The Great Divide

by Peter Watson

  The physiological effects of coca have been variously attributed to its ability to restrict blood-flow to the skin, increasing body temperature, to keeping waste products out of the blood system, to dilating air passages in the lungs and nose.

  There is archaeological evidence which dates coca use back to 2500 BC, when it is shown in paintings and figurines which have their cheeks bulging on one side. Coca is found in all manner of ancient graves, as part of the preparation of corpses for the (journey to the) afterlife and the very word, coca, may be derived from Aymara, the language of the pre-Inca Tiwanaku tribes, in which ‘khoka’ means plant or tree, the original plant or tree.4

  The Spaniards found that the South American Indians would not work without coca and the Spanish king, after much thought, allowed them access to their favoured stimulant, at the same time instructing the church to forbid its religious use. According to Dominic Steatfeild, coca’s earliest use was probably shamanistic, producing a different state of mind for those who chewed it, aiding communication with the ancestors or spirits.5 At several sites, mummified bodies have been found accompanied by a coca vessel and shell containers in which there was powdered lime, much the same as the llipta alkali still used today to help release the alkaloids.

  The Incas believed that coca had the powers of rejuvenation and that nothing could prosper without it. Coca was offered in sacrifices, burned so that its smoke would reach the gods. Almost certainly it was also used to help anaesthetise the sacrificial victims ahead of their ordeal. Stars in the sky were named after coca and it was offered to the earth goddess, Pachamama, to ensure plentiful harvest and the good fortune of the army in war. It was offered to the dead and divination with it was also common: the shaman would chew coca and spit on his hand with the first two fingers extended. How the spittle arranged itself and how it fell to the ground, affected the diagnosis of ailments. The Inca rulers were adepts of coca, always accompanied by their pouches, or chuspa. Two of the Inca leaders named their wives after coca.

  Coca played an important role in initiation rites, helping young men (mainly men) endure the ordeals they had to face. Successful initiates were rewarded with slings for their (poisoned) arrows and a chuspa filled with coca leaves.

  Coca use was generally confined to the elite, which in this case included the army (another of its properties was that it was felt to give men courage) and the chasquis, the imperial runners, for the obvious reason that it helped them perform their duties more efficiently (not just military duties but bringing fresh fish to the court, for example). And it was also available to the yaravecs, or memory men, whose job it was to act as human archives and record events on the quipus, the elaborate llama-wool devices of knotted strings.6

  Over time it seems that coca use became more and more widespread. Being such a valued commodity, which grew naturally in remote parts of the Inca empire, it would have been very difficult to stop almost anyone who wanted to from growing his or her own coca plant.

  THE SMOKING GODS

  When they first reached the New World, the Spanish priests classified tobacco alongside magic mushrooms, peyote and the morning glories as traditional intoxicants. Judging by its very wide spread of use, from Canada to the Amazon and Bolivia, tobacco may in fact have been one of the oldest, perhaps the oldest, psychoactive substance in the Americas. It was consumed in a variety of ways – by chewing, snuffing, even by enema, as well as by smoking – but it was always used ritually, never recreationally, as it is these days.

  One of the reasons for this was that the most widely used variety among tobacco’s forty-five different species was Nicotiana rustica, which is hardier than other forms, growing where other forms cannot grow, and in which, moreover, the nicotine strength is four times that in modern cigarettes. This meant that it was far more likely to produce hallucinogenic effects and that it was much more addictive, either than what we would regard as ‘regular’ tobacco, or than other hallucinogens, very few of which are in fact addictive. N. rustica was therefore used mainly for its metaphysical and therapeutic properties, among such peoples as the Aztecs, the early Brazilians and those in the eastern woodlands of North America.

