Many like to dismiss as myth the use of kykeon in Greek antiquity, believing whatever archeological evidence exists as unreliable.  Fair enough.  But no one can dismiss the irrefutable data proving the peyote cactus, species, Lophophora williamsii, a known hallucinogen, played an important role in the religious ceremonies of ancient Aztecs and Native Americans.  Peyote buttons.  They've been found strung around the neck of skeletal remains in Mexican burial caves, some considered 1,000 years old.  While some Aztecs considered peyote God, all users believed it an agent for communing with God.

That, of course, did not sit well with the invading Catholic Spaniards.  Immediately they set out to eliminate all forms of indigenous worship, setting the tone by destroying religious sites and records.  Resistance of any kind was met with the kind of brutality and torture best left to the imagination.  Still, the use of peyote continued, clandestinely.  It was around Civil War time when American Indian tribes learned of the peyote ritual, and possibly of Aztec atrocities, adding a pinch of Jesus for good measure.

Just as our Native Indians were getting the hang of it, we were stoking the imagination of those who would chronicle just how the West was won.  And they said we won a lot of it from the natives.  It wasn't very pretty, as most of history and Hollywood suggests, or the emergence of the Ghost Dance any coincidence.  Performed as a peyote ritual, the belief was that, if one's soul were pure and full of prayer, God would send down their ancestors and help destroy the white man, or at least bring him to his senses.  It didn't work.  And you can bet that little ditty Home on the Range, where seldom a discouraging word is heard, doesn't get much airplay on the reservations.

With little else to cling to, Native Americans fought for their right to consume peyote as a religious ritual.  It took a while, but in 1918 the Native American Church was founded, permitting members to ingest peyote in religious ceremonies.  Christians took a dim view, and over the next four decades numerous bills came before Congress seeking to ban the religious use of peyote.  Now, can you imagine telling the Pope everything would be fine if Catholics just quit eating Jesus, symbolized in that little white wafer we eat?  Me either.  Yet it wasn't until 1960 when an Arizona judge ruled the religious use of peyote protected by the First and Fourteenth Amendments.

Stepping back to the 1880s, scientific studies of peyote led pharmaceutical companies to produce and distribute peyote buttons (minus the necklace) for the treatment of numerous mental disorders, as well as alcoholism.  But no one really knew what it was about peyote that caused its effect, encouraging science to get to the bottom of it all.  Which occurred in 1897 when German chemist Arthur Heffter isolated peyote's active ingredient, naming it mescaline, no doubt a nod to an ancient oracle, the mescal bean.  Mescaline was first synthesized in 1919, and various studies were conducted, including the extensive Der Meskalinrausch, published in 1927, in Berlin.