landfall in the Western Hemisphere, and spread on that con-
tinent so quickly that some students of the phenomenon as-
sumed 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 cof-
fee 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 so-
ciability comes from a report by the French anthropologist
and Africanist Marcel Griaule (1898–1956). During field re-
search with the Dogon people of Mali, Griaule met an old
blind hunter named Ogotemmêli, who was especially knowl-
edgeable in the cosmology and religion of his people. “Hav-
ing sat down on his threshold,” Griaule recounts, “Ogotem-
mêli 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 Rus-
sia’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 along-
side, or even instead of, the fly agaric mushroom, Amanita
muscaria. In the Himalayas, on the other hand, Nepalese sha-
mans have added N. rustica tobacco to a long list of psy-
choactive species they classify as “traveling plants” belonging
to the god S ́iva—“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 co-
lonial times.
TOBACCO MYTHS. A common theme in the origin mytholo-
gy 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 them-
selves 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 Wiscon-
sin (Michelson, 1932, p. 127). So they must rely on human
beings to give it to them. In exchange, the gods listen to peti-
tions and confer their blessings or, conversely, withhold evil.
Reciprocity is thus extended from the social realm to interac-
tion between the spirit world and human beings, whose con-
trol 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 intox-
icating 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 “tobac-
co 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 ce-
lestial 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 proba-
bly diffused together with cultivated tobacco itself. The no-
tion 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 ceremonial-
ly 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 ori-
gin mythologies of the cultivated hybrid species Nicotiana
rustica and the less potent and less widely distributed N. ta-
bacum, 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 be-
cause, as casuals, these species (like the daturas, which also
belong to the Solonaceae) are sometimes seen to grow in dis-
turbed 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 spe-TOBACCO 9217