TOBACCO

TOBACCO . Now used recreationally throughout the world, tobacco originated in South America as long as eight thousand years ago as a product of two cultivated hybrid species of the genus Nicotiana, N. rustica and N. tabacum. The genus, which belongs to the nightshade or potato family (Solanaceae), occurs naturally in many parts of the world, including North and South America, Australia, some of the South Pacific Islands, and—with but a single species—Africa. The greatest number is native to North and South America, but even with this relative abundance of nicotine-bearing species, only in one small area of the New World, most likely fertile valleys located between Peru and Ecuador, did early food cultivators discover and make use of the extraordinary effects on mind and body of the powerful alkaloid from which the genus derives its name.

More than likely the early experiments with cross-fertilization that resulted in the two cultivated hybrid species of tobacco, Nicotiana rustica and N. tabacum, were products of that moment in time when some South American Indians turned from a pure hunting and gathering economy to food cultivation, beginning with the root crop cassava, or manioc. Although all species of the genus contain nicotine, that alkaloid is present in much greater amounts in the two cultigens of ancient lineage, N. tabacum, the progenitor of commercial blends, and N. rustica. The former is the more variable, with percentages of nicotine content in the leaf ranging from only 0.6 percent to 9.0 percent. In contrast, in a Mexican species of N. rustica, the percentage of nicotine was as high as 19 to 20 percent. Although, as Johannes Wilbert notes in his pathbreaking book Tobacco and Shamanism in South America (1987), nicotine is distributed throughout the plant, in both species the leaves contain the highest amount, those of N. rustica far outstripping the milder species in its capacity to inebriate and addict. Little wonder, then, that the leaves were used either whole or dried and crushed and that N. rustica achieved by far the widest distribution as a sacred ecstatic intoxicant among many Native American peoples. Often, especially in South America, it serves as the exclusive vehicle of the shamanic trance, and sometimes it is one of several herbal preparations employed for the altered mental state in which the shaman, it is believed, travels out-of-body to consult with the spirits of the deceased and the gods or to do battle with disease demons and other negative forces on behalf of his or her clients.

Tobacco is sometimes also employed to create an especially receptive state of mind for the application of another psychoactive species with even greater ramifications in the intellectual culture. Thus, to cite just two examples, on their peyote pilgrimages to the north-central Mexican desert, the Huichol Indians of northwestern Mexico, whose most sacred and supernaturally charged plant is peyote, smoke N. rustica tobacco wrapped in cornhusks to intensify the effects of the psychoactive cactus. Far to the south, on the north coast of Peru, Mestizo curanderos combine tobacco syrup administered through the nostrils with infusions of San Pedro (Trichocereus pachanoi ), the popular name for a tall, columnar cactus that, like peyote, has mescaline as its primary alkaloid and whose place in Andean shamanism is archaeologically documented as reaching back at least three and half millennia.

It should be emphasized that as many as two hundred major and minor species have been identified in the visionary-therapeutic pharmacopoeias of Native American shamans, the majority in the tropics. Of these, tobacco had the widest distribution even before it became a major item of commerce as a recreational drug in the centuries after Christopher Columbus arrived in the New World. Curiously, despite the rapid pre-Columbian diffusion of tobacco through the Indian Americas, tobacco's cultural role as a visionary intoxicant seems to have stopped at the shores of the Atlantic and the Pacific. Tobacco and the custom of smoking reached West Africa in the 1500s, not long after Columbus's first landfall in the Western Hemisphere, and spread on that continent so quickly that some students of the phenomenon assumed it to be African in origin, reaching the New World with the slave trade, rather than the other way round.

In parts of Africa, notably the Cameroons and Nigeria, tobacco pipes of terra-cotta, metal, and other materials evolved into great sculpture, real masterpieces of portable art and objects of prestige associated with the nobility, great warriors, and priests, with long stems and complex chimneys rivaling in size and volume the monumental pipes of the so-called Mound Builder cultures of prehistoric North America. Both men and women smoked pipes, some with sculptural bowls whose interiors exceed the size of large teacups or coffee cups. Even if the tobacco was of the milder kind, it is hard to believe that the amount of nicotine the smoker absorbed would not have had some effect on consciousness. And yet if African medicine men or shamans used tobacco to contact the spirits, no evidence for it exists. The only possible hint that there was more to African smoking than pleasure or sociability comes from a report by the French anthropologist and Africanist Marcel Griaule (1898–1956). During field research with the Dogon people of Mali, Griaule met an old blind hunter named Ogotemmêli, who was especially knowledgeable in the cosmology and religion of his people. "Having sat down on his threshold," Griaule recounts, "Ogotemmêli scraped in his tobacco pouch and gathered some yellowish dust on the flap. 'Tobacco,' he said, 'clears up the sense of judgment.' And he began to reconstruct the system of the world, for one had to begin with the very beginnings of things" (Griaule, 1970, p. 16).

