María Sabina was a Mazatec poet and sabia, or “one who knows”. She lived a modest life in an Oaxacan village in southern Mexico and dedicated much of her life to healing others through sacred psilocybin mushroom ceremonies. She accidentally became famous after conducting one of the sacred ceremonies for a foreigner named Robert Gordon Wasson. He wrote an article about her and her sacred practice, majorly influencing the 1960s psychedelic counterculture in America. But before being ‘discovered’ by the Western world, María Sabina had her own complex life and local influence that had been neglected by media outlets during that time. Her image and identity, along with the sacred practice of mushroom rituals, have been exploited and commodified over the years, leaving only a shallow rendition of who she was and what she stood for. As we move past the exoticized lens of María Sabina and explore the deeper layers of her life, we find a woman who was deeply rooted in her indigenous culture and spirituality. Her role as a sabia went far beyond facilitating psychedelic experiences, but instead about connecting with the spiritual side of nature and healing her community.
Sabina’s birth and early life
María Sabina Magdalena García was born on July 22, 1894, in the lush, mountainous Sierra Mazateca region of the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca. Her parents were campesinos, or “peasant farmers,” who worked hard to support her and her younger sister, María Ana. Unfortunately, when María Sabina was still a young girl, her father passed away from an illness. As a result, she and her family relocated to her maternal grandparents’ home in the village of Huautla de Jiménez. They lived a modest upbringing and had to help their grandparents with farm work, such as raising animals and silkworms, taking care of plantation work, and assisting with other domestic chores.
Several relatives on her father’s side were shamans and used local psychedelic mushrooms to communicate with God during ceremonies. María recounted that she used to hear her family members sing and chant during their mushroom rituals many nights before she went to sleep. These experiences inspired her to one day experience this altered state of consciousness herself. She first tried the hallucinogenic mushrooms when she was around seven or eight years old after she and her sister recognized them growing along a hill during their walk. After consuming them, the sisters laughed and cried together, experiencing a sensation that remained significant for the remainder of María Sabina’s life. This encounter set the stage for María’s future as a mushroom healer for her village.
María Sabina was married at fourteen to a twenty-year-old street vendor named Serapio Martínez. Together, they had three children — Catarino, Viviana, and Apolonia. Because of his occupation, Serapio would frequently travel to Tehuacán to trade. During one of these trips, he joined the fight in the Mexican Revolution with the Carranza forces. Shortly after his return, Serapio passed away due to an illness he contracted while fighting. They had been married for six years. After her husband’s death, the widowed María became ill and could not move her body, possibly from grief. María took some mushrooms as a medicine to cure herself and experienced a newfound clarity and revolution. From now on, she knew her purpose was to worship God and heal others with the sacred medicine.
María carried on raising her children, vending on the streets, and tending to her land. She helped cure some individuals with the mushroom ceremonies, but this calling was set aside as María focused on caring for her family as a newly single mother. Twelve years later, she remarried a healer named Marcial Carrera. Her new husband was an alcoholic and physically abusive towards María. She went on to have six more children with Marcial, but all died except for one of her daughters, Aurora.
During this time, Maria’s sister fell ill, and the town’s healers believed she would die. Despite this, Maria successfully held a ceremony to heal her sister. After this occurrence, the word of Maria’s healing powers spread quickly.
Several years into their marriage, Marcial was caught cheating by his mistress’s children and was killed by them. María Sabina claimed that mushrooms helped heal her during the times of abuse from her marriage and the sadness that came from being widowed once again. After Marcial’s death, she returned to her purpose and became fully committed to becoming a mushroom healer for her community.
María Sabina, the healer
María Sabina consistently treated several kinds of ailments for people in her village — from physical illnesses to emotional distress and even family disputes. She collected mushrooms growing near the mountains in her town, most commonly used Psilocybe caerulescens, but also Psilocybe mexicana and Psilocybe cubensis. She referred to these mushrooms as her Niños Santos, or “holy children.” In her lifetime, María had several hundred mushroom ceremonies, changing the lives of many.
The ceremonious vigils, known as veladas, were often performed in gatherings in her home. During the ritual, she often sang and chanted in the Mazatec language to help guide the participants through their trip. María Sabina went beyond providing the mushrooms for her patients; she helped mediate between the spiritual realm of mushrooms and the physical world, helping people tap into a higher consciousness that helped them find remedies for their ailments.
María Sabina has been commonly described as one of the first contemporary Mexican curanderas, or shamans, who specialized in traditional medicine. However, María Sabina claimed she was not a curandera but rather a sabia, which were two entirely different practices. She had tried to be a curandera in her past but believed the path was not meant for her. In her culture, she was known as a Chjota Chjine, which translates to ‘a person who knows things.’
As her reputation as a sabia grew beyond her village, people came from afar to seek out her expertise in these ceremonies. María Sabina was cautious about sharing the sacred practice with outsiders, fearing they would not treat it with the reverence it deserved. And despite her growing popularity, she faced heavy criticism even from some members of her own community since they considered her practices to go against Catholic beliefs. Despite this, María Sabina continued to follow her calling and help heal people in need.
Introducing mushrooms to the rest of the world
Entheogens like psychedelic mushrooms have been used by indigenous communities worldwide for centuries for spiritual and healing purposes. Yet their impact on the Western world is relatively recent. In the late 1950s, American mycologist and banker R. Gordon Wasson traveled to Mexico with his friend Allan Richardson to learn more about the sacred mushroom ceremonies of the Mazatec people.
