cies are available, the wild varieties are sometimes feared for
their association with death.
The oldest evidence thought to point to smoking comes
from California, where conical stone pipes dating to circa
4000 BCE have been excavated and where wild tobaccos were
widely employed for shamanistic, magico-religious, and me-
dicinal procedures, including the ecstatic trance. The Sho-
shonean (Uto-Aztecan) Kawaiisu of south-central California
used virtually every technique of ingestion reported from
South America, including smoking, snuffing, licking, chew-
ing, and swallowing. Likewise, the prophylactic, therapeutic,
and metaphysical uses for cultivated species in South Ameri-
ca and eastern North America were paralleled by these and
other California tribes with the native wild species. The most
common method was mixing the pulverized, dried leaves
with slaked and powdered lime and either swallowing the
mixture dry or liquified or licking and sucking it.
The Kawaiisu participated in the ecstatic-initiatory tolo-
ache (Datura inoxia) religion common to other California In-
dians, but tobacco, whose magical potency was given to the
first people by the trickster culture hero Coyote, was much
more generally employed by them and their neighbors. They
used it as a mild-to-potent dream-inducing soporific; as a
shamanistic and initiatory intoxicant; or for preventing and
curing illness; repelling and killing rattlesnakes; driving away
ghosts, monsters, and other threatening supernatural beings;
and divining and manipulating the weather.
In North America the widespread function of tobacco
to please the spirits is particularly well documented among
the Iroquois and Algonquin of the Eastern Woodlands and
the Plains and Prairie tribes. Seneca mythology attributes the
origin of tobacco (Nicotiana rustica) to Awen’hai’i (ancient
bodied one), the pregnant daughter of the Great Chief in the
Sky, who stripped the heavens of tobacco when she fell onto
the newly created earth island through a hole in the sky. This
left not only the heavenly powers but the vast company of
other spirits that manifest themselves in nature without their
most essential divine sustenance. To induce these spirits,
which included masters and mistresses of animals and plants
as well as the “faces” that appear to hunters in the forest or
in dreams and that are represented by the wooden masks of
the shamanistic medicine societies of the Iroquois, to act on
one’s behalf requires the indispensable gift of tobacco.
THERAPEUTIC APPLICATIONS. Though widely employed to
trigger the ecstatic visionary trance that is one of the corner-
stones of shamanism, tobacco was also deeply embedded in
native therapeutics. Almost certainly this was in large part
based on observation and experience with the pharmacologi-
cal effects of nicotine, not only on the human organism but
other phenomena in the environment. Answering his own
question whether pharmacological science corroborates nico-
tine therapy and curing practices with tobacco of South
American shamans, Wilbert, in a paper published in 1991,
lists a whole series of tobacco administrations by shamans
that at first sight might be considered “magical” but whose
therapeutic efficacy can be pharmacologically demonstrated.
Take, for example, the shaman’s breath. Not only in the
Americas but wherever shamanism survives, the shaman’s
breath is considered to have curative, purifying, and
strengthening powers. Except in the Arctic, breath is of
course invisible, but in the American tropics it is often given
form by tobacco smoke. This phenomenon of shamanic
practice was noted by the earliest European explorers. Sha-
mans blow both their breath alone and thick clouds of tobac-
co smoke over their patient and his or her relatives and also
fumigate the house. Blowing tobacco smoke is especially val-
ued at the planting season. Before putting their seeds in the
ground, farmers ask their shaman to “purify” their seed stock
with tobacco smoke to assure a good harvest. Of course, to-
bacco smoke is sacred and feeds the spirits. But there is more
to it than magic or religion: nicotine is a powerful insecticide
and vermifuge. German experimenters found that fully 8
percent of the insecticides in tobacco are transferred into to-
bacco smoke. Seeds fumigated with nicotine against insect
pests have in fact been observed to do better than those not
so treated.
In treating their patients, shamans not only blow thick
clouds of smoke but “capture” the smoke in their cupped
hands; direct it into a wound, an aching or extracted tooth,
eyes, nose, and mouth; and then massage the affected body
parts. In addition curers blow nicotine-laden spittle and
soothe aches and pains with tobacco juice. “Looking at these
therapeutic practices from the point of view of drug adminis-
tration,” writes Wilbert, one recognizes in them more or less
sustained-release mechanisms of application. Tobacco leaves
are also used as plasters or compacts. Tobacco therapy thus
involves the respiratory, dermal, and even gastrointestinal
routes.
In both South America and Mexico, tobacco was also
employed in the form of therapeutic enemas. In addition to
tobacco, other plants that native peoples invested with sacred
power and even divinity were so used. For example, a seven-
teenth-century Spanish colonial account of therapeutic prac-
tices and incantations in a community of speakers of Nahuatl
(Aztec) in Guerrero, Mexico, lists therapeutic enemas not
only of piciétl (tobacco, Nicotiana rustica) but of peyote
(Lophophora williamsii), the little cactus of the north-central
Mexican desert whose most important visionary alkaloid is
mescaline; an aquatic species of Datura; and ololiuhqui, the
Nahuatl name for the potent seeds of the white-flowering
morning glory Turbina (form. Rivea) corymbosa, whose ac-
tive principles are lysergic acid derivatives related to synthetic
LSD.
Native American tobacco lore and therapy thus run
counter to modern experience with the effects of tobacco on
human health. Of course, Indian tobaccos are truly “organ-
ic”—they are cultivated, processed, and ritually employed
without chemicals. Shamans often reach great age, including
those for whom tobacco is the primary avenue of ecstasy.9218 TOBACCO