KIÉRI AND THE SOLANACEAE: NATURE AND CULTURE IN HUICHOL MYTHOLOGY1

By Francessco Baba

I

In 1966 Barbara G. Myerhoff and I published an essay entitled, "Myth as History: The Jimson Weed Cycle of the Huichols of Mexico" (1966:3-390). It introduced a myth we considered to be of considerable ethnological, ethnobotanical and literary interest. We also thought it might have historical implications for religious change in the Huichol past, specifically from a ritual focus on a solanaceous plant to the peyote cactus, Lophophora williamsii. The central theme of the narrative was a contest between the culture hero Kauyumári, who is Deer and whose ally and alter ego is peyote, and his adversary, a malevolent supernatural sorcerer named Kiéri, who in this version was thought to personify Datura inoxia, the western North American species of the genus. I say "thought to be" because an ethnologist named Robert M. Zingg had identified Kiéri as Datura meteloides (since renamed D. inoxia) and called its personification "Jimson-Weed Man" in his book, The Huichols, Primitive Artists (1938).
    Zingg's taxonomy made sense. Datura had been widely employed in divination and therapeutics in prehispanic Mexico, and the genus is still in use for similar purposes among some indigenous groups today, including Pueblo Indians of the southwestern United States. But Zingg turned out to be wrong, or at least only half-right. Early in the 1970s it was discovered that the "god-plant" Huichols identify as the "true," or "real," Kiéri, that is, the Kiéri supposedly possessed of supernatural powers for either good or evil, is not Datura. Instead it is a species of Solandra, a solanaceous genus that not only is closely related to Datura but is distinguished by a similar array of tropane alkaloids, notably scopolamine, hyoscyamine, and nortropine, which are capable of doing permanent physiological damage, to the point of madness and even death.
    That Zingg (and, insofar as we followed Zingg, Myerhoff and I) had after all not been totally wrong in equating Kiéri with Datura was an even more recent discovery. This insight we owe to a Japanese ethnologist of religion, Prof. Masaya Yasumoto (1996:235-63), who during several field seasons over the past ten or more years in the Sierra Madre Occidental conducted intensive studies of the botany, mythology, and ritual significance of the Kiéri phenomenon among the Huichols. Yasumoto confirmed the identification of the "true" Kiéri as Solandra. But he also found that some Huichols do not limit the name only to Solandra, but use it as well for both Datura and the more recently introduced Brugmansia (form. Datura arborea, or tree datura), with spectacular trumpet-shaped blossoms similar to those of Datura but shading more to pink than white. Brugmansia is actually a native of Amazonia that was transplanted to Mexico and Guatemala as an ornamental during the colonial era. One of its popular Mexican names is floripondio, another, more telling one, is arbol loco, crazy tree, said to derive from the intoxicating effects of dew accidentally ingested by people who fall asleep beneath its flowers. Brugmansia does in fact have a well-documented history of use as a ritual intoxicant among some Amazonian Indians, including the Jivaro of Ecuador (Harner 1973). Mexican peasants have discovered medicinal properties in Brugmansia, but, as Schultes and Hofmann warn in their compendium of the botany and chemistry of the "hallucinogenic" flora, Plants of the Gods (1979, 1992:69), experience with Brugmansia in South America shows that uncontrolled or uninformed use can bring on "an intoxication often so violent that physical restraint is necessary before the onset of a deep stupor, during which visions are experienced."
    We owe the corrected taxonomy of the "real" Kiéri first of all to an amateur botanist named Colette Lilly. Mrs. Lilly, who had been living for several years in the Huichol comunidad of Santa Catarina with her cinematographer-husband John C. Lilly Jr., the son of the famous dolphin specialist, was traveling with a party of Huichol women when they pointed out to her a flowering plant they identified as a "like Kiéri." Its flowers were of the same shape as those of Datura, but they were yellow, not white. There were other morphological differences as well, so if this was really a "Kiéri," the Datura identification had to be wrong, for what confronted her here was a well-known viny ornamental popularly known in Mexico as copa de oro, cup of gold — that is to say, a species of Solandra. To make certain, she took samples that were subsequently identified by botanists in Mexico City as S. brevicalyx Standl. This was later revised to S. guttata, but the last word is not in. In any event, it was evidently the latter, and two of its sister species, S. guerrerensis and S. maxima, which the Aztecs had in mind when they told the Spanish of a divinatory and medicinal intoxicant known as tecomaxochitl, lit. "vase[shaped] flower."
    Kiéri as Solandra thus fits no less comfortably into the wider Mesoamerican-Southwestern use, and the mythology, of solanaceous intoxicants as would Kiéri as Datura.
    Unfortunately Zingg left no clue as to how he came to identify Kiéri as Datura. As a native of the southwestern United States, with prior field experience in northern Mexico, Zingg was presumably familiar with Datura morphology. That he would mistake a Solandra for a Datura is less likely than that his chief source for Huichol mythology, a gifted narrator named Juan Reál, applied the term "Kiéri" generically to different members of the Solanaceae, much as Professor Yasumoto reported some Huichols do today. The other possibility is that Juan Reál used the adjective -tsa, like, similar to, as in Kiéri-tsa (or, in another pronunciation, xra), meaning that the plant resembles Kiéri but is not itself a real Kiéri.
    However Zingg came by his taxonomy, neither he nor we should have called its personification "Jimson-Weed Man." If his Kiéri was really a Datura, it would have had to be the western species, D. inoxia, or one of its subspecies, not the eastern, Datura stramonium. And it is the eastern variety that came to be known as Jimson Weed, Jimson being a contraction of Jamestown, the seventeenth century English colony in Virginia.
    The name originated in an incident involving a party of English soldiers on their way to put down a rebellion led by a Lieutenant Bacon at Jamestown (then James Town), Virginia in the seventeenth century. Robert Beverly (ca. 1673-ca. 1722), in his History and Present State of Virginia (1705), tells the story:
 




