by D.R. Gehlbach, Columbus, Ohio
Hopewell platform pipes had an important but not well understood impact on the lives of their Middle Woodland owners. They certainly were regarded as significant artifacts since many highlighted the inventory of totemic furnishings deposited with ranked Hopewell burials. Researchers have suggested that during funerals honoring special citizens a series of observances took place featuring Hopewell pipes and their apparent magical qualities. While the unique stylization of platform pipes can reveal something about their makers’ pursuit of aesthetics, a more thorough investigation would reveal that Hopewell smoking instruments could provide a function for the study of Hopewell ritual practices.
The sacred pipes of the Hopewellians provide a window through which to view the symbolic, ideological, and political roles that smoking played in the Midwest from about 200BC to 500 AD. The following diagnostic information is provided to better understand Hopewell pipes, their roles as smoking instruments, and their contributions to overall Woodland prehistory.
Hopewell platform pipe diagnostic information—
- Almost all Hopewell pipes have been found in mortuary locations with burials or as part of cached deposits, almost never at Hopewell encampments or workshop sites.
- Platform pipes were probably not used in secular activities of the Hopewellians.
- Hopewell pipes were never widely distributed nor were they the material possessions of the rank and file. Most if not, all were controlled by leaders, and or religious clans.
- Hopewell pipes were used only in special events such as during funerals. They performed several functions including social integration, spiritual sanctification, and supra-world communications.
In burial ritual there were several primary roles that Hopewell pipes might have played. One was an operational role to establish the sacred pipe as an instrument for communal worship to be smoked in common on special occasions by neighboring ritual-dependent people. It has been theorized the act of smoking the pipe or acting out the smoking event also served to release the soul or spirit of the deceased to travel to another world or universe. Facilitating the movement were the trance-inducing ingredients of the smoking mixture and wafting pipe smoke aided on occasion by the symbolic or iconic effigies portrayed on some specimens.
The physiological effect of wild tobaccos smoked in combination with other materials such as ground up tree bark and leaves of aromatic plants gave the smoker the sensation of an out-of-body experience.
This could have allowed for the manipulation of time that is to literally bring the present into the ancestral past that the Hopewell mounds represented. Studies have indicated that nicotine and other narcotic elements were present in trace amount in the bowls of some Hopewell pipes. The pipes were thus used or treated as drug-delivery devices and the rituals in which they were deployed featured altered states of consciousness.
Some Hopewell pipes were deliberately sacrificed (broken or mutilated) during ritual activities apparently to kill their accompanying spirits (animate spirits were separate from the human spirits but always accompanying it and affecting human welfare). This is based on the duality belief among Proto-historic and early historic Indian groups where two separate spirits, one within the body and one outside determined one’s destiny.
Pipes were said to be a device to enable these spirits to move between different worlds or universes located below, on and above the earth’s surface. Hopewell pipes then became the designated and sanctified instruments included with burials to help release and direct an individual’s spirits to another world. This determination receives para-scientific support from the forms and conditions of multiple deposits of pipes deposited at crematorium sites.
The Hopewell platform pipes pictured with this article illustrate the diagnostic styles of pipes found at Midwestern Hopewell sites. Most of the pictured forms were likely derived from early Woodland Period designs.
