María Sabina

María Sabina was born outside of Huautla de Jimenez in the Sierra Mazateca toward the end of the 19th century. Though Sabina herself was not sure, she believed it to be 1894. Her parents were both humble campesinos, mother María Concepcion and Crisanto Feliciano, her father, who died from an illness when she was three years old. She also had a younger sister, María Ana. Her grandfather and great-grandfather on her father's side were also shamans, skilled in using the mushrooms to communicate with God. After the death of her father, her mother moved the family into town, and Sabina grew up in the house of her maternal grandparents.[3]

María Sabina was the first contemporary Mexican curandera, or Sabia to allow Westerners to participate in the healing vigil that is known as the velada.[4][5] All participants in the ritual ingested psilocybin mushroom as a sacrament to open the gates of the mind. The velada is seen as a purification and a communion with the sacred.

In 1955, the US ethnomycologist and banker R. Gordon Wasson visited María Sabina's hometown and participated in a velada with her. He collected spores of the fungus, which he identified as Psilocybe mexicana, and took them to Paris. The fungus was cultivated in Europe and its primary ingredient, psilocybin, was isolated in the laboratory by Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann in 1958.

Youth from the United States began seeking out María Sabina and the "magic" mushrooms as early as 1962.[6] Seeking the Magic Mushroom, a 1957 Life magazine article was written by Wasson about his experiences. Her name and location were not revealed. Wasson published 512 copies of his two volume book called Russia, Mushrooms and History whose second volume revealed her identity and location. In the early sixties a lot of counterculturists, scientists, and other people started visiting the remote isolated village of Hualta de Jimenez.

María Sabina received several of them, including Wasson, who became a friend. Many 1960s celebrities (Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and Keith Richards among them) were rumored to have visited Maria Sabina, but these claims cannot be substantiated as no photographic evidence or reports of the visits by the "Rock Stars" themselves have ever been reported.[7]

While she was initially hospitable to the first of the arrivals, their lack of respect for the sacred and traditional purposes caused María Sabina to remark:

Before Wasson, nobody took the children simply to find God. They were always taken to cure the sick.

As the community was besieged by Westerners wanting to experience the mushroom-induced hallucinations, Sabina attracted attention from the Mexican police who believed her to be a drug dealer. The unwanted attention completely altered the social dynamics of the Mazatec community and threatened to terminate the Mazatec custom. The community blamed Sabina, she was ostracized from her community and her house was burned down. Sabina later regretted having introduced Wasson to the practice, but Wasson contended that his only intention was to contribute to the sum of human knowledge.[8][9][10] Later from 1967 to 1977 Hualta de Jimenez and Mazatec life returned to normal conditions because the Army blocked the only roads in to American, European and Mexican Hippies or unwanted visitors. A few Federales also patrolled the town to evict undesirable foreign visitors who were not native Mazatecs

Late in life, María Sabina Alvaro Estrada wrote a book about her life that Henry Munn translated into English. Maria Sabina only spoke Mazatec and many of her “ Quotes “ in English are not verified. The book by Estrada was translated from English into Spanish by Henry Munn who had lived in Hualta de Jimenez and knew the Mazatec language. Henry Munn wrote two elegant reports on Sacred Mushroom Veladas and Curenderos. One called The Mushrooms of Language was about the traditional Veladas and Ceremonies of the typical Curenderos in Hualta. The second was called The Uniqueness of Maria Sabina. The book Sacred Mushroom Rituals The Search for the Blood of Quetzalcoatl has several chapters on the author, his wife and a friends experiences at her home in a Velada with Maria Sabina and her daughter Appolonia. The book reports on Maria’s musical tonal songs, poetic expressions, ventriloquy, incantations-and chanting during the Velada. The rituals before the ceremony and prayers for the participants are similar to Wasson’s visits in the mid 1950’s. Wasson after Russia Mushrooms and History wrote Maria Sabina’s Mushroom Velada which included several records of her musical veladas translated from Mazatec to Spanish to English. Henry Munn later in Estrada’s book did a better job of translating these unique songs into English in Estrada’s book.

In 1962, R. Gordon Wasson and Albert Hofmann went to Mexico to visit María Sabina. They brought a bottle of psilocybin pills, Hofmann's latest invention.[11] Sandoz was marketing them under the brand name Indocybin—"indo" for both Indian and indole (the nucleus of their chemical structures) and "cybin" for the main molecular constituent, psilocybin. Hofmann gave his synthesized entheogen to the curandera. "Of course, Wasson recalled, Albert Hofmann is so conservative he always gives too little a dose, and it didn't have any effect." Hofmann had a different interpretation: "activation of the pills, which must dissolve in the stomach, takes place after 30 to 45 minutes. In contrast, the mushrooms when chewed, work faster as the drug is absorbed immediately". To settle her doubts about the pills, more were distributed. In total, for Maria, her daughter, and the shaman, Don Aurelio, up to 30 mg each was ingested, a moderately high dose by current standards but not perhaps by the more experienced practitioners. At dawn, their Mazatec interpreter reported that Maria Sabina felt there was little difference between the pills and the mushrooms. She thanked Hofmann for the bottle of pills, saying that she would now be able to serve people even when no mushrooms were available.[12]

Álvaro Estrada, a fellow Mazatec, recorded her life and work and translated her chants. Estrada's American brother-in-law, Henry Munn, translated many of the chants from Spanish to English, and wrote about the significance of her language. According to Munn, María Sabina brilliantly used themes common to Mazatec and Mesoamerican spiritual traditions, but at the same time was a unique talent, a masterful oral poet, and craftsperson with a profound literary and personal charisma.

