6 The Soverane Herbe 



religious ceremony for high days, and for times of 

 trouble and stress, and a remedy for disease ; it 

 became a common and a daily custom. From a 

 sacred rite it passed into an ordinary practice, with 

 which were still associated, when Europeans dis- 

 covered the New World, a moral, if not a religious, 

 significance, and established medicinal virtues. 



The invention of the cigar or cigarette — the folding 

 of tobacco in a strip of maize — marked strongly the 

 secularization of smoking and the subjection of its 

 religious significance. Europeans, disregarding its 

 pagan purport, adopted the habit for its intrinsic 

 merits. And the smoker of to-day, lost in the first 

 blue balmy wreaths that float from his choice Havana 

 or well-burnt briar, little dreams that he is observing 

 a primitive religious rite, and that between his 

 entrancing vapour and the smoke of the censer 

 there is merely the difference of a continent and a 

 herb. Curiously enough, indeed, during the seven- 

 teenth century tobacco was used in English churches 

 as incense. There are frequent entries in church- 

 wardens' accounts of sums paid 'for tobacco and 

 frankincense burnt in church,' a combination of 

 paganism, sanitation, and symbolism. 



When brought within the range of history by the 

 voyage of Columbus, smoking was general and 

 common throughout America, though still regarded 

 as a semi-religious and medicinal practice. The 

 strange Indian custom of drinking smoke appealed 

 to the Europeans as one of the greatest marvels of 

 the New World. It was first noticed by the crew of 

 Columbus in the November of 1492. Two sailors, 