Tobacco was introduced into Siberia by trade from Russia's possessions in Alaska and the Aleutians—or even earlier; that is, at least by the 1700s. But there are no reliable reports that Siberian shamans adopted it as a ritual intoxicant alongside, or even instead of, the fly agaric mushroom, Amanita muscaria. In the Himalayas, on the other hand, Nepalese shamans have added N. rustica tobacco to a long list of psychoactive species they classify as "traveling plants" belonging to the god Śiva—"traveling" because they enable the shaman to travel to other worlds. N. tabacum, in contrast, is regarded as merely "pleasurable." Both species were introduced in colonial times.

Tobacco Myths

A common theme in the origin mythology of tobacco among Native Americans is that this most widely distributed psychoactive species in the New World was given to the first people by the gods. The gods themselves were believed to require tobacco as their sacred, and even only proper, food. But in making it a gift to humanity they neglected to keep any for their own use—"not even one pipeful," in the words of an elder of the Fox tribe of Wisconsin (Michelson, 1932, p. 127). So they must rely on human beings to give it to them. In exchange, the gods listen to petitions and confer their blessings or, conversely, withhold evil. Reciprocity is thus extended from the social realm to interaction between the spirit world and human beings, whose control over a spirit food fervently desired by the supernaturals gives them some leverage, for the gods are said to be unable to resist it.

The craving for tobacco attributed to the supernaturals can thus also be understood as an extrapolation from human experience, in this case nicotine addiction, especially among tribes whose shamans regularly intoxicated themselves with tobacco. The use of tobacco as smoke, snuff, cuds mixed with lime, or liquid infusions to induce "drunkenness" for the purpose of "communicating with demons" is repeatedly described by sixteenth-century sources from the Caribbean, Mexico, and South America, though in some cases the intoxicating substance was probably not tobacco but another of the many botanical hallucinogens then and now in ritual use.

Wilbert found a particularly complex variety of "tobacco shamanism" among the Venezuelan Warao, whose sacred geography and cosmic architecture are virtually constructed of tobacco smoke and whose shamans smoke themselves into "out-of-body" ecstatic trance states with cane cigarettes three and four feet long. Warao shamans travel to the House of Tobacco Smoke in the eastern part of the universe over a celestial bridge of tobacco smoke conceived of as a channel of energy that guarantees health and abundance on earth as long as the supernaturals continue to be properly fed with tobacco smoke. Wilbert reports that Warao shamans crave tobacco smoke with such "tremendous physiological and psychological urgency" that they are literally sick without it. They believe that the gods likewise await their gift of tobacco with the craving of an addict and will inevitably enter into mutually beneficial relationships with human beings as long as humans provide the gift.

This attribution of addictive craving to the gods probably diffused together with cultivated tobacco itself. The notion dominates tobacco mythology and ritual even among peoples who, like those of the North American Plains and Prairies, customarily reduced the potency of tobacco with such nonpsychoactive plant materials as red willow bark and who, in any event, smoked only small quantities ceremonially in sacred pipes with chimneys of limited interior diameter to please gods and spirits and sanctify the spoken word, never to the point of intoxication.

A significant dichotomy may be noted between the origin mythologies of the cultivated hybrid species Nicotiana rustica and the less potent and less widely distributed N. tabacum, on the one hand, and the wild species (N. attenuata, N. bigelovii, and N. trigonophylla ) of aboriginal western North America, on the other. While the origin of the Indian species is commonly credited to the divine realm, the latter two species are frequently attributed to the dead, perhaps because, as casuals, these species (like the daturas, which also belong to the Solonaceae) are sometimes seen to grow in disturbed soil (e.g., on graves). In California and the Great Basin they are often highly valued as gifts of the ancestors, but in transitional areas, where both wild and cultivated species are available, the wild varieties are sometimes feared for their association with death.

The oldest evidence thought to point to smoking comes from California, where conical stone pipes dating to circa 4000 bce have been excavated and where wild tobaccos were widely employed for shamanistic, magico-religious, and medicinal procedures, including the ecstatic trance. The Shoshonean (Uto-Aztecan) Kawaiisu of south-central California used virtually every technique of ingestion reported from South America, including smoking, snuffing, licking, chewing, and swallowing. Likewise, the prophylactic, therapeutic, and metaphysical uses for cultivated species in South America and eastern North America were paralleled by these and other California tribes with the native wild species. The most common method was mixing the pulverized, dried leaves with slaked and powdered lime and either swallowing the mixture dry or liquified or licking and sucking it.

