Sacred Tobacco
Indigenous peoples have treated tobacco as sacred medicine for millennia and as a gift from the Supreme Creator.
My journey with tobacco started at a very young age. I used it intuitively, imitating people around me, abandoned it completely as it became less socially acceptable, then used cigars as a networking tool in my corporate years. I’ve recently been re-introduced to tobacco as a sacred medicine and recognize that however unconsciously I used it in my early days, I was building a powerful relationship with the medicine all along.
Sacred Tobacco History
Native American Tobacco
The history of tobacco dates back at least as far 6,000 BC. In 1492, Columbus encountered Native American tribes who brought gifts of food, weapons, and dried tobacco leaves, though the Europeans has no idea what to do with them and considered the leaves to have no value.
Native Americans have been smoking tobacco leaves for over 2,000 years for medicinal and religious purposes and also bartered and gifted them often.
Traditional tobacco is a medicine that has been used to promote physical, spiritual, and emotional, well-being. It may be used as an offering to Source or in ceremonial blessings and rituals of all kinds. A gift of traditional tobacco signifies respect and may be offered when requesting help, guidance, or protection from a person, spirit, or Source. Traditional tobacco may also be used directly for healing in traditional medicine, burned in a fire as an offering, or smoked in a pipe. In these cases, the smoke is generally not inhaled.
Amazonian Tobacco (Mapacho)
Nicotiana (tobacco) is a genus of perennial herbs and shrubs, including many subspecies, strains, and cultivars the fruit of which contains tiny red-brown seeds that may be used for smoking or other consumption purposes.
Nicotiana plants are native to North and South America and gets its name from the French envoy Jean Nicot who sent Nicotiana rustica seeds from the Americas back to Europe in the 1500’s.
Nicotiana rustica has been found in the graves of Andean cultures as far back as 600 AD. Egyptian mummies have been found to contain nicotine alkaloids, and one theory states that Nicotiana rustica was present in Egypt and was used regularly throughout their culture.
Mapacho is considered to sacred medicine by Amazonian shamans and is used on its own and in combination with other plants in a variety of shamanic practices. Some shamans drink the juice of tobacco leaves to experience visions. Mapacho is also used extensively in healing practices and is one of the most important plants in the lives of all tribes of the northwest Amazonian region. Tobacco is a fundamental plant medicine in curative rituals, tribal ceremonies, and is occasionally used as a recreational drug.
Recreational use of tobacco may be in the form of snuff like hapé. Native peoples of the Amazon may mix mapacho with other natural ingredients for use during festivals, ceremonies, dances, and other celebrations often in conjunction with Ayahuasca or other substances. Almost all tribes in the northwest Amazon take tobacco as snuff and is smoked only rarely, in curative rituals where medicine men blow smoke or spit tobacco juice over the patient or inhale the smoke, all with appropriate incantations and ritual. Recreational mapacho smoking among these people is rare and cigarettes are rarely smoked in traditional tribal societies.
My Journey With Sacred Tobacco
As I mentioned, my journey with tobacco started at a very young age. I can remember my parents smoking pretty much from the time I was born until my teenage years when my father had heart troubles and was forced to quit. I remember being extraordinarily young, perhaps even less than five years old, sneaking a cigarette or two from my dad’s pack and heading out back behind the garage to take a couple of puffs, awkwardly striking matches with the smell of sulfur and smoke in the air.
Back in those days, in the early seventies, so many people smoked cigarettes. Far more than they do today and for me at that time, it was the intrigue I guess of experiencing what adults were doing, or, in retrospect, maybe it was a call to the medicine itself, some kind of inner knowing that tobacco was and is an important part of my existence. Over the years I snuck cigarettes many times, and although I never became a smoker at that young of an age, it was a gateway to exploring and experimenting with all forms of tobacco along the way.
I grew up in small-town Texas and my friend group from grade school on stuck together through middle school, and got even tighter in high school when all the different cliques formed and solidified creating much more established and stringent boundaries between the social groups. Our group of close friends went more to the way of the Ropers.
This is the way it played out; there were the Ropers, the Socials, the Jocks, the Nerds, the theater and band Geeks, etc. Well, we were the Ropers because we were connected to the land or the earth or animals in some way through our families or our own experiences. I grew up around horses and tons of other farm animals in a very rural area. In my neighborhood and practically everybody had a couple of acres and a couple of horses and a variety of other farm animals. For many years, we had 50 rabbits that we raised for food, we had a duck, goats, cattle, as well as horses. I grew up playing in the creek bed, building tree forts and rope swings and we cut wood to burn in the winter. At one time, we had a farm of 80 acres where we harvested hay to feed the cattle and the horses. Needless to say I had a strong connection to the land and animals from a young age. When I entered high school, I joined the Future Farmers of America and by that time had already been dipping snuff for several years starting around 12 years old. My chew of choice was Copenhagen; the strong stuff.
Plug Tobacco
My friends and I would also explore chewing tobacco like Redman, Beechnut, Levi Garrett and even the old-school plug tobacco that the old timers used to chew on.
