30 May 2025 / 10 House
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Find out moreDid the Aztecs leave tobacco as a harvest offering?
Nicotiana rustica
ORIGINAL QUESTION received from - and thanks to - V: I think i saw it on one of your cutting a tree articles, but do we have any more info on the offerings (particularly tobacco) the nahua people leave when harvesting things? And Did the aztecs do the same thing/when did it start? was it associated with a specific god? (Answered by Ian Mursell/Mexicolore)
Yes, in Professor Alan Sandstom’s piece on Trees (link below) he wrote: ‘[The Nahua today and Aztecs in the past] view plants, animals, objects, and humans themselves as part of the sacred order. Spirit beings supply people with rain, seeds, sunlight, fertile earth, and all of the things that they need to live and prosper. In return, people must dedicate offerings of food, tobacco, cornmeal, copal incense, music, chanting, and dance to the spirits so that they will continue to provide what is needed for life’ (our emphasis), and in his classic book Corn Is Our Blood, he adds ‘Before planting, and following the harvest, gifts are carefully offered to the earth lest it become offended at being disturbed’ (1991:240).
We’ve already uploaded a piece on tobacco’s ancient use in Mesoamerica for medicinal purposes (link below). What’s less commonly known is that tobacco was, out of more than thirty, the plant most widely used for ritual purposes (González 2017: 48; Miller & Taube 1993: 169) - and a harvest offering was only one of several such contexts. And it didn’t have to be smoked, chewed or otherwise ‘consumed’: its symbolic presence was sufficient. It was a symbol of respect, peace, agreement and of harmony (Medina 2015: 84), but its sacred spirit could also be invoked in order to protect citizens in a range of daily activities, such as planting, hunting, harvesting, carrying, fishing, even walking...
With which deities was tobacco - called picietl in Nahuatl - associated? In some cases, with specific gods: ‘When a merchant arrived home at night from a long expedition... at midnight he made offerings to the merchant god Yacatecuhtli, and just before dawn he and other merchants laid out food, chocolate and tobacco offerings for the gods Yacatecuhtli and Xiuhtecuhtli’ (Berdan & Smith 2021: 95). According to the Spanish chronicler Gerónimo de Mendieta, it was the embodiment of Cihuacoatl, an aspect of Ilamatecuhtli, goddess of the Milky Way (Miller & Taube 1993: 169).
The Florentine Codex specifically refers to the ritual placing of bundles of tobacco smoking tubes as gifts to be burnt in front of altars to Huitzilopochtli (Book IX), and in general to ‘offering priests carrying their tobacco bags on their backs’ (Book II). For the Huichol people, tobacco belongs to sacred fire, part of an ancient ceremony in which tobacco is distributed, with an arrow pointing to each of the four cardinal directions (Schultes & Hofman 1989: 136); similarly, the Dominican friar Diego Durán mentions the Aztec custom of honouring Xiuhtecuhtli (god of fire) in which flames were ‘sprinkled with pulque and fed incense or tobacco (which is a type of plant with which the Indians deaden the flesh so as not to feel bodily fatigue)’ (1971: 262).
It would be wrong, however, to associate tobacco with any one specific deity. In his 17th century Treatise on Superstitions, Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón, referring to Aztec farmers, wrote ‘When they are to go to transplant the maguey plants... they prepare themselves with tobacco as if it were a guardian angel... to which they entrust the task’ (Coe & Whittaker 1982: 171). Tobacco was, by all accounts, identified universally as a divine gift for humans from the spirit world and a vehicle by means of which humans could offer prayers and thanks to - and repay - their gods (Medina 2015).
Sources/references:-
• Berdan, Frances F. and Smith, Michael E. (2021) Everyday Life in the Aztec World, Cambridge University Press
• Coe, Michael D. and Whittaker, Gordon (1982) Aztec Sorcerers in Seventeenth Century Mexico: the Treatise on Superstitions by Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón, Institute for Mesoamerican Studies, State University of New York at Albany
• Durán Fray Diego (1971) Book of the Gods and Rites and the Ancient Calendar, trans. Horcasitas and Heyden, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman (original written 1574-79)
• González, Lilián (2017) ‘Tenexyetl: el tabaco en la tradición nahua de Guerrero’, in Plantas Sagradas, Artes de México, no. 127, Mexico DF
• Hermann Lejarazu, Manuel A. (2008) ‘Códice Nuttall Segunda Parte’, Arqueología Mexicana, edición especial no. 29, Nov. 2008
• Medina González Dávila, José (2015) ‘La práctica de fumar tabaco entre los indígenas norteamericanos: síntesis de una práctica milenaria’, Arqueología Mexicana vol. XXIII, no. 133, May-June 2015, pp. 82-87
• Miller, Mary and Taube, Karl (1993) The Gods and Symbols of Ancient Mexico and the Maya, Thames & Hudson Ltd., London
• Sandstrom, Alan R. (1991) Corn Is Our Blood: Culture and Ethnic Identity in a Contemporary Aztec Indian Village, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman
• Schultes, Richard E. and Hofman, Albert (1989) Plantas de los Dioses, Fondo de Cultura, Mexico DF.
Picture sources:-
• Main: downloaded from Wikimedia Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nicotiana_rustica_-_Köhler–s_Medizinal-Pflanzen-226.jpg
• Pix 1, 2 & 3: images from the Florentine Codex scanned from our own copy of the Club Internacional del Libro 3-volume facsimile edition, Madrid, 1994
• Pic 4: image from the Codex Mendoza (original in the Bodleian Library, Oxford) scanned from our own copy of the James Cooper Clark 1938 facsimile edition, London
• Pic 5: Image from the Codex Zouche-Nuttall scanned from our own copy of the ADEVA facsimile edition, Graz, Austria, 1987.
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Nicotiana rustica
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