"Attacks on sustainable societies: the Wixárika answer"

As the descendants of a First Nations People firmly anchored in its mythical past, the Wixaritari belong to the select and dwindling group of indigenous peoples that survived human history intact, i.e. without having been alienated from nature. This fact alone qualifies their society as utterly sustainable. A qualification in high demand in our XXIth century where, under the aegis of the United Nations, the entire planet is invited to identify sustainable development goals as the means to help build nations that can withstand crisis and drive and sustain the kind of growth that improves the quality of life for everyone. One would expect therefore some genuine interest for the few remaining sustainable human societies on our planet from a global community ensnared in non-renewable and un-sustainable development models. Unfortunately for the Wixárika people, the opposite is true. The world's interests, it appears, do not concern the contribution of the Huichol to sustainability but rather to the raw materials in its territories, untapped hitherto precisely because of the sustainable relationship of this indigenous people with the earth. Momentarily halted in the courts, the scheduled mining extraction in the sacred Wixárika peyote desert, referred to as “Wirikuta”, the place where Father Sun first emerged into the world, and the dwelling place of their gods, near Real de Catorce, in the state of San Luis Potosi will to the contrary destroy the Huichol culture. Founded on the perpetual renewal of their cosmos through the good stewardship of human beings, in a constant consultation with the divine forebears enabled by their communion through the peyote sacrament, the Wixárika society has been notified by the global community of the planned erasing of their peyote fields, which are the mainstay of their culture and native spirituality.

Until recently it seemed though that the Wixaritari had at last obtained from the world community the political consent and legal tools to peacefully organize the survival of their society. : the right to use the peyote cactus with the 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Substances, the right to claim their traditions and ceremonial territories with the 1989 ILO Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention C169 and the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. It is therefore a particular ironic twist of history that at the very moment that this pre-Hispanic people was led to believe that it finally was to enter from mythology into present day history on its own terms – or as they view it, to integrate new history in their mythology – that at that moment the world’s commitments already belonged to the past, and that the neo-liberal world order was ready to outsource the de facto prohibition of the Huichol sacrament to some international conglomerates and their stakeholders.

If this were to happen, one of the longest living examples of a sustainable, documented approach of a human group towards the environment would disappear. Of course, the human ecology model of the cash-strapped Huichols does not address the problems faced by modern man in his man-made materialistic environment. But, against the background of the anthropocene - the new geological epoch caused by the human impact on the earth’s geology and ecosystems - the inquiry should go well beyond types of environment as the environment itself has become irrelevant as source for the solution of earth’s demise. The anthropocene is by definition a man-made epoch. The focus of the attention to grasp this phenomenon should therefore not be on the selection of the human intervention with the highest impact to determine the start of the new epoch in the Geologic Time Scale, the so-called Golden Spike - the first cow plow, the first engine or the Trinity test - but on the change in human attitude towards the environment that put the whole sequence into motion.
From this perspective, the comparison between a people that has deliberately opted for an ecological management system that has sustained their relation to the earth throughout their existence, is in sharp contrast to the rest of the world community which has now discovered that their much-acclaimed approach is leading to global extinction. This epiphany may be the catalyst to motivate the UN to devise a sustainable 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda that won’t be limited to mere repair work but addresses the apparent basic flaw in contemporary human ecology: the absence of the spiritual component in western ecological awareness. After all, the Huichol mode of subsistence is not just an accidental grade on some evolutionary scale - from hunting and gathering to foraging and agriculture, and so on - but rather the result of a conscious choice about how they relate to their environment, to nature and to life.

The Huichols chose to adhere to their past and honor their ancient traditions. Not out of incapacity to adapt to the modern world and look the future in its face, or out of complacency, but with the full conviction to safeguard the richness of existence that began in “illud tempus” – ‘that time'. According to the Huichols ‘that time’ has been recorded by their myths since the creation of the world and had to be brought forward and protected against all threats. Thus, the Huichols remained in their territory, and passed down their myths and their cosmogony to future generations. Their beliefs that the annual cycle of renewal of nature should be recreated by the Huichols, follows the example set by the ancestral deities, the Kaukauyarixi, throughout history. To this end groups of Huichols, under the guidance of the spiritual leaders, annually complete the re-creation journey from their residential territory (the ‘Nanayari’ in Wixárika) in the Sierra Madre Occidental, to the peyote fields in Wirikuta, at the foot of the Cerro Quemado (Burnt Hill), near San Luis Potosi. Here, Tayaupa, Father Sun, appeared in the first dawn and brought the world to life. Here he settled with the other deities to await the annual visits of their offspring who bring offerings in exchange for the blessings that the people need to survive in their harsh habitat.

It is worth considering that people educated in the western knowledge tradition based on mere scientific criteria may feel uncomfortable with this shamanistic narrative because as victims of the prohibition of psychedelic plants they may very well have developed an overall spiritual deficiency. Indeed, after the first, a second hygiene hypothesis holds that a lack of exposure to consciousness altering substances (such as those listed on the INCB schedules I-IV) leads to overall spiritual poverty by suppressing the natural development of the mental immune system and increases susceptibility to nervous diseases and emotional distress. This lack of exposure is in particular known to lead to defects in the development of mental tolerance, to the inhibition of religious, recreational and cognitive expression and to physical ailments, including addiction, due to the denial of the benefits of the therapeutic properties of these substances. 

As a consequence, and even though it is agreed upon that ecology shows us how many processes in our different environments contribute to the development of how we act as crucial players, we are unable to spiritually identify with the other entities the way shamans do in their mythical world of equivalence. According to them, beings of a different nature are equals: animals are allies with magical powers to help people, the spirit of deer, corn and peyote are one and the same, and the elder shamans are thought of as living gods. In contrast, the western scientific approach positions us as outsiders, scrutinizing objectively, without any involvement other than the realization that we are an insignificant part of infinite series of development processes. Instead of being responsible for creation, we analyze its functioning and misfunctioning and in the process we have lost our feeling of shared responsibility as we have stepped outside of creation itself

The ultimate goal of the Huichol people is to secure the most intimate, awesome moment in human life they were able to safeguard since times immemorial : access to wholeness, to ‘life’ as they call it, for all Huichols, without exclusion. A personal access to the gods - respectful of human sovereignty - in a communion facilitated by the peyote cactus, and the joyful and safe return into society with the help of the marakate, their brightest specialists.

The epic of Gilgamesh tells us how the king is thrown out of heaven. It is the last step in a long process of de-divinization which started with the kings of Mesopotamia taking a privileged position with the gods thousands of years earlier, dethroning them and banning them beyond earth, to heaven. The communion with the divine world became a royal privilege, inaccessible to the king’s subjects.
And when, upon returning to Jerusalem from their Babylonian exile, the Jews in turn had their god forbid the use of the fruits of the tree of knowledge, the path was paved for the Christian inquisition and the US-directed war on drugs for the final attack : use of mind-altering substances is not covered by divine or human rule of law nor protected by human rights but it is the crime of all of mankind. All? No, Mesoamerica’s Huichols stood by their ancestors and gods and halted Mesopotamia’s criminal incrimination.

The Huichols secured their tradition at great personal cost during 500 years of subjugation.
It is their gift to the gods who receive them in the splendor of life, to the ancestors who defended that privilege throughout time and to mankind to which they belong and adhere and to whose survival they have loyally contributed, since time immemorial.