13.8 billion years ago
First there was dust, and there was no one to breathe
Start further back than any story usually starts. Nicotine is C10H14N2. The fourteen hydrogen atoms in it were made in the first minutes of the universe and essentially none has been made since. The carbon and the nitrogen could not exist yet. There was no process that could make them. They had to be cooked inside stars, and those stars had to die and throw them outward, before there was an Earth for them to land on.
Then four and a half billion years. Then plants crawling onto land and learning to poison whatever tried to eat them. Then a plant in the Americas that builds an insecticide in its roots and files it in the leaves. Then people. Then, very recently and almost as an afterthought, a name.
The word is 190 years old. The molecule is around a hundred million. The atoms are 13.8 billion.
Hold that number, because there is a sentence at the end of Ecclesiastes that says the dust goes back to the ground it came from, and it turns out to be more literally true than the person who wrote it could possibly have known. The full ladder is here →
day seven
God took a smoke break
We are going to say this out loud, because it is the joke everyone makes and it happens to be sitting on top of something real.
Genesis 1:27: humans are made b'tzelem Elohim, in the image. Genesis 2:2: on the seventh day the work is finished and God שָׁבַת, shavat, ceased. Stopped. It is the root the word Sabbath comes from, and it does not mean "was tired." It means the work came to an end.
Now go to Exodus 31:17, where the same six-days-then-one is repeated, and the Hebrew adds a second verb that most English Bibles flatten into "and was refreshed." The word is וַיִּנָּפַשׁ, vayinafash, and it is built from נֶפֶשׁ, nefesh, the word for soul. Robert Alter, who spent decades translating the Hebrew Bible into English that keeps its edges, renders the line:
"God rested and caught His breath."
Six days of work. Then the maker of everything steps outside for a minute and catches his breath. And if we are made in the image, then the break is not a failure of the work. the break is part of the picture we were copied from.
Say what you like about whether any of it happened. As a piece of writing, the creation account ends with the boss going outside. That is a very good ending.
the first holy thing
The oldest sacred object we have is a pause
Genesis 2:3 does something people miss because they are reading for the six days and not the seventh. It is the first time the word קָדוֹשׁ (kadosh, holy) appears in scripture at all. And it is not attached to a mountain, a temple, an altar, a person or a nation. Those all come later. The first holy thing is a day.
Abraham Joshua Heschel built a whole book on that observation in 1951. His phrase for the Sabbath is a palace in time, the argument being that a tradition famous for arguing about one particular piece of real estate actually opens by sanctifying something nobody can own, fence, or be excluded from. You cannot buy a Tuesday. Everybody gets the same amount of it.
The first holy thing in the book is not a place. It is a break.
Which is a strange and slightly funny thing to be carrying around in the back of Western civilisation while it spent the twentieth century arguing about whether workers should be allowed fifteen minutes outside. That argument has its own article →
the vocabulary
Soul, wind, breath, spirit, pick one, they will not help you
Here is the part that reorganises things. Biblical Hebrew does not have our tidy separation between the physical act of breathing and the invisible animating self. It mostly has these:
- רוּחַ ruachWind. Breath. Spirit. The same word for all three, and Genesis 1:2 uses it in the second sentence of the Bible, something moving over the water that is either a wind or a spirit depending entirely on your translator's mood.
- נְשָׁמָה neshamahBreath. In Genesis 2:7 the human is dust until God breathes into the nostrils, and it is that exhalation, specifically, that is the difference between a shape and a someone.
- נֶפֶשׁ nefeshTranslated "soul" for four hundred years. At the root it means throat, the passage air moves through. So it also carries breath, appetite, hunger, thirst, the whole living want of a body.
- הֶבֶל hevelVapor. Mist. A puff of wind. The visible cloud of a breath on a cold morning, there, and then not there.
Sit with nefesh for a second. The word a whole civilisation used for the soul is, underneath, the name of the part of you that air goes through. Not the heart, not the head. The throat. They located the self at the place where the outside comes in.
