María Sabina

María Sabina. The saint of mushrooms. As an indigenous Mazatec, María lived in Southern Mexico, in the mountains of Sierra de Oaxaca, in the little town of Huautla de Jiménez. Her family has had a history with healing and we’re considered shamans. At 3 years old, Marías father dies, sending her mother off to work and María and her sister, María Ana, into the hands of their grandmother.

At seven years old, María attends her first mushroom ceremony for her sick uncle. On a walk with her sister, María recognizes these mushrooms sitting atop the dirt, as they were the same ones used in the ceremony. Both sisters experiment with the mushrooms and are filled with laughter, equally enjoying the moment they have shared. Seven years later, at age 14 María married a man by the name of Serapio Martínez. Together they have 3 children by the names of Catarino, Vivianna & Apolonia. Serapio goes on to join the Mexican revolution, he makes his return but dies a while after. Heart broken from this news, María falls ill. She begins to stop moving & no one is able to cure her. Its then she decides to take a trip. A life altering trip. It’s revealed to her during this trip that she must take this gift and use it to heal. 

In 1955, Robert Gordon Wasson, travels to the town of Huautla to meet the infamous María Sabina, natural healer, holder of the secret mushrooms. He arrives to experience the ceremony of “los niños santos”, what María referred to the mushrooms as, her “holy children”. Wasson sits in on nine of these ceremonies, on one he is accompanied by a french mycologist by the name of Roget Heim, who sent samples of the mushrooms to Albert Hoffman (the ,an who synthesized LSD). Wasson returned to the United States claiming to be the “first white men in recorded history to eat the divine mushrooms”. He publishes an article in Life magazine. This article gets a lot of attention, as the 60-70’s hippie movement was huge at the time, knowledge of a healer who used mushrooms as a main ingredient was incredible. As this article spreads and becomes more and more popular, it starts attracting a huge number of tourists in the village as they are all seeking to experience this magical new world. Well most I should say, there’s also a huge number who are just looking to get high.

While Wasson and his fellow peers blossom in fame from this new found discovery, María and her family face the opposite. The Mazatec community turned on María, they blamed her for the fall of the village and for defiling the sacred ceremonies. She was arrested for drug use twice, it was only when international anthropologists & scientists spoke to the President of Mexico, José Guillermo López, and asked him to let her go. But it didn’t stop there. Police would frequently raid her home in search of drugs, hippies would run through the town naked, and her house was burned down forcing her out.

María Sabina was put at fault for the rise of these magic mushrooms. After years of research we can say that we are much closer to using mushrooms for the purpose María had used them for, healing. Her intellectual curiosity of this little piece of earth has led us to an entire new world of psychedelics. Though she wasn’t just the introducer of magic mushrooms, she was a woman of many powerful qualities. A mother, a poet, a healer. The space and care she provided in each ritual was sacred. Her story was not written by her, as an indigenous Mazatec who did now know how to read or write,nor did she even speak Spanish, her story is not translated from her own but instead from Mazatec to English and then to Spanish by others. Marías legacy continues to live on as she is a huge part of the history of psychedelics, she’s seen all throughout today in murals, social media, cafes, her name will never be forgotten, Live on María!