This Is Your Mind on Plants

by Michael Pollan

Calabrese found that many Navajos share Sandor Iron Rope’s belief that peyote is an omniscient spirit, capable of seeing through people and somehow “knowing” them better than they know themselves; it has the power to bare one’s faults and force a person to confront them. Peyote functions in the lives of Church members much like a superego; he suggests that the plant has a gaze. Children are socialized in this belief, taught that “the Peyote Spirit knows his or her activities even in the absence of parents.” Conceiving of a plant as an omniscient spirit might seem fanciful, but how different is that, really, from a psychological construct like the superego—an inner voice that recalls us to the moral and ethical strictures of our society? What I found striking in Calabrese’s account is that we have in peyote a “drug” that, instead of undermining social norms, actually reinforces them.