Each Year in January, when there are heavy thunderstorms, the Tapirapé shamans and a few courageous laymen conducted the Thunder ceremony to protect their people from danger of Thunder and Lightning ... The men swallowed smoke from their long pipes, sang, and danced in frenzied intoxication until they fll in trance and traveled to the house of Thunder. Some of the men were struck down by the enemy's arrows, revived by having tobacco smoke blown and massaged over their bodies, and rejoined the fight, which was characterized by pronouced violence. Commeners, novice shamans, and seasoned practitioners swallowed repaeted doses of smoke and moved about in clouds of spewed-out smoke. They vomited, suffered violent seizures, staggered blindly through the houses, and some had to be removed from the battlefield in cataleptic rigidness on the shoulders of their comrades. Thus, whether as were-jaguars or as simply human fighters, tobacco shamans, upon confronting the enemies on earth, in the sky, and the otherworld, ... return from their ecstatic warpath reassured of having affirmed once again their role and office. Tobacco is one of the many gifts made to us by the South American Indians. By now it looms so large in our civilization that users and n on-users alike will be enthralled by this book. Tobacco is considered from every angle: ethnography, pharmacology, art, magic, and religion. While Wilbert has mustered an impressive mass of documents, his erudition remains enlivened throughout by his intimate acquintance with tribal life in South America - Claude Lévi-Strauss