time. After prayer the leader hands each 

 man four buttons, which are slowly chewed and swallowed, and alto- 

 gether about ten or twelve buttons are consumed by each man between 

 sundown and daybreak. Throughout the night the men sit quietly 

 round the fire in a state of reverie — amid continual singing and the 

 beating of drums by attendants — absorbed in the color visions and 

 other manifestations of mescal intoxication, and about noon on the 

 following day, when the elfects have passed oft", they get up and go 

 about their business, without any depression or other unpleasant 

 aftereftect. 



There are five or six allied species of cacti which the Indians also 

 use and treat with great reverence. Thus Mr. Carl Lumholtz has 



lEeprinted from The Contemporary Eeview, January, 1898, by permission of 

 Leonard iSoott Publication Company. 



537 



