Tobacco intoxication and a specific ritual posture, the Tennessee Diviner (TD) posture, combined with a rapidly beating drum or rattle, were used by Casas Grandes Medio period (AD 1200–1450) shamans in the North American Southwest to reliably produce trance experiences of soul flight, transformation, and divination. A conceptual model proposes that trance experiences emerge from the interaction of human minds with entheogens, cultural expectations, physiological states, postures, and sound. Pairing tobacco with the TD posture and rhythmic drumming likely reinforced culturally desired trance states. This mutually reinforcing practice may have been part of tobacco-based shamanism in other New World cultures, and the model can be applied to understand trance induction and resulting cosmological frameworks in other cultures.
Between AD 1200 and 1450, shamans in the Casas Grandes region used tobacco and possibly other entheogens to enter trance states, enabling their spirits to travel across the cosmos. These trance experiences involved vertigo and soul flight, common cross-culturally and consistent with nicotine intoxication. Shamans interacted with other-than-human beings, including macaw- and serpent-linked deities, and used animated objects such as Playas Red and Chihuahuan Polychrome pottery effigies of humans, macaws, and snakes. These pots, proposed as animate “pot-people,” featured designs emphasizing spinning and vertigo, central to soul flight. Some pots were literally spun, as evidenced by wear patterns on their bases, reflecting sympathetic and mimetic magic linking them to the spirit world.