constitute the bulk of the magical component. All these prac-
tices are of pre-Hispanic origin, but they do contain elements
of European and even African witchcraft and sorcery, some
of which became syncretized independently of Catholicism.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Pre-Hispanic Polytheism
Carrasco, Pedro. “La sociedad mexicana antes de la Conquista.”
In Historia general de México, vol. 1, edited by Bernardo Gar-
cía Martínez. Mexico City, 1976.
López Austin, Alfredo. Hombre Dios: Religión y política en el
mundo náhuatl. Mexico City, 1973.
Sahagún, Bernardino de. Historia general de las cosas de la Nueva
España (compiled 1569–1582; first published 1820). Trans-
lated by Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble as
Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain,
13 vols. Santa Fe, N. Mex., 1950–1982.
Syncretic Development
Gibson, Charles. Tlaxcala in the Sixteenth Century. New Haven,
Conn., 1952.
Nutini, Hugo G., and Betty Bell. Ritual Kinship, vol. 1, The Struc-
ture and Historical Development of the Compadrazgo System in
Rural Tlaxcala. Princeton, N. J. 1980.
Contemporary Folk Catholicism
Nutini, Hugo G. San Bernardino Contla: Marriage and Family
Structure in a Tlaxcalan Municipio. Pittsburgh, 1968.
Nutini, Hugo G. Ritual Kinship, vol. 2, Ideological and Structural
Integration of the Compadrazgo System in Rural Tlaxcala.
Princeton, N. J., 1984.
Nutini, Hugo G., and Barry L. Isaac. “Ideology and the Sacro-
Symbolic Functions of Compadrazgo in Santa María Belén
Azitzimititlán, Tlaxcala, Mexico.” Uomo: Società, tradizione,
sviluppo 1 (1977): 81–120.
HUGO G. NUTINI (1987 AND 2005)
TOADS SEE FROGS AND TOADS
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 spe-
cies 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, in-
cluding 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 ex-
traordinary effects on mind and body of the powerful alka-
loid 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 alka-
loid 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 in-
toxicant among many Native American peoples. Often, espe-
cially 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 espe-
cially 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 adminis-
tered through the nostrils with infusions of San Pedro
(Trichocereus pachanoi), the popular name for a tall, colum-
nar cactus that, like peyote, has mescaline as its primary alka-
loid and whose place in Andean shamanism is archaeologi-
cally 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 vision-
ary-therapeutic pharmacopoeias of Native American sha-
mans, 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 Chris-
topher Columbus arrived in the New World. Curiously, de-
spite the rapid pre-Columbian diffusion of tobacco through
the Indian Americas, tobacco’s cultural role as a visionary in-
toxicant 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 first9216 TOADS