Dr. Fikes has provided the following summary of his presentation:
Reading Carlos Castaneda’s first four books played a significant part in my decision to begin fieldwork in 1976 among the Huichol (Wixarika) living near the ceremonial center of Santa Catarina. See map on my website, http://jayfikes.com/spanish-sobre-el-autor. Dr. Castaneda’s alleged apprenticeship (as described in his first two books) featured three entheogenic plants. One of them, peyote, was collected annually by Huichol temple officers; who walked eleven days to enter Wirikuta, the sacred land where the Sun Father was born, in order to hunt peyote as (if it were) a deer. To understand the meaning and functions of rituals embedded in the Huichol annual ritual cycle I took Castaneda’s advice. Thus eating peyote during their rituals and while visiting sacred sites, became vital to my research. This strategy of “enhanced participation,” led me to complete a pilgrimage in 1986 to a female Kieri, a powerful entheogenic plant in the Solandra genus. Although Kieri has long been defamed as evil by anthropologists who relied solely on hearsay, Note 1, by doing an all night pilgrimage–making offerings and prayers to a divine Kieri – combined with translating the narrative explaining Kieri’s role in creating the first Deer Shaman (Fikes 2021) I learned that Huichol veneration of Kieri preceded collecting peyote–by temple officers making annual peyote pilgrimages which enabled the inhabitants of Santa Catarina to ingest it during their Peyote Dance at the end of each dry season.

After doing 34 years of research with four Huichol shamans, in 2011 Unknown Huichol: Shamans and Immortals, Allies against Chaos, was published. In 2021 I published Beyond Peyote: Kieri and the Huichol Deer Shaman, which is the focus for our Friday seminar.