The Kawaiisu participated in the ecstatic-initiatory toloache (Datura inoxia) religion common to other California Indians, but tobacco, whose magical potency was given to the first people by the trickster culture hero Coyote, was much more generally employed by them and their neighbors. They used it as a mild-to-potent dream-inducing soporific; as a shamanistic and initiatory intoxicant; or for preventing and curing illness; repelling and killing rattlesnakes; driving away ghosts, monsters, and other threatening supernatural beings; and divining and manipulating the weather.

In North America the widespread function of tobacco to please the spirits is particularly well documented among the Iroquois and Algonquin of the Eastern Woodlands and the Plains and Prairie tribes. Seneca mythology attributes the origin of tobacco (Nicotiana rustica ) to Awen'hai'i (ancient bodied one), the pregnant daughter of the Great Chief in the Sky, who stripped the heavens of tobacco when she fell onto the newly created earth island through a hole in the sky. This left not only the heavenly powers but the vast company of other spirits that manifest themselves in nature without their most essential divine sustenance. To induce these spirits, which included masters and mistresses of animals and plants as well as the "faces" that appear to hunters in the forest or in dreams and that are represented by the wooden masks of the shamanistic medicine societies of the Iroquois, to act on one's behalf requires the indispensable gift of tobacco.

Therapeutic Applications

Though widely employed to trigger the ecstatic visionary trance that is one of the cornerstones of shamanism, tobacco was also deeply embedded in native therapeutics. Almost certainly this was in large part based on observation and experience with the pharmacological effects of nicotine, not only on the human organism but other phenomena in the environment. Answering his own question whether pharmacological science corroborates nicotine therapy and curing practices with tobacco of South American shamans, Wilbert, in a paper published in 1991, lists a whole series of tobacco administrations by shamans that at first sight might be considered "magical" but whose therapeutic efficacy can be pharmacologically demonstrated.

Take, for example, the shaman's breath. Not only in the Americas but wherever shamanism survives, the shaman's breath is considered to have curative, purifying, and strengthening powers. Except in the Arctic, breath is of course invisible, but in the American tropics it is often given form by tobacco smoke. This phenomenon of shamanic practice was noted by the earliest European explorers. Shamans blow both their breath alone and thick clouds of tobacco smoke over their patient and his or her relatives and also fumigate the house. Blowing tobacco smoke is especially valued at the planting season. Before putting their seeds in the ground, farmers ask their shaman to "purify" their seed stock with tobacco smoke to assure a good harvest. Of course, tobacco smoke is sacred and feeds the spirits. But there is more to it than magic or religion: nicotine is a powerful insecticide and vermifuge. German experimenters found that fully 8 percent of the insecticides in tobacco are transferred into tobacco smoke. Seeds fumigated with nicotine against insect pests have in fact been observed to do better than those not so treated.

In treating their patients, shamans not only blow thick clouds of smoke but "capture" the smoke in their cupped hands; direct it into a wound, an aching or extracted tooth, eyes, nose, and mouth; and then massage the affected body parts. In addition curers blow nicotine-laden spittle and soothe aches and pains with tobacco juice. "Looking at these therapeutic practices from the point of view of drug administration," writes Wilbert, one recognizes in them more or less sustained-release mechanisms of application. Tobacco leaves are also used as plasters or compacts. Tobacco therapy thus involves the respiratory, dermal, and even gastrointestinal routes.

In both South America and Mexico, tobacco was also employed in the form of therapeutic enemas. In addition to tobacco, other plants that native peoples invested with sacred power and even divinity were so used. For example, a seventeenth-century Spanish colonial account of therapeutic practices and incantations in a community of speakers of Nahuatl (Aztec) in Guerrero, Mexico, lists therapeutic enemas not only of piciétl (tobacco, Nicotiana rustica ) but of peyote (Lophophora williamsii ), the little cactus of the north-central Mexican desert whose most important visionary alkaloid is mescaline; an aquatic species of Datura ; and ololiuhqui, the Nahuatl name for the potent seeds of the white-flowering morning glory Turbina (form. Rivea ) corymbosa, whose active principles are lysergic acid derivatives related to synthetic LSD.

