The Smoke of the Gods: A Social History of Tobacco

"I chose it mainly because it was the only history of tobacco that was actually readable. The fact that it had that global and chronological sweep was, of course, pivotal. It’s really well written. It’s written by a journalist. He said he would never write anything unless it had been verified by three separate sources. The way he writes about the impact of tobacco upon the culture of wit in Shakespearean London and how it affected the Mermaid wits in particular — Jonson, Spenser, Marlowe — is incredibly lyrical. It’s got this razor-sharp journalism, but also this poetic prose, with a really good pace, and a great title. It’s popularly assumed that Sir Walter Raleigh introduced it. That’s not actually true. It was introduced — so far as we know — by a merchant adventurer, John Hawkins. Again, there’s a lot of mistrust and suspicion of it to begin with. But after a campaign to make it palatable it’s a huge hit and you start seeing tobacco houses sprout. This is in the late Elizabethan period and according to one pamphlet there are 7000 of them by 1614. That’s a suspiciously round number, I suspect that’s just shorthand for ‘a lot’. But if it’s true that would mean there were more tobacco houses than there were taverns and ale houses combined. Other sources, other diaries, especially diaries written by foreign travellers like Thomas Platter (who was a Swiss medical student), or Horatio Busino (who was a chaplain to the Venetian ambassador), testify to the extraordinary popularity of tobacco. They go so far as to say that men and women in London would keep their pipe underneath their pillows at night, so if they woke they could gratify their longing. It’s also claimed that young children in the grammar schools would smoke a pipe for breakfast because it was assumed to be an excellent substitute for food. Things we take for granted if we smoke — the fact it is smoke, you breathe it in and then breathe it out, you see it rising up into the air, then it just vanishes — was a whole new level of sensuality. It gave a zest to life. It was seen, again, as this kind of mysterious, exotic thing that was really magical. According to eyewitness accounts, it was a massive, massive smash hit. You couldn’t go to the playhouse, you couldn’t go to a tavern, you couldn’t go to a dinner without everyone drinking tobacco, as they called it. But there were also medical reasons. It was hailed as this infallible prophylactic. It would cure you of depression, they thought; it would cure you of insomnia; they said it was a perfect way to regrow fingernails that might have been ripped off; also for sick cats. It was a really ‘useful’ thing. People who were dying of the plague were routinely told it was their own fault because they hadn’t smoked enough and pregnant women who miscarried ditto. It’s tempting to say ‘they didn’t have a clue,’ but in fact they did. There was a modicum of scientific awareness. There was a pamphlet written by someone called Philaretes — presumably not his real name — in 1602 in which he managed to presage all of the nefarious effects of smoking. He said it hardens your arteries; he said that it’s full of poisonous fumes; he said it stunts the growth and it makes you thin (which in those days was seen as a bad thing). Thomas Platter, the Swiss medical student, said that he’d actually seen the body of a tobacconist (as heavy smokers were called) who’d been cut open and his insides were coated with this oily, unctuous stuff. He said it looked like the inside of a chimney. They were aware of it, but so magical did it seem and so great was the alleged benefit upon your health that they embraced it. “People who were dying of the plague were routinely told it was their own fault because they hadn’t smoked enough.” There was one further catalyst that explains its popularity. People thought that it was a brilliant spur for creativity. This is beautifully explained in Eric Burns’s book. It links into the four humours theory. People were told to breathe tobacco in with the force of the ocean tide and let it penetrate every last nook and cranny of their innards, and then breathe it out. The brain was seen as something possessed of cold, moist humours and they thought the heat of the tobacco would counteract these qualities, kindling what he describes as ‘a deft and lyrical wit, which allows you to fulfil your divinely apportioned creative faculties, bringing you closer to God and giving you brilliant ideas.’ They were the first generation of chain-smoking intellectuals. Eric Burns is really good on the spiritual side of smoking. There’s a reason why he calls it the smoke of the gods. In the Mayan civilisations, it was thought that the smoke was an emissary of your prayers, so you breathe it in — the head of the pipe was shaped like a god’s head, so it was like a portable altar — and it mingles with your prayers. When you breathe out, those prayers are going to go up to heaven in the smoke. It’s a quasi-religious experience. But then when you get to London it’s secularised. But they do think it’s bringing them closer to God because it’s stimulating their minds. Yes, it’s this idea of cleansing yourself and exorcising foul humours. I don’t know if it would do you any good, probably not. They did all sorts of weird things. They used to sauté tobacco leaves in urine and they thought that gave it more miraculous healing qualities, which is why a Thomas Dekker character, in one of his plays, says, ‘Tobacco makes your breath stink like the piss of a fox.’ I like that staccato. Edmund Spenser hails the ‘holy herb’ and others call it ‘the greatest herb that nature did ever tender for the use of man.’ I like Dekker’s take, it sounds very caustic and, it cuts through these rhapsodies of the other wits."