He studied the Plains Indians and their peyote cult with Richard Evans Schultes (which resulted in the 1938 book The Peyote Cult).
La Barre conducted field work across North and South America, and later through India, China, Africa and Europe. Born in Uniontown, PA, La Barre studied at Princeton and Yale, and later taught at Rutgers, Wisconsin and Duke universities. Weston La Barre is best known for his work in anthropology and ethnography, in which he drew on the theories of psychoanalysis and psychiatry. Illustrated with photographs and diagrams., and an index. The Peyote Cult includes extensive bibliographic and reference material, including lengthy and in-depth bibliographical essays and notes on audio and media material as well as journals and books. Richard Evans Schultes, Psychedelic Review
La Barre follows the search for the 'mystic experience' through use of chemical substances - a new fashion albeit as old as history - in an unusually objective manner. The Peyote Cult is still quite generally considered to be the one outstanding work on peyote.
La Barre also explores related issues, such as anthropology, economics, chemistry, botany, pharmacology, and archeology. La Barre looks at the legal aspects of drug use, ritual drug use (including in the Native American Church), and the increasing spread of peyotism from the South-West to other Native American tribes.
The Peyote Cult includes discussions of contemporary drug culture and experiments with altered states of consciousness and psychedelic drugs, including Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert and Carlos Casteneda. This is the latest edition (the fifth, enlarged edition), now back in print.įor decades, readers on peyotism have enjoyed Weston La Barre's fascinating original study, which began when the author at age twenty-four, studied the rites of Native American tribes using Lophophora williamsii, the small, spineless, carrot-shaped peyote cactus growing in the Rio Grande Valley and Southward. The Peyote Cult by Weston La Barre (1915-1996) is the classic work on peyotism, originating in Weston La Barre's studies of the use of peyote in the rituals of fifteen Native American tribes in the 1930s.
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