María Sabina

María Sabina (1894 - November 23, 1985) was a Mazatec curandera who lived her entire life in a modest dwelling in the Sierra Mazateca of southern Mexico^{[citation needed]}. Her practice was based on the use of the various species of native psilocybe mushrooms.^{[citation needed][1]}

Her life

María Sabina was the first contemporary Mexican curandera, defined as a native shaman, to allow Westerners to participate in the healing vigil that became known as the velada,^[2][3] where all participants partake of the psilocybin mushroom as a sacrament to open the gates of the mind. The velada is seen as a purification and as a communion with the sacred^{[citation needed]}.

In 1955, the US banker and ethnomycologist R. Gordon Wasson visited María Sabina's hometown of Huautla de Jimenez, Oaxaca, and participated in a velada with her. He also brought spores of the fungus, which he identified as Psilocybe mexicana, to Paris. The fungus was cultivated in Europe and its active ingredient was duplicated as the chemical psilocybin in the laboratory by Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann in 1958.

US youth began seeking out María Sabina and the "holy children" as early as 1962, and in the years that followed, thousands of counterculture mushroom seekers, scientists, and others arrived in the Sierra Mazateca, and many met her.^[4] By 1967 more than 70 people from the US, Canada, and Western Europe were renting cabins in neighboring villages. Many of them went there directly after reading the May 13, 1957 Life Magazine article written by Wasson about his experiences.

Sabina cultivated relationships with several of them, including Wasson, who became something of a friend^{[citation needed]}. Many 1960s celebrities visited María Sabina, including rock stars such as Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Jagger gave Sabina a pair of golden earrings from France, depicted in this article and many other photos.^{[citation needed]}.

While she was initially hospitable to the truth seekers thronging to her, 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^{[citation needed]}."

Many of the travelers were penniless, and they contributed little to the local economy, especially when they learned to find the mushrooms on their own^{[citation needed]}.

Late in life, María Sabina became bitter about her many misfortunes, and how others had profited from her name^{[citation needed]}. Nevertheless, late in her life she confided to Joan Halifax that the dissemination of the knowledge of the sacred mushroom was her fate, that it was pre-ordained by God that she met Wasson. She also felt that the ceremony of the velada had been desecrated and irremediably polluted by the hedonistic use of the mushrooms:

"From the moment the foreigners arrived, the 'holy children' lost their purity. They lost their force, they ruined them. Henceforth they will no longer work. There is no remedy for it^{[citation needed]}."

Use of synthetic entheogens

María Sabina was celebrating a mushroom velada with pills of Indocybin or synthetic psilocybin.^[5]

On the 1962 expedition organized by R. Gordon Wasson to see Maria Sabina, Hofmann came along and brought a bottle of psilocybin pills. 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." ("Psilo" in Greek means "bald," "cybe" means "head.") Hofmann gave his synthesized entheogen to the curandera who divulged the Indians' secret. "Of course," Wasson recalls of the encounter, "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 before they can be absorbed, takes place only after 30 to 45 minutes, in contrast to the mushrooms which, when chewed, work faster because part of the drug is absorbed immediately by the mucosa in the mouth." In order to settle her doubts about the pills, more were distributed, bringing the total for Maria Sabina, her daughter, and the shaman Don Aurelio up to 30 mg., a moderately high dose by current standards but not perhaps by the Indians'. At dawn, their Mazatec interpreter reported that Maria Sabina felt there was little difference between the pilb 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."^[6]

Chants

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^{[citation needed]}.

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...^[7]

Cultural impact

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

The Mexican counterculture has an affinity for Sabina. The Mexican rock group Santa Sabina is named for 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". The quality of the original recording is excellent. Reyes also used more of the recording in his collaboration with "Deep Forest" in the track, "Tres Marias", in the Album "Comparsa".

Notes

1. ^ Such as Psilocybe mexicana
2. ^ In Spanish, the noun la velada refers to a vigil or watch, and is uniformly a nocturnal one. "Acción y efecto de velar", as defined in the Real Academia Española's Diccionario de la lengua española (RAE 2001)
3. ^ It was Wasson who used the term by which it has since become generally known, when he first wrote about the ritual in María Sabina and Her Mazatec Mushroom Velada (1974). See Karttunen 1994: 225.
4. ^ Estrada 1996 passim; Monaghan & Cohen 2000: 165
5. ^ http://www.sagewisdom.org/ott2.html
6. ^ Psychedelics Encyclopedia, p 237-238
7. ^ Estrada, María Sabina: her Life and Chants

References

• 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. Mexico: Grijalbo. ISBN 970-05-0665-7. OCLC 35986756.  (Spanish)
• 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) (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) (online version). Diccionario de la lengua española (22nd ed.). Madrid: Editorial Espasa Calpe. ISBN 84-239-6814-6. OCLC 48657242. http://www.rae.es/RAE/Noticias.nsf/Home?ReadForm.  (Spanish)
• Monaghan, John D.; and Jeffrey H. Cohen (2000). "Thirty Years of Oaxacan Ethnography". In John D. Monaghan (Volume ed.), with Patricia A. Andrews. 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)

External links

• Works by or about María Sabina in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• [http://www.folkways.si.edu/albumdetails.aspx?itemid=1614/ R. Gordon Wasson's recording of a 1956 velada at Smithsonian Folkways.

Persondata
Name	Sabina, Maria
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	1888
Place of birth
Date of death	November 23, 1985
Place of death