Desacralized Peyote Use in Sixteenth-Century Mexico

In the spring of 1569, rumors began to circulate in the Minas de Guanajuato that a young Spanish woman from the Canaries had been eating peyote and engaged in a variety of spell casting, divination and superstitions.  Peyote was not formally banned by the Mexican Inquisition until 1621 but its use prior to the ban was still viewed by Church officials and missionaries as suspect and potentially punishable.  This paper examines the case of Catalina de Peraza, in Guanajuato, in comparison with other cases of Spaniards using peyote, to discuss the use of peyote by non Indians in early Mexico.  While peyote use originally had sacred religious meanings, and continues to possess such meaning for Huichols, the use of peyote by Spaniards, mulatos and mestizos appears to have been a case of desacralization, in which the original religious purpose of peyote rituals was shifted to practical uses, primarily divination.  There is little discussion of peyote use among historians of colonial Mexico. There is some discussion in works of ethnohistory and histories of women folk healers, but there does not appear to be a sustained attempt to understand peyote use as it related to the policy of the Inquisition or to adaptations in that policy. Within one year of its ban a censor of the Mexican Inquisition, fray Martín de Vergara, was asking for exemptions from the ban for one of his parishioners.  This paper is part of a larger project on frontier religion among Spaniards in early Mexico and hopes to open a discussion about the long-term historical trends about peyote use and state-sponsored efforts to regulate its use.