  Tobacco was considered by many Native American peoples to be a gift to humankind from the gods, who no longer had it themselves, but craved it, and this is why it was smoked – the smoke rose to the heavens to assuage the appetite of the deities. Shamans consumed more tobacco than anyone else – in some cases prodigious amounts – and the craving this caused in them was regarded as evidence for the craving of the gods. Nowhere did it have a secular use before the arrival of Europeans, even though its distribution (near universal) was much wider than almost any other plant.7

  Both pipes and enemas have been found from very ancient times. Early Quechua dictionaries mention huilca syringes, early Inca accounts refer to enemas, as do those of the Hualca Indians in Veracruz; and they are shown in Moche artworks. Enema rituals were carried out among the Maya, where jaguar deities have been found painted on enema syringes. Men gave enemas to themselves or had women do it for them, according to the art discovered at sites dating to AD 600– 800. The enemas themselves appear to have been made of the femur of a small deer, with a bulb of deer bladder rather than rubber. Snuffing tobacco remained common in South America, especially Peru.8

  Equally careful attention was given to pipes, which were equally – if not more – sacred. Tobacco was smoked by the shamans who lavished great care on their equipment. Pipes would be carved in human or animal forms, no one was allowed to laugh while the pipe was being manufactured, nor could anything be allowed to be broken. Songs were sung during construction, the completed pipes were given names and fired in a pit that was specially dug. In many societies even today the shaman must smoke incessantly, to ensure the gods have enough ‘food’ and the shamans must never exhale, but ‘eat’ the smoke ‘until it suffuses their entire system’. In this way the shaman becomes ‘lightened’ by the tobacco and able, via ecstatic trance, to ascend to the heavens to commune with the supreme spirit in the House of Tobacco Smoke.9

  Tobacco belongs to the Solanacae family of nightshades, potato and eggplant. Throughout the New World there were six hundred terms for tobacco, including three in the Maya tongues, zig, kutz and mai. Smoking aromatic herbs (but not tobacco) was also known in the East, in particular ancient India. When the Spaniards first arrived in the Americas they immediately noticed that people smoked wherever they went and that the Aztecs ‘composed themselves to sleep with the smoke of tobacco’.10

  The Indians of Mexico primarily smoked cigars or cigarettes, as we would call them, though they also used pipes, tobacco snuff and even chewed it. These practices may have been adopted from the incense used by shamans. In fact, it may be that the earliest use of tobacco was in the chewing form, used by shamans who mixed it with lime, which releases the alkaloids, making it more potent.11 Besides being a more rapid way of producing hallucinogenic effects, and of bypassing the stomach and any digestive ailments that might result, tobacco enemas were regarded as very useful medicinally. They deadened the flesh and helped overcome fatigue.

  In the Madrid Codex (a 112-page Mesoamerican folding book, probably produced by a single scribe around the time of the Conquest and now in the Museo de América in Madrid), three deities are shown smoking cigars, tobacco playing an important part in religious ceremonies. For the Maya its attractions were that it was aromatic, beautiful in flower and was consumed by fire, ‘the great cleanser’, disappearing into the great void, ‘the abode of gods and departed spirits’. To begin with it was probably used exclusively by shamans but even when it was smoked generally it always retained a pervading holiness, used to seal treaties and bind agreements, and in rites of human sacrifice. The Aztecs believed that the body of the goddess Cihuacoahuatl was composed of tobacco. It was also used as an offering to the war god, Huitzilopochtli, and used in ceremonies declaring war. Tobacco gourds and pouches were symbols of divinity, and gourds have been discovered c
ompletely covered in gold leaf. They were worn by priests.12

  The Huichol Indians of Mexico regard tobacco as a prized possession of ‘Grandfather Fire’ and carried balls of tobacco tied to their quivers, the balls being burned at the end of successful expeditions. In both North and South America and in the Caribbean, tobacco was believed to augment the powers of the body and it was used as part of the induction into shamanhood. The Menominees of north-east Wisconsin buried their dead with tobacco in order to placate their gods. Francis Robicsek reports that tobacco smoke was used in shamanistic divination by the Venezuelan tribes, the Florida Indians, the Guajiros of Colombia, the Cumanos of the Orinoco, the Arawaks, the Caribs and several other tribes. The Mayans believed that their gods loved tobacco and that comets were the still-burning cigars the deities had thrown away. Several tribes sprinkled tobacco powder on the chest and face of the very ill to protect them from evil spirits, especially those of the underworld. Elsewhere shamans would spit tobacco juice on to sufferers, the mixture being prepared in a vessel decorated, as often as not, with jaguar motifs.13

