Fieldwork records la santa rosa ritual cannabis use near the Gulf

Near the Gulf of Mexico, an Indigenous group calls marihuana la santa rosa and treats it as a sacred plant of divine origin — chewed in small quantities, its great observed effect being to make people speak at length.^[1] Williams-Garcia’s account rests on fieldwork including ceremonies observed at San Pedro in 1953.^[1]

The altar companion

The plant rests on the altar of the divine, hidden in paper bundles among bells, whistles, incense pots and crystal-and-obsidian antiquas, the ancient things that are gods from the Hill of Gold, with Catholic saints against the wall.^[1] It receives daily offerings of water, refreshments and incense, morning and afternoon; a travelling priest entrusts it to a colleague with money for the rites.^[1] Men and women of the altar eat it, priests of both sexes holding equal supernatural status, plus invited guests made its padrinos and madrinas; cult musicians eat it too.^[1] Alone it is imprudent — intoxication, dizziness, brief anxiety.^[1] Special occasions call it forth: harvest festivals, a priestly aspirant’s vows signalled by a cat-like gatanit shout, consecrations requiring revelatory dreams.^[1]

Pedro Agustin’s initiation

Pedro Agustin ate it late one afternoon and slept; at dawn, rockets he took for the herb’s effect woke him, and a voice ordered him to speak the cult’s requirements — servants, branches, sacrificial fowls, a pilgrimage to the Lagoon.^[1] On the road the party ate the rose; at the pool priests and godparents asked for rain as one, heard thunder and a torrent, watched the water rise in the dark, and offered aguardiente at the plant’s own ordering, then birds the next day.^[1]

The 1953 chapel ceremony

The chapel rite ran purification first: flowers, lemon-branch cleansing, incense, six chairs, priest and priestess enthroned centre, whistle and bell announcing spirits from the ancestors.^[1] Then the papatla-leaf package opened to reveal the plant; madrinas took pinches between finger and thumb and chewed, padrinos received theirs, music sounded, and the eaters circled dancing.^[1] The priestess sang, turned, breathed hard, spoke incessantly in a high unusual voice; her assistant sweated, trembled, swung a branch, orated fluently.^[1] The possessed chastised backsliders and inventoried missing ritual elements while the priest stared; the company swayed as one, danced an areito in the patio, and came down over an hour to tranquil normality, some still dancing at dawn.^[1]

Speech against visions

Apparent CNS effects were tremor plus the urge to speak, oratory fixed on religion; yet ten-year eater Pedro Agustin felt nothing from the plant itself — it only gave ideas afterward, a stimulant to thought — and his disciple felt only dance while music played, the rose speaking through melody.^[1] Music is the doctrine in code: set sounds gladden the taking, call the spirits, announce arrival at the father-and-mother altar, invoke companions, beg the plant to stay, and receive its thanks.^[1] Against all this, a twenty-year priestess called the speakers fools and deceivers, theatre about the very act of speaking; she only thought, and saw — flowers of all colours bearing results, then the brilliant Hill of Gold in the East where the master god illuminates the world and all priestly souls reunite.^[1] At followers’ funerals a musician who had eaten played beside the body while women danced with branches and a priest swept the corpse head to foot with the herb for a clean arrival where the sacred plant lives.^[1]

The maize boy’s mother

The myth: a gestating child announces he will be born dead and must be buried where his mother bathes; a maize plant rises, its tamales bitter, discarded, transformed into a boy — her son — who takes her east past a flat lizard whose tongue he cuts for her, into St. Peter’s guarded house.^[1] She stays at the entrance, worshipped ever after, clean, fresh, sprouting, seeding: the sacred rose.^[1] The boy, moving the lizard’s tongue, makes storms; the thunder-elders bargain tongue-pieces for peace.^[1] He was the sun, the supreme deity, first manifest as maize; his mother lives at heaven’s gate.^[1] The living herb is “a small piece of the heart of god.”^[1] Gardens answer the myth: growers tend plants daily past a metre tall, neighbours and priests depending on them, access reserved.^[1]