Tobacco Offering

As the popular saying goes, advice and tobacco are only given to those who ask. And the apparitions, as is known, ask a lot. As Cascudo reminds us, roll tobacco, along with cachaça, were indispensable for the exchanges of colonial Brazil. Curiously, however, it is to perceive how this basis of negotiation also passes into the invisible field, with drink and tobacco being the two great offerings to attract, please or at least avoid the punishment of the myths of the forests.

Tobacco and its forms of use

It is assumed that tobacco was introduced to Europe after the colonization of the Americas by the Spanish and Portuguese. Christopher Columbus, from his first voyage to the New World, noted that the “Guanahani” indigenous people of the island of San Salvador had the custom of smoking herbs. In subsequent expeditions, Friar Bartolomé de Las Casas observed that these herbs were consumed wrapped in a large, cone-shaped leaf, which the native peoples called “tobacco.” The leaves were prepared and cured, like cigars.

Among the native peoples of Brazil, one of the most traditional ways of using tobacco is through pipes, both made of wood and clay. To smoke in Tupi is to smoke, hence the words pito and piteira. Later, clay pipes made by black people and popularized by the figure of the old black people also became famous.

Another way that tobacco is traditionally consumed is by chewing it, like chewing gum, for long hours. From time to time, the person chewing spits out a mixture of dark saliva with the tobacco juice.

Offerings to the apparitions

Tobacco is offered so that Matinta Pereira leaves a house in peace and goes away with her bad omen; tobacco is left for sacis, caiporas, curupiras and comadres fulozinhas so that the apparitions do not bother them in the woods and even for Saint Peter, writes Câmara Cascudo, it was customary to throw tobacco on the roof of the house to stop the rain.

Tobacco makes the direct connection with smoke, and smoke with breath and spirit. That is why it is so connected to the world beyond.