CHAPTER FIFTEEN: HALLUCINOGENS AND THE SACRED DEER

Almost everywhere in the New World deer were important food animals. But almost nowhere were they only that. On the contrary, few animals were so universally revered as supernaturally endowed with a special power, and perhaps none was so widely associated with shamans and shamanism. Consequently, even where deer was favorite and frequent game, its hunt was never routine, its death never casual. To eat deer meat, it seems, almost always and everywhere was at least as much a matter of feeding the spirit as the body. If this was generally the case for everybody, it held even more for the shaman, so much so that in some societies (the Warao of Venezuela, to mention one), for the shaman to treat venison as ordinary food is still tantamount to cannibalism.

Deer deities or deer as divine beings occur prominently in the cosmologies and rituals of innumerable peoples, from the Far North deep into South America, as they also do in archaeological art. Sometimes the supernatural deer is male—Deer as patron of hunting, for example—sometimes female, as supernatural mistress of the species or even of all animals, or as animal wife to a primordial hunter and female ancestor of the human race.
Deer ceremonials to obtain supernatural power and other benefits—direct or indirect, physical or spiritual, from the spirit of a particular deer or from the species as a whole—are so widespread in North America as to be near-universal, not only among hunters but among agricultural Indians as well. Many of the latter regard the deer as master and protector of crops and fertility, invoking its spirit at every turn of the agricultural cycle, from the clearing of the forest for a new field to the first fruits at harvest time. Among the Huichols, whose culture hero Kauyumarie, we recall, is Deer and who have several other major deer deities, every important agricultural endeavor is (or should be) preceded by a ceremonial deer hunt; in fact, deer are never hunted or eaten except in a ritual context. In many origin myths of North or South American Indians a supernatural Deer is directly associated with other major supernaturals in the establishment of the most important aspects of culture and the social order; so, for example, among the Ge-speakers of Brazil, one of the oldest American Indian language families, Sun, Moon, and Deer set up the system of age-graded societies.

Deer deities and ceremonialism were of overriding importance to the ancient Maya and other ancient Mesoamerican peoples (as they continue to be in some areas), and this outlook is of course reflected both in the complex calendrical system for which the Maya are rightly admired and in pre-Columbian art as a whole. In some areas deer were sacrosanct and could not be killed; Bernal Diaz del Castillo (1908:16), for example, reported that in the country of the Mazatecs (deer people) in Oaxaca, tame deer were venerated as deities and no deer could be hunted. From the enormous corpus of painted and carved Maya funerary pottery, it is quite evident also that the deer played an important role in Maya beliefs about the land of the dead, the Underworld; clearly the deer was intimately associated among the Maya and other Mesoamerican Indians with magic, transformation, death ritual and the Upper- and Underworlds, in particular the latter.

It is a reflection of the extraordinary status of the deer as divine being, the special animal of gods and shamans, in pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica that in the process of Christian acculturation Christ himself should sometimes have become identified with the deer—to the degree that in some Indianized Good Friday ceremonies in Mexico the Passion itself is treated like a sacrificial deer hunt. Among the Cora of Nayarit, for example, the symbolic hunt for the divine deer, which ends in the crucifixon and interment of the Christ-Deer, involves not just one animal but four, one each for the cardinal points, recalling the traditional non-Christian Deer Dance of the New Mexico pueblos of San Ildefonso and San Juan, which also culminates in the symbolic hunt and sacrificial death of four deer. There is little question that the present-day syncretistic Cora ceremony and that of the Pueblos ultimately derive from the same ancestral source.

The question is, how far back can we legitimately take this whole pan-American deer-shamanism complex? Can we in fact consider it solely in the context of American prehistory? I don't think so. American Indian deer-shamanism, with its particular emphasis on the deer as divine source of medicine and curing power, is too obviously analogous to the reindeer and deer shamanism of the Paleo-Siberians and their Eurasiatic Paleolithic and Mesolithic antecedents to be anything other than its linear descendant (for an illuminating discussion of antlered shamans and reindeer shamanism, see La Barre's chapter,"The Dancing Sorcerer," in his The Ghost Dance: Origins of Religion [1970d]).

Of particular pertinence to this problem is the deer's more or less intensive relationship to several New World hallucinogens, sometimes to the point of total qualitative identification between plant and animal. In these final paragraphs I would like to suggest this as a new focus of inquiry, in the hope that it may help shed light on the genesis of the widely held belief in the deer as source of supernatural power.

