In many Indigenous nations of North America, the smoke of sacred plants — sage, sweetgrass, cedar, tobacco — is fanned over persons and places in prayer.
Tagged: Prayer Purification Remembrance
How It Is Practiced
The plant is lit in a shell or bowl, and the smoke is drawn with the hands or a feather over the head, heart, and body, and through the room or lodge, before prayer, ceremony, council, or healing. Each nation has its own plants, protocols, and teachings about them; tobacco in many nations is offered first, as the eldest of the medicines. A note of respect belongs in any account: several nations regard their ceremonies as closed, and the sale of white sage — now over-harvested for a fashion market — is widely protested by the peoples whose medicine it is. This entry describes the practice in general terms and honors that boundary.
Purpose and Meaning
Smudging treats prayer as breathable: the smoke carries the intention upward and cleanses what it touches, and the devotion is sensory — smell, sight, and the slow gesture of the feather. It prepares the person as the font prepares the shrine visitor elsewhere: no one enters the sacred unwashed, and here the washing is smoke.
References
- Smudging — Wikipedia Free / open access
Related Practices
- Misogi — Purification by Water — Standing under a waterfall, or in the sea or a river at dawn, the practitioner lets cold water carry away pollution: Shinto's most austere devotion.
- The Sweat Lodge (Inípi) — The Lakota inípi — the rite of the sweat lodge — is prayer in steam and darkness: 'to live again,' sung and prayed around the heated stones.
- Offerings at the Buddhist Shrine — Flowers, candles, incense, water, and fruit before the Buddha image: the daily offering whose lesson is impermanence itself.
Related Across the Site
- First Fridays Devotion Devotion — The First Fridays devotion joins Mass and Communion on nine consecutive first Fridays to the promises of the Sacred Heart.
- Novena Devotion — A novena is a prayer or set of prayers repeated on nine consecutive days for a particular intention.
- Pilgrimage (Catholic) Devotion — Catholic pilgrimage is a journey to a shrine undertaken as prayer, penance, thanksgiving, or petition.
- Prostrations and Bows Devotion — Orthodox prayer is prayed with the body: bows from the waist and full prostrations punctuate the daily rule and the services.
- Stations of the Cross Devotion — The Stations of the Cross walk the worshipper through fourteen scenes of Christ's journey to the crucifixion.
- The Angelus Devotion — The Angelus is a short prayer on the Incarnation, prayed at morning, noon, and evening at the sound of a bell.
- The Jesus Prayer Devotion — The Jesus Prayer repeats one sentence — 'Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner' — until it becomes continual.
- Dhikr Prayer or Creed — The remembrance of God through repeated short formulas of glory, praise, and greatness.