Democratic Sentinel, Volume 17, Number 25, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 July 1893 — Ceremonial Use of Tobacco. [ARTICLE]

Ceremonial Use of Tobacco.

Since the world-wide diffusion of the tobacco habit, its earliest, and perhaps original, use has been in a great measure overlooked. With the aborigines of America, smoking and its kindred practices were not mere sensual gratifications, but tobacco was regarded as an herb of peculiar and mysterious sanctity, and its use wiu deeply and intimately interwoven with native rites and ceremonies. With reasonable certainty the pipe may he coiuidered as an implement the use of which was originally confined to the priest, medicine-man, or sorcerer, in whose hands it was a means of eommunication between savage man and the unseen spirits with which his universal doctrine of animism invested every object that came under his observation. Similar to this use of the pipe was its employment in the treatment of disease, which in savage philosophy is always thought to be the work of evil spirits. Tobacco was always regarded as an offering of peculiar acceptability to the unknown powers in whase hands the Indian conceived his fate for good or ill to lie; hence it is obset veil to figure prominently in ceremonies as incense, and as material for sacrifice. —[Popular Science Monthly.