And that is why vayinafash in Exodus is so good. It is not "God had a nap." It is closer to God re-souled himself, a verb made out of the throat, meaning the thing that happens when you finally stop and take one deep one.
There is one more, and we are going to hand it over carefully because it is the most beautiful idea on this page and it is also the least certain. The name that tradition holds as unpronounceable is four letters: יהוה, Y H W H. Rabbi Arthur Waskow has spent years making the case that it is unpronounceable for a very specific reason: they are all aspirate letters, and if you try to say them with no vowels at all, you do not produce a word. You just breathe. In, then out.
On that reading, the name is not spoken. It is respired, and everyone alive has been saying it, all day, since the day they were born.
Flagging this honestly: that is a devotional reading, not a settled one. It is widely loved and widely circulated, and it is not linguistic consensus, Hebraists will tell you we do not securely know how the name was vocalised, precisely because it stopped being said aloud. Take it as a beautiful thing some people believe, which is how Waskow offers it. The rest of this chapter is dictionary work; this bit is not, and we would rather say so than let you find out later.
the punchline
Everything is vapor
Ecclesiastes opens with a line everybody knows in a translation that has been quietly misleading them since 1611: Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.
The Hebrew is הֲבֵל הֲבָלִים, havel havalim. And hevel does not mean vanity. It does not mean conceit, or pride, or pointlessness. It means vapor. Breath. Mist. The word appears five times in that one verse. A more honest rendering, and Alter goes almost exactly here, is merest breath, everything is mere breath.
So the most quoted pessimism in Western literature is not actually saying none of this matters. It is saying something far stranger and far kinder: everything is a vapor. Your work, your money, your name, the argument you won, the thing you are worried about tonight. All of it has the density of an exhalation on a cold morning. Visible for a second. Then gone. Which is not an insult. It is a description, and it is the same description for all of us.
Everything is vapor. Including you. Including whoever is annoying you.
And then the detail that makes the hair stand up. In Genesis 4, Adam and Eve have a second son. In Hebrew his name is הֶבֶל, Hevel. The identical word. We say it in English as Abel.
The first person in the story to die is named Vapor. He is introduced, he is described as good, and he is gone within a few verses of arriving. Somebody built that on purpose, thousands of years ago, and then dropped the same word two hundred times into a book about how briefly everything lasts.
Ecclesiastes 12:7 closes the loop: the dust returns to the earth, and the ruach returns to the one who gave it. Read that again after Chapter 0. The dust is not a metaphor. The dust is stellar. The author had no way of knowing how right they were about where the material came from.
so, us
Meet me outside
We are a price comparison site for nicotine. We are aware of the distance between that and the last four chapters. But this is our whole thesis and it is not a stretch, so here it is plainly.
The oldest vocabulary humans have for the self is a vocabulary of breath. The first thing that vocabulary calls holy is a break. And what a person does on a break, what they have done in every century we have records for, is step outside, away from the work, and deliberately move something through the throat. Air. Smoke. Vapor. Steam off a coffee. The mechanism has changed a dozen times. The gesture has not moved an inch.
Every one of those words is doing the same job: I am stopping. I am taking one for myself. I will be back in five. Somebody wrote that down as a commandment before anyone in Europe had ever seen the plant we sell by the pouch.
We did not invent the break. We are extremely late to it.
And there is one more thing worth saying out loud, because once you have noticed it you will notice it everywhere: for almost all of human history, smoke was how you talked to whatever was above you. Not a side effect of worship, the medium of it. Burnt offerings and the temple incense in the Hebrew Bible. The censer swung down the aisle of a cathedral. Incense in Buddhist, Hindu, Shinto and Taoist practice. Psalm 141 asks, in as many words, for a prayer to go up like incense.
The logic is entirely visual and it needs no theology to understand. You cannot see a prayer. You can see smoke. It leaves your hands and it goes up, and it keeps going after you have stopped watching. For thousands of years, across traditions with no contact whatsoever, smoke was the part of the invisible thing you could actually point at.
