Maria Sabina

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María Sabina García (1888 - November 23, 1985) was a Mazatec medicine woman who lived her whole life in a modest dwelling in the Sierra Mazateca of southern Mexico. Her practice was based on the use of the various species of native psilocybe mushrooms such as Psilocybe mexicana).

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[edit] Her life

Sabina was the first contemporary native shaman to allow Westerners to participate in the healing vigil known as the velada, where all participants partake of the psilocybe 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.

In the 1955, the American banker and ethnomycologist R. Gordon Wasson visited her hometown of Huautla de Jimenez, Oaxaca, and experienced 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.

American youth began seeking out 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 saw her. 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 a Life Magazine article written by Wasson about his experiences.

Sabina cultivated relationships with several of them, including Wasson, who became something of a friend. It is rumored, without validation, that many important 60s celebrities visited Maria Sabina, including rock stars such as Bob Dylan and John Lennon.

While she was initially hospitable to the truth seekers thronging to her, their lack of respect for the sacred and traditional purposes caused Sabina to remark, "Before Wasson, nobody took los niños simply to find God. They were always taken to cure the sick."

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.

Late in life, Maria Sabina became bitter about her many misfortunes, and how others had profited from her name. 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."

[edit] Chants

Alvaro 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, Maria Sabina brilliantly used themes common to Mazatec and Mesoamerican spiritual traditions, but at the same time she 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 "little 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 . . .

(Alvaro Estrada, Maria Sabina: her Life and Chants)

[edit] Cultural impact

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. T-shirts bearing her image, smoking a filterless Alas cigarette, are sold in markets throughout Mexico.

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").

[edit] References

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