,538 mescal: a new artificial paradise. 



found that tbe Taraliumari, a tribe of Mexican Indians, worsMp 

 various cacti as gods, only to be approached with uncovered heads. 

 When they wish to obtain these cacti, the Tarahumari cense them- 

 selves with copal incense, and with profound respect dig up the god, 

 careful lest they should hurt him, while women and children are 

 warned from the spot. Even Christian Indians regard Hikori, the 

 cactus god, as coequal with their own divinity, and make the sign of 

 the cross in its presence. At all great festivals Hikori is made into a 

 drink and consumed by the medicine man, or certain selected Indians, 

 who sing as they X3artake of it, invoking Hikori to grant a "beautiful 

 intoxication;" at the same time a rasping noise is made with sticks, 

 and men and women dance a fantasth; and picturesque dance — the 

 women by themselves in white petticoats and tunics — before those who 

 are under the influence of the god. 



In 1891 Mr. James Mooney, of the United States Bureau of Eth- 

 nology, having frequently observed the mescal rites of the Kiowa 

 Indians and assisted at them, called the attention of the Anthropo- 

 logical Society at Washington to the subject, and three years later he 

 brought to Washington a supply of mescal, which was handed over for 

 examination to Drs. Prentiss and Morgan. These investigators experi- 

 mented on several young men, and demonstrated, for the first time, the 

 precise character of mescal intoxication and the remarkable visions to 

 which it gives rise. A little later Dr. Weir Mitchell, who, in addition 

 to his eminence as a physician, is a man of marked sesthetic tempera- 

 ment, experimented on himself, and published a very interesting record 

 of the brilliant visions by which he was visited under the influence of 

 the plant. In the spring of the past year I was able to obtain a 

 small sample of mescal in London, and as my first experiment with 

 mescal was also, apparently, the first attempt to investigate its vision- 

 producing properties outside America,' I will describe it in some 

 detail, in preference to drawing on the previously published descrip- 

 tions of the American observers. 



On Good Friday I found myself entirely alone in the quiet rooms 

 in the Temple which I occupy when in London, and judged the occa- 

 sion a fitting one for a personal experiment. I made a decoction (a 

 d liferent method from that adopted iu America) of three buttons, the 

 full physiological dose, and drank this at intervals between 2.30 and 

 4.30 p. m. The first sym^jtom observed during the afternoon was a cer- 

 tain consciousness of energy and intellectual power.^ This passed off, 



' Lewiu, of Berlin, indeed, experimented with Anhalonium Lewinii, to which he 

 gave its name, as early as 1888, and as he foand that even a small portion produced 

 dangerous symptoms, he classed it amongst the extremely poisonous drugs, like 

 strychnia. He failed to discover its vision-producing properties, and it seems, in 

 fact, highly probable that he was really experimenting with a different cactus from 

 that now known by the same name. 



2 1 pass lightly over the purely i^hysiological symptoms which I have described in 

 some detail iu a paper on "The phenomena of mescal intoxication" (Lancet, Jime 

 5, 1897), which, however, contains no description of the visions. 



