According to the label, Peyote Pomade is good for hair styling as well as relief from cramps, rheumatism and “softening of the nerve fibers” (I hate it when that happens). It is suggested you use it before going to bed so it can work its magic while you sleep. Imagine the dreams.
As a hair gel, this could give new meaning to head trip. I’m visualizing rockabilly dudes with day-glow quiffs that melt and reform before your eyes as flaming desert ravens. Good for punks too: I saw Mescalito in your mohawk.
Carlos Castaneda loved the stuff:
In addition to peyote, some gels contains camphor, arnica, eucalyptus and petroleum jelly among other things, depending on brand and suggested usage. Some claim to contain marijuana. Spliff meets quiff?
Historically, people have used peyote for treating fractures, wounds, and snakebite. So this stuff just may work. Various Peyote pomades are available online from multiple Mexican-based resources. You can get yours here. Tell them Don Juan sent you.
I ate 12 fat fresh buttons while drinking black cherry juice to mask the extreme bitterness of the cactus. 12 buttons is a large quantity of mescaline for an experienced peyote eater. This was my first encounter with peyote. I had made a serious commitment to Mescalito.
When the peyote came on, it came on strong. My home in the Berkeley Hills overlooked the bay and I could see the Chevron oil refinery in Richmond smudging the night sky with a reddish haze of sodium lamps and spewing infernal smoke like some futuristic version of hell. I felt a sense of dread. But soon the apocalyptic vision was swept away by a surge of powerful euphoric energy. My body started to hum and vibrate and I became aware of surging energy along my spine and pinwheels of light radiating from ganglion centers within my body. I gathered that this was the awakening of my kundalini and the sparking of my chakras. I know this sounds like new age jive talk. But it was 1969 and I was 18 years old. The new age was new and hadn’t become an industry. The era of spiritual materialism was dawning, but hadn’t arrived yet. There were a handful of books by scholars of Eastern mysticism on the subject of kundalini and you had to make an effort to seek out this information. I’d read John Woodroffe’s book The Serpent Power: The Secrets of Tantric and Shaktic Yoga and knew a little bit about the dormant energy coiled like a snake at the base of the spine waiting to be awakened. I had also read about about the chakras: seven clusters of energy bundled within nerves that radiate along the spine. I had read it, but I wasn’t sure I believed it. Well, peyote introduced me to all of this in precise and intricate detail. The connection between flesh and spirit wasn’t conceptual, it was manifest right there in the moment.
In my dark Berkeley apartment, sitting in front of an altar of white candles, I fell into the grip of Mescalito’s magic. My body was suffused with blissful energy, my spine tingling with waves of ecstasy. I was horny for the cosmos, in love with the every little minutia of being. I chanted OM and the vibration in my chest worked its way into my skull where it tapped into some universal language composed of sympathetic waves of energy. And what my eyes saw, both inside and out, were the most sophisticated, intricate and dazzling visual constructs I’d ever encountered. Beautiful and perfectly detailed geometric mandalas were spinning in the space between my closed eyes. And when I opened my eyes the mandalas spun outward to meld with the billions of mandalas that were surging toward me and offering to embed their cosmic code upon my brain. And holy mother of jesus, my chakras were spinning, sparkling and luminescent. And when all the chakras were vibrating at the exact same frequency, none prevailing over the other, I disappeared into an infinite white light and no longer existed. Marc was dead. That little nub of ego that grinds up against what we call reality was shattered into a million little pieces. Marc was a pimple that had received a liberating squeeze.
Peyote taught me that when we emphasize just one aspect of our being while ignoring the rest, we create ego. If our sexual energy is dominant, we create ego. If our intellect is dominant, we create ego. If our emotions are dominant, we create ego. Only when sex, heart and mind are in complete balance and harmony do we experience so called enlightenment. When all of our chakras, our energy centers, are vibrating on the same wavelength, at the same pitch, we become in tune with the cosmos. Ego is the result of getting stuck in just one corner of our totality. Ego is the illusion of isolation. When our mind is in tune with our heart and our sexuality, we become one with the natural order of things and no longer exist apart from the world. That’s how it works. If you don’t believe me, eat 12 fat peyote buttons and get back to me.
The morning after my peyote trip, I re-entered the world tenderly, with the vulnerability and openness of a newborn child. I felt humbled and amazed. I never again felt quite as solid as I did before taking peyote. I was more conscious of myself on a molecular level. I felt oceanic.
Eating peyote was the most profoundly religious experience I’ve ever had and it continues to inform my point of view on a daily basis. At 18 years of age a door opened and it has remained slightly ajar ever since. The ego is monolithic and stubborn. It takes something powerful to put the brutal bastard in its place. The modern world has been the ego’s best ally. It provides little space for the dissolution of ME. Thank goodness for psychedelics.
Peyote is called “medicine” for a reason. It can heal, purge and cleanse. But it’s just one part of a bigger process. The deal with psychedelics is that you get the Cliff Notes version of cosmic consciousness. Don’t me get me wrong, the experience is real, genuine, but it’s also just a kind of crash course giving us a quick glimpse of who we really are. Most of us, actually all of us, can’t afford to leave our jobs, family etc. to sit on a mountaintop completely devoting our lives to contemplating the nature of existence. There have been a handful of human beings who could make that commitment: Milarepa, Buddha, Jesus and those divinely intoxicated bums who used to practice their Dharma on Bowery and Broadway back in the 70s. But, in this day and age, when there are so many forces conspiring against our attaining even the slightest insight to who we are and what has authentic value in our lives, we need guidance that can lead us to a deeper and more profound understanding of why we are here and where we are going. I suggest taking the crash course. If you can get your hungry hands on some peyote, psilocybin mushrooms or clean LSD (I’m not sure it still exists) go for it. Don’t wait for the world to become your paradise. Throw away the travel brochure. Create your own cosmic getaway. If your head’s in the right space, Newark is just as beautiful as the beaches of Belize. But ultimately it’s up to us to follow up on the psychedelic experience and do the hard work of self-realization on a daily basis.
While psychedelics do open the doors of perception, it is our responsibly to walk through those doors and keep walking. There are no quick fixes for what ails us. Peyote showed me the way, it was a cosmic road map, but I still had to do the driving and part of the trip is to question the “I’ in the driver’s seat. One way that I found to keep the “I” real is to have a gallon jug of peyote tea in the refrigerator at all times. Depending on my particular mental state on any given day, a sip or gulp of the tea might be the perfect prescription for clarifying a moment in time or reminding me of what really matters. Every household should have at least a week’s supply of peyote tea on hand. It’s better than coffee for kickstarting your day. Unfortunately, peyote is so effective in bringing balance and insight into the lives of men and women, that most peyote fields through the Southwest and Northern Mexico have been picked clean. I am hoping that once marijuana is legalized that we can look to making peyote a legal sacrament for the population at large and the cultivation of peyote will become a thriving industry like artichokes and endive. America would greatly benefit from having psychedelic salad on our dinner tables.
The following documentary on peyote will help you plan ahead.
Michael McClure, Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg at City Lights Books, 1966
Poet, playwright and novelist, Michael McClure discusses his “poetic processes and experiences with peyote” in this extract taken from the USA Poetry series by Richard O. Moore (1966).
A key figure in The Beats, a mentor to Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison, McClure has just released his latest book of new and selected poetry Of Indigo and Saffron, details for which can be found here.
