Saturday, March 6, 2021

Friday, January 8, 2021

Mapacho Effects: Methods of Snuff Ingestion - shamandealer.com

Mapacho Effects: Methods of Snuff Ingestion

Except intravenous injection, the indigenous people of South America used the snuff through all means humanly possible (gastrointestinal, respiratory or percutaneous) and in a variety of ways. The snuff is chewed , is taken as juice or syrup , pasta licks, suppositories and edemas are used, is drawn as dust snuff , snuff  smoke is aspirated and products of snuff are applied on the skin and eyes.

MAPACHO: Gastrointestinal tract. Chewed snuff

Chewing, or more precisely, sucking pieces of snuff is widely distributed in South America and the West Indies. Chewing snuff in North America was primarily an activity of the indigenous people of the Northwest Coast. Indigenous preparing snuff in rolls of about ten centimeters long, with green snuff, sometimes spreading ash  or salt on the wet leaves and mixing them with certain types of land or honey. Also, it is normal to combine a  mixture of crushed snuff leaves with soil containing nitro obtaining a mass that snuff tablets are made. Similar tablets are obtained simply by mixing with ash and crushed leaves wetting the powder with water ;  in order to make a smooth paste. Other additives for chewing that do not contain salt or and salt substitues include among  many others lime obtained from shells of mollusks, caraña resin (Protium heptaphyllum March.), Pepper  (Capsicum fructescens L. Willd.) And medicinal herbs such as peel yellow rose, a emenagoga plant. As mentioned, the Amerindians suck more than chewing snuff and swallow the juices that come out gradually.

MAPACHO: Snuff  drinking

The distribution of the habit of drinking juice is similar to snuff chewing; however, it is absent in the Gran Chaco region. Most of the native peoples of the Great Guyana drink snuff as well as a considerable number of groups in the upper Amazon and Ecuador and Peru mountains. A few cases of snuff drinking have also been reported in the  coastal area of ​​northwestern Venezuela, northwest Colombia and in scattered locations in Bolivia and Brazil.Likewise, the people of the Upper Amazon and the Mountain soaked squeeze and stir the leaves of snuff and chewed in water. In this western area of ​​distribution, however, the Indians did not seem to add salt or ashes to the snuff juice, although occasionally peppers (Capsicum sp.) is added. Several psychotropic substances may be consumed together with the snuff; for examples are ayahuasca (Banisteriopsis caapi), Coca (Erythroxylum), Datura (Brugmansia aurea Lagerh .; huanto, Brugmansia sp .; maikua, Brugmansia sp.) parica snuff (Virola  calophylloidea Marcgraf) and takini latex (helicostylis tomentosa [Poepp. & Endl.] Macbride or H. pedunculata Benoist). Snuff juice is ingested orally or nasally, using hands or pumpkins. Drinking snuff has not been widely  accepted as a way of consuming snuff besides South America.


MAPACHO: Licked Snuff


Licking snuff has limited distribution in South America. It is found among people of the northern end of the  Andes in Colombia and Venezuela , some parts of the Northwest Amazon , and in some other places.This particular practice is very similar to chewing. However, instead of sucking a piece of snuff leaf or a tablet  made of paste , an extract syrup or jelly known as AMBIL is sucked .In the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Colombia , Indians make a thick, black jelly through a baking snuff  leaves which lasting hours or even days . The product gets thicker because they add cassava starch ( Manihot  esculenta Crantz) or arrowroot ( Maranta arundinacea L. ) .Salt or alkaline ashes are used by local villages of the mountains as part of its recipe for AMBIL. The greenest  leaves from the bottom of the snuff plant are selected to be cooked over low heat. At the same time, salts are  obtained by certain peoples through evaporation of water has been poured and percolated through the ashes  of parts of a large tree of the genus Lecythis, outbreaks of Bactris and Chamaedorea palm leaves.In other groups ashes are achieved simply burning red shell and sifting cocoa, banana peels and green pods  yoco (Paullinia yoco Schultes & Killip). Salts are combined to make AMBIL before focus on a thick syrup or paste  (Schultes 1945: 20-21). The pepper (Capsicum sp.) Is also mentioned as an ingredient of AMBIL and guacate  seeds (Persea americana L.), coarse sugar, tapioca or manioc juice, as well as the aforementioned cassava starch. The paste is stored in many ways, wrapped in leaves, tubes of bamboo, walnut shells, small pitchers and today,  glass bottles and tin cans.If it is properly storaged, AMBIL last for several months before it must be replaced by a fresh one. AMBIL is  placed in the mouth by dipping a finger or removing a small amount and rubbing it on the teeth, gums, or tongue. Although it is consumed alone, the ambil is sometimes ingested simultaneously with other snuff products. Some  villages in the Peruvian Highlands lick along with coca (Erythroxylum), ayahuasca (Banisteriopsis caapi) and possibly other psychoactive plants.