To the Huichols, we recall, the peyote is deer (and vice versa), whose inebriating flesh enables mankind to "find its life." Although this fundamental aspect of Huichol metaphysics is not theirs alone, it survives among them in its most dramatic and purest shamanistic form. Further, Elder Brother Deer is the Huichol shaman's guardian par excellence, his mount to the upper levels of the universe, and his indispensable spirit helper in curing. That the deer-peyote identification is of respectable antiquity in Mexico is at least suggested by a remarkable effigy snuffing pipe from Oaxaca, dating to ca. 400-200 B.C., which represents a reclining deer holding in its mouth a realistically modeled peyote cactus (see photo, p. 155). The upturned tail of the animal forms the perforated nosepiece (Furst, 1974b).

North of Mexico we find the deer widely associated with tobacco, and also with Datura; in the Andes, on the other hand, the deer seems to have been in some way identified with Anadenanthera colubrina, the principal hallucinogenic component of the divine compound known as huilca or wilka, judging from Moche vase paintings of the sixth century A.D. of ceremonial deer-hunt scenes, in which the animal is almost always flanked by A. colubrina, and sometimes also by free-floating Anadenanthera seed pods. In the Southern Plains, deer were very much involved in the ecstatic-shamanistic mescal-bean (Sophora secundiflora) medicine cults, among whose essential purposes was the securing of supernatural power ("medicine"), as well as sustenance, from the deer or from its larger cousin the elk. Indeed, in historic times at least, these rites were often referred to as "Deer Dance." In the ancient rock art of the Pecos River area of Texas, whose iconography seems to be related to early precursors of the historic mescal-bean ceremonies, the most common animals again are deer, sometimes depicted in association with mountain lions and anthropomorphic figures believed to be shamans (Newcomb, 1967).

Zuni cosmology weaves the deer into an intricate symbol complex that is strikingly reminiscent of the deer-maize-peyote complex among the Huichols —not really surprising in light of the many other cultural parallels between Southwestern Pueblos and the Cora-Huichols of western Mexico. As was noted earlier, the sacred hallucinogenic plant of the Zuni Rain Priest Fraternity is Datura inoxia—aneklaka in Zuñi-whose white, trumpet-shaped flowers stand for the East. However, there is also another divine plant, called tenatsali, never identified botanically, which stands for the Zenith and which the Zunis say embodies all the sacred flowers or plants of the world directions (the four cardinal points plus zenith and nadir): the yellow sego lily (Calochortus nuttallii var. aureus) for the north; the blue sego lily (C. nuttallii), and sometimes also lupine (Lupinus palmerii or aduncus) for the west; the red cardinal flower (Lobelia cardinalis or splendens) for the south; the white flower of Datura inoxia for the east; the "multicolored" flower, encompassing all of the other colors, of tenatsali itself for the zenith, and an unidentified root for the nadir, whose color is black.

Now, say the Zunis, all these flowers, and the plants which bear them—including, of course, Datura inoxia, which is in a sense the most important because it stands for the east—have an irresistible attraction for deer, who "go crazy with them"; in the esoteric songs, therefore, we find the Zuni hunter magically transforming into these flowers so as to draw deer toward himself and within range of his arrows. (Deer, by the way, move within an eternal closed cycle of death and rebirth, meaning that at death they travel to Katchina Village to be reborn as deer, whereas Zunis who were members of the Katchina Societies go through three cycles of death and rebirth as spiritual beings but are reborn as deer when they die the fourth time).

It may be that tenatsali will never be specifically identified, for the reason that it may not be a botanical species at all but a compound representing a sacred concept—a symbol complex embodying all the sacred flowering plants of the world directions together with the deer, with Datura responsible for whatever psychoactivity figures in tenatsali medicine.* That, at any rate, is the preliminary conclusion of Barbara and Dennis Tedlock, anthropologists who have spent several years exploring the richness and sophistication of the traditional Zuni world (cf. Tedlock, 1972, and personal communication).

American Indian Deer Symbolism: Asiatic Roots or Independent Origins?

The question, of course, is why of all possible animals the relatively gentle, herbivorous deer should recur over and over again as source of supernatural medicine power, and why it should so often be identified or associated with those plants that facilitate entry into the world of spirits. There are undoubtedly many levels of explanation for this phenomenon. But the fact remains that not only are deer considered to be closer to humans than any other animal by many American Indian societies, but where psychoactive plants are used, we often find deer closely associated with them—not, to be sure, always to the point of total identification and interchangeability, as between deer and peyote among the Huichols, but still closely enough to be impressive as a cultural phenomenon, and one, besides, that seems to have its counterpart, if not in fact its antecedents, in Paleo-Siberian mushroom shamanism. Here, again, Wasson's Soma is a rich source of information, as are Eurasian archaeology and ethnology.

