Tobacco & Shamanism

[dragonfly]

Re-reading Jeremy Narby's The Cosmic Serpent this weekend, I found myself intrigued by the use of nicotiana rustica among Amazonian shamans. Has anyone here had any experience with this? How did you take it? What was it like?

[Woodpecker]

In the late '90s when I was in Ecuador, the Secoyas weren't growing much of their own, but the nice thing was to have a long, thin cigar rolled in a semi-dry banana leaf to smoke during a ceremony; equally OK was a normal cigarette.

Further south, the jungle Quichuas were using homegrown, very strong tobacco which I believe was Nic rustica. It was dried and then rolled into a tight log shaped like a sausage but fat in the middle and thin at the ends; a vine was wound around this to keep it tight and dry. The log is up to 10" long and weighs about a pound. When you want tobacco, you uncoil the end of the vine and slice off a disk of leaf. You can smoke this, or you can drink it through the nose. Casimiro Mamallacta's son Ramon showed me how to do this. Soak it in a bit of hot water until the water's dark and strong. Then just suck it in through one or both nostrils. It will wash over those sensitive tissues up your nose, causing a sharp sting and an equally-strong nicotine rush. If you keep snorting, you will end up drinking it. This can lead to vomiting and mild trance. (Indian medicine make you feel bad first, good later.) Casimiro apparently drank twelve logs of tobacco through his nose during his apprenticeship.

Shuars I met later snorted "zumo de tabaco," tobacco juice, in the same way, and--with or without ayahuasca--to bring on a light trance and feed their tsentsak, spirits that guarded their bodies and helped them suck sickness out of their patients.

Tsentsak are said to live in a special phlegm in the chest, and by drinking tobacco through the nose, the shaman can simultaneously feed them and bring them up into the mouth, where they help magnetise sickness up out of the patient's body while preventing its accidental ingestion by the shaman.

Snorting tobacco up the nose is nice. I'm too lazy to do it much these days. Or I don't feel the need for it. But I've enjoyed it very much. I sometimes try to convince my friends who smoke that instead of polluting their lungs, they should get their nic fix by drinking it through their nose. Almost none of them have ever considered it, though...which shows how culture-bound some of our habits are.

[ May 11, 2003, 08:28 PM: Message edited by: Woodpecker ]

[sacha]

What Woodpecker said. I brought Mapacho (Nicotiana rustica) back with me from Ecuador, and I take Mapacho tea up the nose as I learned to do there. If the head is tipped back when it is taken into the nose, some of it runs down the throat. It burns the nasal membranes at first, then clears the sinuses and lungs, and then produces a powerful rush and a sense of clarity, centeredness, well-being and focused strength, and a mild trance, as Woodpecker said.

But a shaman in training has to drink Mapacho tea -- not through the nose, but simply drinking it -- which simultaneously produces a sense of being poisoned and an indescribable sense of power. Drinking enough of it is supposed to produce visions. Casimiro had to drink those twelve Mapacho logs. Not for the fainthearted.

[John Hoopes]

The best book on this topic is anthropologist Johannes Wilbert's definitive study Tobacco and Shamanism in South America (Yale University Press, 1987). Wilbert's other books on the ethnography of northern South America are also excellent. I especially recommend Mindful of Famine: Religious Climatology of the Warao Indians (Harvard University Press, 1996), which is about the control of weather and disease by shamans of the Orinoco Delta in Venezuela. Very cool stuff indeed.

[sacha]

Here is a post I wrote elsewhere on Amazonian Tobacco shamanism.

The Tobacco shamanism of South America is a secret hidden in plain sight. It is mentioned by practically every anthropologist who has done work with Indians in the Upper Amazon, yet it is invisible to them. Books about Amazonian ethnobotany and entheogen use often omit Tobacco altogether.

Tobacco is used as a universal curing plant by some Amazonian peoples. I was reading a book by French anthropologist Philippe Descola about his work with the Achuar. in one part he talks about collecting information on medicinal plants. He was introduced to several dozen medicinal plants. Then at some point, it dawned on him that he never saw any of those plants actually used. The Achuar used Tobacco as the medicine for every sickness. So Descola lost interest in investigating Achuar plant medicine further. (Jeremy Narby in "The Cosmic Serpent" is practically the first anthropologist to question why Tobacco is dismissed this way.)

My friend was initiated as a tabaquero (Tobacco-using) shaman in Ecuador. I talked to him today.

<<The secret of Tobacco is that the less you use the more powerful it becomes. Smoking on a daily basis accustoms the body to tobacco and we do not perceive the message of the plant as clearly when our brain is be-sotted with 1 pack a day level of nicotine in our bloodstream. Smoking once a day or less, you will feel the connection between here and now and the spirit world when you have that smoke. You will be 100 times more attuned to every flavor and aspect of that one cigarette than if you smoked the rest of the pack. If you learn something about your tobaccos and use a pipe or roll-you-own you will deepen your enjoyment even more. Eventually you may become so sensitive to tobaccos power as to experience it while holding a pinch in your hand, and offering thanks to the four directions. Many who pray with tobacco only touch the pipe to their lips and do not inhale. But they look forward to the time they spend praying and making small prayer bundles with tobacco. The less you use, the more powerful Tobacco becomes.>>

