the actual Myth

of t and its affiliates make up one of the United States' premier research and training institutions. In addition to the many services and research areas provided directly by he My, stery, to become immersed in the original mythic arcana, to e

nter t

hrough them into the Mystery of Mysteries, to look upon the face of those extreme operations by which THE FATHER MAN, NEITHER MAN NOR WOMAN, created all things. To be sure I did not catch all this immediately and it took me a while to understand it, and indeed, many of t

he dance movements, many of the attitu

des

or the shapes which the priests of Ciguri draw in the air as if they were imposing them on the darkness or drawing them from the caves of night, they themselves do not understand, and in performing them they are merely obeying on the one hand a kind of physical tradition, and on the other the secret commands issued to them by the Peyote whose essence they absorb before they start dancin

g, in order to achieve a trance stat

e. I

The Institute for Complex Additive Systems Analysis (ICASA) is an academia, industry, and government cooperative venture. ICASA is dedicated to studying the behavior, vulnerabilities, and predictability of complex systems. ICASA's interdisciplinary approach delivers information age research, applies that research to real-world problems, and develops key enabling technologies. In support of research and development, ICASA trains and educates the nation's next generation of critical systems thinkers.

mean that they do what the plant tell

s th

em to do; they repeat it like a kind of lesson which their muscles obey, but which they no longer understand in the relaxation of their nerves, any more than their fathers or grandfathers before them. For the function of every nerve is strained. This did not satisfy me and w

hen the Dance was over I wanted to f

ind ou

t more. For before witnessing the Rite of Ciguri as it is performed by living Indian priests, I had questioned many Tarahumara on the mountain and had spent the night with a young family of whom the husband was an adept of this rite and seemed to know many of its secrets. And I received from him some marvelous explanations and extremely precise elucidations of the way in which Peyote revives throughout the n

ervous system the memory of certain su