Peyote Dreams by Charles Duits;

Author:Charles Duits;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spirituality/Entheogens
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2013-09-01T16:00:00+00:00

6

THE LAND OF ILLUMINATIONS

It took about an hour for the peyote to mix with my blood.

However, the very act of taking peyote almost always created a shock to the system. In big or small doses, it made me another man; the substance that I had just consumed isolated me from my fellow creatures, as if I were a sick man infested by germs.

I felt nothing. To be more precise, I could feel that I felt nothing. The joints of my body, the weight and the warmth of my clothes, the play of my muscles, the slumber of my bones, the imperceptible breeze aroused by my movements—all these insignificant things had acquired a peculiar character.

Why peculiar? This remains a mystery. These things remained insignificant; yet, my attention had trouble leaving them alone, and not without regret.

The glass on my table was still a glass, but because I looked at it differently, I saw it differently. Enclosed in blue silence, it spread a range of lunar strips on the tablecloth.

I paced up and down. Seated, I thought of sleeping; lying down, I thought of getting up. More than ever, I wanted to act on something, “do something.” Brief spells of dizziness ran through my body. My stomach hurt.

I knew that the American Indians held these signs to be beneficial. Christ began by driving away the bad spirit, which needs to be vomited by the adept before the peyote—“Christ’s gift to the red man”—can take effect.

It is necessary to be pure in order to cross the threshold of the pure land, and for this, it is necessary to pass through the purgatories that guard the doors. . . .

I admired the American Indians, their indifference to the plant’s taste, to the anxieties and the nausea that accompanied the intake of peyote. I remembered old Chief Yellow Hand, who, one day, in order to prove his courage to the young men of the tribe, consumed forty cactus flowers and disappeared, without leaving a trace.

I felt nothing except a black and elated ascent from time to time.

The approach of drunkenness can give us an image of what this phenomenon is like, but only a rough image, because wine is only the colorant of the soul, whereas these energies seemed conscious.

I felt that I possessed an intelligence that was different from my own and indifferent to my own, an intelligence that was powerful and pursued unfathomable ends.

I was not being held by a substance, but by a force that was faceless and shapeless, a malignant mist that suddenly melted away into the shadows from where it came, leaving me attentive, my chest trembling.

Sometimes, when the uneasiness became too strong, I would close my eyes. That is when I perceived the “Mexican faces.” Green and rushing by, they were just like the forces I was abandoned to by this bitter powder, which seemed like a dream and a grave.

I had saved some of the leftover, crushed, and rotten bone remains in my cupboard that the American Indians refused to sell, infinitely more precious than these blackened, waxen, heavy, and obtuse turquoises.

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