Sean Croke

Lecture & Workshop Host

LECTURE: The Medicinal Qualities of the Mother of Poison: Magical Uses of Tobacco

Tobacco (Nicotiana spp.) is a much maligned plant in the modern world, considered an addictive scourge, stinking and cancerous. Many people all over the world ingest this plant daily, but often with a sense of shame and a lack of intention, which does often lead to negative health outcomes. People are moving more and more towards divorcing the main addictive/desired alkaloid, nicotine, from the plant matrix in which they live so that it can be more easily consumed in bubblegum flavored vegetable glycerine vape juice and etc.

Many people are unaware that Tobacco is considered a teacher plant and a medicine by many different spiritual traditions, the plant is held in the same level of esteem as some of the better known plant teachers such as Ayahuasca. People turn into jaguars and divine the sources of illness through working with Tobacco.
Tobacco also has their place as a practical addition to any herbalist’s toolkit, they can reduce pain and swelling and have a profound influence upon the vagus nerve.
This presentation will look at historical and current methods of working with Tobacco as a medicinal herb and teacher plant while also trying to understand how this sacred herb has come to be so disrespected in the modern world.

WORKSHOP: Working with Tobacco
1.5 HOUR INTENSIVE– space is limited to 20 participants

In this workshop we will be delving into some more specifics about how and why to work with Tobacco as a physiological and spiritual medicine as well as as a teacher/friend. We will delve deep into a variety of methods of employing Tobacco for pain relief, as a divinatory tool, for mental health support, etc.
Cultivation of various species of Tobacco will be covered, with discussion around which species are best suited to which purposes. We will also cover the curing of raw tobacco and further processing into various forms such as cigarette/cigar/pipe tobaccos, snuffs and snus, liquid preparations, and external preparations.
Finally we will sample some non smoke based forms of tobacco with a focus on communicating with the spirit of the plant.

$35 workshop add on fee
$0 materials fee

BIO: Sean Croke is a wildcrafter, gardener, practitioner, medicine maker, and teacher. He lives on a 25 acre plot of land with his family and a bunch of other humans, animals, and plants on occupied Chehalis tribal territory, but he works and moves extensively within Skokomish, Squaxin, Nisqually, and Lummi lands in the area often called “Washington State”.
He is a father and loves to take care of living things of all sorts. He is the head teacher and founder of The Hawthorn School of Plant Medicine, a nine month program that connects plants to people by visiting the many different landscapes that exist within the Pacific Northwest and the plants that live upon them, while also learning cultivation, medicine making, and clinical skills.
Sean runs a small herbal medicine company called Understory Apothecary that produces small batches of extracts and fresh plant material from either the farm or the wilds. He also works with Cascadia Terroir, a small essential oil company that he picks and distills for. He does his best to provide medicines to the Canoe Journey Herbalists every year. Sean graduated from The Evergreen State College in 2012 with a BA/BS in Ethnobotany and Organic Chemistry and maintains a deep love of phytochemistry. He was a practitioner and the main medicine maker for the now defunct Olympia Free Herbal Clinic for five years, and continues to see clients on a sliding scale down to zero in the name of keeping herbs accessible to everyone. Sean is currently really excited about planting alders and camus, and hopes that the salmon will run thicker than ever in the centuries to come.

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