The more you give nicotine to your neurons, the more the DNA they contain activates the construction of nicotinic receptors, within certain limits. Here, I thought, is the almost insatiable hunger of the spirits for tobacco: The more you give them the more they want. I was surprised by the degree of correspondence between shamanic notions of tobacco and neurological studies of nicotine."

"How was it that the shamans saw spirits by ingesting staggering quantities of tobacco?
Before continuing with this question, I will clarify two points. First, the discovery that nicotine stimulates the construction of nicotinic receptors was only made at the beginning of the 1990s; the connection between the phenomenon and the addiction displayed by tobacco users seems obvious, but has yet to be explored in detail.

Second, there are fundamental differences between the shamanic use of tobacco and the consumption of industrial cigarettes. The botanical variety used in the Amazon contains up to eighteen times more nicotine than the plants used in Virginia-type cigarettes. Amazonian tobacco is grown without chemical fertilizers and pesticides and contains none of the ingredients added to cigarettes, such as aluminum oxide, potassium nitrate, ammonium phosphate, polyvinyl acetate, and a hundred or so others, which make up approximately 10 percent of the smokable matter. During combustion a cigarette emits some 4,000 substances, most of which are toxic. Some of these substances are even radioactive, making cigarettes the largest single source of radiation in the daily life of an average smoker. According to one study, the average smoker absorbs the equivalent of the radiation dosages from 250 chest X-rays per year. Cigarette smoke is directly implicated in more than 25 serious illnesses, including 17 forms of cancer. In the Amazon, on the other hand, tobacco is considered a remedy. The ashaninca word for “healer,” or “shaman,” is sheripiari—literally, “the person who uses tobacco.” The oldest ashaninca men I knew were all sheripiari. They were so old that they did not know their own age, which only their deeply wrinkled skin suggested, and they were remarkably alert and healthy.

'There is certainly evidence that Western tobacco products contain many different harmful agents which are probably not present in organically grown plants. I have not heard of shamans developing cancers but that may, of course, be a function of several things, like lack of Western diagnosis, natural life span of indigenous people, magico-religious restriction of tobacco use in tribal societies, ect.'

It seems clear that nicotine does not cause cancer, given that it is active in the brain and that cigarettes do not cause cancer in the brain, but in the lungs, esophagus, stomach, pancreas, rectum, kidneys, and bladder, the organs reached by the carcinogenic tars, which are also swallowed.

SHAMANIC TOBACCOS
Tobacco smoking was widespread in North America at the time of the European contact. While the habit of taking hallucinogenic DMT-containing snuffs was also prevalent in the Caribbean cultural area, there are no confirmed reports of materials other than tobacco being smoked.
The high culture of the Maya that flourished until the mid-800s in Mesoamerica had an old and complex relationship with tobacco and the habit of smoking it. The tobacco of the Classical Maya was Nicotiana rustica, which is still in use among aboriginal populations in South America today. This species is much more potent, chemically complex, and potentially hallucinogenic than the commercial grades of Nicotiana tabacum available today. The difference between this tobacco and cigarette tobacco is profound. This wild tobacco was cured and rolled into cigars which were smoked. The trancelike state that followed, partially synergized by the presence of compounds that included MAO inhibitors, was central to the shamanism of the Maya. Recently introduced antidepressants of the MAO inhibitor type are distant synthetic relatives of these natural compounds. Francis Robicsek has published extensively on the Mayan fascination with tobacco and its chemical complexity:
It also must be recognized that nicotine is by no means the only bioactive substance in the tobacco leaf. Recently alkaloids of the harmala group, harman and norharman, have been isolated from cured commercial tobaccos and their smoke. They constitute a chemical group of beta-carbolines, which include harmine, harmaline, tetrahydroharmine, and 6-methoxy harmine, all with hallucinogenic properties. While to date no native varieties of tobacco have been analyzed for these substances, it is a reasonable supposition that their composition may vary widely, depending upon the variety and growth, and that some of the native-grown tobaccos may contain a relatively high concentration of them.
Tobacco was and is the ever-present adjunct of the more powerful and visionary hallucinogenic plants wherever in the Americas they are used in a traditional and shamanic way.
And one of the traditional uses of tobacco involved the New World's invention of the first enemas. Peter Furst has researched the role of enemas and clysters in Mesoamerican medicine and shamanism:
It has only recently come to light that the ancient Maya like the ancient Peruvians employed enemas. Enema syringes or narcotic clysters, and even enema rituals, were discovered to be represented in Maya art, an outstanding example being a large painted vase dating A.D. 600-800, on which a man is depicted carrying an enema syringe, applying an enema to himself, and having a woman apply it to him. As a result of this newly discovered scene, archaeologist M. D. Coe was able to identify a curious object held by a jaguar deity on another painted Maya vessel as
an enema syringe. If the enemas of the ancient Maya were, like those of the Peruvian Indians, intoxicating or hallucinogenic, they might have consisted of fermented balche (honey mead). Balche is a very sacred beverage and it may have been fortified with tobacco or with morning-glory seed infusions. Datura infusions and even hallucinogenic mushrooms may have been taken in this way. Of course they could also have used a tobacco infusion alone.

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.

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.

It has a deeper, more centered, longer-lasting buzz for me. It is like a clear-headed high. A sort of glow.