Some of that stuff was VERY strong shit. From dabbling in all of these forms of hardcore chewing tobacco, I got used to very strong tobacco and settled on Copenhagen as my daily snuff that I used throughout my teens until probably I was 16 or 17. When I quit dipping Copenhagen in high school, I transitioned into smoking cigarettes and opted for Marlboro Lights. Once I switched to smoking tobacco, the habit lasted until my early twenties.
At some point on my tobacco journey, when I was very young, probably 14, I also experimented with snuffs that you sniff. I saw snuffs as something that old grandmothers would do. With snuff tobacco, you sniff it up your nose. When I was experimenting with it, I didn’t have any other way to do it except to use a straw. I explored and experimented with snuffs like W.E. Garrett and other commercial brands and I feel that experience has informed my journey with hapé (see my hapé page).
Since then I struggled to completely quit smoking and always came back to it in times of stress over the years. I used it as a comfort habit to soothe me somehow. Now I understand how that soothing effect may be related to the breath, and that it was the action of breathing in deeply that actually would have calmed my nervous system and would have served me much better if I had not had smoke coming in along with it.
Eventually, I was able to control my smoking habit and stop altogether in my twenties even though I did come back to it a few times in times of great stress, but only for very short periods of time and only a few cigarettes here and there. As of today, I have not smoked a cigarette for as long as I can remember. Probably 20 years.
Cigars
I did go through a phase in my 40’s when I was coming into a more corporate lifestyle, connecting and networking often and wanting to relate to this new group of people. That’s when I got into cigars. Of course, you don’t inhale cigar smoke, so I was never concerned about enjoying a cigar once in a while. Smoking cigars was a little bit awkward in the beginning because I wasn’t sure what I was doing. But as I learned, I would go to cigar shops and talk to people, network and feel like a big shot while I was there.
Smoking cigars gave me the opportunity to relax in social situations and ponder the ways that I was becoming something greater than I was, aspiring to be some of the people around me who seemed to be so successful and have it all figured out. Cigars served as a measure of sophistication class, and accomplishment, however delusional that projection may have actually been, it deepened my relationship to tobacco and informs my reverence for it today.
In using cigar smoking as a tool for networking, I felt that I would meet other people who were of a higher class and of a more successful level of business. To some degree that happened, though not to the degree that I had anticipated. I did smoke cigars for many years intermittently, though I was never a heavy cigar smoker and I was always into medium-sized cigars that didn’t last all damn day. For me, it was never about who can smoke the biggest cigar or the strongest cigar or the best cigar. Instead, it was always something that I took as a practice that confirmed or anchored in that sophisticated sense of business success that I so desired and still resonate with today.
I still smoke cigars here and there, along the way when I’m feelin’ in. At one point I was a member of a Men’s Lunch where some very high-level business people in town would get together once a month and share a five-course meal at one of the best restaurants around and then have a powwow afterward, smoke cigars, talk shop, make fun of ourselves and enjoy being on top of the world, as we networked and drank a lot of wine. I was a member of this group for about four years, and through that experience, I was able to network with some of the top business people in town and hear amazing speakers including mayors of cities and Deans of Law Schools along with others in the business community. I was a bit of a fish out of water at that time because I was struggling in my business and life and barely getting by in some way. But having that experience taught me a lot about people who I thought were “successful” and that things aren’t always what they seem to be or what you might think they are. It also gave me sooooo many reps at being in the room with high-level people, off the record, and behind closed doors. I learned how they talk, how they talk to each other, how they think, and what’s important to them.
It was an amazing experience that lasted all the way up until my awakening when I became less and less interested in drinking and felt less and less resonance with that community in general. It wasn’t the people specifically, but just a lack of desire to drink of to have my life revolve around it in any way.
I was feeling more of a cognitive dissonance with drinking in that way or using any substance unconsciously. That was an amazing shift in frequency even though I cherish those memories of being in those rooms will all of those amazing people. Over the course of four years, I probably attended dozens of these wine lunches and it was fantastic. Nowadays I gravitate towards the smaller, shorter, “short stories,” as they’re called and I have found one that I adore called “the Cuban Reject” by Ventura Cigar Company. Great stuff!
I resonate with these cigars because they’re not pretentious, they’re short, sweet, and last just enough time, but not too long. I’m able to smoke one more ceremonially in the moment, to bless the day, to bless an activity, or to bless whatever needs to be blessed in the moment. My jam is to smoke it until it’s close enough to the end and then break it apart and spread the remaining tobacco over and around whatever I’m blessing. So this is how I use tobacco today and I’m learning more and more about the history of tobacco
I’ll have to admit that my relationship with tobacco has not always been conscious or healthy and that there are many ways that it could have been better or that I could have made it better. But now I feel so connected to the spirit of Tobacco, especially with this perspective of looking back on my tobacco journey and recognizing that the thread of connection and reverence was there all along and that it called to me from a very young age to create that relationship. It’s even more special to me that I’ve developed this relationship over a 50-year period with so many different aspects of it and perspectives on it.
I look forward to continuously deepening my relationship with Sacred Tobacco over time, using it meditatively, ceremonially, and ritually to pass on this lineage that already spans millennia and nearly every culture that ever existed.