Smoke was the visible part of the prayer.
Then, over about sixty years, we took it out of every building. And whatever you think about why, and there were extremely good reasons, and we are not relitigating them, something else went out with it that nobody costed. The pause went. The going-outside went. The standing next to somebody in silence with nothing to do but be there went. We removed the smoke and we did not put anything in the hole where the ritual had been. Then we were surprised that people at work seemed lonelier.
That is the thing we think is worth having back. Not the smoke, necessarily . The mechanism has changed a dozen times and it will change again. The pause. The five minutes. The going outside on purpose and breathing something and standing with somebody. That is not an indulgence anyone granted you in 1950. It is the oldest holy thing in the book, it is a hundred thousand years of human beings stepping outside, and it does not belong to your employer.
And it was never only this plant. In 2019 a team publishing in Science Advances analysed ten wooden braziers from the Jirzankal Cemetery, high on the Pamir Plateau, dated to around 500 BCE. The stones inside had been heated, and the residue came back loaded with cannabinol, the marker left when THC is burned. Which tells you two things at once: the cannabis was potent, and it was being burned at a funeral. Not recreationally. In braziers, at a graveside, for the same reason anybody has ever lit incense.
Two and a half thousand years ago, on a mountain, people burned a plant to send something upward. We have the chemistry.
This is the thread that ties our three shops together, and we should say it plainly. Nicotia Market is nicotine. Legal Leaf Market is the other thing humanity has been putting in the air for thousands of years, and they have the whole braziers story written up. Herbal Leaf Market is everything else people reach for, for when it is time to put the other two down for a while, the closest we come to quitting.
Three storefronts, and they are not three businesses that happen to share a template. They are three branches of one human habit, and it is a much older and stranger habit than any of the products involved: put a plant in the air, and breathe it. Every culture we have records for found some version of it. Most of them did it at a funeral before they ever did it for fun.
One boundary, stated clearly: ceremonial tobacco is a living sacred practice in many Indigenous nations across the Americas, it is not the same thing as the commercial product this site compares prices for, and it is not ours to borrow as a marketing line. We are pointing at a near-universal human pattern that includes incense, resin and a dozen other things. We are not claiming any part of anyone's ceremony, and a pouch of Zyn is not a pipe.
the black sheep bit
The smoking area is where they put you
Here is why that song is on this page and not just in a footnote.
In 2014 Michael Gungor published a post called What Do We Believe? saying he no longer had the ability to read Genesis literally, that he could not believe the first people were a couple named Adam and Eve six thousand years ago. He was, at the time, one of the most successful worship musicians alive.
The response was immediate and it was industrial. A Baptist church cancelled a concert. A Christian radio station in Wisconsin pulled its support from another. Three shows went in short order and promoters started backing away from the rest. Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis took him apart in public. When Gungor followed up on the Liturgists podcast by saying you cannot simply assume what Jesus held to be history versus what he held to be myth, it got worse. The upshot, plainly: a Grammy-nominated worship band got walked out of the Christian music business for saying out loud what a great many people in the pews already quietly thought.
He asked the question everyone was thinking and got sent outside.
And then it went further than a career. By his wife Lisa's own public account, Michael went fully atheist in 2012, she has said the same about a period of her own, before finding his way back to something he could live with. He has described it since not as losing God but as losing the machinery around God, and has landed on a question worth the whole ordeal: can a myth be beautiful, important, and even true?
Which brings us to the part that should stop you. Vapor, the song that says everything this article has taken seven chapters to say, is reported to be the first song he wrote to God on the way back, out of the middle of not knowing. It was not written from inside the building. It was written by somebody standing outside it.
Every church, every school, every office has this same geography. There is the room where everyone agrees, and there is a spot round the side where the people who asked something awkward end up standing together. The doubters, the divorced, the newly unemployed, the kid who will not say the words. Historically that spot has an ashtray in it. It has better conversations in it too, and everybody knows it.
