Her Sacred Excellency, Queen Tobacco
In the New World — by antonomasia the land of herbal remedies and altered states of consciousness — one psychoactive plant stands above all others. Spread throughout the Americas at the arrival of Europeans like no other, used in countless contexts and administered in innumerable forms, tobacco — one of the most potent plant toxins known — has been used for millennia to contact the gods, to heal, or simply for the pleasure it provides.
The Shipibo doctor Pedro Pérez blows tobacco smoke over the sick baby, as a fundamental part of the healing ritual.
Text and photos by Carlos Suárez Álvarez
Originally published in issue 143 of Cáñamo magazine, November 2009.
At half past five, with the first leaden grays of the Amazonian morning, I return from peaceful sleep to vague awareness. A slight attempt to sit up brings a painfully sharp stab in the left side of my abdomen. I don’t imagine it yet, but the subsequent development of the ailment will make me realize I have a kidney stone. I suffer such nausea that no position brings relief. I writhe, walk, lie down, sit, breathe, despair. Two hours of unrelenting pain pass until my host, Roger López, a Shipibo shaman from San Francisco de Yarinacocha in the Peruvian jungle, hears my moans. He softens his expression with a smile that seems incomprehensible to me and states, “Don’t worry, my mother will come soon.”
His mother is Ida Ramos, a lively and serious woman close to sixty, who holds great knowledge of medicinal plants and non-shamanic healing techniques. The small, lively, and serious Ida carries two small branches—one of pión colorado, the other of nettle—and a pipe loaded with tobacco. She invites me to take off my shirt and lie on my back. She sits beside me and begins to icarar the tobacco—that is, to blow gentle melodies over the full pipe. “This way I am calling my allied spirits,” she explains in her hesitant Spanish. She softly whistles her melodies for five minutes, concentrated, eyes closed; then lights the pipe and smokes for several minutes, taking quick, short, intense, rhythmic puffs, occasionally accented by burps. It is this intoxication that will allow her to see. I feel worse than ever in my life. She blows tobacco smoke over my abdomen a couple of times, then sets the pipe aside and palpates with her hands searching for the pain; she leans her mouth toward those points and begins to suck; then she moves away a few steps, dizzy, to spit ostentatiously, as if expelling the evil she has removed from me. She returns to kiss my belly, first gently, then the kiss becomes a bite. Afterward, she rubs the affected area with the two little branches. I feel the slight itch of the nettle. Finally, she massages firmly my belly and the base of my spine, and to finish the healing, she blows tobacco smoke again on the painful spot. I am still somewhat bewildered when she withdraws. “I learned from my great-grandfather. I know everything.” She hands me a bright red drink; I down it in two gulps. It is acidic and slightly bitter, but pleasant in taste. I sit, stand, walk, bend over at the waist, and touch the tips of my toes with my hands. It’s true. The pain is gone.
Flowers of Nicotiana tabacum. The term Nicotiana originates from Jean Nicot, a French consul in Portugal in the 16th century, who introduced the plant to his king.
spirit, molecule
“For shamans, tobacco is an important tool because its smoke drives away what is diabolical,” explains Roger López, son of healer Ida and himself a renowned ayahuasquero. In Shipibo ceremonies, tobacco is an essential element. Each participant in the ceremony has tobacco, which is smoked at specific moments. Each patient, each apprentice, has their turn to receive the protective smoke blown by the shaman on the crown of the head and on the hands. “That way they are protected from evil spirits, and it ensures a good mareación (psychoactive experience).” Tobacco has more uses among Shipibo shamans. It is, for example, a master plant used in dietas. The dieta is the process through which shamans acquire new healing knowledge. It consists of spending several months under a strict dietary regime, avoiding sexual relations, and ingesting a plant in various ways, though typically by infusions or smoking. At the end of the dieta, the spirit of the plant will appear under the effects of ayahuasca—a substance whose primary purpose is not to heal but to connect the shaman with the forces of the beyond—and will grant the shaman a song; that song is the medicine. But dieting with tobacco is not pleasant. “I don’t like dieting with tobacco,” Roger grimaces, “it’s too strong.”
This fearsome power of tobacco is well documented in the book Tobacco and Shamanism in South America by Johannes Wilbert. Nicotine is one of the most toxic botanical substances in nature; one or two drops of the pure substance—60 or 120 milligrams—on a man’s tongue would kill him. “So the amount of nicotine contained in an ordinary cigarette, if extracted and injected, could kill two adult men,” Wilbert infers. Apparently, nicotine penetrates all tissues in the human body, which is one of the reasons behind its enormous addictive power.
This potency of the plant—its capacity to establish a bridge between the beyond and the here-and-now, and, it’s worth repeating, its addictive power—made it the omnipresent drug in South American indigenous cultures. Its importance is such that some researchers suggest that tobacco cultivation preceded the cultivation of food plants and was thus the first domesticated plant in South America. Tobacco-producing plants belong to the Solanaceae family, which also includes potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, and potent hallucinogens such as borrachero, mandrake, and belladonna.
The use of this plant was widespread throughout the South American continent as early as eight thousand years ago. Archaeological evidence has been found in the form of tubular pipes dating back three thousand years. Already in the early years of contact, Europeans noted the various forms of tobacco consumption, its toxic effects—sweating, euphoria, general weakness, and fainting—and its biphasic action: in small doses it served as a stimulant, thirst and hunger suppressant, and analgesic; in large doses it produced visions and catatonia. Its topical use as an analgesic was also reported. Natives became intoxicated in various social contexts—for fertility, for spirituality, and, to a lesser extent, simply in pursuit of pleasure.
