by Stephen Houston and Harper Dine (Brown University)
“A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied.” (Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1890)
Addictive substances have many reasons to exist—from the entwined evolutionary perspectives of both plants and people (e.g., Pollan 2001). In 19th century England, opiates dulled the pain of a toothache, soothed a restive child or led to restorative sleep. One chemist mixed laudanum, a tincture of opium, into 20% of his prescriptions, and laborers in the “ague-ridden Fens” of eastern England often dropped opiate pills into their beer, taking the edge off a hard day’s work (Berridge 1977:78, 79). Only later, when professional pharmacists wished to monopolize opium—and xenophobic concerns arose about what was perceived as a drug associated with Chinese immigrants and members of the East Indian working class—did moralizing laws take effect in the United Kingdom (Berridge 1977:79–80), a clear example of the way economic motivations and prejudice can become codified in notions of what is virtuous or right. The broader point is that various kinds of drug use—including everyday substances such as caffeine—have a long social history (e.g., Grund 1993).
In the case of tobacco (Nicotiana sp.), the well-known psychoactive plant native to the Americas, a relationship with people extends as far back as 10,350 BC, denoting an extensive story of mutual influence (Duke et al. 2022). When absorbed through the skin, mouth, stomach, rectum or lungs, tobacco, a member of the Solanaceae or nightshade family, triggers a surge of dopamine that induces euphoria and calm (Picciotto and Mineur 2014:546). With certain varieties and in higher doses, it even mimics death, followed by a recovery that can seem miraculous (Wilbert 1987:157; see also Harrington 1932:195–96). A drug this potent, with such diverse uses and impacts, is bound to vary in meaning. In Indigenous America, these form part of what Johannes Wilbert calls “tobacco shamanism,” a suite of practices and visionary or healing experiences that involve drying, shredding, pulverizing, incinerating, and poulticing tobacco (Wilbert 1987:149). This processing allows leaves of the plant to be smoked, drunk, licked, chewed, ingested through the rectum (by enema), blown on others, or packed as wet masses on the skin.
Most of these practices are well-attested among the Maya and adjacent peoples, with evidence going far into the past (Thompson 1990:110–22). Residues in vases from the Pacific piedmont of Guatemala point to liquid consumption of tobacco, perhaps for healing or visions (Negrin et al. 2024), seeds have been recovered from Formative Honduras (Morell-Hart et al. 2014:75–76) and Late Classic Belize (Dedrick 2014), and glyphic and chemical evidence shows that small containers from the final years of the Classic period stored snuff, possibly as trade goods packaged at their source in molded containers (Houston et al. 2006:114–16; Loughmiller-Cardinal and Zagorevski 2016; see also Groark 2019; Hull 2019). Some of these ingestibles were “polydrugs,” admixtures of other substances such as aromatic marigolds that might have cut the asperity of certain tobacco species (Zimmermann et al. 2021; see also Cagnato 2018). Among the Lacandon, such additives included vanilla or fragrant bits of tree-bark (Palka 2017:116).
But smoking, aspiration through the lungs, was likely the most common way of ingesting tobacco. A photograph of a Lacandon Maya speaker from over 70 years ago, by Gertrude Duby Blom, features a large, hand-rolled, and tapered cigar, the individual leaves of tobacco or nance-leaf wrapping quite visible as rough diagonal folds (Figure 1a; Robicsek 1978:fig. 20). Striations or lashings like this are depicted on the similarly large cigar smoked by God L, the deity of traded wealth, on the east door jamb of the Temple of the Cross at Palenque, indicating a comparable method of rolling (Figure 1b; Robertson 1991:fig. 44). These somewhat resemble the tobacco bundles that Lacandon Maya would prepare for trade in the mid 20th century and before (Figure 1c; see also a smoking God L with his occasional companion, K’awiil [Robicsek 1978:figs. 35, 132, 133, pls. 101, 103]; see also Palka 2017:120, fig. 4.14). Not all tobacco was or is of the same quality. The Lacandon were known to neighboring communities for their good tobacco (Vogt 1969:25), but such business had costs for the cultivators. Extensive production of the crop exhausted the fertility of local plots, and its care and processing needed extra hands, usually women (Palka 2005:207, 211; Palka 2017:104, 114, 120).