There is a saying that goes around American evangelical circles, and nobody seems to know who said it first, which is usually the sign that a thing is true enough to survive without an author:
"If there aren't cigarette butts in your parking lot, you're not doing church right."
Sit with what that actually claims. It says the litter is the evidence. It says a congregation with a spotless car park has quietly filtered for people who already had it together, and that the churches doing the difficult, unglamorous, actually-described-in-the-book work of taking in addicts, ex-cons, the newly sober and the barely holding on will always, without exception, have a mess by the door. The butts mean somebody hard to love made it inside. It is the single most generous thing anyone has ever said about a cigarette end, and it was said by people who mostly do not approve of smoking.
Some of the most beautiful things ever made about faith were made by people the faithful had just finished throwing out.
But the part we keep coming back to is not that he left. It is that he put it down and then picked it back up, and said both halves out loud while they were happening, which almost nobody does. He did not come back to the thing he walked away from. He came back to something he could actually hold, and he was honest that the version he had before was not survivable for him.
We know that shape. Everyone who has ever used nicotine knows that shape. Down and back up, quit in January, out the back door by March, six months clean and then a wedding. Somebody hands you one. It is the most ordinary story in this entire industry and it is the one nobody will narrate honestly, because both of the available scripts are lies: the one where you triumphantly never again, and the one where you were never really trying.
Picked up, put down, picked up again. That is not a character flaw. That is the actual shape of a long relationship with anything.
We want to be careful here, because there is a version of this paragraph that is genuinely irresponsible and we are not writing it. We are not telling anyone to pick anything back up. Nicotine is addictive, we sell nothing, and we are not a quit aid, if you are trying to stop, we are not the resource and a doctor is. What we will not do is the shame. The shame has been tried on an industrial scale for sixty years, on the people standing outside in the rain, and as far as we can tell the only thing it reliably produces is people lying about it.
And when it is time to put it down for a while, which for most people it will be, more than once. Our sister site is Herbal Leaf Market, where the alternatives live. Same family, same honest pricing, no lecture attached.
We are a nicotine market. We are, structurally, the corner round the side. So we are going to be honest about who tends to be standing there: not the people who never believed anything, but the ones who believed hard, asked one question too many, and found the door shut behind them. If that is you, the price per pouch is below and nobody here is going to ask you what you think about Genesis.
2010, then 2015
Dust, then breath
We did not go looking for this. It fell out of the dates, and when it did we sat with it for a while.
Gungor's biggest song by an enormous margin, tens of millions of plays, sung in churches that would later refuse to book him, is Beautiful Things, the title track of the 2010 album. Its central image is dust: dead ground, spent earth, the used-up stuff at the bottom of everything, being made into something worth looking at. That is the song from before. Written from inside the building, at the height of it.
Then the questions, the cancelled shows, the public rebukes, and by his wife's account a year of straightforward atheism.
And the song from after, reported to be the first one he wrote to God on the way back, is Vapor. Which is hevel. Which is breath.
He wrote the dust song. He lost everything. He came back and wrote the breath song.
Now go and read Genesis 2:7 again, the verse we quoted five chapters ago without seeing where it was going. God takes the dust of the ground. God breathes into it. And the result is a living nefesh, a soul.
Dust plus breath is the entire recipe. Not dust. Not breath. Both, in that order, with a long and unpleasant gap in between where it is only ever dirt.
A man wrote the dust half in 2010, went through the worst five years of his working life, and wrote the breath half in 2015, and as far as we can tell nobody including him set out to do that. It is the oldest sentence in the book, performed accidentally, in public, at some cost, by somebody who had been told to leave.
And here is the part that will not leave us alone.
Beautiful Things is still sung. Every Sunday, in enormous rooms, by people who love it, and they are right to, it is a wonderful song. It is a song about God picking up what everybody else wrote off. Dead ground. Spent dirt. The used-up thing at the bottom.