It is evident from Neanderthal burials in central Asia and from mankind's earliest art in the great Paleolithic cave galleries of the Dordogne, as much as from the early rock art of western North America, that cervids of all kinds, and especially deer, were not merely an important food resource but a special font of metaphysical benefits, and that in Eurasia generally deer and shamans have apparently stood in a special relationship from very early times.
In northern Eurasia, wherever shamanism survived into recent times, the deer—specifically the reindeer—is still the shaman's animal. Among the Reindeer Tungus, for example, as among other tribes of Siberia, the deer is his spirit mount that carries him in his ecstatic trance to the realm of the sky people. The traditional shaman's costume of many Siberian tribes is festooned with deer symbolism, and the shaman's cap, without which he cannot properly shamanize, is frequently crowned by iron antler effigies or by real horns, for it is the animal horn that since time immemorial has embodied the concept of supernatural power and eternal renewal. (Early engravings showing antlered Siberian shamans in their full animal disguise are virtually indistinguishable from their Paleolithic counterparts in the cave sanctuaries of France). The northern forest and tundra people still live in an intimacy with the reindeer, wild and semidomesticated, that is hard for us to imagine, amounting almost to a symbiotic relationship, writes Wasson (1968:75). There is little doubt that this very ancient spiritual connection between man and the sacred deer, dating to a time long before reindeer were ever domesticated, inspired the horse nomads of central Asia to transform their mounts magically into stags by crowning them with antlers. Such antlered horses, presumably meant to carry their deceased Scythian riders into the Otherworld in the manner of Siberian shamans on their reindeer, were found by Russian archaeologists in the well-preserved "frozen tombs" of Pazaryk, in southern Siberia, dating to ca. 600-500 B.C. (Gryaznov, 1969).

The Reindeer and the Sacred Mushroom

Now, it happens that not only Siberian shamans but their reindeer as well were involved with the sacred mushrooms. Several early writers on Siberian customs reported that reindeer shared with man a passion for the inebriating mushroom, and further, that at times the animals urgently sought out human urine, a peculiarity that greatly facilitated the work of the herders in rounding them up—and that might just possibly have assisted their reindeer-hunting ancestors in early efforts at domestication:

 . . these animals (reindeer) have frequently eaten that mushroom, which they like very much. Whereupon they have behaved like drunken animals, and then have fallen into a deep slumber. When the Koryak encounter an intoxicated reindeer, they tie his legs until the mushroom has lost its strength and effect. Then they kill the reindeer. If they kill the animal while it is drunk or asleep and eat of its flesh, then everybody who has tasted it becomes intoxicated as if he had eaten the actual fly agaric. (Georg Wilhelm Steller, 1774, in Wasson, 1968: 239-240)

. . . in one of those open places in the woods we gathered twenty mushrooms, to the immense joy of the older of my companions who, as an enthusiastic devotee of this intoxicant, again praised its powers and its benefits. He affirmed, from his own experience, the most varied effects of this mushroom on herbivorous animals: wild reindeer that have eaten some of them are often found so stupefied that they can be tied with ropes and taken away alive; their meat then intoxicates everyone who eats it, but only if the reindeer is killed soon after being caught; and from this it appears that the communicability of the narcotic substance lasts about as long as it would have affected the animals' own nerves. (Adolph Erman, 1833:304-306, in Wasson, 1968:235)

As for the reindeer's longing for human urine, we are told by the distinguished Russian anthropologist Waldemar Jochelson (1905) that the Koryak had special sealskin containers, called "the reindeer's night-chamber," in which every herdsman collected his urine. This was used to attract refractory animals, who apparently required urine whenever they fed exclusively on certain lichens. So strong was this passion, he reports, that men urinating in the open ran a real risk of being run down by reindeer, who have a keen sense of smell, coming at him at full gallop from all sides!
From a strictly psychopharmacological point of view, Steller's and Er-man's accounts are in one respect impossible, in that the tribesmen could not have become inebriated by eating only the meat of an intoxicated reindeer. But it is possible that the early writers missed something, and that the contents of the bladder were consumed for that purpose—perhaps in a hunting rite akin to the walrus-bladder ritual of Alaskan Eskimos. The urine of reindeer "drunk" with fly-agaric would of course be as hallucinogenic as that of humans.

On the other hand, what if to the Siberians the reindeer itself was flyagaric, as to the Huichols deer and peyote are one? Then the killing and sacrificial eating of the inebriated deer would take on a very different and much more profound meaning, akin to the eucharistic implications of the Huichol Deer-Peyote sacrifice.