It is a different style of smoking that appears in most Classic Maya imagery. Delicate cigarettes, not sizable cigars, occur most often (Figure 2). Even God L puffs on a cigarette in two related images that show the orderly arrangement of gods in primordial time; as the presiding deity, he alone seems permitted to smoke (Figure 3). The presence of black background on the two vases and their occurrence at a place of dawning (k’inichil) indicate nocturnal or near-nocturnal scenes; the lit cigarettes would have shown brightly in such settings, a glow before sunrise (for an explicit reference to tobacco smoking at night, see the Codex Madrid 87b, for figures seated at “night,” AK’AB). At Palenque, in the Temple of the Cross, God L stands as a kind of sentry to the dark, symbolic sweatbath inside. In Maya imagery, smoking tobacco appears to cue events at night or in dim spaces. The evening might also have been thought a good time to smoke after the exertions of the day.
There is another telling feature of Classic Maya cigarettes. When close-ups are available, they sometimes reveal a distinctive kind of segmentation that seems to differ from the cigar wrappings described above. On one late vase, among the last polychrome, narrative scenes produced by the Classic Maya, two lords grasp thin tubes; they appear to be speaking to one another, so the objects are held at an angle away from the face yet could easily be raised for a puff (Figure 4; closeup in Figure 5). On two other pots identical tubes emanate smoke or are being lit from a torch (Figure 6).
It is possible that these tubes are bamboo grass (Bambusoideae), the stems of which are natural hollow cylinders whose nodes present as regular, perpendicular ridges, also seen in other contexts of Maya art (Houston et al. 2017). Such grass and other reeds could have served as a way of packing tobacco, perhaps ground snuff, into light containers of compressed, regular shape (Houston and Schnell 2018; an alternative might be corn-husk wrappers, known in South America, but those seem far wider than those on display here [Wilbert 1987:101, 104]; for another description of such “tubes” or cañuotos, see Robicsek 1978:43; also Negrin et al. 2024:526). Eric Thompson describes examples seen during the Grijalva expedition to Cozumel Island in 1518: there were “cañas (‘reeds’ or ‘canes’ about a palm long which gave off a delicate odor on being burned” (Thompson 1990:108). Such tubes were also mentioned among the Aztec and in Michoacan, sometimes offered in burials of important men (Thompson 1990:122). The organic, ephemeral nature of bamboo, cane or reed cigarettes could explain the absence of such tubes in archaeological deposits.
As in many other contexts of elite Maya imagery, the central figures in these scenes are men. (Women likely smoked as well, but that was not depicted in imagery.) Nor will a habitual smoker swoon into visions or liminal “death” from the minute quantities of tobacco in these thin tubes, whatever their organic housing. These are suited best to individual delectation, not to be passed around as Lacandon cigars were. There is an undeniable jauntiness, a casual quality to the gesture, figures often slightly off-kilter, leaning over, deploying the “dainty hand,” pinky up, an index figure extended, that also marks glyphs and images of certain scribes (Stuart 2017). These are settings of courtly ease and pleasure, if in a refined manner, and highly “homosocial” in the sense of single-gender gatherings, and perhaps connected to the types of power displayed or enacted behind the scenes. Tobacco had strong sacred associations for the Maya and elsewhere in Mesoamerica, a solemn ingredient of healing, but that attribute appears muted in these scenes. The images appear to focus on a distinctly masculine pleasure, a performance that touches on how the cigarette is held, in what company, how it is lit or ashed, where the smoke should go, when to light up, when not (Gilbert 2007). There may be a gestural decorum and subtle signalling that is, indeed, difficult to reconstruct. Why, for example, is joint consumption of cigarettes relatively rare in this imagery (Figures 2, 4)? When was drinking, as with the small bowl held by one figure, part of these pleasures (Figure 2, upper left)?
The late vase in Figure 4 is anomalous in its emphasis on two smokers at the center of the scene; more usually, it is a figure or figures to the side, almost whimsical in pose, and, elsewhere, it is solely God L, a slightly disreputable being, who puffs on his throne. To notable extent, the “segmented,” cane-like cigarettes occur relatively late in the Classic period, from the mid-8th century on. All practices have a history, a time of introduction, robust use, and desuetude. When depicted in the Postclassic codices, cigars, not cigarettes, are the norm, with the large, tapered shapes and copious tobacco to be shared around a group (e.g., Codex Madrid 79b, 87a). The time of the segmented cigarette, of almost desacralized tobacco, indulgently consumed, would seem to have been far briefer in span. Cigarettes may not only have been a “signature” commodity (Halperin 2023:85–88, 108–109). They were also, perhaps, a packaged and lightweight item of trade during a period of considerable movement and, as in the vase of Petol, novel modes of consumption.
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