Mapacho

Nicotiana rustica is not the plant in a cigarette. It is a separate species, considerably higher in nicotine than the Nicotiana tabacum grown commercially, and the difference is large enough to change what the plant is used for. Where commercial tobacco is a mild stimulant taken habitually, mapacho is used in quantities and by routes that produce strong physical effects, including nausea and, at the upper end, states the practitioners are deliberately seeking.

The routes of administration are unusually varied. Johannes Wilbert's continental survey recorded it smoked, drunk as a juice, taken as snuff, licked as a syrup or a paste, and applied in other ways besides, with different peoples favouring different methods. Preparation differs accordingly: leaf cured and rolled for smoking, boiled down for a liquid, ground and mixed with ash for snuff.

The use that matters most for understanding it as a sacred object rather than as a plant is blowing. Smoke is blown deliberately over a person, over an object, into a space, along the length of a body, and this is done as an action with an intended effect rather than as an incidental part of smoking. It is the point at which tobacco stops being a substance a person consumes and becomes something a practitioner directs.

For most of the twentieth century, writing about ritual plant use in South America concentrated on the visionary substances: ayahuasca, yopo, San Pedro, the Amanita speculations. Tobacco was treated as background, a familiar thing that everyone had and that therefore explained nothing.

Johannes Wilbert's 1987 survey put the case that this was backwards. Working across the continent, he found tobacco in use among an extraordinary range of peoples, by more methods and in more contexts than any of the more celebrated plants, and argued that it is the single most widespread shamanic plant in South America. The argument reframed the field, and it did so without any new discovery, simply by counting what was already in the literature.

The practical consequence for an atlas is that tobacco has to be treated as a religious material in its own right rather than as a habit that happens to appear near religious materials. In the western Amazon today mapacho is bound up with ayahuasca practice, used to open and close a session and to work on a person during it, and it travels internationally with that practice. It is now sold worldwide, which puts it in the same position as several other objects in this region: a thing with a long and specific local history that is also, now, a commodity.