The Peyote Hunt

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.

 

 Homegrown peyote (six months old)...