CHAPTER TWO TOBACCO: "PROPER FOOD OF THE GODS"

The Spanish clergy from the first classified tobacco alongside peyote, morning glories, and mushrooms as a ritual intoxicant of traditional Indian culture. This fact may come as a surprise, but the ministers of the Colonial church knew whereof they spoke.

The natural and cultural history of tobacco (Nicotiana spp.) as an aboriginal American cultigen—as much unknown to the rest of the world less than 500 years ago as were chocolate, maize, and rubber—is too complex and too extensive to fit into these pages. But we can hardly ignore it in the present context, not so much because as used by us today it is potentially one of the most physiologically damaging substances known, but rather because in much of the traditional Indian world tobacco was and still is considered to be the special gift of the gods to humanity, given to assist mankind in bridging the gulf between "this" world and "the other"—the world of the gods themselves. In many cases this view involves employing tobacco to attain precisely the kinds of mystical states, or the characteristically shamanistic ecstatic trance, that we commonly associate only with the better recognized vegetal hallucinogens. To mention only one example from Mexico: not only before the Conquest but centuries later the curing shamans of Aztec-speaking communities used pici&I (Nicotiana rustica), in conjunction with chants of certain origin myths, to place themselves in what we might call "mythic time"—a time when everything was possible—and to enlist the supernatural power of the creator gods and their primordial handiwork in the restoration of the patient's health and equilibrium. This use is about as far removed from hedonistic smoking as one can get. We will have occasion to refer to this particular Aztec phenomenon again in another chapter.

Such things did not escape the attention of the Spanish chroniclers, and should have led to many detailed investigations since, but in the modern ethnographic literature a recent study of tobacco intoxication and shamanism, with its underlying mythological and cosmological complex, among the Warao Indians of Venezuela (Wilbert, 1972) is literally the only competent in-depth treatment of this important topic.

Gods and Men as Tobacco Addicts

I do not wish to imply that tobacco was universally employed to trigger alternate states of consciousness. On the contrary, it probably served a greater variety of sacred purposes than any other plant in the New World, among its most important and virtually universal functions being that of divine sustenance for the gods, mainly in the form of smoke; it also served as an indispensable adjunct of shamanic curing, primarily as a supernaturally charged fumigant but sometimes also as a panacea. Yet there seems to have been at least an element of incipient intoxication in shamanistic smoking in many Indian societies of North and South America, and real tobacco intoxication, to the point of a radical altering of consciousness or psychedelic trance, was certainly of considerable importance in the ecstatic complex of the New World as a whole. This element, together with what we know today of the chemical activity of Nicotiana, justifies assigning tobacco—as the Indians themselves did—to the psychedelic flora, but with this important difference: in contrast to the plants that we usually call hallucinogens, of which not a single species has been known to be addictive, tobacco may be so. There seems to be no scientific reason to doubt, and more than enough evidence to suggest (including observations among and testimony by South American Indians) that tobacco is not just psychologically habituating, as some have maintained, but that it does in fact result in physical dependency—i.e., is addictive in the true sense of the word, a fact that many Indian populations recognized and codified in their mythologies, even to the point of assigning to their gods the same physical and psychological craving for tobacco they observed in their shamans, themselves archetypically the mythmakers. Anthropologist Johannes Wilbert (personal communication) notes that various North and South American Indian societies share a tradition that in giving tobacco to the people the supernaturals failed to hold any back for themselves ("not even one pipe," the Fox quote the Gentle Manitou). Inasmuch as the gods crave tobacco as their essential spirit food (usually though not always or everywhere in the form of smoke), by this act of generosity they could be said to have placed themselves in a position of dependency, subject to manipulation by religious practitioners. However, since the people likewise depend on the good will of the supernaturals, the relationship was one of reciprocity and interdependency, differing fundamentally from Judeo-Christian concepts. Because of the similarity of tobacco rituals and beliefs in widely separated areas of aboriginal North and South America, Wilbert thinks they diffused long ago from a common point of origin along with the first plants themselves.

Edward Brecher et al. (1972) having adequately dealt with the problem of tobacco addiction in the context of contemporary American society (pp. 209- 244), there is no need to dwell on it here. What concerns us, rather, is the traditional use of Nicotiana as a ritual and very sacred inebriant, concerning which some Indians were, and are, well aware of its tendency to addict, even if they did not phrase it in quite those terms.

