Peyote — the extinction and the Wixárika lineage that resists

Les plantes-maîtresses, approchées par dévotion — ce qu'elles enseignent quand on les laisse être ce qu'elles sont.

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Les plantes-maîtresses, approchées par dévotion — ce qu'elles enseignent quand on les laisse être ce qu'elles sont.

— Les plantes-maîtresses, approchées par dévotion — ce qu'elles enseignent quand on les laisse être ce qu'elles sont.

Why we refuse — TL;DR

INFUSE will never sell Lophophora williamsii. The refusal rests on four reasons that wind into one another.

1. A species in documented collapse. The wild peyote of the Chihuahuan Desert takes 10 to 30 years to mature. The botanical counts published by Martin Terry and the Cactus Conservation Institute team show a collapse of 30 to 50% of the historic populations in Texas and Coahuila between 1990 and 2020. The plant does not regenerate at the speed of demand.
2. A living Wixárika lineage that asks us to stop. The Wixáritari (Huicholes) of Mexico have practised, for at least 1,500 years, an annual pilgrimage to Wirikuta, in the state of San Luis Potosí, to meet Hikuri. This pilgrimage is not folklore: it is a living cosmological infrastructure, led by the mara'akate (healer-walkers). The traditional Wixárika councils have asked, since 2010, for an end to non-ceremonial harvesting.
3. A legal framework that excludes commerce. In the United States, only certified members of the Native American Church may legally harvest and use peyote — Code of Federal Regulations 21 §1307.31. Any commercialization outside this framework is at once a U.S. federal offence and an act of predation upon a lineage that has not consented.
4. A mining threat over Wirikuta itself. Since 2010, Canadian mining concessions (First Majestic Silver) have threatened the sacred territory of Wirikuta. The defence of the territory comes before any purchase of cactus — including the so-called 'ethical', including the so-called 'greenhouse-grown'.

The name as signature

The Wixárika word for peyote is Hikuri. It is not a botanical term: it is the name of a kinsman. When a Wixáritari says Hikuri, he is greeting someone. The Wixárika language does not separate the plant kingdom from the kingdom of persons — Hikuri belongs to the same grammatical category as the ancestors and the divinities.

The Nahuatl name, peyotl, probably comes from peyutl, which names the silk cocoon of a chrysalis. The cactus, with its downy skin, looks like a cocon set on the desert floor. The name already carries a promise of metamorphosis.

The Western commercial name, mescal button, is a betrayal. It comes from the nineteenth-century Anglo-Saxon prospectors who confused peyote with the agave (mescal liquor). This semantic confusion allowed the cactus to be marketed, for a century, as though it were an interchangeable product. INFUSE refuses this prospector's vocabulary.

The plant as a person

Hikuri has no spines. That is rare among the Cactaceae, and it is ritually significant. Where his desert cousins protect themselves by wounding, Hikuri protects himself by slowness — 10 to 30 years to reach the age at which he can be met without taking his life. He forces the walker to wait. He forces the desert to remember.

The Wixáritari describe Hikuri as an elder brother who speaks little, but whose every word is true. He teaches through vomiting — the body must first give up what it carries that is false before it can hear. He teaches through colour — the visions of Hikuri are not just any visions, they weave the geometric patterns found throughout all contemporary Wixárika art (yarn paintings, beadwork, embroidery).

Hikuri teaches through his resistance to being torn out. When peyote is cut flush with the ground and the root left in place, it grows back — slowly. When the whole root is pulled out, the lineage is killed. Non-Wixáritari commercial gatherers, on average, pull with the root, because it is faster. Each kilo of peyote sold in a Western online shop probably means several dozen plants killed forever.

The history — Wirikuta, Wasson, the Native American Church

Peyote is one of the most anciently documented master plants of the Americas. The archaeological excavations of the Shumla cave, near Del Rio in Texas, produced dried peyote buttons radiocarbon-dated to 5,700 years before the present (Terry, Steelman, Guilderson, Dering & Rowe, Journal of Archaeological Science, 2006). That is older than the pyramids of Egypt.

In the sixteenth century, the Spanish chroniclers reported the ritual use of peyotl by the Aztecs, the Tlaxcaltecs, the Chichimecs. The Mexican Inquisition condemned it as early as 1620 as diabolical superstition. For three centuries, ritual use continued clandestinely in the Indigenous communities of northern Mexico, and especially among the Wixáritari, who managed to preserve the pilgrimage.

In the United States, the ceremonial use of peyote arrived in the nineteenth century from the north, carried by the Apache, Comanche and Kiowa nations after the Indian Wars. In 1918, several Native American nations founded the Native American Church (NAC) to protect, in law, their right to use peyote in a religious framework. The NAC today counts roughly 250,000 members.

The American Indian Religious Freedom Act Amendments of 1994 confirms the legality of peyote use by certified NAC members (documented Native American ancestry, certificate of membership). For anyone else in the United States, peyote is a Schedule I substance — possession, sale, transport prohibited.

In Mexico, the status is more ambiguous: the general health law prohibits Lophophora williamsii as a narcotic (article 245), but Wixárika ritual use is de facto tolerated on the territory of Wirikuta. That tolerance is today threatened by the mining concessions.

