The transformation of indigenous shamanic practice through the colonization of Amazonia did remarkably little to modify local ritual uses of tobacco. The reasons are threefold: tobacco smoking, as the main curing tool of shamans, was conflated with licit uses of tobacco in the colonial period; the contribution of the phytochemistry of Nicotiana species to the centrality of tobacco in shamanic plant medicine; and the way in which the specialized path of tobacco shamans, although displaced by the less demanding path of ayahuasca shamans in the nineteenth to twentieth centuries, has fostered the conservation of varied modes of tobacco consumption among both indigenous and urban non-Indian shamans. Moreover, despite the discouragement of tobacco use in public health discourse and practice, the development and spread of ayahuasca shamanism has contributed to a revival of traditional cultivation, curing and modes of consumption of tobacco.
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The five categories of shamans recognized in the upper Amazon on the basis of their dominant plant media (ayahuasca, toé, tree barks, flower essences or tobacco) all use tobacco as a primary connecting substance in their relations to spirits, as a synergetic enhancer of the effects of the other mediating plants, and as the main tool of their therapeutic agency. In this way tobacco use is truly the hallmark of shamanism through history (cf. Hugh-Jones 1979a: 231; Fausto 2004: 158).
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Through their psychotropic effects, shamanic plants ‘teach’ novices about the interactions between people, plants and animals and ‘show’ them empirical and symbolic pathways to counteract the malevolent senders of sickness. The repeated ingestion of tobacco juice during long periods of strict fasting, in which the constant smoking of tobacco is also encouraged, is said to add an important dimension to the visionary effects of other powerful plants such as ayahuasca or toé since, in moderate doses, ‘tobacco teaches in dreams’. Through the ingestion of tobacco, novices receive instructions about the plants that they need to work with and study in order to gain spirit allies in an individualized path of practice, within local and lineage patterns of knowledge transmission. ‘We see different things with tobacco, which plants we need to follow, how to learn medicine, which spirits will come to us, animals’.
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The feeding of spirits with tobacco creates and augments the agential intent of shamans, supported by their allies’ subjectivities that they hold inside them in embodied forms: the Q. llausa or Q. yachay (‘ knowledge phlegm’) that shamans grow in their trachea and bronchiae, needs to be fed with tobacco smoke and in the case of strong shamans (Q. sinchi sinchi yachak) by tobacco juice. Inside the phlegm are not only small darts that are the expression of shamanic power but also ‘live’ small animals (Q. karawa)–scorpions, worms, spiders, centipedes, millipedes–that shamans acquire from others as gifts, by theft or by seizing them after they escape from the mouths of dying shamans. Without tobacco smoke and also tobacco juice as regular food, these entities become inactive and impotent, not responding to shamans’ agentive intentions. Very large pipes of strong tobacco are necessary to ensure the transfer of karawa to selected initiates, by regurgitating and re-swallowing their yachay. All shamans, however, also use regular, often daily tobacco smoking to maintain the visionary space that they enter under the effect of psychotropic plants, something they describe as contemplative study. For observers it may look no different from recreational pipe smoking for relaxing the mind, but for shamans this is a central connective activity that creates psychic bonds with spirits, patients, the whole cosmos and relational entities.