María Sabina's interactions with the Western world, starting with
R. Gordon Wasson, have been described, from an indigenous perspective, as "a story of extraction, cultural appropriation, bioprospecting, and colonization." María Sabina was named by foreigners the first contemporary Mexican
curandera to allow Westerners to participate in the healing ritual known as the
velada. María Sabina herself stated that she was not a curandera, that she was in fact a sabia, and that a sabia and curandera are not the same practice. All participants in the ritual ingested psilocybin mushroom as a sacrament to open the gates of the mind. The
velada is seen as a purification and a communion with the sacred. In 1955, American
ethnomycologist and banker
R. Gordon Wasson, and his wife Valentina, a Russian pediatrician and scientist, as well as a passionate mycology enthusiast, visited María Sabina's hometown, where Gordon Wasson participated in a
velada with her. Wasson was the first outsider to take part in the
velada, and to gain access to the ceremony (which was used to locate missing people and important items), Wasson lied and told her that he was worried about his son back home and wanted information about his whereabouts and well-being, later admitting that this was a deception. The Wassons collected spores of the fungus, which they identified as
Psilocybe mexicana, and took them to Paris. The fungus was cultivated in Europe and its primary
psychoactive ingredient, psilocybin, was isolated in the laboratory by Swiss chemist
Albert Hofmann in 1958. Wasson wrote a book about his experience of the ritual in a 1957
Life magazine article,
Seeking the Magic Mushroom; María Sabina's name and location were not revealed. However, as author Michael Pollan notes, 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 of Huautla de Jimenez. Many 1960s celebrities, including
Bob Dylan,
Jim Morrison,
Pete Townsend and
Keith Richards, were rumored to have visited María Sabina.
John Lennon and
Yoko Ono are said to have flown from Canada to Oaxaca in March 1969 to visit Maria Sabina and take part in a ceremony. Due to young American visitors' lack of respect for the sacred and traditional uses of los niños santos María Sabina remarked: Before 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 the Mazatec custom. The community blamed Sabina; consequently she was ostracized, her house was burned down, her son was murdered, and she was briefly jailed. Though later released documents reveal Wasson was unaware of the true intention behind the funding. The way that he is credited in modern history with "discovering" the power of the sacred mushrooms, has been described as a narrative which "mimic[s], in many ways, the colonialist language of "discovery"." From 1967 to 1977 life returned to normal conditions for Huautla de Jimenez and the Mazatec after the
Mexican Army blocked American, European and Mexican hippies or other unwanted visitors from entering on the only roads into the town. A few
Federales also patrolled the town to evict undesirable foreign visitors. Álvaro Estrada wrote a biography of María Sabina that was translated into English by Henry Munn. Sabina spoke only Mazatec and many of her supposed quotes in English are not verified. Munn, who had lived in Huautla de Jimenez and knew the Mazatec language, wrote two reports on sacred mushroom
veladas and
curanderos:
The Mushrooms of Language was about the traditional ceremonies of the typical curanderos in Huautla; the second was called
The Uniqueness of María Sabina. Another book on her song-poem chants was
María Sabina: Selections by Jerome Rothenberg.
The Sacred Mushroom of Mexico, by Brian Akers, has excerpts from five Mexican authors translated from Spanish to English.
Los Hongos Alucinantes (in Spanish) by Fernando Benitez dispels many rumors about her life. The book
Sacred Mushroom Rituals: The Search for the Blood of Quetzalcoatl, by Tom Lane, has several chapters by the author on the experiences he, his wife, and a friend had at her home in a
velada with María Sabina and her daughter Appolonia. The book reports on María's musical tonal songs, poetic expressions, ventriloquy, incantations and chanting during the
velada. The rituals before the ceremony and prayers for the participants are similar to those recorded by Wasson in his visits during the mid-1950s. After publishing his book on
ethnomycology,
Russia, Mushrooms and History, Wasson wrote
María Sabina and her Mazatec Mushroom Velada with George and Florence Cowan and Willard Rhodes, which included four cassette recordings and the musical score of Sabina's
veladas, with lyrics translated from Mazatec to Spanish to English. Henry Munn later translated these songs into English in Álvaro Estrada's book. The entheogenic use of the sacred mushrooms
(hongos sagrados) practiced by María Sabina had roots in
Pre-Columbian Mexico. By her meeting R. Gordon Wasson and her
veladas being recorded in the mid-1950s, these ancient Mazatec ceremonies and rituals entered Western knowledge systems, although they existed within Mazatec culture, intentionally hidden, for centuries. and in the Three
Stelae of
Xochimilco, but until Wasson met María Sabina in the early 1950s there was almost no proof that the sacred mushroom healing and divination ceremonies and rituals actually existed. Academics note that before Wasson's account, there was "little to no evidence" of the medicinal properties of the psilocybin mushrooms in western scientific literature, thus confirming the pivotal role that Sabina and the Mazatec community had in all Western uses of the mushrooms. == Use of synthetic entheogens ==