[Aztlan] 'Warding-Off' Snakes With Tobacco

[john.pastore]

Elaine, in part, wrote:

"Even though the part about calming the  snake by throwing the tobacco may seem absurd (and cowardly, no doubt),  apparently, snakes are so sensitive to it that they can absorb it through  their skin or possibly through their forked tongues, which pick up tiny  particles in the air.  I would suggest that tobacco was used on snakes to  calm them when Mesoamericans were performing special 
snake ceremonies."

I would think past use of tobacco on snakes would have included present use of tobacco on snakes which is not, as far as I've ever seen, to "sedate" them for "special ceremonies" but for the very practical use of warding off snakes.

Long before Punta Laguna (between Coba and Nuevo Xcan) became a day-tour destination I would explore the zone, including its caves, with its caretaker and non-smoker Serapio.

On the very first occasion we explored a cave, Serapio, his eldest son and I, went to a cave from which Serapio thought he would, from time to time, hear voices at night. He thought the voices were of long dead Conquistadors.

The cave's entrance was barely more than a slit on the ground. Serapio macheted a nearby sapling, debranched it into a pole longer than the cave was deep and then slid it upright down through the narrow entrance. Before allowing his son to shimmy down*, he asked me for a lit cigarette.

Jokingly I asked why: "To make the mosquitos go away?"

"No," he laughed, "to make the snakes go away."

(*After Serapio's son, also armed with a lit cigarette, shimmied down, Serapio cut and made a long pole of a second sapling and, along with short stout branches and rope, dropped it through the entrance and down to his son who then, from the bottom, lashed the short branches laterally to the poles and, step by step ascended the ladder-in-the-making to the top from which Serapio and I could then descend into the now 'snakeless' cave.)

Never did I see Serapio enter a cave without first "borrowing" ("for the mosquitos" he would then say jokingly) a cigarette from me and puff some smoke through the cave's entrance---and this at a time when, instead of being paid in rather useless cash for his and his ejido's services, he'd rather me give the then still novel flashlight.

Without flashlights Serapio and his ejidotarios would otherwise be pretty much palapa-bound at night fearing as they did that they could, if venturing out, tread on snakes.

(*Btw, for reasons unknown to me don Demetrio, Coba's desceased h-men, insisted in being paid in cigarettes [Alas or Delicados to be exact] though, in Coba, there were stores which obviously took cash for even tobacco.)



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