MAPACHO: Airway and nasal absorption

Psychotropic rapés snuffs are little known in North and Central America but are widely common in South  America and the West Indies.In order to make snuff, leaves of the plant are dried in the wind or sun, over a fire or on a pot placed upside  down on the hot coals. The dried leaves are crushed, pulverized and sifted often. Nutshells and pots can serve  as mortars. The snuff tobacco is stored in containers made of bamboo, gourds or shells of mollusks. Psychotropic powders, including tobacco snuff may be aspirated directly from the hand or a leaf.More frequently however they ingested through nasal tubes, single or double, branched or angular absorption,  made cane or perforated bones. Nasal tubes, simple and relatively short absorption are used as inhalers consumption. The earliest example in South America is the bone inhaler which Junius Bird found near a snuff box made of whalebone,  in the pre-agrarian site Huaca Prieta, on the coast of Peru, around 1600 BC


MAPACHO LOG: Smoking

 The practice of smoking is the most common form of consumption in the indigenous South America.Indigenous people shaped snuff smoke cigars, cigarettes and various forms of pipes. Snuff dried by sunlight or wind is  ground before being put into envelopes of various types. Sometimes whole snuff leaves or pieces of them are used for this purpose. Indians used most frequently leaves of various kinds, estípulas palm and banana leaves corn leaves.Men normally roll their own cigarettes; in several indigenous communities however it is assumed that women should do  the job. Also they light up cigars and take a few puffs themselves before passing them to men.The natives of South America usually smoke with deep breaths or hyperventilation, but rarely holding a puff of smoke in  the mouth before expel or inhaled. Inhalation is described as absorbing cigarette smoke into the lungs with "deep aspirations",  "using the lungs like bellows" (Huxley 1957: 195).Giant cigars are nearly a meter long and two centimeters wide, they are smoked with hyperventilation by the Warao people  in the Orinoco and several other tribes, such as indigenous Vaupes.A peculiar method South America respiratory absorption of nicotine is inhaled snuff smoke is floating in the atmosphere. As  already mentioned, this happened on the east coast of Brazil, where those who practiced the custom blew smoke cigars snuff  by reeds and wide mouth on the heads and faces of warriors dancing. Men in this community also inhale snuff smoke that has  been burnt in human head shaped rattles. Adults between the Kuna of Panama used snuff smoke being blown over their faces  from an inverted cigarette, and men in Peru Jíbaro blowing smoke snuff through long tubes into the open mouth of another person.
mapachos in belen market iquitos, Peru
Mapacho and pippes in Belen Market, Iquitos

MAPACHO LEAVES: Skin application

 The application of snuff products on healthy or excoriated skin has a widespread distribution in the indigenous South America,  including the practice of smoking and blow smoke in general; blowing spitted juice snuff, nicotine mixed with saliva, and snuff  powder; massage with saliva; ablutions juice; snuff  rapé and leaf wrappers and napkins. The use of snuff in this context focus  on therapeutic purposes. 


MAPACHO RAPE: cular administration

 Smoke and snuff juice are applied to the eye so that the nicotine is absorbed from the conjunctiva of the inner surface of the  lid and the front of the eyeball. The main purpose of this application is magical - religious.


Buy mapacho roll directly from Peru in www.shamandealer.com
Organic, fresh, sustainable....



Monday, October 5, 2020

the traditional use of mapacho tobacco in the amazonian medicine

  Traditional use of mapacho tobacco

Tobacco is considered in traditional Amazonian medicine as the master plant of first importance. There is a hierarchy within the master plants, the Tobacco is considered as the father and the Ayahuasca the mother. From a thousand years ago the Indians use it for their purposes Medicines but also to get in touch with the spirit world (to cure a sick person, know if the hunt will be good, know the weather.). In indigenous communities, tobacco was forbidden to ordinary people because it could kill. At the beginning this plant was only used by shamans or priests as a ceremonial plant. Those who used Tobacco were called "the one who eats the Tobacco" (Ashaninka) because it was considered as a food for the spirit or also "the one who blows the Tobacco" (Aguarunas). That is to say: he who is able to blow the Tobacco because this healer has the habilitation and acquired a sufficient degree of control of the powers of the Tobacco to be able to administer it. Managing Tobacco needs great psychic, physical and spiritual control.
If the management of tobacco is poorly done, the spirit of tobacco is desecrated and will invest the human being the point of practically possessing him. Common use spread with the arrival of Westerners A shaman Guajiro explained to ethnologist Michel Perrin that the powers of writing were comparable to those of Tobacco. The indigenous think that the Tobacco allows to receive and decode messages coming from the other world, function that they attribute, to reading for Whites. It is the matter to which a word would be coupled.

Traditionally, there are two main uses of tobacco

First with a lower dose:
For popular phytotherapeutic uses and manifestations of
ritual character as a council of war or the arrival of an important person.

Second with massive dose:
the search is intoxication with the goal of entering into
trance, in narcoleptic state and rubbing with death (cardiac arrest).
This state is used in cases of divination, healing and initiation (reaching the limit of your being and living a symbolic death).

In many South American indigenous traditions we find the absorption in massive doses of Tobacco,
in cases of rites of passage (to adulthood for example). The young man fell into a state of near death and if he resisted, he could see his vocation (...)
During the initiation, the natural-supernatural duality is obtained, when the participant dies as a natural man and is reborn as a person having forces from the other world.
Tobacco ingestion methods are varied and interesting since Tobacco has so much power in its symbolic function, that it covers the entire axis of the most material (solid form, then liquid) to the most aerial (smoke) -
Gastrointestinal: Tobacco chewed, licked, drunk or in the form of enema.
The habit of chewed tobacco is quite developed from eastern Venezuela to northern Colombia and
of the Upper Amazon. "The Indians prepare the Tobacco in 10 cm wide rolls of green tobacco, and sometimes they scatter ashes or salt over the wet leaves, mixing them with some kind of earth or honey.

Buy mapacho from Peru in www.shamandealer.com