The genus Nicotiana belongs, with Datura ("Jimsonweed") and such important food plants as the tomato and potato, to the nightshade or potato family (Solanaceae), which also includes a number of important narcotic genera, such as Atropa (A. belladonna). There may be as many as 45 different species of tobacco, most of them the result of cultivation, but only a few achieved wide pre-European dissemination. The most prominent of these are N. tabacum, which may have originated as a cultivated hybrid of two other species in the eastern valleys of the Bolivian Andes, spreading from there across northern South America into the West Indies and to lowland Mexico, and N. rustica, another cultivated hybrid that is found from the Andes to Canada, rivalling maize in its pre-European distribution. In the Great Basin of western North America, particularly in California and the adjacent Nevada and Arizona desert, three other species, N. bigelovi Watson, N. attenuata, and N. trigonophylla, were the important tobaccos in native ritual. N. glauca Graham, the so-called "tree tobacco" that is found growing all over the foothills on the Pacific coast of California, is a comparatively recent import from South America that was apparently never employed by California Indians in aboriginal times (Zigmond, 1941).

Although other alkaloids may contribute to the psychedelic aspects of Nicotiana intoxication, the most important active principle is nicotine, a pyridine alkaloid that occurs in the aboriginal species in much higher concentrations (up to four times) than in modern cigarette tobacco. It is nicotine that produces the craving for tobacco in confirmed smokers, as it does among Indians who use it in great amounts for ritual rather than pleasure. The nicotine content of N. rustica is significantly greater than that of N. tabacum, which, along with the fact that N. rustica is also the hardier of the two species and requires less attention in cultivation, probably accounts for its far more extensive geographical and cultural distribution. In any event, being more powerful, N. rustica was much more widely employed in metaphysical and therapeutic contexts. It was the sacred picihl of Aztec ritual and medicine, also the divine tobacco of the Indians of the eastern Woodlands and also, probably, the petitm of aboriginal Brazil. Today, secular smoking of commercial tobacco for pleasure, wholly unknown in the Americas in pre-European times, is probably general among most Indian populations, excepting those in the remote interior of South America. Nevertheless, the aboriginal Indian tobaccos have nowhere passed into secular use. Even many relatively acculturated Indians who participate to one or another degree in the national economy still make a distinction between white man's tobacco and their own. Commercial cigarettes or cigars may be freely smoked at any time (and are sometimes even used ceremonially), but the powerful N. rustica continues to be everywhere reserved for traditional metaphysical and therapeutic purposes. This differentiation is also emphasized in the terms applied to the traditional species. For example, the Huichols of Mexico refer to N. rustica as "the proper tobacco of the shaman," while the Seneca of New York call it oyengwe onwe , "real tobacco." At the same time, it seems that some Indians, the Huichols included, are aware that N. rustica is not without danger; among the Huichols there are even reports of imbibers of tobacco infusion falling ill with what is apparently nicotine poisoning. There are also stories of peyote pilgrims dying after a tobacco purification ordeal in the course of the quest for peyote. Considering the very high nicotine content of N. rustica, occasional accidents of this sort are certainly possible.

The importance of tobacco in Huichol shamanism is especially interesting because it is yet another example of the functional and symbolic coexistence of tobacco with a sacred hallucinogen, in this case peyote. The shaman to whom tobacco is said to belong is not only the actual shaman of a particular group but also the principal deity, the "First Shaman," Our Grandfather, the deified fire, who established tobacco as well as the peyote ritual, and to whom N. rustica is ceremonially sacrificed, not only in the peyote rites but in all other ceremonies. Furthermore, tobacco smoke is as essential to shamanic curing among the Huichols as it is everywhere else in American Indian shamanism. Huichol shamans "with a bad heart"—i.e. in their malevolent role, as sorcerers—also use tobacco to speed "arrows of sickness" to their victims, a phenomenon of which we will hear again shortly. My Huichol informants say that evil shamans have their own special tobacco, which may or may not be true in the literal sense, but which in any case reminds one of a Carib Indian tradition of a mythological contest between a good and a bad shaman. At one point the good shaman challenges his rival to reveal all the kinds of tobacco he has, and when the other fails to enumerate more than ten, shows him up by magically producing many more varieties of his own (KochGriinberg, 1923:213-214).

Tobacco also enters into the contest between the Young Lords or Hero Twins in the Popol Vuh, the sacred book of the Quiche Maya of highland Guatemala, and the rulers of the Underworld. The latter challenge their visitors from the Upperworld to keep two cigars lit through the night. The Hero Twins pass the test by placing fireflies at the tips of their cold cigars, only pretending to smoke incessantly, and relighting their still fresh cigars in the morning, a feat that mystifies the rulers of the dead. As a matter of fact, the Tzotzil Maya of Chiapas, Mexico, still believe that tobacco shields one from the evil beings of the Underworld and from death, and the Lacandón Maya of the Usumacinta region even now offer the first tobacco harvested to their gods in the form of cigars (Thompson, 1970). Similar practices and traditions abound all over the Americas.