  The Aztecs believed tobacco was useful against snake bites, for head colds and abscesses, and their priests carried an ointment of tobacco and Morning Glory seeds to be used against venomous insects.14 The Cherokees had a kind of tobacco butter that was believed to heal wounds and cure bad humours. Among the Mayans tobacco was recommended as a cure for toothache, chills, lung, kidney and eye diseases and to prevent miscarriage.15

  In Guatemala the shamans would become intoxicated with tobacco in order to consult the supernaturals and to divine future events. Tobacco’s role in shamanistic trance in both North and South America has been documented by Johannes Wilbert of UCLA’s Latin American Institute. He argues that many tribes used different species of tobacco for different purposes, the varieties used in ritual being more powerful than those used more generally. He also notes that nicotine is not the only active substance in tobacco – some tobaccos contain harmine, harmaline and tetrahydroharmine, all hallucinogens. Some Indians, such as the Tenetehara in Brazil, smoke enormous cigars and in suffi-cient quantities to send them into trances.

  Robicsek also reports the combination of self-torture and tobacco consumption among the Zapotecs and Mixtecs, when worshipping the god Coquebila. ‘In honour of the god they held a fasting period of forty to eighty days, during which time they consumed only a quantity of tobacco and offered blood from their tongues and ears.’16

  In North America some sixteen plants, other than tobacco, were smoked for pleasure or ceremonial reasons, but they were largely abandoned when tobacco became more plentiful. Some (bearberry, manzanita) may have been hallucinogens and jimsonweed (Datura strammonium) certainly was, and was often mixed with tobacco. According to the Dominican friar, Fray Diego Durán’s Book of the Gods and Rites (1574–76), tobacco was used with Rivea corymbosa (Morning Glory) in the manufacture of a magical ointment for Aztec priests which, when it was painted on them, caused them to lose all fear and to slay men in sacrifice ‘with the greatest daring’. In lowland South America, tobacco was mixed with ayahuasca (see chapter 12), among the Mayans it was steeped with a whole toad (again, see chapter 12), and in North America with peyote.17

  There is also, among the Mayans, a class of small god, usually anthropomorphic spirits with upturned muzzles, open mouths and prominent incisors, who fall into various categories, one of which is called the flare gods. These figures are associated with the glyph for ‘fire’ and sometimes with jade celts that the Mayans believed were thrown to earth by the gods through lightning. Sometimes also linked to jaguars, these gods are occasionally depicted as the storm god, which has given rise to the theory that tobacco was somehow mixed up with the maintenance of fire, the storm god being worshipped out of fear because it was in storms that fires went out. Figurines are shown with cigars in their hair because, without the tradition of pockets, and being required to keep fire burning at all times, the hair was one place where cigars could be held.

  Smoke also features in the iconography of Tezcatlipoca (Lord of the Smoking Mirror) of central Mexico, a god whose cult was still very much alive at the time of the Conquest. This god, the antagonist of Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent god, about which there will be a lot more to say, was the patron of sorcerers, princes and warriors. He was also the God of the Sunset and of Sacrificial Pain. His symbol was the obsidian mirror into which the Aztec shamans gazed until they fell into trances and in which they saw the will of the gods. These mirrors are shown on inscriptions emitting coils of smoke. The Olmec had concave iron ore mirrors which John Carlson, the Texan archaeo-astronomer, believes were used as ‘burning mirrors’ to generate fire.18

  In his survey of the smoking gods, Robicsek presents many inscriptions where the figures are probably (but not definitely) smoking, some with jaguar cloaks, jaguar-hide belts, while many vases are decorated, for example, with jaguar heads, figures that are half-deer, half-jaguar, and with skeletons smoking, accompanied by dancing (but still ferocious-looking) jaguars.19 On one vase the jaguar is itself breathing fire, another smoking figure has a jaguar head, and a third wears a jaguar kilt and quetzal feathers (the quetzal is the ‘resplendent’ golden-green and red-bellied bird native to the forest in central America). On another vase the figure smoking is accompanied by a jaguar-dog, frogs and alligators.20

  Not enough is known about the origins of tobacco use but it may be that its ability to burn slowly was the all-important factor, the first use of cigars being to conserve fire. The psychoactive properties – discerned simultaneously or subsequently – would have confirmed it as a sacred substance twice over.