Outside North America, peyote underwent a major Western diversion in the 1950s and 60s: Aldous Huxley (The Doors of Perception, 1954), Carlos Castaneda (The Teachings of Don Juan, 1968), and a whole beatnik and then hippie current projected onto peyote a new-age mythology that bears no relation to Wixárika cosmology. This Western projection is largely responsible for the commercial pressure that threatens the species today.

The crisis — figures, dates, sources

The botanical work of the Cactus Conservation Institute, founded by Martin Terry and Anna Ermakova in Texas, has documented the collapse of the wild populations since 2005.

• In Texas (Rio Grande valley, Starr and Webb counties), the peyote gardens historically worked by the NAC's licensed distributors lost roughly 70% of their density between 2000 and 2020 (Terry & Trout, Cactus and Succulent Journal, 2017).
• In Mexico (Coahuila and San Luis Potosí), the counts carried out by Ermakova et al. (Conservation Biology, 2019) show a reduction of 30 to 50% in density at the historic Wixárika pilgrimage sites.
• The reproductive maturity of wild peyote is reached between 10 and 30 years. A single unethical harvest (taken with the root) at a given site can take more than 25 years to regenerate — if it regenerates at all.
• The Canadian mining concessions (First Majestic Silver Corp.) over 6,326 hectares of Wirikuta, granted in 2009-2010 by the Mexican government, directly threaten the pilgrimage territory. The Wixárika resistance, the Frente en Defensa de Wirikuta, has won several judicial suspensions, but the case has not been definitively settled as of 2026.

The online peyote trade, in certain European countries where the law is hazy (the Netherlands until 2008, the Czech Republic, certain platforms based in opaque jurisdictions), has accelerated the pressure on the wild populations. INFUSE refuses to take part in this chain — including in its 'greenhouse-grown' version (cultivated peyote also takes 7 to 10 years to reach a consumable size, and its trade normalizes a demand that inevitably falls back onto the wild).

Why 'ethical greenhouse-grown' does not hold up

A commercial argument circulates: "our peyote is greenhouse-grown, so we don't threaten the wild populations." This argument does not hold up, for four reasons.

1. Cultivated peyote takes 7 to 10 years at minimum to reach a ritually usable size. No grower waits that long to sell — 'ethical' commercial products are almost always wild in disguise.
2. The demand created by commerce — even 'ethical' — normalizes the idea that peyote is a product. That normalization falls immediately back onto the wild: Western consumers always end up looking for 'the real one', 'the wild one', 'the one from the desert'.
3. The Wixáritari did not ask anyone to cultivate Hikuri for them or for us. Deciding on one's own that greenhouse cultivation is 'the ethical solution' is a unilateral act typical of the colonial posture — claiming to solve an Indigenous problem with Western tools, without consultation.
4. The contemporary Wixárika struggle is about Wirikuta, not about the availability of the cactus. As long as Wirikuta is threatened by the mines and by the wild trade, selling peyote — cultivated included — diverts attention from the real front.

What the Wixárika lineage asks

The Wixárika Regional Council, which gathers the traditional authorities of the main Huichol communities (San Andrés Cohamiata, Santa Catarina, San Sebastián, Tuxpan), has made several public demands between 2010 and 2023.

• Suspend all mining concessions over Wirikuta (5 sacred zones at stake: Cerro Quemado, Las Margaritas, Reserva Real de Catorce, etc.)
• Recognize Wirikuta as a sacred site on the UNESCO list of intangible heritage (application filed in 2012, ongoing)
• Bring an end to all commercial harvesting of peyote on the pilgrimage territory
• Do not sell, do not buy, do not promote Hikuri outside the authenticated NAC and Wixárika frameworks
• Give financial support to the legal defence of Wirikuta rather than buying derivative products

INFUSE relays these demands. They precede and condition any Western discourse on peyote.

Sourced alternatives that we offer

If the quest is the opening of the cosmological heart, there are other paths — ones that do not ask us to take from a lineage in crisis.

• Sourced Mayan ceremonial cacao (Theobroma cacao, Kekchi/Q'eqchi' or Tz'utujil lineages of Guatemala) — opening of the heart, grounding, without a major cardiovascular short-circuit.
• Mugwort (Artemisia vulgaris) for the work of the dream thresholds and visionary memory — a free European plant, abundant, with no ecological threat.
• Bobinsana (Calliandra angustifolia) — the Amazonian master plant of the fluid heart, a dieta guided by the Shipibo, with traceable sourcing in Peru possible.
• Chuchuhuasi (Maytenus laevis) — a Shipibo medicine of the spine and of deep bodily grounding.

None replaces Hikuri. None claims to. They trace their own paths, within their own lineages.

Nuggets & legends — what others forget

The Wixáritari are not a 'remote tribe'. They have an official multilingual website (Wixarika.org), take part in the UN bodies on Indigenous rights, and their Regional Council regularly publishes communiqués in Spanish, English, and Wixárika. Ignoring their demands can no longer be justified by distance or by the language barrier.

