María Sabina

María Sabina (July 22, 1894 – November 23, 1985) was a Mazatec curandera who lived in the Sierra Mazateca of southern Mexico. Her practice was based on the use of psilocybin mushrooms, such as Psilocybe mexicana.

María Sabina was born outside of Huautla de Jimenez in the Sierra Mazateca toward the end of the 19th century. Though Sabina herself was not sure, she believed it to be 1894. Her parents were both humble campesinos, mother María Concepcion and Crisanto Feliciano, her father, who died from an illness when she was three years old. She also had a younger sister, María Ana. Her grandfather and great-grandfather on her father's side were also shamen, skilled in using the mushrooms to communicate with God. After the death of her father, her mother moved the family into town, and Sabina grew up in the house of her maternal grandparents.

María Sabina was the first contemporary Mexican curandera, or native shaman, to allow Westerners to participate in the healing vigil that is known as the velada. 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, the US ethnomycologist and banker R. Gordon Wasson visited María Sabina's hometown and participated in a velada with her. He collected spores of the fungus, which he identified as Psilocybe mexicana, and took them to Paris. The fungus was cultivated in Europe and its primary ingredient, psilocybin, was isolated in the laboratory by Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann in 1958.

Youth from the United States began seeking out María Sabina and the "magic" mushrooms as early as 1962. In the years that followed, thousands of counterculture mushroom seekers, scientists, and others arrived in the Sierra Mazateca to seek an audience. 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 "Seeking the Magic Mushroom", a 1957 Life magazine article written by Wasson about his experiences.

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