Can Smoking Be Sacred?

Is what we do as important as how we do it?

In today’s modern Western world we are bombarded with messages that tell us that smoking is bad for us and there is a mountain of medical evidence to prove it. We are also given subliminal messages from Hollywood that smoking is cool and sexy and we may come across social pressures saying the same thing. The messages we receive, both on a conscious and subconscious level, are numerous. The overall prevailing message is that smoking is bad and we either react to that message by not smoking or we smoke and live with the guilt and shame of betraying social convention.

Over thirty years ago when I was immersed in my indoctrination into Lakota spirituality I learned that the Lakota considered four herbs as being sacred. Those four sacred herbs were; sage, used to dispel negative energy, cedar, used to attract positive energy, sweet-grass, used for purification, and tobacco, used for prayer.

Tobacco a sacred herb? Used for prayer? The Surgeon General would surely disagree…

It was the native peoples of the Western Hemisphere who introduced tobacco to the rest of the world. But the rest of the world never understood — and surely never even heard of — the sacredness with which it was originally used. They loved it, though, and turned it into something completely…