The Antiquity of Tobacco in America

How ancient is tobacco in the New World? Its spectacular aboriginal distribution and the striking similarity of tobacco ideology suggest that it is very old indeed. It is entirely possible that the progenitors of N. rustica and N. tabacum are the most ancient cultivated plants in the Americas, older even than the earliest varieties of maize and other native American food plants, whose initial domestication in southeastern Mexico dates to ca. 4000-5000 B.C. There is of course no reason why the first cultigens should not have been intended to feed the spirit rather than the stomach. In any event, tubular stone pipes, probably (though not certainly) for tobacco smoking, rivaling in age the earliest primitive Mexican maize, have been found in California—and smoking is not even believed to be among the oldest methods of tobacco use! By the time of Columbus there was virtually no Indian population, from Canada to southern South America, to whom one or another of the major species of tobacco was not sacred and that did not either cultivate it or obtain it by trade from their neighbors. This was true as much for societies that also used other psychoactive species as for those that did not. Not only did Nicotiana enjoy a far wider geographical and cultural distribution than any other vegetal hallucinogen, but it was also consumed in many more ways and for many different purposes, from shamanic intoxication to feeding the gods, to curing. Best-known and probably most common is smoking, but it was also drunk, snuffed, licked, sucked, eaten, and even injected rectally as enemas, a technique that permits especially rapid absorption of the active principles into the blood stream, while bypassing the digestive system and thereby avoiding unpleasant side effects.

Psychedelic Enemas?

The rubber enema syringe is actually a South American Indian invention, but other suitable materials were also employed for the bulb. Intoxicating as well as medicinal enemas have been described both in the earliest European accounts of native customs, dating to the sixteenth century, and in the more recent ethnographic literature. Tobacco juice, ayahuasca (Banisteriopsis caapi), and even a species of Anadenanthera (A. colubrina) whose seeds (huilca or wilka) were used for hallucinogenic snuff and in intoxicating beverages, all seem to have been employed for enemas in western South America. Very early Quechua dictionaries mention huilca syringes, and the sixteenth-century chronicler Poma de Ayala (1936) likewise reports enemas made from these potent hallucinogenic seeds among the Inca. Enema syringes also appear in the pictorial art of the Moche civilization, which predates the Incas by more than a thousand years. Sahagiin mentions enemas in Aztec medicine, but does not tell us the purpose for which they were employed. Not so the Anonymous Conqueror (1917), another sixteenth-century Mexican source, who writes of the Huastec Indians of Veracruz that, not content with intoxicating themselves by drinking their "wine" (actually pulque , the fermented juice of the agave cactus), they also injected it rectally.

It has only recently come to light that the ancient Maya, too, employed enemas. Enema syringes or narcotic clysters, and even enema rituals, were discovered to be represented in Maya art, an outstanding example being a large painted vase dating A.D. 600-800, on which a man is depicted carrying an enema syringe, applying an enema to himself, and having a woman applying it to him. As a result of this newly discovered scene, archaeologist M. D. Coe was able to identify a curious object held by a jaguar deity on another painted Maya vessel as an enema syringe. If the enemas of the ancient Maya were, like those of Peruvian Indians, intoxicating or hallucinogenic, they might have been compounds of fermented balche (honey mead), itself a very sacred beverage, fortified with tobacco or with morning-glory-seed infusions. Of course they could also have been a tobacco infusion alone.

The suggestion that the ritual enemas of pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica were in fact not just medicinal or therapeutic in our sense but, like those of the Incas, were meant to affect the user's state of consciousness and place him in touch with the supernaturals, is supported not just by the sixteenth-century and later evidence from South America but also by the recent discovery of peyote enemas among the Huichols of the western Sierra Madre in Mexico (Timothy Knab, personal communication). The Huichol syringe is made of the femur of a small deer, with a bulb of deer bladder instead of rubber, closely resembling Plains Indian deer-bone enema syringes in the collections of the Museum of the American Indian in New York. Huichols say shamans who take a peyote infusion rectally instead of by mouth (whole or ground in a specially consecrated mortar) do so because their stomachs are weak and cannot tolerate the very bitter and astringent plant, which often causes nausea and even severe vomiting; however, I suspect that inasmuch as the sacred cactus is itself equated with, and identified as, deer (see Chapters 10 and 11), the practice probably has deeper symbolic meaning.