It is sung in a shamanic trance in which, as she recounted, the "saint children" speak through her:

Because I can swim in the immense
Because I can swim in all forms
Because I am the launch woman
Because I am the sacred opposum
Because I am the Lord opposum

I am the woman Book that is beneath the water, says
I am the woman of the populous town, says
I am the shepherdess who is beneath the water, says
I am the woman who shepherds the immense, says
I am a shepherdess and I come with my shepherd, says

Because everything has its origin
And I come going from place to place from the origin...[13]

Sabina is regarded as a sacred figure in Huautla. At the same time, her image is used to market various local commercial ventures, from restaurants to taxi companies.

The Mexican counterculture has an affinity for Sabina. The Mexican rock group Santa Sabina is named after her, and El Tri, one of the first and most successful rock groups in Mexico, dedicated the song "María Sabina" to her, proclaiming her "un símbolo de la sabiduría y el amor" ("a symbol of wisdom and love").

Mexican musician, Jorge Reyes, included prerecorded chants of Maria Sabina in the track "The Goddess of the Eagles", in his album Comala. Reyes also used more of the recording in his collaboration with Deep Forest on the track "Tres Marias", from the Album Comparsa.

Bolivian singer Luzmila Carpio has made a song in honor of Maria Sabina.[14]

Mexican poet and novelist Homero Aridjis has written a novel, Carne de Dios, about Maria Sabina, her life in Huautla and her experience with Westerners who flocked to her home to experience the hallucinogenic effects of the mushrooms. Aridjis brought Maria Sabina to Mexico City for medical treatment towards the end of her life.[15]

• Allen, John W. (1997). María Sabina: Saint Mother of the Sacred Mushrooms. Ethnomycological journals, v. 1. Seattle, WA: Psilly Publications. ISBN 0-9631518-9-4. OCLC 39920921.
• Allen, John W., and Jochen Gartz, 2002. Teonanácatl: A Bibliography of Entheogenic Mushrooms (ISBN 1-58214-099-5)
• Estrada, Álvaro, (1976) Vida de María Sabina: la sabia de los hongos (ISBN 968-23-0513-6)
• Estrada, Álvaro, (1981). María Sabina: her Life and Chants (ISBN 0-915520-33-8)
• Estrada, Álvaro (1996). Huautla en tiempo de hippies (in Spanish). Mexico: Grijalbo. ISBN 970-05-0665-7. OCLC 35986756.
• Feinberg, Benjamin, (2003). "The Devil's Book of Culture: History, Mushrooms, and Caves in Southern Mexico" (ISBN 0-292-70190-X)
• Gonzáles, Enrique, (1992). Conversaciones con María Sabina y Otros Curanderos (ISBN 968-20-0158-7) (in Spanish)
• Guerrero, Rita, (n.d.) "¿Qué nombre le ponemos?", Chapter 3 of the History of Santa Sabina
• Harner, Michael J., ed. "Hallucinogens and Shamanism" (ISBN 0-19-501649-1)
• Karttunen, Frances E. (1994). Between Worlds: Interpreters, Guides, and Survivors. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. ISBN 0-8135-2030-4. OCLC 28150669.
• RAE [Real Academia Española] (2001). Diccionario de la lengua española (in Spanish) (22nd ed.). Madrid: Editorial Espasa Calpe. ISBN 84-239-6814-6. OCLC 48657242. Archived from the original (online version) on 2010-02-06.
• Monaghan, John D.; Jeffrey H. Cohen (2000). "Thirty Years of Oaxacan Ethnography". In John D. Monaghan (Volume ed.), with Patricia A. Andrews (ed.). Supplement to the Handbook of Middle American Indians, Vol. 6: Ethnology. Victoria Reifler Bricker (General Editor). Austin: University of Texas Press. pp. 150–178. ISBN 0-292-70881-5. OCLC 42786223.
• Rothenberg, Jerome, ed. (2003). "María Sabina: Selections" (ISBN 0-520-23953-9)
• Zolov, Eric, (1999). Refried Elvis: The Rise of the Mexican Counterculture (ISBN 0-520-21514-1)

• Works by or about María Sabina in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• R. Gordon Wasson's recording of a 1956 velada at Smithsonian Folkways
• Maria Sabina and Visionary Mushrooms
• https://brooklynrail.org/2019/02/fiction/Excerpt-of-Carne-de-Dios