The Mescal Plant and Ceremony is a 1896 article by James Mooney’s. It sits at the junction of ethnography, comparative religion, and early psychopharmacology—before any of those words had quite settled into their modern meanings.
Mooney begins from a simple fieldworker’s astonishment: here is a plant described to him not merely as a remedy, but as a sacred presence—“a vegetable incarnation of a deity,” eaten in a communal rite that could last through the night. He then does what careful observers do: he moves between the concrete and the mysterious without collapsing either side. We get the botany as it was understood at the time (including disputes about naming and classification), and we get the social fact of sacredness: that communities carry a knowledge of use, setting, and meaning that cannot be reduced to chemistry alone.
The heart of the piece is the ceremony itself. Mooney describes an all-night gathering inside a tipi, a circle of participants around the central fire, the sequence of eating, singing, drumming, and the disciplined attention the ritual demands. It reads like an early lesson in what later researchers would call “set and setting”—the insight that experience is shaped by context, expectation, music, rhythm, and community, not only by what is ingested.
What makes the The Mescal Plant and Ceremony especially valuable, more than a century later, is its tone. Mooney is writing in a period when Indigenous ceremonies were often dismissed or condemned out of hand; he notes that peyote use had been punished and stigmatized “without investigation.” Against that backdrop, his willingness to describe the ceremony as coherent, structured, and meaningful is itself historically significant.
This is not a “how-to” text, and it should not be read that way. It is a historical document: an early record of how a powerful sacrament was understood, practiced, and protected within living traditions—at a time when outside authorities were already moving to control or criminalize it. Read it as anthropology in miniature: precise observation, cultural humility (by the standards of its era), and a reminder that spiritual technologies often arrive in the West long before the West has a language for them. Download the free PDF here:
