What Is Mapacho? The Indigenous Perspective on Sacred Tobacco
What is mapacho? Mapacho is the name commonly used in the Amazon for Nicotiana rustica, a potent species of tobacco with a long history of ceremonial, medicinal and spiritual use among Indigenous peoples of South America. Far removed from the casual use of commercial tobacco, mapacho is traditionally approached as a sacred plant, used for prayer, protection, cleansing and healing.
The following text offers an Indigenous perspective on tobacco and its place within the traditional medicine of the Americas, including its relationship with ayahuasca and Amazonian shamanism.
Adapted from the foreword to the book Plant Teachers: Ayahuasca, Tobacco, and the Pursuit of Knowledge, by Jeremy Narby (New World Library, 2021).
Tobacco as Medicine in the Indigenous Americas
Tobacco is the preeminent medicine plant of the Americas. Every other medicinal or entheogenic plant is used only in particular regions, but tobacco is used in every part of Native America — North, Central, South, and Caribbean.
Yet tobacco is barely noted by anthropologists. An anthropologist working with the Achuar in the Ecuadorean Amazon was gathering information about their medicinal plants, till he realized that he never saw anyone actually using any of those plants when they were ill. For every illness, they used tobacco. So he just lost interest in their medicinal plant use. Like most anthropologists in the Amazon, he didn’t care to find out more about tobacco.
Some writers, like Johannes Wilbert, in his book Tobacco and Shamanism in South America, hint that the shamanic use of tobacco may be only a cover for nicotine addiction. Indeed, Wilbert almost seems to suggest that, in South America, shamanism itself may just be a pretext for consuming tobacco, in absurd quantities, by every possible route. But that notion ignores the fact that not all shamanic use of tobacco even requires ingestion. In fact, in some North American cultures, tobacco is traditionally not ingested at all. At least, not by humans.
Sacred Tobacco, Prayer and the Spirit World
Among North American Indians, like my own ancestral Ktunaxa people, tobacco is considered food for the spirits. Tobacco can be sprinkled or thrown into a fire to amplify prayers. During gatherings, tobacco is offered to other plants to say thanks and to repay the plants for their help by strengthening the spirits of the plants with the power of tobacco.
Tobacco is offered by those requesting help from the spirits. A pinch of tobacco can be placed at the base of a tree with a prayer for the tree’s help, much in the same way that a pouch of tobacco is offered to a medicine person to solicit their help.
Tobacco smoke can be blown onto a person or object to protect it or strengthen it. It is used to feed the energies of protection, like feeding watchdogs to keep them strong. Tobacco is like a megaphone for our prayers.
None of this uses smoking. Even in the Pipe Ceremony, tobacco is not inhaled, but taken only into the mouth and blown out as an offering.
Traditionally, tobacco was sometimes smoked, but never carelessly or disrespectfully, or unconsciously, while doing other things. Traditionally, tobacco is smoked in solitary or communal meditation.
The spirits can absorb the energy of tobacco only if there is human intent to give it to them. If some tobacco just fell at the base of a tree and rotted there, it would not feed the spirit of the tree. Tobacco is an amplifier of our intent.
Intent and the Power of Tobacco
As such, if tobacco is grown and processed and offered with the intent of addicting people and making money, it will carry that intent as well. And, as we all know, when used carelessly, unconsciously, and disrespectfully, tobacco can sicken and kill people.
But even commercial tobacco, grown with base intent and adulterated with chemicals, can be offered to the spirits. So few people offer tobacco to the spirits nowadays, it is said, that the spirits are starved for it, and if you’re starving, you don’t turn up your nose at food even if it’s junk food.
Traditional Sacred Tobacco Cultivation
In hidden corners of reservations, medicine people still cultivate sacred tobacco. Some use seeds passed down from the old days in a lineage never used for anything but sacred purposes. They sing to the tobacco as it is growing and imbue the tobacco with their songs.
Tobacco has been cultivated in North America everywhere it would grow and traded where it wouldn’t. It was likely the first plant ever cultivated in the Americas. Even peoples who didn’t practice seed agriculture for food cultivated tobacco (proving that people who followed a hunter-gatherer way of life didn’t do so out of ignorance about seeds). Tobacco Plains, Montana, is named for the rich tobacco gardens of the Ktunaxa people.
Mapacho and Nicotiana Rustica
But the tobacco cultivated there was neither Nicotiana tabacum nor Nicotiana rustica, originally cultivated, respectively, in the East and Southwest and familiar to us, respectively, as cigarette tobacco and mapacho, or shamanic tobacco. (Both species originate in South America and appear to be anthropogenic.) In western North America, outside the Southwest, the most-used species was Nicotiana quadrivalvis, which is low in nicotine, and in the Southwest, Nicotiana attenuata was also cultivated. When commercial tobacco was introduced, many people found it too strong for smoking, so they mixed it with kinnikinnick or red willow bark. This again contradicts the notion that the sacred use of tobacco is merely a cover for nicotine addiction.
So does the fact that when tobacco was brought to Siberia, the Native shamans recognized its power and adopted it for shamanic use. It was introduced by the Russians for recreational use, probably in the 1600s, and many of their people took up recreational smoking. But the shamans sensed its real purpose. When tobacco reached Mongolia, the shamans there adopted it as well.
Some Native American people say, only half tongue-in-cheek, that the reason humans were placed on Earth was to cultivate tobacco for the spirits, because the spirits cannot do it for themselves. When I came to the Amazon, I was startled to hear indigenous people say the same thing.
Mapacho in the Amazon
I was also startled to hear that Amazonian shamans drink tobacco tea. Nicotine is more lethal, per weight of dosage, than arsenic or cyanide, and drinking or eating tobacco can be fatal. Surely, I thought, the tobacco tea they drink must be very weak.
But I didn’t hear much about that practice — until a friend of mine apprenticed to a yachak, or shaman, of the Napo Runa people in Ecuador. My friend thought he was apprenticing to become an ayahuasquero, or ayahuasca shaman. But once he had committed himself, the “secret” of ayahuasca healing was revealed to him: tobacco. “Ayahuasca only helps you see the work that needs to be done,” the yachak told him. “Tobacco gives you the power to actually do it.”
Mapacho and Ayahuasca
It’s not enough to perceive the spirit world; one must be able to affect it as well. Anyone can drink ayahuasca, and local people would often try to cure their own ailments by drinking ayahuasca themselves before heading to the professional ayahuasquero, like trying home remedies before going to the doctor. When they turned to the ayahuasquero, it was because he could do something. And that ability came from the power of tobacco.
Tobacco is the “muscle” of the work. A curandero has to do battle in the spirit world. So he has to build up his inner soldados, or soldiers. That requires drinking tobacco — Nicotiana rustica, which is very high in nicotine.
Learning from Tobacco
My friend was given small quantities of tobacco to eat daily, and once or twice a week he had to drink tobacco tea, which made him sick and miserable. I once participated in a tobacco drinking ritual myself and discovered how he felt. My body knew it had been poisoned. Vomiting gave no relief from the nausea, because the nausea didn’t come from the gut, but from the brain — like seasickness. One experience of drinking tobacco was enough for me. I did continue to take nasal infusions of tobacco tea, though. It was invigorating to feel small doses of the poison trickle down my throat. But my friend had to drink tobacco over and over, in ever-stronger doses, for months.
Tobacco is related to the Datura genus. It is a cousin of Brugmansia (aka toé, wanduk, and angel’s trumpet), jimson weed, belladonna, and mandrake — plants that, like tobacco, draw their power from their closeness to the world of death.
As a poison, nicotine works on the nervous system. But drunk in gradually increasing doses, it creates a tolerance, and that tolerance is permanent. Which means that it creates some sort of permanent change in the nervous system.
Medicine and POISON
Like many Amazonian peoples, the Napo Runa have the same word for “medicine” and “poison,” hambi. By being poisoned and surviving, my friend came out changed. Tobacco was no longer deadly to him. He could drink doses that would kill a normal human. He could now walk unscathed to the doorway of death.
He found the visionary realm of tobacco to be distinct from that of any other entheogen. But visions were not the main reason he was made to drink tobacco. Lots of plants give visions. The reason an apprentice ayahuasquero has to drink tobacco was its power. Very experienced tobacco shamans develop the ability to drink unlimited quantity of tobacco without harm. But learning to command that power is another task.
Why Sacred Tobacco Is Treated with Respect
This book gives us a glimpse of the tobacco practices of other Amazonian cultures, the Shawi and the Ashaninka. While there are differences, the profound respect for tobacco is the same.
By juxtaposing ayahuasca and tobacco as plant teachers, this book conveys that tobacco is to be taken as seriously and treated with as much respect as ayahuasca. That makes this book unique in the growing literature about ayahuasca and Amazonian shamanism.
Written by Gayle Highpine – Published at RitualItems.com with the permission of the author.
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