People's Pilot, Volume 3, Number 12, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 September 1893 — CEREMONIAL USE OF TOBACCO. [ARTICLE]

CEREMONIAL USE OF TOBACCO.

A Sanctified Herb Among the American Aborigines. 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 a herb of peculiar and mysterious sanctity, and its use was deeply and intimately interwoven with native rites and ceremonies. With reasonable certainty the pipe may be considered 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 communication between savage men 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 also regarded as an offering of peculiar acceptability to the unknown powers in whose hands the Indian conceived his fate for good or ill to lie; hence it is observed to figure prominently in ceremonies as incense, and as material for sacrifice.— John Hawkins, in Popular Science Monthly.