The James Town Weed (which resembles the Thorny Apple of Peru, and I take to be the plant so call'd) is supposed to be one of the greatest Coolers in our World. This being an early Plant, was gather'd very young for a for a boil'd Salad, by some of the soldiers sent thither, to pacify the troubles of Bacon; and some of them eat plentifully of it, the Effect of which was a very pleasant Comedy; for they turn'd natural Fools upon it for several days; One would blow up a Feather in the air; another would dart Straws at it with much Fury; and another stark naked was sitting up in a Corner, like a Monkey, grinning and making Mows at them; a Fourth would fondly kiss, and paw his Companions, and snear in their Faces, with a Countenance more antick, than any in a Dutch Droll. In this frantick Condition they were confined, lest they should in their Folly destroy themselves; though it was observed, that all their Actions were full of Innocence and good Nature. Indeed, they were not very cleanly; for they would have wallow'd in their own Excrements, if they had not been prevented. A Thousand such simple Tricks they play'd, and after Eleven Days, return'd to themselves again, not remembering any thing that had pass'd. (Quoted in Schleiffer 1973:129-130).

The soldiers later claimed they picked what had turned out to have been Datura stramonium under the impression that it was a savory pat herb, but there is a good chance that they had actually learned about its intoxicating effects from local Algonquin-speaking Indians — the original inhabitants of Virginia — who had long used Datura in boys' initiation ceremonies resembling the toloache (Datura inoxia) rites of California Indians. In any event, the incident passed into history as "Bacon's Rebellion,'' while D. stramonium became Jamestown, or Jimson, Weed.

II

Word that Kiéri was not Datura first reached me in the 1970s from T. J. Knab. Knab, an ethnographer then employed by the Universidad Autónoma Nacional de México as a linguistic investigator, had spent some time in the same Huichol community, Santa Catarina, where the Lillys were then living. People there, he told me, identified Kiéri not, as had Zingg and we, with Datura, but with a closely related solanaceous species, Solandra, the flowering ornamental Mexicans call copa de oro, after the shape and color of its golden blossoms. No one who had seen a Solandra in the field, with its yellow flowers in bloom and its long, rangy branches, could mistake it for a Datura, despite its close relationship to the latter. Knab said he had written a paper on the subject that was not yet in print, but that I could use his information. I did so, in a book on which I was then working, Hallucinogens and Culture, published in 1976. I suggested that perhaps there were different Kiéris, one, the "real" Kiéri, identified as Solandra, the other an evil sorcerer whose plant form is Datura, another possibility being that Kiéri might be differentially identified in the five communities that make up the Huichol territory, or simply that there was not just one Kiéri but several (Furst 1976:136-137).
    Knab's paper on Solandra use and mythology appeared in 1977. There was no doubt that the "real" Kiéri was a Solandra, wrote Knab, but Huichols also distinguish between it and "Kiéri-like" plants, as well as between "good" and "bad" Kiéris, or between good and bad qualities as complementary opposites in one and the same "god-plant."
    I was particularly interested in Knab's observations on the Kiéri as a dualistic "bad shaman," i.e. sorcerer, because the myth dictated to Myerhoff and me in 1965/66 by Ramón Medina, a gifted Huichol artist and, then, apprentice shaman, excoriated the personification of Kiéri as unremittingly evil, a dangerous sorcerer who deceives his followers not only with intoxicating words and music but also with his "juices" — or, as we would see it, his tropane alkaloids — into thinking themselves to be birds, capable of flying from the rocks, only to fall to their deaths.
    According to Knab (1977:84), "people seeking certain favors from the /kieli/ god-plant2, such as better singing ability, aid on a journey to /wilikuta/ (Real Catorce) where peyote is gathered, more children for a wife, more calves for a man's cow, skill in embroidery or weaving, and so forth...go to the nearest important /kieli/3 god-plant, bearing various small offerings...Many people also bring candles - which symbolize /tatewari/, the god of fire — as well as small bowls of food, small bottle gourds, boules, filled with alcoholic beverage or small votive gourds filled with water from one of the numerous sacred springs in the area."
    That is Kiéri's positive side. Against this, Knab reported, many Huichols, if not most, have a very real fear of Kiéri's great powers as a capricious and dangerous sorcerer and avoid the plant and its personification (Kiéri Tewiyari, Kiéri Person) as much as possible. Hence offerings to Kiéri are as often prophylactic, meant to ward off his nefarious capabilities, as they are petitions for benefits. In fact, much of what Knab had to say about Kiéri as sorcerer dovetailed with Ramón Medina's myth. In any event, it was becoming clear that whatever Ramón and other Huichols might believe about the plant spirit as an evil and much-to-feared sorcerer, others — or even the same people — regarded him as a powerful, if minor, divine being from whom favors are asked — and expected — in exchange for offerings from the petitioner. As a matter of fact, both the older literature, notably Volume II of Fernando Benítez' five-volume Los Indios de México, and the more recent field research of Professor Yasumoto make it clear that whatever else he may be, Kiéri may bestow certain benefits, in particular exceptional skill in playing the violin, even when not directly asked for them. We cannot be certain, but the functional association Huichols consistently make between a visionary plant that was important to the Aztecs and other Nahuatl-speaking Central Mexican and a stringed instrument that was unknown in Mexico before the Conquest and that may have first reached the Huichols via the nominally Christianized Nahuatl-speaking Central Mexicans the Spanish transplanted into the Sierra Madre Occidental, may have ethnohistorical implications.

