Maria Sabina

Maria Sabina was a Mazatec curandera (healer) from Huautla de Jiménez in Oaxaca, Mexico, who used psilocybin mushrooms—los niños santos, “the holy children”—in all-night healing ceremonies called veladas.

Working within a syncretic tradition blending indigenous Mazatec practice and Catholic imagery, she chanted, prayed, and diagnosed illness in the mushroom-induced visionary state. In 1955 she permitted R.

Gordon Wasson to attend a velada, an act that, once publicized worldwide, made her the most famous shaman in the world and the conduit through which sacred mushrooms entered Western consciousness. Maria Sabina’s significance to this lineage is as the living source of the tradition that the entire psychedelic-spirituality stream draws upon and romanticizes.

She embodied the claim—central to cyber-shamanism and modern plant-medicine culture—that altered states are a legitimate technology of healing and contact with the sacred. Her story is also a cautionary one: the influx of Western seekers desacralized the practice in her view, brought outsiders and authorities to her village, and left her ostracized and impoverished.

Any honest account of the Western consciousness movement’s debt to indigenous shamanism runs through her, including its extractive costs.