Whatever negative effects tobacco intoxication has on the
vocal cords, visual acuity, color perception, and so on—and
Wilbert lists many of these—have, by way of natural model-
ing, long since been processed into desirable qualities in the
intellectual world of tobacco shamanism. Still, there are no
statistics to show whether tobacco shamans fall victim to
lung cancer, heart disease, emphysema, or any of the other
ills associated in the West with smoking. That Native Ameri-
can peoples are well aware that tobacco can kill is obvious
from the many traditions of symbolic death and resurrection
through the experience of initiatory intoxication. But there
is also the reverse: revitalization, bringing the dead back to
life by means of tobacco. This desirable end is dramatically
illustrated in the following Seneca myth from upstate New
York (Hewitt, 1918):
In his travels a youth encounters a skeletonized man in
a place heaped with the bones of dead people. Skeleton
Man tells the youth that the only thing he desires is to-
bacco, but his pipe and pouch are empty. He sends the
youth on a harrowing journey, past or through danger-
ous obstacles and variations of an ordeal familiar from
heroic, funerary, and shamanic mythology—the Sym-
plegades-like “paradoxical passage,” that is, clashing
rocks, islands, or icebergs that open and close in an in-
stant and through which the hero, the soul, or the sha-
man must pass. The Seneca youth survives these ordeals
and finally reaches a distant place where tobacco is
guarded by Seven Sisters and their terrible old mother.
Using his orenda (spirit power) and trickery, he suc-
ceeds in entering the lodge of the female spirits, evading
their war clubs and escaping with the magical tobacco.
When he returns and fills Skeleton Man’s pipe, the
bones of the dead people are reclothed with flesh, and
the people return to life.SEE ALSO Smoking.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Griaule, Marcel. Conversions with Ogototemmêli: An Introduction
to Dogon Religious Ideas. London, 1970.
Hewitt, J. N. B., ed. “Seneca Fiction, Legends, and Myths: Part
1.” In Thirty-second Annual Report of the Bureau of American
Ethnology, pp. 37–813. Washington, D.C., 1918. The first
volume of a comprehensive collection of Seneca Iroquois oral
traditions by a Smithsonian Institution ethnologist and lin-
guist who was a Tuscaloosa, one of the nations of the Iro-
quois Confederacy.
Meyer, Laure. Art and Craft in Africa. Paris, 1995. With numer-
ous photographs in full color, a noted French art historian
surveys the high technical and aesthetic qualities of everyday
and court arts of one hundred African tribes.
Michelson, Truman. Notes on the Fox Wapanowiweni. Smithsoni-
an Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 105.
Washington, D.C., 1932.
Müller-Ebeling, Claudia, Christian Rätsch, and Surenda Bahadur
Shahi. Shamanism and Tantra in the Himalayas. Rochester,
Vt., 2002. With 605 color and black-and-white illustrations,
this is a popular but authoritative overview of Nepalese sha-
mans and tantrikas and their practices, with special emphasis
on psychoactive plants.
Parker, Arthur C. Seneca Myths and Folk Tales. Buffalo, N.Y.,- An important collection of the oral traditions of his
own people, the Iroqouian Seneca of upstate New York, by
an ethnologist and New York State archaeologist who served
for many years as director of the New York State Museum.
Robicsek, Francis. The Smoking Gods: Tobacco in Maya Art, Histo-
ry, and Religion. Norman, Okla., 1978. A richly illustrated
study of tobacco and smoking in ancient Maya art, history,
and religion.
Ruiz de Alarcón, Hernando. Treatise on the Heathen Superstitions
That Today Live among the Indians of This New Spain, 1629.
Translated and edited by J. Richard Andrews and Ross Has-
sig. Norman, Okla., 1984.
Wilbert, Johannes. “Tobacco and Shamanistic Ecstasy among the
Warao Indians of Venezuela.” In Flesh of the Gods: The Ritual
Use of Hallucinogens, edited by Peter T. Furst, pp. 55–83.
New York, 1972. New ed., Prospect Heights, Ill., 1990. A
pioneering essay on Warao tobacco shamanism and tobacco
cosmology, proposing for the first time that tobacco belongs
in the category of the “true” hallucinogens.
Wilbert, Johannes. Tobacco and Shamanism in South America.
New Haven, Conn., 1987. A pathbreaking study of the eth-
nology, ethnobotany, and pharmacology of tobacco, the
physiological effects of nicotine, and their incorporation in
the ideology and practice of shamanism across the South
American continent by a UCLA ethnologist whose fieldwork
among Indian peoples spans five decades.
Wilbert, Johannes. “Does Pharmacology Corroborate the Nico-
tine Therapy and Practice of South American Shamanism?”
Journal of Ethnopharmacology 32 (1991): 179–186. An exam-
ination of empirical ethnographic data on indigenous nico-
tine therapy shows it to compare favorably against experi-
mental clinical studies of nicotine pharmacology and its
effects on the human body.
Zigmond, Maurice L. Kawaiisu Ethnobotany. Salt Lake City,
PETER T. FURST (2005)
TOLSTOY, LEO (1828–1910), Russian writer. Leo
Nikolaevich Tolstoy was born on his family’s estate of Yas-
naia Poliana (Bright Meadow), in Tula Province. His par-
ents, both from the high aristocracy, died in his early boy-
hood. Tolstoy was a melancholy child, self-centered but
filled with the desire to be a better person.
He entered the University of Kazan in 1844, planning
to become a diplomat, but left the university in 1847 with-
out taking a degree. That same year, he inherited Yasnaia
Poliana and went there to live. In 1849 he opened a school
for the village children and was one of its teachers. At this
time, as later, he was strongly under the influence of
Rousseau.
Tolstoy volunteered in 1851 for army service in the
Caucasus, and he subsequently took part in the Crimean
War (1854–1856) in the Danube region and at Sevastopol.
He left the army in 1856 and returned to Yasnaia Poliana.TOLSTOY, LEO 9219