Native American tobacco lore and therapy thus run counter to modern experience with the effects of tobacco on human health. Of course, Indian tobaccos are truly "organic"—they are cultivated, processed, and ritually employed without chemicals. Shamans often reach great age, including those for whom tobacco is the primary avenue of ecstasy. Whatever negative effects tobacco intoxication has on the vocal cords, visual acuity, color perception, and so on—and Wilbert lists many of these—have, by way of natural modeling, long since been processed into desirable qualities in the intellectual world of tobacco shamanism. Still, there are no statistics to show whether tobacco shamans fall victim to lung cancer, heart disease, emphysema, or any of the other ills associated in the West with smoking. That Native American peoples are well aware that tobacco can kill is obvious from the many traditions of symbolic death and resurrection through the experience of initiatory intoxication. But there is also the reverse: revitalization, bringing the dead back to life by means of tobacco. This desirable end is dramatically illustrated in the following Seneca myth from upstate New York (Hewitt, 1918):

In his travels a youth encounters a skeletonized man in a place heaped with the bones of dead people. Skeleton Man tells the youth that the only thing he desires is tobacco, but his pipe and pouch are empty. He sends the youth on a harrowing journey, past or through dangerous obstacles and variations of an ordeal familiar from heroic, funerary, and shamanic mythology—the Symplegades-like "paradoxical passage," that is, clashing rocks, islands, or icebergs that open and close in an instant and through which the hero, the soul, or the shaman must pass. The Seneca youth survives these ordeals and finally reaches a distant place where tobacco is guarded by Seven Sisters and their terrible old mother. Using his orenda (spirit power) and trickery, he succeeds in entering the lodge of the female spirits, evading their war clubs and escaping with the magical tobacco. When he returns and fills Skeleton Man's pipe, the bones of the dead people are reclothed with flesh, and the people return to life.

See Also

Smoking.

Bibliography

Griaule, Marcel. Conversions with Ogototemmêli: An Introduction to Dogon Religious Ideas. London, 1970.

Hewitt, J. N. B., ed. "Seneca Fiction, Legends, and Myths: Part 1." In Thirty-second Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, pp. 37–813. Washington, D.C., 1918. The first volume of a comprehensive collection of Seneca Iroquois oral traditions by a Smithsonian Institution ethnologist and linguist who was a Tuscaloosa, one of the nations of the Iroquois Confederacy.

Meyer, Laure. Art and Craft in Africa. Paris, 1995. With numerous photographs in full color, a noted French art historian surveys the high technical and aesthetic qualities of everyday and court arts of one hundred African tribes.

Michelson, Truman. Notes on the Fox Wapanowiweni. Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 105. Washington, D.C., 1932.

Müller-Ebeling, Claudia, Christian Rätsch, and Surenda Bahadur Shahi. Shamanism and Tantra in the Himalayas. Rochester, Vt., 2002. With 605 color and black-and-white illustrations, this is a popular but authoritative overview of Nepalese shamans and tantrikas and their practices, with special emphasis on psychoactive plants.

Parker, Arthur C. Seneca Myths and Folk Tales. Buffalo, N.Y., 1923. An important collection of the oral traditions of his own people, the Iroqouian Seneca of upstate New York, by an ethnologist and New York State archaeologist who served for many years as director of the New York State Museum.

Robicsek, Francis. The Smoking Gods: Tobacco in Maya Art, History, and Religion. Norman, Okla., 1978. A richly illustrated study of tobacco and smoking in ancient Maya art, history, and religion.

Ruiz de Alarcón, Hernando. Treatise on the Heathen Superstitions That Today Live among the Indians of This New Spain, 1629. Translated and edited by J. Richard Andrews and Ross Hassig. Norman, Okla., 1984.

Wilbert, Johannes. "Tobacco and Shamanistic Ecstasy among the Warao Indians of Venezuela." In Flesh of the Gods: The Ritual Use of Hallucinogens, edited by Peter T. Furst, pp. 55–83. New York, 1972. New ed., Prospect Heights, Ill., 1990. A pioneering essay on Warao tobacco shamanism and tobacco cosmology, proposing for the first time that tobacco belongs in the category of the "true" hallucinogens.

Wilbert, Johannes. Tobacco and Shamanism in South America. New Haven, Conn., 1987. A pathbreaking study of the ethnology, ethnobotany, and pharmacology of tobacco, the physiological effects of nicotine, and their incorporation in the ideology and practice of shamanism across the South American continent by a UCLA ethnologist whose fieldwork among Indian peoples spans five decades.

Wilbert, Johannes. "Does Pharmacology Corroborate the Nicotine Therapy and Practice of South American Shamanism?" Journal of Ethnopharmacology 32 (1991): 179–186. An examination of empirical ethnographic data on indigenous nicotine therapy shows it to compare favorably against experimental clinical studies of nicotine pharmacology and its effects on the human body.

Zigmond, Maurice L. Kawaiisu Ethnobotany. Salt Lake City, 1981.

Peter T. Furst (2005)