Women’s Medicine: Religious vs. Secular Peyote Consumption in New Spain and the Contemporary United States

Women’s Medicine: 

Religious vs. Secular Peyote Consumption in New Spain and the Contemporary United States

A Proposal Submitted to the Native Traditions in the Americas Unit

For the American Academy of Religion Conference, 2025

This paper analyzes the historiography of women and peyote in the Americas from the Mexican colonial period through the mid-twentieth century. I suggest that the distinction between religious versus secular peyote consumption was highly gendered and involved locally-specific assumptions about domesticity, spiritual power, and medical authority. The Inquisition in colonial Mexico commonly described women’s peyote consumption as purely medicinal and therefore not a major cause for concern. Similarly, nearly 500 years later, anthropological studies characterized Indigenous women’s utilization of peyote as secular, practical, and often medicinal. This paper aims to explore the precise contours that characterized religious or secular peyote consumption under two distinct religious and carceral regimes: the Inquisition in colonial Mexico and the Code of Indian Offenses in the United States. The paper concludes with a discussion of peyote as both religion and medicine, drawn from oral histories of contemporary peyote women in Oklahoma. 

Nearly everywhere peyote appears in the literature, from the early Spanish colonial period through the late 20th century, it is discussed in the context of efforts to criminalize it. The Inquisition officially banned peyote consumption in 1620, but had been investigating people suspected of using it since at least 50 years before. One of the first people to be brought to trial was Spaniard Catalina Peraza, a wealthy noblewoman living in Guanajuato, New Spain. Peraza was accused of ingesting peyote at her home to divine the romantic interest of a local magistrate. According to witnesses, Peraza claimed that “whoever ate peyote would be able to know anything they wanted to know.” She was accused of other activities associated with witchcraft, including being an unmarried woman of a certain age, possessing a catalogue of herbs in her home, and possibly chanting incantations. Peraza was found guilty and sentenced to one year’s exile from the city. However, as historian Martin Nesvig notes, Peraza’s case was unusual given that “Spanish inquisitors were generally skeptical of the real harm of folk medicine and generally did not believe in witchcraft.” It appeared that the court’s primary concern was more specifically about who Peraza may have invoked in her incantations. Had she called upon the old gods or Satan? Had she mixed the sacred with the profane? Folk medicine may not have been seen as harmful by the dominant regime, but refusal to adhere to the mandates of the Holy Office was a crime. 

Nesvig calls Peraza’s case an example of the desacralization of peyote consumption in the Mexican colonial period. At the time of Spanish contact, peyote use was a highly ritualized, outdoor, communal activity that was recognizably and meaningfully religious to the church officials who observed it. As Indigenous religious practices--especially those involving psychoactive plants--were repressed, practitioners adapted by taking them underground. Inquisition records from the 17th century suggest that ingesting peyote indoors for divination, alone or with one or two others, had become a common practice among women of all backgrounds in New Spain. Unless the person had invoked Indigenous deities, Inquisitors often excused peyote use because they saw it as purely medicinal. Characterizing one’s peyote consumption as purely medicinal may have enabled the practice to survive. It also moved peyote into the domestic sphere, which was most commonly associated with women. 

Centuries later and thousands of miles north, in 1962 anthropologist Louise Spindler conducted a study of acculturation among Menominee women. Spindler noted that Menominee women used peyote in “a very secular and rational manner--e.g. as medicine for earache, childbirth, etc.” Admittedly, Spindler’s interlocutors were living in a radically different context from colonial Mexico. Decades of criminalization of Indigenous North American religious traditions, including peyote, had again sculpted the contours of women’s relationship with the plant--or at least what they were willing to share with outsiders. For the first half of the 20th century, peyotists resisted criminalization by testifying before lawmakers to both the medicinal and religious aspects of the plant. When they obtained First Amendment protections in 1918, it was for their religious practice only. However, peyote’s medicinal qualities were acknowledged by the state so long as it was utilized by non-Indigenous doctors.

Criminalizing peyote functioned to domesticate the women who worked with it. It is curious that in New Spain, peyote use had to be demonstrably medicinal to avoid being criminalized, while in the 20th century United States, it was precisely peyote’s medicinal aspect that was ignored in the law. I suggest that this is not simply an expression of sexism, racism, or xenophobia (though these are certainly at play), but that it was part of an entire system of containment and fragmentation of Indigenous ways of life. Isolating Indigenous religious and medical traditions within the home was a key aspect of undermining their validity, both in New Spain and the US. It also may have fostered the development of new approaches to healing.  

Since Spindler’s characterization of peyote as secular medicine for women, scholars Brianna Theobald (2019), Patrisia Gonzales (2012), and Guy Mount (1993) have also noted peyote’s medicinal qualities, specifically those associated with childbirth. The example of childbirth disrupts and exceeds the boundary between religion and medicine. In Indigenous cosmovisions, the birthing body becomes a doorway between one world and the next. Characterizations of peyote either as an aspect of religious or medical practice deploy limiting, binary frames of reference: sacred/profane, religious/secular, irrational/rational, and so on. For Indigenous people working with peyote, religion and medicine are interwoven and mutually reinforcing. To heal, one must pray. To pray is to petition spiritual beings, including peyote, to share their power--and their medicine--so that the people may live.