Nicotiana rustica
Johannes Wilbert’s impossibly comprehensive study of tobacco has stood the test of decades: “Tobacco in traditional South American societies […] is shown to have played a culture-building role. Functioning as an actualizing principle between the telluric and the cosmic, it has served to validate the normative behavior and to affirm cultural institutions.”
Wilbert documents (with a certain amount of chagrin due to his scientific purism) the coexistence of a variety of plants in combination with tobacco: “Especially vexing, in this regard, is the overlapping geographical distributions of potential source plants and the simultaneous use of snuffs derived from them within the same region or tribe. Consequently, tobacco snuffing is not always clearly distinguishable from that of other intoxicating materials. Further exasperating the problem is the practice, in some societies, of blending tobacco with yopo (prepared from Anadenanthera), parica (from Virola), coca (from Erythroxylem), or still other substances.”
Wilbert confirms the fundamental importance of this plant among a vast range of Amerindian cultures: “In terms of geographic reach and cultural penetration, tobacco has few, if any, rivals among psychotropic plants in pre- and postindustrial societies.”
Russell and Rahman agree wholeheartedly: “…Regardless of location, the one plant used more than any other was tobacco. Virtually every Amerindian society knew tobacco.”
And so does the major researcher and co-inventor of the term entheogen, Jonathan Ott: “Tobacco, manifestly, is the fundamental and irrecusable element of American shamanic entheognosia. Virtually no well-known American shamanic inebriant exists independently of some connection with tobacco…”
In an astonishing demonstration of linguistic detective work, Roland B. Dixon documents hundreds of Amerindian words for tobacco used by Indigenous groups from Alaska to Patagonia. His most important conclusion (from 1921) seems to corroborate current research described by Russell and Rahman that the ancestral plants of Nicotiana rustica are believed to be N. paniculata and N. undulata, both from North-Central Peru. From his vantage point as a linguist, Dixon affirms the importance of the Quechua word for tobacco still used by Peruvian shamans (according to Francoise Barbira Freedman): “Only one case has been found in which a single stem seems to have a wide distribution among unrelated languages, that of sairi, for which, however, no extra-American source can be claimed. The situation is, in fact, just what would be expected if tobacco had been known and used by the American Indians for centuries or even thousands of years.”
Barbira Freedman reveals amazing details as to how tobacco is essential for nourishing the yausa, or yachay, the “knowledge-phlegm” that the shaman keeps in his trachea. This phlegm contains darts that hold shamanic power as well as small animals called karawa that include scorpions, spiders and millipedes received from other shamans as gifts or stolen as they emerge from the mouths of moribund healers. Barbira Freedman says that “without tobacco smoke and also tobacco juice as regular food, these entities become inactive and impotent, not responding to shamans’ agentive intentions.”
Robert Hall mentions an extremely important idea regarding the ubiquitous nature of this plant-teacher in Amerindian rituals: “The main evidence of antiquity is the pervading holiness of tobacco. It was a sacrifice, a ritual fumigant, a good-will offering, and a sacrament. It was used to seal treaties, friendships, and solemn, binding agreements, to begin war, conclude peace, and legitimize covenants of every description between man and man, between man and the supernatural. Tobacco was used in rites of curing and in rites of human sacrifice.”
And because one can never say enough about the enormous significance of tobacco, I was fascinated by the metaphor that appears in this reflection by Glenn H. Shepard, Jr., in an article about his experiences doing fieldwork with Peru’s Matsigenka. He was told the following about the tobacco paste called opatsa seri that this Indigenous group prepares for shamanic purposes: “When you swallow it, it is like planting a seed in your heart… Each time you take opatsa seri, your soul grows like a tree.”
Kevin P. Groark is an American Psychological and Medical Anthropologist who teaches at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia as well as the New Center for Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles, whose research, according to his website, has a “long-term ethnographic focus on the Tzotzil-speaking Chamula Maya of highland Chiapas, Mexico” embedded in what Groark calls “the emergent paradigm of cultural psychodynamics.” His exemplary article from the Journal of Ethnobiology “The Angel in the Gourd: Ritual, Therapeutic, and Protective Uses of Tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum) Among the Tzeltal and Tzotzil Maya of Chiapas, Mexico” is the result of nearly two decades of research and close contact with this particular Amerindian group and their fascinating ethnobotanical practices in relation to tobacco (see also Breath and Smoke: Tobacco Use among the Maya, edited by Jennifer Loughmiller-Cardinal and Keith Eppich). Groark maintains that all forms of tobacco are highly valued by the Maya, though they consider their snuff preparation the most powerful way to benefit from the plant as “a medicine, a stimulant, a protective agent, as well as an intoxicant.” He continues by saying that “this mixture, stored and carried in small polished gourds, is the embodiment of an unbroken tradition of Mayan oral tobacco snuff use spanning more than a thousand years.” Groark includes an explanation of the process to prepare the snuff: leaf-collection, de-veining, pounding, addition of admixtures (such as slaked limestone as an alkalizing agent), and storage in a tobacco gourd. In considerable detail, the author then describes the intoxicating effects of ingesting this preparation. As one might imagine, there is an entire section on the gourds that are used now as yavil moy (tobacco’s place/vessel) as well as the ceramic containers used for holding tobacco among the ancient Maya. As a therapeutic powerful substance, tobacco is administered in a variety of ways for the treatment of gastrointestinal ailments, intestinal worms, broken bones, sprains and bruises, tuberculosis, toothaches, gangrene, mange, and boils. Tobacco is also believed to repel evil forces, to blind witches and also to serve “as one of the primordial foods of the deities, offered to them during fiestas and rituals through proxy ingestion by religious officeholders.” One can spit tobacco juice at a coming storm to calm the winds and toward snakes to paralyze them. Tobacco rubbed on the body can prevent “shock-induced soul loss” and its strong odor facilitates “soul collecting rituals.” Groark also mentions that tobacco not only serves in this life, but also after death as a kind of distinguishing merit badge: “Frequent use of tobacco snuff is believed to leave an invisible and indelible green stain in the center of the palm, blessing the user with an afterlife of ease and repose.” Chamula syncretic narratives link the Sun-Christ deity’s tobacco gourd to Hummingbird, “messenger of the Sun and protective animal companion of warriors throughout Mesoamerica.” Groark ends his study with a discussion of contemporary threats to these traditional uses of tobacco that include “the availability of commercial cigarettes combined with widespread conversion to evangelical Protestantism.” Reading a study of this kind, one feels closer to a preferred “Indigenous research paradigm,” even if, as is often the case, the Amerindian perspective is mediated by a Euro-American academic, who lives for extended periods of time in close proximity with the community being studied.
One of the confocal images we include here in the website is a visual enactment of this botanical analogy: microscopic Nicotiana rustica shapeshifting and becoming a tree. Sustainable Seed Company, the vendor of these seeds, which I was able to germinate, says the following in a catalog description: “This is only the third time this tobacco seed has been grown since it was unearthed in a 1,000-year-old archeological site on Vancouver Island. Talk about an heirloom tobacco!”
New evidence from an archaeological site in what is now northwestern Utah suggests that humans were using tobacco at least 12,300 years ago (see Nuwer).
