#maria sabina
“Mujer espacio soy. Mujer de día soy. Mujer de luz soy.” María Sabina Disponible en Nahualitas
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The Sacred Mushroom Seeker, 1990
Velada is the name of the healing vigils carried out by Mazatec curanderos. The rituals involved the use of psilocybin or Salvia divinorum to commune with God and experience enlightenment.
María Sabina Magdalena García was a Mazatec curandera, shaman and poet who lived in Huautla de Jiménez, a town in Oaxaca in southern Mexico. Her veladas contributed to the popularization of indigenous Mexican ritual use of entheogenic mushrooms among westerners, though this was not her intent.
Young people from the United States began seeking out María Sabina and the “magic” mushrooms as early as 1962, with numerous hippies, scientists, and other people visiting the remote isolated village. Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and Keith Richards , were rumored to have visited her.
Their lack of respect for the sacred and traditional purposes caused María Sabina to remark: “Before [American Ethnomycologist Gordon] 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 their custom. The community blamed Sabina; she was ostracized, her house was burned down, her son was murdered, and she was briefly jailed.
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, despite being funded by the CIA’s mind control project MK Ultra. The way that he is credited in modern history with “discovering” the power of the sacred mushrooms, has been described as a narrative which mimics, in many ways, the colonialist language of “discovery.”
María Sabina died in poverty, suffering from malnutrition later in life… while the J.P. Morgan banker and CIA researcher Gordon Wasson (who exploited her by lying that he needed a Velada ceremony to find his missing son) was honoured by Harvard for his stolen research on mushrooms and lived a long life of wealth and comfort.