The tobacco enema is presumably a relatively recent refinement in the history of nicotine ecstasis, while the drinking of tobacco in the form of a syrupy infusion may be among the earliest. The juice, produced by steeping or boiling of the leaves, can either be taken by mouth or imbibed through the nostrils, in which case the active principles are absorbed more quickly into the system. Tobacco drinking to induce the desired trance state, often in great amounts and after prolonged periods of fasting, was and is especially common in shamanic initiation among Amazonian Indians, where it is often followed by the neophyte's first introduction to the ritual Banisteriopsis caapi beverage, whose most important active principles are harmala alkaloids. Tobacco infusions, imbibed through the nostrils, are also well-integrated in the symbolic system and psychopharmacology of drug-assisted folk therapy in urban Peru, where, for example the healer administers it both to his patients and to himself in conjunction with the mescaline-containing San Pedro cactus (Sharon, 1972).

More or less rapid intoxication by eating raw or prepared tobacco, or by snuffing, or more gradual intoxication by sucking, are probably also very old. Snuffing is common, especially in South America, where pulverized tobacco, mixed with wood ashes or some other alkaline preparation to facilitate release of the active principles, is inhaled either alone or in combination with some other psychoactive species. What is often called chewing in the literature should more properly be described as sucking, since the quids prepared of powdered or crumbled tobacco and lime (or ashes) are not actually chewed but held in the mouth, between the gums and the teeth, and sucked for hours, allowing the juice to trickle down the throat. This technique of gradual nicotine intoxication was aboriginally so widespread, from the Northwest Coast of North America through California deep into Amazonia, that it must surely rank among the earliest methods. It is still the common practice among the Yanomamo (Shiriana, Waika) of the Upper Orinoco as well as other aboriginal populations of tropical South America. Significantly, the Yanomamo, who also employ powerful intoxicating tryptamine snuffs in their shamanistic rituals, apparently can and do go for long periods without snuffing but say they suffer physical discomfort if they are deprived of their tobacco quids for even short periods of time (Chagnon et al., 1971). Powdered tobacco mixed with lime in the form of a quid or cud is also one of several ways in which Nicotiana was and is used among both the highland and lowland Maya, as it was throughout Middle America (Thompson, 1970). The early literature lists alleviation of fatigue, hunger, and thirst, and also ritual intoxication among the principal reasons for the practice.

The Sacred Pipe

Considering its enormous geographic spread in the Americas at the time of European discovery, as well as the probable age of stone tobacco pipes in California, the inhaling (often called "drinking" or "eating") of tobacco smoke by the shaman, as a corollary to therapeutic fumigation and the feeding of the gods with smoke, must also be of considerable antiquity. Tobacco was and still is smoked by shamans and other participants in shamanic ritual in many different ways—as cigarettes and cigars with wrappings of corn husk or other plant materials, of which some may well have been themselves psychoactive; in cane tubes up to three feet in length; or in tubular or elbow pipes of varying design and of different materials. Such pipes were often of simple construction, but others, especially in North America, were frequently real works of art on which much care and ritual was lavished, representing humans, animals, or supernatural beings and activities associated with the "medicine" or spirit power of their owners. Simple or complex, however, the manufacture of the pipe never was solely a matter of technology. It was a sacred art, often an elaborate ceremonial lasting over many days, fully commensurate with the divine nature of tobacco and the metaphysical purposes for which the pipe was intended. Perhaps the following, summarized from a description of pipe manufacture among the Navaho (Tschopik, 1941) will help us appreciate this better:

While a pipe is made, no one may talk or laugh and great care is taken that nothing be broken. Pipes may be made by either men or women, who are usually specialists in this art. Both must observe strict rules about handling of their tools and other objects; for example, tools may be passed only between thumb and index finger and in no other manner. A pipe maker usually makes two pipes at a time, and if a man and a woman are both making pipes, two pairs are produced (this relates to Navaho insistence on male-female balance and balance in general). The pipe maker generally makes a black, crooked, conical mate pipe that is used in hunting rituals, and a white, straight, conical female pipe which is employed in the Blessing Way ceremony. Pipes are made from clay which deer, antelope, elk, jackrabbits, or prairie dogs have chewed in order to extract salt. The water used for mixing the clay likewise has a mystical bond with deer, for plants that have been knocked down by deer while feeding are soaked in it before it is added to the clay. The paste is rolled out between the palms of the hands and modeling is done with the fingers. The pipe is smoothed with a wooden scraping tool and saliva produced as the maker chews "deer medicine." The pipe is bent into the desired shape and perforated longitudinally while the clay is still soft.