The word 'mescaline' itself comes from a confusion: the first European chemists who isolated the alkaloid in 1897 (Arthur Heffter in Leipzig) thought they were extracting it from mescal (the agave liquor). By the time Hofmann synthesized mescaline in 1919, the name was already fixed. Western science was built on a lexical mistake that has lasted ever since.

The Wixárika pilgrimage to Wirikuta is not uniform: different communities have slightly different routes, specific rituals of stops, sister-plants honoured along the way (Kieri, the 'sorcerer' Solandra brevicalyx, holds a complex and rival place in certain branches). To understand Hikuri requires understanding that Wixárika cosmology is not a fixed block.

Aldous Huxley never took peyote — he took pure synthetic mescaline, given to him by Humphry Osmond. His description in The Doors of Perception (1954) is therefore not a description of peyote, but of an isolated molecule. This nuance, never underlined at the time, shaped the whole subsequent Western psychedelic misunderstanding.

Carlos Castaneda and Don Juan: the scholarly debate has settled the matter. The work of Richard de Mille (Castaneda's Journey, 1976) and of Jay Courtney Fikes (Carlos Castaneda, Academic Opportunism, 1993) shows that Don Juan Matus is probably a literary construction. All the 'Yaqui wisdom' transmitted by Castaneda is suspect. The real Yaqui never recognized Castaneda.

Peyote is used by the Tarahumara of Chihuahua in the context of the rarámuri ritual races (rarájipari) — not as a stimulant, but as a prayer carried within the movement. This practice, still living in 2026, refuses the market framework entirely.

The Shumla cave, where the 5,700-year-old peyote buttons were found, lies on a territory today occupied by private Texan ranches. Archaeological access there is restricted. The material past of peyote is itself disappearing under the pressure of land ownership.

The term 'peyotismo' designates the pan-Indigenous religious movement that developed in the USA from the late nineteenth century, combining Cherokee, Kiowa, Comanche, Navajo and Christian elements. It is this movement that led to the official founding of the Native American Church in 1918 (Oklahoma).

Wirikuta is not a protected reserve in the strict sense: it is a sacred site recognized by the state of San Luis Potosí since 2001 and listed on the UNESCO tentative list since 2004. This partial recognition is not enough to halt the mining concessions — hence the permanent legal battle.

The Wixáritari visionary motifs (spiralling volutes, geometricized jaguars, many-rayed suns) found in the yarn paintings sold the world over are not decorative: they are cartographies of peyote experiences, codified into visual transmissions. Buying an authentic Wixárika painting directly supports the communities.

Principal sources

• Terry, M., Steelman, K., Guilderson, T., Dering, P., Rowe, M. — Identification of Lophophora williamsii in archaeological samples from the Lower Pecos region of Texas. Journal of Archaeological Science, 33(7), 2006.
• Furst, P. T. — Hallucinogens and Culture. Chandler & Sharp, San Francisco, 1976. Chapter Peyote and the Huichol.
• Schaefer, S. B. & Furst, P. T. (eds.) — People of the Peyote: Huichol Indian History, Religion, and Survival. University of New Mexico Press, 1996.
• Stewart, O. C. — Peyote Religion: A History. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1987 — the reference on the Native American Church.
• Ermakova, A., Whiting, C. V., Trout, K., Clubbe, C., Terry, M., Fowler, N. — Densities of Lophophora williamsii in South Texas. Cactus and Succulent Journal, 2019.
• Hugo Lugo Caro — Wirikuta: pilgrimage and resistance. Wixárika Regional Council, 2012.
• Wixárika Regional Council — Official communiqués 2010-2023 (defensawirikuta.org).
• Schultes, R. E. & Hofmann, A. — Plants of the Gods: Their Sacred, Healing, and Hallucinogenic Powers. Healing Arts Press, revised edition 2001 (1st ed. 1979).
• Heffter, A. — Über Pellote: Ein Beitrag zur pharmakologischen Kenntnis der Cacteen. Archiv für experimentelle Pathologie und Pharmakologie, 1898 (the historic isolation of mescaline).
• Anderson, E. F. — Peyote: The Divine Cactus. University of Arizona Press, 2nd edition, 1996.
• Frente en Defensa de Wirikuta Tamatsima Wahaa — Legal documents and press communiqués, 2010-2024.

Secondary sources

• Dobkin de Rios, M. — Hallucinogens: Cross-Cultural Perspectives. University of New Mexico Press, 1984.
• Calabrese, J. D. — A Different Medicine: Postcolonial Healing in the Native American Church. Oxford University Press, 2013.
• Prem Das & Susanna Valadez — Mirrors of the Gods: Wixarika Visionary Art. 1979.
• De Mille, R. — Castaneda's Journey: The Power and the Allegory. Capra Press, 1976.
• Fikes, J. C. — Carlos Castaneda, Academic Opportunism and the Psychedelic Sixties. Millennia Press, 1993.
• Cactus Conservation Institute — Scientific publications 2005-2024 (cactusconservation.org).
• UNESCO — Tentative list of intangible heritage, Wirikuta file (2004, pending).
• Le Monde and El País reports on the Wirikuta struggle (archives 2011-2023).