Whether or not such an interpretation has substance, the intimate relationship between the reindeer and the sacred mushroom is beyond question, as is the fact that this animal, which before the melting of the Pleistocene glaciers ranged much farther south than it does today, was one of the principal animals not only in the physical but also the spiritual universe of the Paleolithic ancestors of the first Americans. To some degree China is involved here as well, in light of the fact that according to Chinese mythology it is the deer that leads man to the legendary Ling Chih, the divine mushroom of immortality. Such a concept might, as Wasson (1968) has suggested, have diffused to China in the third century B.C. from India, but it could conceivably have come to the Chinese from western or southern Siberia, at an earlier time for which we have no written records, out of the same shamanistic stratum to which the Indian Soma rite ultimately owes its origin. The analogy between the Chinese tradition of the deer as a near-immortal precisely because of its association with a mushroom to which it points the way for man and the reindeer-mushroom identification in Siberia is strong enough to suggest something more direct than secondary diffusion northward across the Himalayas from a region in which all memory of Soma as mushroom had by then long disappeared.

All this brings us back to La Barre and the origins of the great hallucinogenic complex of Indian America. It is certainly tempting, on the basis of the above, to suggest that beyond the phenomenon of deer shamanism, the specific identification of the deer with plant hallucinogens also has its roots in an ecstatic Eurasian shamanism in which the reindeer's physical and metaphysical relationship to the sacred inebriating mushroom was an integral element. If so, the shamanistic deer-hallucinogen association that we now recognize in the Americas could have been already present in the ideational universe which the earliest Americans carried with them into the New World from the northeast Asian homeland, 15,000-25,000 or more years ago.

Proposing that possibility, of course, is assuming a great deal. But whether or not one is justified in postulating cultural survivals over such an enormous time span—and I, for one, would not reject this out of hand as at least a possibility—it is also conceivable that a deer-mushroom complex arose quite independently in the New World, out of the peculiar ecology of one of the principal species of psychoactive fungi employed in Mesoamerican ritual.

Deer-Mushroom Ecology in Mexico

As was noted in another chapter, Stropharia cubensis, reportedly the strongest hallucinogenically of all the psychoactive species found in Mexico, is a dung fungus; it is typically found growing on manure in open meadows. Like other mushrooms, Stropharia reproduces by releasing countless microscopic spores from its gills into the wind, which deposits them in the surrounding grassland.* Like those of other coprophyllic species, the spores of S. cubensis do not germinate directly when they reach a suitable environment but require passage through the digestive system of grazing animals; in other words, they are ingested with the forage, being subsequently depositedmas the animal evacuates. Not all herbivorous animals are capable of playing this essential symbiotic role, however; rather, it appears that to propagate, Stropharia requires the complex digestive system of ruminants. And indeed, the mushroom is today typically found on cow dung.

This curious circumstance has long worried those who, like Wasson, have studied Mexican mushroom cults in depth and been impressed with the important role Stropharia plays in these cults. The Mazatecs of Oaxaca, and perhaps some of the Maya of Chiapas and other Mesoamerican peoples to whom Stropharia is sacred, harvest the mushrooms in the rainy season in grassy meadows where cattle have been browsing. But cattle were unknown in the Americas before the coming of the Europeans. So the question naturally arises, in light of its apparent dependence on domestic ruminants, is Stropharia also a foreign import into Mexico? Or is there some indigenous species of animal that could have played the same essential role in pre-Hispanic times?

The answer is yes. And the animal is the deer. As a ruminant it is in fact the only species that could have served as Stropharia's host in Mexico and—assuming that the multichambered stomachs of ruminants are indeed the crucial factor—assured its survival as a species. In light of such an essential and easily observable relationship between deer and their preferred sacred psychoactive mushroom, the strict prohibition by the sixteenth-century Mazatees of Oaxaca against the killing of deer in their country, and indeed their very name, which means "people of the deer," take on new significance.

To return to the question of Paleolithic or Mesolithic survivals, the discovery, by early migrants into Mexico, of a functional deer-mushroom relationship could, conceivably, have served to reinforce whatever ancient Asian traditions might then still have remained alive concerning the deer as source of supernatural power, and especially the visionary gifts of shamans. Thus, to borrow Albert Hofmann's imagery, another research series, culture-historical and ecological rather than strictly pharmacological, might be said to close like a magic circle.

*In addition, it may be that the cardinal flower (Lobelia cardinalis or splendens , which belongs to a genus from which lobeline, an alkaloid used in western medicine chiefly as a respiratory stimulant, has been isolated) also contributes some psychoactivity. Species of Lobelia have long been a part of the herbal pharmacopoeia of different Indian populations, including those of Mesoamerica, asthma being one of the afflictions which Aztec physicians treated with a Lobelia preparation. Indians of northeastern North America also smoke the cardinal flower as a substitute for tobacco (hence its popular but botanically erroneous name "Indian tobacco").

*1 am indebted to John Haines, mycologist for the New York State Museum in Albany, for clarifying the ecology of Stropharia cubensis.