Initially, María Sabina was reluctant to trust the two foreigners who came to their village since they were not in need of healing. However, she eventually agreed to conduct the ceremony after being persuaded by a trusted village official. According to María, “Wasson and his friend were the first foreigners who came to our town in search of the saint children, and they didn’t take them because they suffered any illness.” Instead, she claims, they “came to find God.” Through a translator, Maria attempted to explain to the men that her ceremonies were meant to heal people, not give them the ability to find ‘God’. In her culture, mushrooms were viewed as sacred tools for healing physical and emotional ailments, not for the kind of spiritual transcendence that Westerners were searching for. She said, “If you want to find God then you must go to mass, not stay up with the little-one-who-springs-forth.” Regardless, the men were insistent on trying the mushroom and eventually did.
Imapact of the “Western” lens
With no ill intentions, Wasson returned home from his experience and wrote an article about María Sabina and the sacred mushroom ritual in a LIFE magazine article titled, “Seeking the Magic Mushroom.” He changed María Sabina’s name to Eva Mendez in order to protect her identity, yet this protection effort substantially failed.
As an amateur ethnomycologist, Wasson’s goal was to document how different cultures viewed wild mushrooms. In the article, Wasson barely skimmed the surface of Maria’s personal life and the beauty of the Mazatex cultural practices, but instead he spoke about his experience with mushrooms and the divine euphoria he experienced once he took them. Soon after publishing, the article gained popularity and went viral.
Suddenly, the small village of Huautla de Jiménez was packed with foreign visitors. Many people wanted to find god or encounter a mystical experience, which flooded María Sabina and her town. This explosion of new visitors disrupted the locals lives and exploited an incredibly sacred tradition. In response, the Mexican government had to station soldiers at a checkpoint near Huautla from 1967 to 1977 to keep out the flood of tourists and ‘hippies’ from the village, but the damage was already done. The mushroom rituals were no longer something sacred just for healing; outsiders had transformed them into something entirelt different.
Yet María Sabina’s newfound ‘fame’ brought more than just curious foreigners to her doorstep. Many locals were uncomfortable with how their sacred traditions were being exposed to the world. Her own community expressed criticism towards her actions, offended by the commercialization of the mushrooms, but by then it was too late. Although this caused tension, María had her own complex relationship with these outsiders. Initially, she shared the mushrooms out of trust and a sense of duty to help, but over time, she regretted the cultural shift that followed, realizing that she could not control how the rituals were exploited and misunderstood.
“From the moment the foreigners arrived to search for God, the saint children lost their purity,” she said. “They lost their force; the foreigners spoiled them. From now on, they won’t be any good. There’s no remedy for it.”
For the Mazatec people, mushrooms were never about ‘finding God’—they were used to heal ailments. They were seen as a way to connect with nature and the divine fources, bu not in the same way that outsiders sought mystical enlightenment. Yet when outsiders began using them for spiritual exploration, it altered the traditional purpose of the rituals, which Maria believed diminished their true meaning and sacredness.
María Sabina’s life after the Wasson article
Years after releasing the article, Wasson expressed deep remorse for ever exposing the sacred mushroom practice to the entire world. He intended to inform the world of an important cultural discovery. Instead, Huautla de Jiménez became filled with psychedelic tourists seeking to misuse a medicine held so dear to the people of the village. “What I have done gives me nightmares: I have unleashed on lovely, Huautla a torrent of commercial exploitation of the vilest kind. Now the mushrooms are exposed for sale everywhere—in every marketplace, in every village doorway. Everyone offers his services as a “priest” of the rite, even the politicos,” Wasson said in a follow-up article published in 1970.
Sabina’s misunderstood fate
Many sources incorrectly claim that following the publication of Gordon Wasson’s article, María Sabina’s life took a tragic turn—her house was burned down, she was banished from her village, and she lived out her final years in poverty. However, these reports are largely exaggerated or misinterpreted.
Tom Lane, author of Sacred Mushroom Rituals: A Search for the Blood of Quetzalcoatl, who spent time with María and her family, clarified that, “her house was never burned down—and she was never banished from Huautla de Jiménez.” She remained in her village until she became seriously ill in 1984, only then leaving for Mexico City, where she passed away the following year.
Descriptions of María ‘dying in poverty’ are also misleading. Her life in Huautla de Jiménez was simple, as was typical of the region, where material wealth was not the measure of a person’s worth. As Tom Lane explained, “to Americans, everyone in Huautla de Jiménez would be in the utmost poverty,” but in reality, María’s community lived self-sufficiently and modestly, with their own traditions and values.
In reality, María’s struggles were less about financial poverty and more about the emotional toll of seeing her people’s sacred practices become commercialized and misunderstood. She also had to face deep social tensions from parts of her community, since many in her village felt betrayed that their sacred traditions were exposed to the outside world.
A lasting influence
María Sabina’s ancestral knowledge of mushrooms and their healing powers far exceeded what modern medicine is just finally beginning to unveil about psilocybin mushrooms. But her legacy goes far beyond the mushrooms themselves. María Sabina embodied the wisdom of her people, a worldview deeply connected to nature, spirituality, and the power of healing through ancestral traditions.
As psilocybin once again becomes accepted in our “Westernized world,” it’s important to remember that indigenous healing traditions should be treated with respect and not commodified for profit. These natural gifts from the earth go far beyond what modern medicine has deemed “scientifically acceptable.” In reality, they come from deep-rooted cultural wisdom and spiritual significance that should be remembered forever. They’re part of something much bigger—something that’s been understood for generations.
María produced several chants and poems during her ceremonies and is regarded as one of Mexico’s best poets. She never took credit for these poems, claiming the sacred mushrooms were speaking through her. Though María Sabina heavily impacted the world through her wisdom and conservation of her cultural practices, we must remember that her words meant far more than what has ever been recorded. She could not read or write, so her verses were spoken or sung. Her chants were recorded and translated from her native Mazatec into Spanish and later English, published for the whole world to interpret. But María Sabina never had the chance to fully tell her own story in her own words..