Well, after over a decade of reading about the stuff, hearing stories from others, and more recently being lucky enough to sit down in front of a Huichol shaman and his son as they played traditional music, I finally made the effort to ingest this medicine.
..and it surprised me. Peyote is some powerful stuff.
I managed to have 14g of the dry cacti in my possession(peyote is 100% legal where I live), which sounds like not much but this cactus is in my eyes a rare gift and to have any amount of it in your life is a blessing. It is also much more potent than any trichocereus cacti I have encountered thus far, and so much less is needed.
I sat down last saturday night, and figured I would try just a small amount. I have worked a few times with trichocereus peruvianus over the summer, which was in part a response to a recent series of life changing experiences that were had with Shulgins favorite little empathogen that has made so many waves in the dance scene. I figured some time with phenethylamines was in the cards. Aside from that, there has been much work done with the fungus both alone and in combination with rue, and one powerful night combining Wachuma and fungi. That is however, for another time. I am here to talk about Wirikuta, or Peyote.
I ingested only a few grams of the dry buttons, meant to be a test dose because I had no idea really how potent peyote can be. From talks with others I gathered that different people seem to eat every and any dose level of the stuff. I quickly realized however, that what I imagined to be more of a low level microdose was building up to something far greater than that. Warm empathic rushes were flowing through my body, not unlike that of MDMA, accompanied by transient nausea and eventual intensification of the visual field, especially in the vibrancy of colors seen. Music became wider and electronic music sounded incredible, again a signature in my experience of empathic phenethylamines.
At some point, maybe 3 hours after ingestion, and the nausea had subsided I smoked a very small puff of cannabis, shut off the lights and got into bed. I was wearing some of my most cherished faux fur festival gear that I feel extremely comfortable in and always makes me smile, bringing back some of the most beautiful memories I have. Everything was perfect. Faint fractal were beginning to bloom on all surfaces with eyes open and color was now saturated with neon brilliance..icing on the cake. My heart was radiating and I felt generally at peace with my life, who I am and where I am going. Peyote was like a vacation from all the delusional crap that we hold on to in this life, only to ironically make us all the more sick for doing so. It is a profound letting go.
And then things got kinda weird for a moment..
The music that was up until this point simply enhanced, and wider sounding, started to loop backwards...but it never lost any rhythm or tempo..the rhythm was maintained but it played forwards and backwards. This wont make sense when reading I know..it was a very strange synesthetic effect, as I could also feel the loop of the music and at that same moment I said to myself "well this is weird!" and instantly I could see the pattern of the looping as a strange fractal implosion, like as if it had pierced linear reality by the act of breaking the regular flow of temporal space time parameters.
In the next moment, the sky appeared above me behind closed eyes. This was rather vivid. In the sky above me was a massive eagle, soaring above me, with quite an impressive wingspan. It was breathtaking. There was a moment where everything sort of slowed down and I just lay there looking up as this beautiful creature. Some kind of fractal pattern or glyph then descended down from the eagle towards me.
This was like the opening to my visions, the eagle there to welcome me into the world of Wirikuta. I knew this, but again it wont make sense to try to explain how or why that sort of communication happens.
Next, the visions shifted, and I spent maybe 30-60 minutes laying flat out in bed eyes closed deep in peyote dreaming, speaking with people and processing events etc that I know were rather personal but I can't for the life of me remember much of it anymore. All I know is that it was a lot of personal junk being processed, and that I was having profound visions.
This is one thing that surprised me. People say sometimes that cacti is not really a psychedelic, or that it's not visionary...Peyote to me is different from the Peruvianus I have worked with, and maybe more visionary, I don't really feel qualified to say. I know that I have had visions with all the cacti I have eaten at some point, but not like I did with Peyote. Peyote for me is on par with ayahuasca and fungi. It is a powerful visionary sacrament not to be underestimated. It can really take you into a whole other world that I don't feel the west is equipped to understand. It is magic.
The next vision I can remember, I am standing on what seems to me to be a Mayan pyramid, or Aztec, Toltec..I would not know the difference. I can see space above, stars, galaxies etc..the way the sky looks when you get far out of the cities into the mountains on a clear night. There is this Indian guy there with me, again maybe Mayan, or Toltec. From the sky down to the pyramid descends this river of rainbow light, and inside of the rainbow light flowing in the river is overlaying patterns and fractal glyphs, morphing and shifting. He sort of points to the thing and put's his hand into it, and tells me that he can open stargates with this stuff, whatever this stuff is. Again, this was not spoken to me, it was simply understood. He then actually opens some kind of cosmic doorway inside of the river of rainbow fractal light, and moves towards it, looks back at me as if to invite me to come with him..but I can't...
"You have not eaten enough peyote today to go where I am going".
The visions continue for hours, again much content I cannot recall. I get up every hour or so to smoke a puff of cannabis, get some juice or water. At times I sit up with a candle petting my cat for prolonged periods feeling a sense of absolute completeness, love and empathy. I feel good about my life, I feel okay with past relationships, I think about my friends and how amazing these people are in my life. I send some of them messages to tell them how awesome they are and how much I love them. At one point I get up and dance around the room to down tempo bass music. Everything is glowing and I love it.
Hours go by and this stuff is still going. The globe on my shelf is alive and winking and smiling at me. Tantric goddesses bathing in faint mandalic light are swimming through the air above me, again smiling back at me.
Next vision, laying back down in bed is of a raver. I am presented with this typical imagine of the kandi kid raver, colored plastic beads half way to the elbow, rainbow hair, beaming on MDMA, dancing in sacred spirals of light to the ecstasis of life. Wirikuta is present, a force, like the presence of tide in the ocean..where is it? from where does it arise? It is a movement, intelligent but transient..always present yet unidentifiable. The vision then becomes like an interactive instruction on the evolutionary development of the human being..a blueprint for the post-industrial human. (okay okay, I like to go to raves, I like to dance with my friends..this stuff is already in my head and the visions might play off of that
)
I see visions about how MDMA came into our world from some other place. It was sent here, a divine incarnation to bless humanity with the most potent activation of the heart chakra we have current access to. Wirikuta shows me the genesis of the dancing human, fused with the neo shamanic heartbeat of syncopated electronic music and the somatic heart and body activation of MDMA. This then sets up the bridge for the introduction of the higher phenethylamine based medicines, which retain much of the heart activation but carry that energy farther up into the other centers as well. In the visions I witness the evolution of the kandi kid raver, who then progresses from MDMA and fuses with the spirit of Wirikuta, maturing like a butterfly an blooming into fuller spiritual realization. Suddenly they are adorned not with plastic neon beads and baby soothers etc, but adorned with beautiful shimmering stones and crystals..turquoise beads, quartz, feathers...they are smiling and beaming with light, dancing in circles and chanting..beautiful sacred music engulfing the dance floor as a whole culture reaches it's climax ready to accept a new way of living on planet earth.
A voice began to address me, this time actually heard in the audible range. I said "are you peyote"?..to which the voice simply responded, "Yes"...
Cool vision, huh?
Long live the unwoke.