Sing that on Sunday morning; step into the car park at eleven; find somebody standing by the wall having a cigarette because it is the only way they can get through the service. That is the person in the song. That is precisely and exactly who the lyric is about. And a great many rooms that sing it every week would quietly prefer that person went somewhere else.
They kept the song and lost the man who wrote it, and most of them will never hear how the story ends.
That is the thing. The Christian world loves Beautiful Things. Much of it never heard Vapor, because by 2015 he had been shown the door, and you do not get playlisted by stations that dropped you. So the song about dust is everywhere, and the song about breath, the other half of Genesis 2:7, the half that completes it, the one he had to lose everything to write, is comparatively nowhere.
We are not saying this to score a point off anybody's faith. We are saying it because it is the same shape as the thing this entire site is about: the people standing outside are usually the ones the story was about in the first place, and the room almost never notices in time.
Which, if we are being completely honest, is not even a modern complaint. It is the complaint. The specific, recurring, on-the-record objection people had to Jesus was not his theology. It was who he ate with. He kept turning up with tax collectors and drunks and prostitutes and the generally disreputable, and the respectable people kept asking, in so many words, why he was over there instead of in here with them. In Matthew 11:19 the accusation is quoted directly and he does not deny it: a glutton, a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.
And he was not defensive about it, either. In Matthew 21:31 he tells the most respectable men in the room, to their faces, that the tax collectors and the prostitutes are getting in ahead of them. Not alongside. Ahead. That is not a liberal gloss anybody added later; it is sitting in the text that those same rooms read out loud on Sundays.
And it gets sharper. In Matthew 7 the people turned away at the end are not the disreputable. They are the accomplished. They arrive with a CV. They preached in his name, they did the impressive things, they have the receipts. And the answer they get is I never knew you. Meanwhile, when the same gospel lays out the actual criterion a few chapters later, it is not doctrinal at all: did you feed anybody, did you visit the prisoner, did you go and find the person nobody else was going to find.
The ones with the credentials get "I never knew you." The ones out the back get let in.
Jesus hung out with the smokers.
Put it in whatever century you like. There is the room, and there is the car park. And every version of this story anybody has ever told has the main character out in the car park, which is a detail the room has been losing track of for about two thousand years.
Now, was he out there with a cigarette? No. Obviously not, and we are not going to pretend otherwise to land a joke: the plant was on a continent nobody in that story had heard of, and it stayed there for another fifteen hundred years.
But he stepped outside constantly, and the gospels keep bothering to mention it. Up a mountain by himself. Out to a lonely place before it was light. Away from the crowd, repeatedly, in the middle of the most urgent work anybody in that book is doing. Luke 5:16 puts it flatly: he withdrew, and he did it often. Whatever else is going on in those verses, the plain reading is that the man left the room a lot, and that the people writing it down thought this was worth recording rather than apologising for.
No cigarette. But a great many breaks, taken alone, on purpose, by somebody with an extremely full calendar.
And it is worth finishing the thought, because the story does not end with him being mildly disapproved of. The company he kept was part of the case built against him. Being the wrong sort of person to be seen with the wrong sort of people was never a footnote in that account. It was one of the running charges, and it contributed to the hostility that ended with a Roman execution on a Roman cross.
They killed him, in the end, partly over who he stood outside with.
And then the last detail, which we did not expect to find and cannot stop thinking about. It did not happen in the temple, or the court, or anywhere respectable. Under the law of the time that execution had to happen outside the city walls, and it did. The letter to the Hebrews makes the point explicitly: he suffered outside the gate, and then tells the reader to go out there and join him.
He lived outside the room. He died outside the walls. The instruction, in the text, is to go out there too.
Said plainly, because this has been used to do real harm: that execution was carried out by the Roman state, on a Roman cross, as Rome dealt with people it read as a political threat. The conflict in those accounts is between one man and the respectable and the powerful of his own moment, the sort of conflict that recurs in every era and every institution, very much including the ones that later took his name. It is not, and has never been, a charge against Jewish people, and any reading of this page that goes there is one we reject outright.