The maloquero Gustavo Macuna blowing rapé during an evening of conversation in his maloca.
smoke, snuff, paste
Nemesio Serrano lives in the small Shipibo village of Vencedor, on the Pisqui River in the Peruvian Amazon. Next to his modest home grow a hundred tobacco plants, which reach two meters in height three months after being planted. To produce mapacho tobacco, the type smoked by both Indigenous and mestizo people in the region, Nemesio harvests two types of leaves: those that are completely dry, withered, wrinkled, and drooping from the stem; and those that are beginning to yellow but still retain some firmness and even some green patches. On a rectangular wooden board, he spreads out the tobacco leaves. First, he places the larger, more intact ones. “So they can be rolled: the worse ones go on later.” He continues layering the leaves, forming a bed of tobacco; after three or four layers, he takes a bottle of sugarcane aguardiente (hard liquor) and sprinkles a few drops, a step he repeats periodically. The use of alcohol reveals that the mapacho tradition emerged after the conquest, since distilled spirits were unknown in pre-Columbian America.
The Shipibo are an Indigenous group known for consistently incorporating techniques and knowledge from other cultures they come into contact with, without losing their own cultural identity. Once Nemesio has spread enough leaves on the board, he begins the rolling process, which turns the bed of leaves into a compact bundle. He then tightens the resulting roll with the flexible bark of a tree so it doesn’t fall apart. That same night, Nemesio and his wife sit at the door of their home to smoke under the stars, in the darkness dimly lit by the glowing embers with which they light their pipes. It’s the only time of day they smoke—in silence, without inhaling the smoke, allowing the nicotine to gradually enter their bloodstream through the lining of the mouth.
Although the most common way to consume tobacco is by smoking—in pipes or cigarettes, inhaling the smoke or not—many other forms of tobacco consumption persist in the Amazon to this day. The Murui people of the Colombian Amazon use ambil, a potent paste that is the inseparable companion of mambe, the Amazonian preparation of coca leaf. In the afternoon, Fernando Pérez heads to his community’s maloca, near the border town of Leticia, to prepare his ambil. That morning, he gathered some tobacco leaves. “The semi-dry leaves are washed well and boiled; when the central fiber of the leaf is really soft, that’s when it’s ready. Then it’s strained to produce a pure juice, which is further cooked down. It reduces, and over time we add starch.” It’s the starch, obtained from cassava—the central food crop of the Huitoto—that gives ambil its paste-like consistency. “With just a little ambil, it makes you see the world inside out,” he says as he lightly touches it with the tip of his finger and brings it to his mouth. Night falls. In the maloca, the men sit around the mambeadero to talk. They take mambe, they take ambil, and together they resolve problems, share thoughts, and examine their actions.
Fernando Pérez, of the Murui ethnic group, preparing ambil in his community’s maloca.
SACRED AND PROFANE
Among the Macunas, also inhabitants of the Colombian Amazon, tobacco is consumed as snuff, forcefully blown into the nostrils of guests by the maloquero, a sort of social leader who is simultaneously a healer, thinker, and conflict mediator. With each blast of the powder, an electric jolt runs through the head and spine, the senses sharpen, and comprehension turns outward: toward the excitement of dance or conversation. “Snuff is what opens me,” says the imposing host Gustavo Macuna, seated in his great maloca near the city of Leticia. “I connect with my God and the energy… Shaaaa! That’s when my God speaks to me. I tell everyone who sits here in the maloca: Let’s talk. I want to learn, what messages do you bring, what words nourish in me what I don’t know. If I’m in danger, and I have that word my friend gave me… then it’s saving me. That’s why we really need to talk among all of us, not just the owner of the maloca. That’s why the elders used to listen a lot.”
Tobacco opens channels of communication among humans and with the divine; but the medicine is the word, the story. “We live, grow, reproduce, and die and we will never finish knowing the world, what my God created. Just as there are grains of earth, so too are there stories, it cannot end. Just as you say: infinite mathematics. In the same way, the stories for us are infinite. We tell stories, we reach a certain point, what we can retain from our elders, and we come back down again to the earth. But we never know it all, we never will. And that’s what scientists do: damage. They haven’t finished living the earth and they’re already building hotels on the moon, looking at the planets, and no…”
The Macunas plant tobacco around the maloca. The leaves are harvested when they turn yellow and are left to dry in the sun. Then they are crushed, and the resulting powder is mixed with ash from the leaves of the white yarumo tree. Finally, it is stored in the shell of a large snail. Tobacco is one of the four gods of the Macunas, it is revered and feared. There is a whole series of control measures and rituals that limit its use: tobacco cannot be spoken of during the day, it must be “cured” by a “doctor” to be suitable for consumption, and it cannot be consumed if it has not been planted. “If I go to smoke tobacco and I get addicted, I’ll become a thief if I haven’t planted tobacco. I’ll have to steal from the one who has it. That’s why it’s bad to be addicted to things that belong to others. And that’s what’s happening here, some of the locals come to steal, to snatch someone’s coca…” It is believed that after the arrival of the Europeans, the value system changed and the plant began to be used by natives in non-religious, recreational contexts.
But the perversion of tobacco use—and its tragic consequences—reached its climax in the twentieth century, when a handful of unscrupulous businessmen decided to indiscriminately promote the consumption of tobacco in cigarette form. They did so using the most powerful tools—film and advertising—designing an ultra-addictive product; that’s how they spread an absurd consumption habit that has claimed the lives of millions on this planet. And it is due to the excesses of insatiable greed that tobacco now bears the curse of government ministries and the contempt of decent citizens. Ten years ago, in Europe, we laughed at the first timid restrictions on tobacco use in the United States. Today, thanks to the formidable power of authority to transform consciousness, we are scandalized by our former habits, while voices rise calling for the total prohibition of this plant, now a diabolical poison, once a sacred medicine.
