barbecue red snapper. Sorted.
Welshman Henry Morgan, through the devious route of rum, piracy, slavery and trade, managed to stock the island with weed-smoking Africans and hash-smoking shopkeepers from the Indian subcontinent, thereby ensuring a permanent ganja culture. St Bob Marley did the rest.
It is quite a three pipe problem
Arthur Conan Doyle
R. Raffauf and R.e. Schultes
Vine of the Soul
T HERE ARE FEW plants more important in South American shamanism, whether as medicines or in mythology, than tobacco: Nicotiana tabacum of the Solanaceae or Nightshade family. It is native to the Andes. South American Indians had long ago discovered every way of utilizing it: smoked, as a snuff, chewed, licked, as a syrup applied to the gums, and in the form of an enema. In many tribes, payes use tobacco smoke blown over a sick patient, especially on the area theoretically affected, with appropriate incantations, in the belief that this practice can cure of itself or at least serve as a prelude to other treatments.
Tobacco is essential in the training of young men wishing to be payes . This aspect of their training is present in virtually every tribe in the Colombian Amazonia.
Amongst the Yukunas, for example, students must snuff tobacco in large amounts. It may take several years of this training before they master the knowledge of the paye and before they satisfy him of their proficiency.
The tobacco plant and the methods of its use among New World Indians never ceased to astonish the earliest European ‘explorers.’ It was unknown, of course, in the Old World before 1492, and snuffing was unknown in the Eastern Hemisphere before that time.
Vine of the Soul , 1992
You abuse snuff! Perhaps it is the final cause of the human nose
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Jeremy Narby
The Cosmic Serpent
T HE A SHANINCA SAY that by ingesting ayahuasca or tobacco, it is possible to see the normally invisible and hidden Maninkari spirits. Carlos Perez Shuma had told me that tobacco attracted the Maninkari. Amazonian shamans in general consider tobacco a food for the spirits, who crave it ‘since they no longer possess fire as human beings do.’
The idea that the Maninkari liked tobacco had always seemed funny to me. I considered ‘spirits’ to be imaginary characters who could not really enjoy material substances. I also considered smoking to be a bad habit, and it seemed improbable that spirits (inasmuch as they existed) would suffer from the same kinds of addictive behaviors as human beings. Nevertheless, I had resolved to stop letting myself be held up by such doubts and to pay attention to the literal meaning of the shamans’ words, and the shamans were categorical in saying that spirits had an almost insatiable hunger for tobacco.
There are, however, fundamental differences between the shamanic use of tobacco and the consumption of industrial cigarettes. The botanical variety used in the Amazon contains up to eighteen times more nicotine than the plants used in Virginia type cigarettes. Amazonian tobacco is grown without chemical fertilizers or pesticides and contains none of the ingredients added to cigarettes, such as aluminum oxide, potassium nitrate, ammonium phosphate, polyvinyl acetate, and a hundred or so others, which make up approximately 10 percent of the smokable matters. During combustion, a cigarette emits some 4,000 substances, most of which are toxic. Some of these substances are even radioactive, making cigarettes the largest single source of radiation in the daily life of an average smoker. According to one study, the average smoker absorbs the equivalent of the radiation dosages from 250 chest X-rays per year. Cigarette smoke is directly implicated in more than 25 serious illnesses, including 17 forms of cancers. In the Amazon, on the other hand, tobacco is considered a remedy . The Ashaninca word for ‘healer,’ or ‘shaman,’ is sheripiari – literally, ‘the person who uses tobacco.’ The oldest
Welshman Henry Morgan, through the devious route of rum, piracy, slavery and trade, managed to stock the island with weed-smoking Africans and hash-smoking shopkeepers from the Indian subcontinent, thereby ensuring a permanent ganja culture. St Bob Marley did the rest.
It is quite a three pipe problem
Arthur Conan Doyle
R. Raffauf and R.e. Schultes
Vine of the Soul
T HERE ARE FEW plants more important in South American shamanism, whether as medicines or in mythology, than tobacco: Nicotiana tabacum of the Solanaceae or Nightshade family. It is native to the Andes. South American Indians had long ago discovered every way of utilizing it: smoked, as a snuff, chewed, licked, as a syrup applied to the gums, and in the form of an enema. In many tribes, payes use tobacco smoke blown over a sick patient, especially on the area theoretically affected, with appropriate incantations, in the belief that this practice can cure of itself or at least serve as a prelude to other treatments.
Tobacco is essential in the training of young men wishing to be payes . This aspect of their training is present in virtually every tribe in the Colombian Amazonia.
Amongst the Yukunas, for example, students must snuff tobacco in large amounts. It may take several years of this training before they master the knowledge of the paye and before they satisfy him of their proficiency.
The tobacco plant and the methods of its use among New World Indians never ceased to astonish the earliest European ‘explorers.’ It was unknown, of course, in the Old World before 1492, and snuffing was unknown in the Eastern Hemisphere before that time.
Vine of the Soul , 1992
You abuse snuff! Perhaps it is the final cause of the human nose
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Jeremy Narby
The Cosmic Serpent
T HE A SHANINCA SAY that by ingesting ayahuasca or tobacco, it is possible to see the normally invisible and hidden Maninkari spirits. Carlos Perez Shuma had told me that tobacco attracted the Maninkari. Amazonian shamans in general consider tobacco a food for the spirits, who crave it ‘since they no longer possess fire as human beings do.’
The idea that the Maninkari liked tobacco had always seemed funny to me. I considered ‘spirits’ to be imaginary characters who could not really enjoy material substances. I also considered smoking to be a bad habit, and it seemed improbable that spirits (inasmuch as they existed) would suffer from the same kinds of addictive behaviors as human beings. Nevertheless, I had resolved to stop letting myself be held up by such doubts and to pay attention to the literal meaning of the shamans’ words, and the shamans were categorical in saying that spirits had an almost insatiable hunger for tobacco.
There are, however, fundamental differences between the shamanic use of tobacco and the consumption of industrial cigarettes. The botanical variety used in the Amazon contains up to eighteen times more nicotine than the plants used in Virginia type cigarettes. Amazonian tobacco is grown without chemical fertilizers or pesticides and contains none of the ingredients added to cigarettes, such as aluminum oxide, potassium nitrate, ammonium phosphate, polyvinyl acetate, and a hundred or so others, which make up approximately 10 percent of the smokable matters. During combustion, a cigarette emits some 4,000 substances, most of which are toxic. Some of these substances are even radioactive, making cigarettes the largest single source of radiation in the daily life of an average smoker. According to one study, the average smoker absorbs the equivalent of the radiation dosages from 250 chest X-rays per year. Cigarette smoke is directly implicated in more than 25 serious illnesses, including 17 forms of cancers. In the Amazon, on the other hand, tobacco is considered a remedy . The Ashaninca word for ‘healer,’ or ‘shaman,’ is sheripiari – literally, ‘the person who uses tobacco.’ The oldest
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