III

The scene now shifts to Bandelier National Monument. The time: summer 1985. Bandelier is a particularly beautiful prehistoric pueblo site in north-central New Mexico, about five miles south of Los Alamos and just over an hour's drive from Santa Fe, on the eastern flanks of the Jémez mountains. It is a place of considerable beauty and much history, a collection of pueblos, circular semi-subterranean kivas (the Hopi name for the ceremonial chambers of prehistoric and contemporary Pueblo peoples that also symbolize the underworld from which the ancestors emerged into the present world), residential blocks, family masonry and rock shelter dwellings and store rooms, with a continuous record of occupation that lasted a little under five hundred years between A.D. 1070 and A.D. 1550, when the site was abandoned.
    Like other members of the Solanaceae, including the Nicotianas, Daturas prefer disturbed soil, and while they are scarce elsewhere in the area, they can been seen in several places adjacent to the ruins at Bandelier. We were photographing one of these spectacular white-flowered shrubs when my wife and colleague, Jill L. McKeever Furst, an art historian with a strong interest in the relationship between natural history and the formation of symbols (cf. McKeever Furst 1995), inquired whether the Huichols identified not just peyote with deer (the two are synonymous and interchangeable in Huichol symbolism), but also made some such connection between Datura and deer. What made her think of deer? "The plant has antlers," she said. "Take a good look at it." Sure enough, sticking out among the new green foliage and showy flowers of the Datura inoxia before us were bleached, dry and leafless branches, dead growth from previous seasons. They did in fact look for all the world like antlers, and for Indian people as preoccupied with deer and deer symbolism as are the Huichols they could well have suggested the forked antlers of the white-tailed Virginia deer. Her astute observation brought to mind an incident in the charter myth of the peyote pilgrimage as I had heard it from Ramón Medina: after the ancestral peyoteros, the divine kakauyárite, had shot their arrows into the sacred deer (the form in which the first peyote manifested itself to the hunters), the animal began to transform and peyotes sprouted from his body and antlers. The pilgrims ground the antlers up and drank them mixed with sacred water from the springs called Tatéi Matiniéri, Where Our Mothers Dwell. The divine beverage, said Ramón, gave them beautiful dreams.
    Could this imagery have originated in pre-peyote Datura use, akin, perhaps, to that of the Pueblo peoples of New Mexico and Arizona? Could the white, antler-like dry branches at Bandelier, though long dead and degraded by exposure to the elements, still contain tropane alkaloids in sufficient strength to be psychoactive, i.e. trigger "beautiful dreams"? With the permission of the park rangers, we collected a few samples for testing by Robert F. Raffauf, Professor of Plant Chemistry in the School of Pharmacy at Northeastern University in Boston, and a close collaborator of Richard Evans Schultes, the now retired director of Harvard's prestigious Botanical Museum. Raffauf found the dry sticks to retain some of the compounds of the living plant, though in reduced and attenuated quantities, sufficient, probably, to trigger visions but without the often unpleasant psychic effects and potentially serious physiological damage of which tropane alkaloids are capable (Robert F. Raffauf, personal communication).
    Interesting, certainly, and suggestive. But it left unanswered the question whether people ancestral to the modern Huichols actually equated Datura with deer, with or without reference to the antler-like appearance of its dead branches. And then of course there was the vexing problem of Kiéri as Datura vs. Kiéri as Solandra.