"Shamanic Voices: a
survey a visionary narratives"
by Joan Halifax,
Ph.D.
(1991)
Maria Sabina, Mazatec healer, curandera, and Shaman. A native of
Huautla de Jimenez, in the State of Oaxaca, Mexico, passed away in 1985
at the age of 91. She is famous for the role she played introducing the
sacred mushroom ceremony velada to the world.
In the early 1930's, prior
to Maria's rise to prominence, Robert J. Weitlaner,
witnessed, but it is not recorded he participated in, the Mazatec
mushroom ceremony just northeast of Oaxaca. On July 16, 1938, his
daughter Irmgard, with an anthropologist who eventually became
her husband, Jean Bassett Johnson, together with two others,
Bernard Bevan and Louise Lacaud, attended a mushroom rite in
Huautla. Johnson later gave a full account of the event and were
the first white persons "recorded" to attend such a ceremony (although
it is said they did not participate in the ceremony or ingest the
mushrooms).
Throughout the intervening
years numerous reports have surfaced, although none officially recorded,
of other white men having actually participating in the ceremony. Of
those, there is only one of any note, that being a mysterious
hallucinogenic bio-searcher and mushroom hunter from the Taos, Santa Fe,
New Mexico area who had several species named after him and said to be
married to a very powerful curanderaShaman
himself.
In 1955, Gordon Wasson and Allan Richardson, made history
by becoming the first KNOWN white men documented or publicized to
participate in the nocturnal mushroom ceremony. Under the guidance of
Maria Sabina, Wasson and Richardson each consumed six pairs
of the mushroom Psilocybe caerulescens var. mazatecorum after
which they began to feel the effects, manifesting visions of geometric
patterns, palaces, and architectural vistas. The results of that
experience was published in Life Magazine, May 13 1957, in an article
titled "Seeking the Magic Mushroom." That article is considered
the inspiration for Dr. Timothy Leary and others to try similar
mushrooms and hallucinogens.
"I was eight years old
when a brother of my mother fell sick. He was very sick, and
the shamans of the sierra that had tried to cure him with
herbs could do nothing for him. Then I remembered what the
teo-nanacatl [mushrooms] told me: that I should go and look for
them when I needed help. So I went to take the sacred mushrooms, and
I brought them to my uncle's hut. I ate them in front of my uncle,
who was dying. And immediately the teo-nanacatl took me to
their world, and I asked them what my uncle had and what I could do
to save him.
They told me an evil spirit had entered the blood of my
uncle and that to cure him we should give him some herbs, not those
the curanderos gave him, but others. I asked where these
herbs could be found, and they took me to a place on the mountain
where tall trees grew and the waters of a brook ran, and they showed
me the herb that I should pull from the earth and the road I had to
take to find them...[After regaining consciousness] it was the same
place that I had seen during the trip, and they were the same herbs.
I took them, I brought them home, I boiled them in water, and I gave
them to my uncle. A few days later the brother of my mother was
cured."
Maria Sabina had
visions on the "little saints" that someone (Wasson) was coming
and would take the tradition to the world after 500 years of secrecy
under Spanish rule. As a result of that action, giving the secrets of
the "little saints" to outsiders, her son was murdered and her house
burned to the ground. During the later years of her life she lamented
that "the power of the sacrament had been lost in the clouds," and
ending up speaking English instead of the Mazatec. She lived to age 91,
passing away on November 22, 1985.
Carlos Castaneda, the best selling author that wrote many, many
books where he outlined how he became a sorcerer's apprentice under the
auspices of a Yaqui Indian shaman he called Don Juan Matus is
reported to have a connection to Maria Sabina. Anthropologist
Jay Courtney Fikes in his book Carlos Castaneda, Academic
Opportunism and the Psychedelic Sixties (1993) even goes as far to
suggests that rather than being one individual, the chance exists that
Don Juan was actually a composite of two or possibly even three
authentic Indian shamans, of which one was Maria Sabina.
