peyōtl

Nahuatl peyōtl is recorded in early colonial central Mexico for the psychoactive cactus used far to the north. Spanish clerical reports from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries preserve peyote as both plant and practice. The earliest written history is already a history of surveillance.

As Spanish administration expanded, peyote moved from indigenous ritual vocabulary into inquisitorial files. What communities guarded as medicine was recoded as disorder by church and state. The linguistic borrowing arrived with legal pressure attached.

By the nineteenth century, the form circulated in ethnography and borderland medicine in Mexico and the United States. English adopted peyote with minimal spelling change. Scientific Latin named Lophophora williamsii, while communities kept older ceremonial meanings alive.

In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, peyote became central in legal debates around religious freedom, especially in the United States. Court language, pharmacology, and indigenous ceremony now share the same word with very different aims. The term stayed short; the arguments around it grew vast.