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Not that I'm an Native American or any type of expert, but I'd think that it refers to any medicinal (including entheogenic/psychedelic) cactus that is used (or has been used) by the Native Americans. In perticular, I think it has a strong link to the L. williamsii species, although I think that appearance comes from a westerner's view as that is what I have always been told (via books/internet/docos/etc) it refers to. Of course after looking into these cacti for a long time I realise that the term has also been used for other species, mostly those which have been incorporated into folk-medicine by the Indians.

I certainly wouldnt link it solely to L.williamsii as I know that it, along with other terms ('tsuwiri' for example) also refer to other species.

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Off the tip of my head I can say that there are at least 18 non-Cactaceae species that have been cited at "peyote" in the literature. The term "peyote" appears to have its etymology in the Aztec language, and likely referred specifically to plants known to the Aztecs. But the name has been extended, almost certainly by Spanish speaking culture, to almost any ethnobotanical cactus, as well as many other plants, even though the name may never have applied to them in pre-Columbian society. I think there are many "peyote" cactus that have gained the name by Spanish speakers simply because the plants may have been found at some point to have medicinal use (traditional or contemporary) or because it looked similar to other plants called peyote. The tribes currently considered the center of "peyote" use, the Huichol and Tarahumara, have their own terms for the cactus plants they use.

~Michael S. Smith

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Many different plants are properly called peyote.
Some are cacti. Some are not.
Some are ingested as hallucinogens but most are not.
Some are used in ethnomedicine but most are not so far as we know.
Some even look similar to L. williamsii but most do not.


L. williamsii is not necessarily small. The heads can reach 4 inches in diameter and a single plant can (with serious age) form a clump of many heads that is a meter in diameter.

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brshroomer said:

fuck...would you all stop complaining about each other and leave the garden alone?! ALL THE FUCKING NEW THREADS are about this!! use PMs to curse one another or go to OTD...

this is seriously making the quality of the garden to get worst.

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You're either gonna take the popular view or the indigenous peoples view.

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Rah said:

But not all shamans believe this, only some groups would degrade to other cacti when they couldnt find LW(Thanks hippies).

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"Until the 1950s there had been no careful and extensive botanical studies of peyote. Plants which were brought into the chemist's laboratory—or the horticulturist's greenhouse—had little or no documentation, available only at the site of collection, about the place of origin or other important characteristics. As a result, plants from the same population were sometimes given different scientific names and those of separate regions often were given the same name. This absence of botanical understanding, primarily due to insufficient field and laboratory studies, consequently resulted in mistakes and confusion by historians, anthropologists, chemists, pharmacologists, and others. For example, numerous references have been made to peyote as belonging to the genus Anhalonium. This name is botanically invalid, as it was applied to the group of plants which had earlier been named Ariocarpus; hence, the later name Anhalonium cannot be used for that group or any other group of plants such as peyote. However, the name Anhalonium had been employed so widely for about a century that few people other than botanists specializing in taxonomy were aware of the fact that the name should not have been used. The confusion and difficulties that have resulted probably can never be completely straightened out. "

-That was written by a scientists i.e. people who come up with taxonomic names in the first place.

I'm not an expert by any means. Just my 2 cents. lolz