When it is finished the maker—whether man or woman—must sing four songs (four being the sacred number), after which the pipes are decorated with bits of stone or shell, in recognition of the materials with which the gods made the first tobacco pipes. Then, after more songs have been sung, the pipes receive names. Navaho pipes are dried for four days, either inside the hogan or in the crotch of a tree. If a dog should urinate on the drying pipes they cannot be used in any ceremony. During the drying period the makers must take sweat baths and wash their clothing.

The finished and dried pipe is fired in a small pit that is specially dug. A flat rock is placed at the bottom and the pipe laid on it with the bowl end facing east. Only one pipe at a time is fired. It is covered with tinder and the fire is allowed to burn down to ashes before the pipe is removed. The ashes are cooled with water, a ritual act believed to bring rain. Four more days of ceremonies must pass before the pipe can be painted. If four pipes have been made, each is painted with a different color, representing one of the four sacred directions and one of the sexes—i.e. a black male pipe stands for east, a white female pipe for north, a yellow male pipe for west and a blue female pipe for south. (Tschopik, 1941:56-62)

Tobacco Shamanism among the Warao

As a fitting conclusion to our consideration of tobacco as a divine—but addictive—inebriant, and by way of introduction to the psychedelic flora as a whole, let us look briefly at the tobacco ideology of the Warao, a Venezuelan Indian society that at least until the most recent times managed to escape the destructive effects of acculturation and maintain its highly successful traditional lifeway as riverine fishermen in the delta of the Orinoco. As Wilbert (1972:55-83) tells us, the Warao, of whom there are more than 10,000, use no other hallucinogen but tobacco. More than that, their astonishingly complex metaphysical universe is quite literally held together and sustained by tobacco smoke, through the agency of their shamans, who smoke incessantly to fulfill the primordial promise to the gods that there be abundant tobacco smoke as their proper and only food and as the shaman's means of communication with the Otherworld. The shaman's cigar is a long and slender cane tube, up to two feet in length, filled with powerful charges of tightly rolled leaves of black tobacco that is perfumed with a fragrant resin to make it attractive to the gods. In the course of shamanizing, shamans may smoke ten, twenty, thirty, and even more of these giant cigars, never exhaling but "eating" the smoke until it suffuses their entire system. So "lightened" by tobacco, the shamans ascend in their ecstatic trances to the zenith and travel to their respective master spirits on celestial bridges constructed of tobacco smoke, as are the houses to which they retire after death. A curing shaman's tobacco smoke is therapeutic, but in their negative role these shamans can also speed projectiles of sickness and death to their victims with the aid of powerful blasts from their reversed cigars.

For the novice shaman the most crucial undertaking of his life is his initiatory tobacco trance, when, after a long fast and instruction by the master shaman, speeded upward by the smoke of his sacred cigar, he at last embarks upon a journey that takes him to the ends of the Warao universe. Along the way he must travel on slippery paths across a yawning defile, evade the knives of demons, the snapping beaks and talons of raptorial birds, and the jaws of alligators and other terrifying creatures, until at the moment of greatest rapture, having successfully negotiated the final obstacle of clashing gates, he is wafted, "buoyant as a puff of cotton," toward his celestial encounter with the supreme spirit in the House of Tobacco Smoke.

Awakening from his tobacco trance, the novice shaman feels newborn, confident of the truth of the ancient traditions because they have been validated by his own ecstatic experience. The new shaman and the tobacco medicine powder that has lodged in his chest are still feeble and tender, but after a month of eating little, avoiding certain odors, and smoking incessantly, he grows strong, ready to take his place as one of the guardians of his community's physical and metaphysical integrity.

But like all shamans, he will always need tobacco and will experience great physical and psychological distress when tobacco is in short supply. Then his people will say, "Our shaman is sick, he craves tobacco."

In his book, Maya History and Religion (1970), the great English Maya scholar J. Eric S. Thompson devotes an entire chapter to the meaning and uses of the divine tobacco among the Maya and their neighbors, from which I wish only to quote the summation (pp. 122-123) as peculiarly pertinent to all that was said above:

This review makes clear the extent to which the taking of tobacco in every form permeated Indian life in ancient Middle America. The attitude of noble, priest, and commoner was imbued at times with something approaching mysticism, as when tobacco was personified or even deified or when it was accepted as an ally fighting beside man to overcome fatigue or pain or to ward off so many ills of the human flesh. There is deep beauty there which we, in our materialistic world, bombarded with advertising on television and in print of some young man lighting a girl's cigarette as a prelude to conquest, are unable to share or even to perceive. The relationship is that of compline to a blast of the Beatles and their sad imitators.

Aside from the fact that in the meantime cigarette advertising has been banned from television and that one can think of lots worse than the Beatles to set against the Night Song, no one could have said it better.