Amazonian Tobacco shamanism is based on the other end of the scale. First, it is good to know about how herbalism in general is learned among Indians of the Upper Amazon. It is learned through what is commonly known as "dieta." The Napo Runa Indians I lived with call it "sasina," which literally means fasting, although it is not usually a complete fast. "Dieta" is a practice used throughout the Upper Amazon. It has many variations, but the core is always the same, which is remarkable considering that these are cultures who are extremely varied in other aspects of their culture. Essentially, dieta involves abstaining from foods with flavor, especially salt and hot peppers, and from sex, even with oneself. A person learning herbalism usually begins with dieta with Ayahuasca, one of whose functions is to teach humans how to communicate with plants (another of her functions is to teach plants how to communicate with humans). Then the person learning herbalism will do dieta with various plants, living alone in the jungle on a semi-fast drinking huge quantites of a single medicinal plant for a week to two weeks, to the point where they become sick from overdosing on that medicine, and then they know that Plant spirit, or really that spirit is like part of them. It is kind of like a vision quest for each medicinal plant.

Tobacco shamanism is learned something in this way -- using Nicotiana rustica, Amazonian wild Tobacco, which is 15 to 18 times as high in nicotine as Nicotiana tabacum. Nicotine can be a deadly poison if ingested into the stomach in sufficient quantity (it would take much less pure nicotine to kill you than arsenic or cyanide). But nicotine also creates a tolerance. Nicotine is a poison, a nerve poison, and that is connected to his power. The Tobacco shaman is basically poisoned, and survives this poisoning and comes out changed, with Tobacco's power connected to his power. My friend who was initiated in Tobacco shamanism compared it to the Sun -- you could get harmed standing out in the sun too long if your body was not used to it, but once your body is adapted, it can take any amount of sunlight. Tobacco shamans can drink quantities of nicotine that would kill a non-initiated person; and no amount of nicotine will kill them, it only keeps increasing their power.

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And here is another post I made about Tobacco, from my own indigenous North American cultural background.


Tobacco is the number one power plant of the world. Tobacco is the Plant of Power. The name he has told me is Power Food. Tobacco is food for the spirits. That is why we offer pinches of Tobacco to herbs when we gather them. Tobacco is nourishment that feeds the spirits and strengthens them. You can use it for protection against negative energies, because if you dedicate it to Protection it will feed the energies of Protection. Like feeding your watchdogs to make them strong. In the same way, it makes prayer-energies more Powerful. If you place prayer intentions and songs in Tobacco when it is growing, it absorbs that energy and acts like a kind of spiritual megaphone for your prayers when you release them. You can enlist the help of elemental-type spirits that don't care about you normally by offering them Tobacco as a kind of payment. The same thing is said among peoples here in Turtle Island and in the Amazon, that the reason humans were placed on Earth was to cultivate Tobacco for the spirits, because they cannot do it themselves.

Tobacco feeds our own spirits when we consume it. We can become addicted to his food, more so if our spirits are starving, then we may crave him and his food. The trouble is, consuming Tobacco unconsciously means that only a little bit of the Power comes in, and, more important, it doesn't reach your Spirit, the depths within you that are crying to be fed. Consuming Tobacco unconsciously is like the unconsciousness of compulsive eating, and it becomes compulsive for the same reasons. Both of these compulsions are manifestations of a starving spirit. (You even see how people who stop smoking often gain weight because they take up overeating instead.)

It also, because it magnifies the power of prayer and intention, magnifies the intention of Tobacco companies to make people addicted and funnel money to them. The commercial Tobacco growers and companies dedicate this intention to the Tobacco they grow -- to feed the spirit of addiction in us. That addiction is intentional and it is because the Tobacco companies put that intention in, both physically (through the hundreds of additive chemicals that can legally constitute 20% of dry weight, not to mention tons of pesticides) and spiritually (through their Intent) dedicate this most sacred of Power Plants to this purpose, of creating addiction. This is a spiritually Powerful plant -- you try to get a lettuce leaf to addict people and place them under your command and intention, well, you might not get much results. You take the most Powerful of Power plants and say, "Addict millions of people and place them under our command so they have to feed us money" -- that Power plant will magnify your intent and give you Powerful results.

Tobacco also shows how when sacred powers are used carelessly and unconsciously, they can cause harm and sickness. There is only one Power, which can be shaped and used in different ways, up to us.

Blaming Tobacco for how he is used is like blaming electricity for how it is used.

And with some sacred things, most sacred things, the power is fragile and must be protected. Tobacco's Power is not fragile. It remains intact no matter how it is used or misused, no matter what other contaminants are also present. This is why ordinary cigarettes can even be used in ceremony. The Intent put in it by the commercial grower and cigarette companies can be cleared by your Intent. (And there are many ways to use Tobacco besides smoking.)

Tobacco is a plant that involves true secrets in its practice. There are things about his practice that are genuine secrets. What I have spoken of is only the public side of the shamanic use of Tobacco, and that is Powerful enough. I don't smoke cigarettes, except under certain circumstances, but I can never say "no" when someone offers me a cigarette, because they are offering me something so sacred, even if they don't know it.

[Giselle62]

i was smoking clove cigarettes when i was first dealing with my grandpa's death. i haven't been smoking them lately, and he's still alive; but i wondered two things about them:
why do goths smoke them?
and why are they the number one cig in indonesia ?
my theories are:
goths smoke them because of their exotic smell evoking travel in distant lands, (but also because a sweet smell is associated with death...)

they are the number one cig in indonesia because(i imagine) the clove smell repels insects.
i wonder if there's any truth to either of these thoughts?