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.