We are aware we are a nicotine price comparison site and that this is not, on paper, our department. We are also aware that we would be lying if we pretended we noticed this and felt nothing.
This is the song. It takes the hevel of Ecclesiastes directly and does the thing we have just spent seven chapters doing, in about four minutes, better. If you only take one thing from this page, take this and not us.
Gungor and Mike McHargue also run The Liturgists, an art collective and podcast whose entire catalogue circles breath, dust, doubt and impermanence, made largely for people left standing outside their own tradition. Their first EP included a piece called Vapor too, and they sell their liturgies and records themselves.
We are not affiliated with Gungor or The Liturgists, we earn nothing from any of these links, and we host none of this music, the player above streams from their own YouTube channel and loads nothing until you press it. Go buy their records from them. No lyrics are reproduced anywhere on this page, deliberately; the words are theirs and the good ones are not ours to print.
read this bit twice
What this is not
This is not a claim that any scripture endorses nicotine. It does not. The plant was on a different continent and was unknown to every author quoted here. Nothing above is an argument that anyone should use anything.
This is not a health claim. Nicotine is addictive. Nothing on this page, no etymology, no cosmology, no verse, changes that, softens it, or is offered as a reason to start. We do not make comparative safety claims about any product on this site, and we are not a quit aid.
This is not theology, and we are not the ones to do theology. It is a reading, of etymology, of translation choices, and of one very good joke about the seventh day. Millions of people hold the Sabbath as something serious and observed, not as a bit. That reading is theirs and it is older and better founded than ours. We are borrowing the vocabulary with real affection, and if the joke does not land for you, take the Hebrew and leave the joke. The Hebrew is the good part anyway.
And we are not speaking for anybody named on this page. Michael and Lisa Gungor are living people who have never heard of us. Everything in Chapter VI comes from contemporaneous reporting or from their own public statements, the atheism is described in the past tense because that is how they describe it, and none of it means they would endorse a nicotine market. We have no reason to think they would. We are admirers with a link, nothing more. The same goes for the several traditions whose vocabulary we have borrowed here.
And the etymology here is unrelated to our name. Nicotia comes from Jean Nicot, a French ambassador, in the 1500s. Hevel and nefesh are thousands of years older and from an entirely different language family. We are not claiming a link between them. We are pointing out that two separate traditions, with no contact, both ended up naming this thing after breath.
Nicotia: A Word for the People
Meet me @ Nicotia Market
Every version of this has been an invitation. Meet me outside. Meet me out back. Coming for one? It is how people have asked each other for five minutes of company since there were factories to step out of, and long before that, it was a day with a name on it.
And notice that none of this required you to agree with us about any of it. Six days or fourteen billion years, a garden or a supernova, a soul or a chemical, people may not agree about where we came from, but nobody can seriously deny that humanity loves this stuff. That part is not a belief. It is a receipt, filed in every century we have records for, on every continent, by every kind of person there is.
We are the market, we are the people powered by nicotine, and we are not ashamed of it. We hold no stock and we sell nothing; we just tell you the honest price per pouch, per puff, per ml, per stick, and let you decide. That is the whole business. The rest of it, the word, the breath, the vapor, the seventh day, is why we bothered.
And if Waskow is right about those four letters, then the oldest act of worship available to anybody is not a song, a building or a subscription. It is a breath in and a breath out, which means the believer taking five minutes by the door and the atheist taking five minutes by the door are, at minimum, doing the same physical thing. Let us worship with our breath. Everyone reading this already is, and has been since the day they were born, and will be until they stop.
Meet me @ Nicotia Market. From Jean Nicot to your front door.
Viva la Nicotia.
go and check us
Do not take our word for any of it
Every Hebrew claim on this page is checkable in about ten minutes with a free interlinear Bible and no Hebrew. Look up Exodus 31:17 and find vayinafash. Look up Ecclesiastes 1:2 and count the five hevels. Look up Genesis 4:2 and notice that Abel's name is that same word. We would much rather you verified it than believed us.
Read where our name comes from →