At the beginning of her book, The Peyote Hunt, Barbara Meyerhoff writes of the Huichol (the aboriginal people of the Sierra Madre range in north-west Mexico):
There is no distinction between sacred and profane... the good life is the religious life, the good day's work is sacred. That what is beautiful is beautiful because it is moral. An evil man is not truly Huichol, for to be Huichol is to live in the proper manner. In other words, to be Huichol is to be sacred, and this applies to all objects, behaviour, and ideas, that make up the culture. That which is non-indigenous, not correct or unacceptable, is not merely secular or even profane. It is outside the state of being Huichol.
Is there any difference here between Huichol and Human? Are not aborigines aborigines wherever they are irrespective of the names they confer upon themselves?
If you replace Huichol with Human you will notice that 'man' (his behaviour, objects, and ideas) are increasingly outside the state of being human. Man, rather, is a perversion of the human (or if you will, the Huichol), a version that has been twisted (per + vertere, to turn through) and mediated through a system of economy predicated upon lies, falsehood, and a technology that is not Nature but that which exploits and contaminates Nature. Man, in other words, just like the evil man above, is not Human, for his behaviour does not coincide with that which is human and 'of the Earth'. If a cat behaves like a dog it's more that likely that it's actually a dog and not a cat. In short, the human has not evolved into man but rather, through the arduous process of overlaying his self with nature-hating technologies, has been made into man.
The hunt then becomes not for peyote per se but for the human hidden beneath all that nature-hating tech.
The Huichol would be proud of my foraging techniques, the crows too. In fact, I often feel like a large crow when I'm foraging in the 'golden field' for mushrooms. The secret to successful foraging like this and spotting the elusive liberty cap (magic mushroom) especially after a dew laden night is to get down on one knee. It is a religious event (insofar as you are at one with Nature and your animal body) and this is perhaps where the idea of genuflecting came from: foraging for wild mushrooms. Once you are closer to the grass your eyes can scan the grassline with ease, and it is here where those very eyes will 'lock on' to a cluster. Whilst picking that cluster the eyes are still roving. Soon, you find yourself in that joyful situation of continually picking mushroom after mushroom once the eyes have become accustomed to their new way of looking. These are your crow eyes, eyes that see subtlety within subtlety, eyes that can pick out a two centimetre tall camouflaged liberty cap at fifty feet. These crow eyes can now be added to your jaguar legs and your owl ears, so that soon you will have earned the respect of all the wild. And you feel that buzz of aboriginality.
