Plants of the Gods: S4E7. Part 2 — Ayahuasca and Tobacco Shamanism: an Interview with Ethnobotanist Dr. Glenn Shepard

Welcome back to Plants of the Gods.

Our special guest is my friend Glenn Shepard.

And there was a famous book published about 30 years ago called Tobacco and Shamanism in the Amazon by Johannes Wilbert, the late ethnobotanist.

It's a brilliant piece of work.

I recommend it to all ethnobotanists and people interested in tobacco.

But the current and living expert on tobacco use in the Amazon and the person who's taken a lot more tobacco in the shamanic world concept in Paul Johannes is Glenn Shepard.

So I want Glenn to give us an overview of why tobacco, which seems to be the sort of forgotten shamanic herb, forgotten shamanic hallucinogen, is overlooked, its importance in shamanic society.

Glenn?

Tobacco is certainly the oldest shamanic plant in the Americas, but it's probably the oldest cultivated plant in the Americas.

This is one of the things that Johannes Wilbert points out in his book is that in the old world, we associate agriculture with barley and wheat and food plants.

But in the Americas...

It seems like certainly one of the oldest plants, and perhaps the oldest cultivated plant, was tobacco, which was not a food plant at all.

It's a plant for altering consciousness, for shamanic purposes.

And that gives you an insight into what Native North and South American peoples, what their priorities were in the world.

It wasn't so much food as the food of the gods.

So you find tobacco usage all over the Americas, in Central America, in North America, in South America.

And tobacco seems to be sort of the master plant of shamanism.

And, you know, tobacco isn't, you know, in Western pharmacology, it's considered to be a stimulant narcotic.

It's not considered to be a psychoactive plant or a hallucinogenic plant.

But...

I mean, first of all, there are two main species.

There's Nicotiana tobacum, which is the common, what they call Virginia tobacco, has about 1% or 2% nicotine.

And then there's Rustica, which has 9% or 10%, 11% nicotine, which has a lot more nicotine.

And so it definitely seems clear that the Rustica in Native North America was used in rituals for people to achieve a kind of coma where you take these overdoses, these nicotine overdoses, and enter a coma state where you would have visions and dreams and sort of spirit visions.

In my experience in South America, the Machigenga Indians of Peru also consider Tobacco was sort of the origin of everything, the origin of diversity itself.