  SACRED GROVES OF THE JAGUAR TREE

  ‘For many pre-Columbian cultures of the Americas, cacao seeds and the comestibles produced from them were literally part of their religion and played a central role in their spiritual beliefs and social and economic systems.’21 The northern limit of cacao was central Mexico but its distribution took in Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador and Honduras.

  The word cacao is a Spanish adaptation of the Nahua kakawa-tl. Chocolate is based on another Nahua term, chocolatl, though a very late evolution. Theobroma cacao, to give chocolate the name Linnaeus chose, is what is called a small ‘understory’ tree that produces pods containing 25–40 seeds each. Cacao trees are cauliflorous, meaning the flowers are produced directly on the trunk and large branches. It is generally accepted that the plant originated in the Upper Amazon Basin and spread north from there, either naturally or by human agency.

  Most scholars believe that only the pulp was used in antiquity. The pulp can be removed from the seeds and made either into a fruit drink or fermented to produce an alcoholic beverage. Cacao was precious because, unlike maize, it could not grow anywhere – it prefers deep, fertile alluvial soils, shaded and humid zones, with heavy rainfall. Because it was so sensitive and precious, wars were fought to control the territory where it grew.22

  Theobroma is found in archaeological remains from about 1000 BC onwards. To possess cacao was invariably a sign of wealth, power and political leadership – vessels of frothy cacao are frequently shown at the foot of the king’s throne on Mayan vases and cacao glyphs occur on elite tombs.23 As we shall see, cacao seeds were used as a form of money.

  Iconographically, cacao was shown as a sacred tree (the ‘World Tree’, referred to earlier, in the section on shamans, and explored in more detail later), was linked to blood, to political power, to ancestors, to maize and the underworld – the latter being so because the plant prefers shade (maize, preferring open fields, was associated with light). The deceased were provided with cacao for the journey to the next world.

  Cacao and maize are, in fact, an important ritual pair in Mesoamerican cosmology. Both formed sacred beverages which, combined with water, served the gods. In Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico, cacao was poured into cenotes, caves, springs and ponds – the underworld is a unifying feature here. Chocolate/cacao was linked with rain, rebirth and ancestors,
was associated more with women than with men but also with blood and sacrifice and there are many images of a cacao pod being sacrificed as though it were a human heart.24

  Because it was precious there were restrictions on its use. People other than the ruling elite, warriors and certain merchants, were forbidden from drinking cacao and it was regarded as bad luck if a common person consumed it. Even among those entitled to use it, it was never drunk unthinkingly. A range of additives was used to flavour the drink – vanilla, chili peppers, honey, aromatic flowers. And it was sometimes mixed with blood and offered in rituals. Kings and queens were buried with it, cacao was used to pay tribute and, according to ethnobotanists Nathaniel Bletter and Douglas Daly, there are 76 substances, in one form of chocolate or another, which act as stimulants, anti-oxidants, diuretics, analgesics, platelet inhibitors, anti-hypertensives, anti-mutagens, neurotransmitters, vasodilators, anti-inflammatory agents, or antiseptic substances.25

  Various alcohols and vinegars can be made from chocolate and in certain parts of South America, chocolate was mixed with tobacco and/or other hallucinogens. As the pods dry, their surface comes to resemble the pattern on a jaguar’s pelt and this has helped give T. Bicolour (wild cacao, white cacao) the name ‘Jaguar Tree’, reinforced by the fact that jaguars are identified with the night, caves and the underworld, the same complex of associations as chocolate. (In the Maya world the word for jaguar and priest are derived from the same root.)

  Cacao-associated vessels go back to 1000 BC but its use appears to have spread mostly between 600 BC and AD 400. The word cacao is of Mesoamerican origin but did not reach South America in pre-Columbian times.26